Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Author’s Note: Rosalie’s World is the fourth volume of the Ngu Family Saga, which takes us from the terraformed asteroid Pallas, to Mars (see: Ares, forthcoming) to the asteroid Ceres, and now, to humanity’s first extra-solar settlement. Olympic champion Llyra Ngu Trask and her girlhood companion Jasmeen Khalidov Ngu bring their families to pioneer a strange new planet, all the animal life of which is mammalian. Morgan Trask, a Newfoundlander, is the male skating champion Llyra married. Tieve is Wilson’s daughter, whom he and Jasmeen are raising. “Young Emerson” is Lyra’s son, named after his great, great grandfather.

 

Chapter 12: BLUEBONNET SQUADRON

 

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.
— Napoleon Bonaparte

 

Young Emerson, his worried father soon discovered, was lying prone on the far side of the fallen tree, pinned down at the left arm and shoulder. In his bloodied right fist he stubbornly held onto the back legs of some basketball-sized animal with broad wings, instead of forelegs, and a short, flat snout. It had clawed and bitten at the boy’s hand until Emerson had beaten its head in on a rock that was lying there, half-buried in the mud and covered with the creature’s blood, as well as Emerson’s.

Morgan carefully lifted the tree off the boy, which brought him around. He seemed to be in pain. “Son,” his father observed, trying to grin, “you appear t’be spendin’ half your time face-down on the ground these days.”

“Dad, please don’t tell Mom,” Emerson pleaded. Morgan thought that his son’s left ulna might be broken.

“When she sees that her only son has broken that arm takin’ care of the homestead,” Morgan predicted in his practical way, “she won’t be mad; she’ll be all tears an’ love an’ kisses.” He knew his wife. “Don’t tell her I said that. What’s that you’ve got there in your hand?”

The boy suddenly brightened, remembering. “I call it a ’pigasus’—a flying pig! Mom’s always complaining about no turkeys on Rosalie’s World. I figured we could have this one for Thanksgiving dinner!”

Morgan grinned down at his son. “Yeah, that’s a pretty fair idea. But first we’re gonna take care of that arm an’ clean your hand up. Then we’ll look at the cayuses—is that the plural, or is it ’cayeese’? I think we’re gonna need a barn before long.”

******

Big Jim Willis laughed and clapped his hands when the Trasks next came to town. Most of the family rode in the kind of fusion-powered six-wheeled ATV nearly everyone in the settlement had, three of the children distributed between their mother’s lap and the cargo space behind her, Morgan at the wheel.

The conspicuous exception was young Emerson, who, despite a heavily bandaged right hand, and his left arm carried in a colorful sling, obviously provided by his aunt Jasmeen, proudly sat astride the strange cat-like animal he had broken and trained. Big Jim had heard about that. Told the Trasks possessed another such creature, not quite broken, Jim said, “Guess I’m gonna have to put up a hitching post. Then this place will be like a real old-fashioned Western saloon!”

For the time being, Topper would be tethered to the braked ATV. Big Jim’s assistant, Montana Garden, watched this operation, having seen things like it in a thousand old West American cowboy movies she had grown up watching. She approached Emerson a bit diffidently. “Do you think you could teach me to ride?”

The boy jumped, startled. Montana was at least twice Emerson’s age, but she was very pretty, unquestionably mammalian, assertively feminine, possessed the type of complexion known as “peaches and cream”, and made the boy feel strangely awkward and tongue-tied. “S-sure, Montana. Any time.” She smelled good, too.

Inside, Big Jim sat on the piano bench, this time facing the other way, his big shoulders hunched and his long fingers spread over the keys. Beside him on a barstool was a tall, thin fellow with an odd stringed device across his chest, forgotten and unfamiliar in this century. “Ladies and gents!” Jim announced, “I have found us a young fellow here, Roderick Rodriguez, who plays the long-necked five-string banjo like an angel, and knows the sacred works of the sainted Scott Joplin!” With that, they launched into Jim’s favorite of all compositions, “Ragtime Dance”. Montana joined in on the kazoo to good effect.

Wilson was out somewhere patrolling, but Jasmeen and Tieve were both enthusiastically present. A few kids started an improvised dance, their tiny boots clattering on the hardwood floor. They especially enjoyed stamping out the “stop-time” measures for which “Ragtime Dance” was famous. Big Jim and his ad-hoc orchestra followed that with “Bethena, A Concert Waltz” and “Solace, A Mexican Serenade”. Soon, some of the adults, families from the area around the truffle farm, and a couple of pilots and warehouse workers from Port Emerson were dancing, too.

Tieve got several invitations (as did her mother) but was too shy to accept them. Fifteen, Llyra reflected, is a long way from seventeen.

******

For a while, more scary beasts continued to show up, following the rains. One variety they were calling “locusts”, although there were no insects on Rosalie’s World. They were more like flying crabs, They came in swarms of millions, were the size of a big man’s hand. and ate anything, animal or vegetable, they sank their teeth into.

Happily, for the Trasks and others, the locusts avoided the big trees which, besides being fireproof, exuded some substance, apparently, that repelled the flying pests. Settlers soon learned to rub it on their skin and wash their clothes in it. The creatures also hated infrared radiation, so the cayuses were moved, with only a few locust bites, to the drying shed, and fenced in by walls of stacked firewood.

“You’ve got to stop doing this kind of thing to yourself,” Llyra lectured Emerson as she applied antiseptic to her son’s bites. “We haven’t even gotten that cast off your arm. The danger,” she explained, “isn’t so much germs native to Rosalie’s World—which we’re largely immune to—but infectious germs we brought with us.” She knew the lecture wasn’t doing any good—it wouldn’t have with her.

“Mom, I just had to do something—poor Topper and Buttermilk were suffering terribly.”

******

Not long after the locust plague had abated—owing mostly to massive flocks of flying predators and only slightly less to the happy discovery that the pests could be “thronged” like sardines, in a wire trap, and pan-fried for a delicious snack—a truly strange thing happened.

“Mom,” little Julie came down one afternoon from her loft with a device in her hand and wireless phones in her ears. There was a puzzled look on her little face. “For some reason, the Portal is offline.”

Julie wasn’t speaking of the ancient alien gateway itself, Llyra knew, which gave off signals nobody understood, but an orbiting station manned by scientists studying the Portal and its signals, that the Ngu Corporation maintained to observe it, and various comings-and-goings to the system.

“That is odd,” Llyra said, feeling a sudden, foreboding chill, “What’s the ’Net say about it, honey?”

******

It was 0400; the bar was finally closed and cleaned up for business tomorrow. He had fed his chicken Henrietta and seen to her comfort. Big Jim Willis thought he probably owned the only electro-mechanical dishwasher on the raw frontier world, and it was busy now—Montana had helped him load it—filling the building with cheery humming noises and warmth.

Once he thought he was alone, he headed for his bedroom. All of this talk about losing contact with the Portal had him thinking, remembering his life immediately before setting foot on Rosalie’s World. Few people knew about it. He was just the tavern-keeper.

He found the proper place along the wall, tripped a hidden latch, then slid part of a log away, until he could swing aside a secret closet door. Inside, dimly lit by low-powered glowspheres, hung a special suit of tough, impervious synthetic, ribbed here and there by reinforcments and rip stops, with valves along the seams to admit pressurizing gases, helping to protect the wearer from g-forces in manuevering and combat. On the suit’s left breast were stencilled several rows of colorful decorations, including the Silver Nova. On the right, the name and rank of one Lieutenant Colonel James Douglas Willis, West American Space Force.

“Boss?” asked a quiet voice, making Big Jim startle. It was young Montana, watching him regard the spacesuit. “Boss, I didn’t mean to spy on you, honest. What are you doing?”

He was somewhat skeptical. That tiny, unassuming voice she was using could be powerful enough singing “Alone” or something similar on Karaoke Thursdays. Beside the suit hung a big helmet, transparent in every direction, with heads-up displays and a pair of long-fingered gloves.

“Contemplating my past sins.” What wasn’t painted on the suit was the name of his outfit, West American Alamo Command, Bluebonnet Squadron, of which he had been the leader. “We were defending the international L5 station from the Celestial Horde. Their idea was that nobody else should explore space or establish bases and settlements anywhere but the PRC.” He’d flown his beloved fighter, the fusion-powered two-engined War-Wagon. “She’d carried what even the WASF called ’Davy Crockett rockets’, ’Col. Travis missiles’, a wonderful Golead 39 millimeter rotary cannon, and an experimental James Bowie ship-to-ship plasma burner”.

“Our defense of L5 was completely successful—not a surviving bandit; we smoked every one of the bastards—and nobody the Chi-coms could complain to about it, since they were committing space piracy and violating international law. But I, myself, became ‘lost in space’, with a hot reactor, but without remaining reaction mass or ammunition, and dwindling oxygen, which spelled certain death for me and my poor War-Wagon.”

“My god, Boss,” said Montana. “What happened? Obviously you didn’t die.”

“Sometimes I’m not so sure,” he told her. “No, suddenly, I received a strange message, a voice I didn’t recognize—as it turned out, it was a Dr. Amy Ngu, Drake’s wife, Emerson’s daughter-in-law. My current ‘course’, I was informed, intersected that of the Prometheus, the Ngu Corporation’s newest starship, under acceleration, headed for the Kuiper Belt and Emerson’s Portal. Would I kindly get the fuck out of the way? I said I’d love to, but no delta vee. I was rescued by auxiliary craft, and taken aboard, starting out as a dishwasher and ending up an assistant astrogator. My poor old War-Wagon was set adrift where the West American Space Force might eventually reclaim her. I sure hope they did. She was a sprightly steed.”

“So you’re an accidental settler?” Montana asked.

“For me, ballistically speaking, there was no going back. In time, we passed through Emerson’s Portal. I put my name to the Stein Covenant and filed a homestead claim somewhere in the six months between the Other Portal and Rosalie’s World.”