The Sam Gunn Omnibus

A Can of Worms

We were all much younger then—said Elverda Apacheta—and our passions were much closer to the surface. I could become enraged at the slightest excuse; the smallest problem could infuriate me.

You must remember, of course, that I had packed off to the asteroid where I had been living alone for almost three years. Even my supply shipments came in unmanned spacecraft. So it was a big surprise when a transfer ship showed up and settled into a rendezvous orbit a few hundred meters off my asteroid.

I thought of it as my asteroid. Nobody could own it, according to international law. But there were no restrictions against carving on it. Aten 2004 EA was the name the astronomers had given it, which meant that it was the one hundred and thirty-first asteroid discovered in the year 2004 among the Aten group. The astronomers are very efficient in their naming, of course, but not romantic at all.

I called my asteroid “Quipu-Camayoc,” which means “The Rememberer.” And I was determined to carve the history of my people upon it. The idea was not merely romantic, it was absolutely poetic. After all, we have lived in the mountains since before time was reckoned. Even the name of my people, my very own name—Apacheta—means a group of magical stones. Now my people were leaving their ancient mountain villages, scattering down to the cities, losing their tribal identities in the new world of factory jobs and electronic pleasures. Someone had to mark their story in a way that could be remembered forever.

When I first heard of the asteroid, back at the university at La Paz, I knew it was my destiny. The very name the astronomers had given it signified my own name: Aten 2004 EA—Elverda Apacheta. It was a sign. I am not superstitious, of course, and ordinarily I do not believe in signs and omens. But I knew I was destined to carve the history of my people on Aten 2004 EA and turn it into the memory of a vanishing race.

Quipu-Camayoc was a large stone streaked with metals, a mountain floating in space, nearly one full kilometer long. It was not in the Belt, of course; in those days no one had gone as far as the Belt. Its orbit was slightly closer to the Sun than Earth’s orbit, so nearly once a year it came near enough to Earth for a reasonably easy flight to reach it in something like a week; that is when I usually got my supplies. This was many years ago, of course, before the first bridge ships were even started. The frontier had not expanded much beyond the Earth-Moon system; the first human expedition to Mars had barely gotten under way.

As I said, I was surprised when a transfer ship came into view instead of the usual unmanned spacecraft. I was even more surprised when someone jetted over to my quarters without even asking permission to come aboard.

I lived in my workshop, a small pod that contained all my sculpting equipment and the life support systems, as well as my personal gear—clothing, sleeping hammock, things like that.

“Who is approaching?” I called on the communicator. In its screen I centered a magnified picture of the approaching stranger. I could see nothing, of course, except a white space suit topped with a bubble helmet. The figure was enwrapped by the jet unit, somewhat like a man sitting in a chair that had no legs.

“Sam Gunn is my name. I’ve got your supplies aboard my ship.”

Suddenly I realized I was naked. Living alone, I seldom bothered with clothing. My first reaction was anger.

“Then send the supplies across and go on your way. I have no time for visitors.”

He laughed. That surprised me. He said, “This isn’t just a social call, lady. I’m supposed to hand you a legal document. It’s got to be done in person. You know how lawyers are.”

“No, I don’t know. And I don’t want to.” But I hurriedly pushed over to my clothes locker and rummaged in it for a decent set of coveralls.

I realize now that what I should have done was to lock the access hatch and not allow him to enter. That would have delayed the legal action against me. But it would only have delayed it, not prevented it altogether. Perhaps allowing Sam to enter my quarters, to enter my life, was the best course after all.

By the time I heard the pumps cycling in the airlock I was pulling a pair of old blue denim coveralls over my shoulders. The inner hatch cracked open as I zippered them up to the collar.

Sam coasted through the hatch, his helmet already removed and floating inside the airlock. He was small, not much more than 160 centimeters, although to his last breath he claimed to be 165. Which is nonsense. I myself was a good ten or twelve centimeters taller than he.

It would be difficult to capture his face in a sculpture. His features were too mobile for stone or even clay to do him justice. There was something slightly irregular about Sam’s face: one side did not quite match the other. It made him look just the tiniest bit off-center, askew. It fitted his personality very well.

His eyes could be blue or gray or even green, depending on the lighting. His mouth was extremely mobile: he had a thousand different smiles, and he was almost always talking, never silent. Short-cropped light brown hair, with a tinge of red in it. A round face, a touch unbalanced toward the left. A slightly crooked snub nose; it looked as if it had been broken, perhaps more than once. A sprinkling of freckles. I thought of the Norte Americano character from literature, Huckleberry Finn, grown into boyish manhood.

He hung there, framed in the open hatch, his booted feet dangling several centimeters from the grillwork of the floor. He was staring at me.

Suddenly I felt enormously embarrassed. My quarters were a shambles. Nothing but a cramped compartment filled with junk. Equipment and computer consoles scattered everywhere, connecting wires looping in the microgravity like jungle vines. My hammock was a twisted disaster area; the entire little cabin was filled with the flotsam of a hermit who had not seen another human being in three years. I was bone-thin, I knew. Like a skeleton. I could not even begin to remember where I had left my last lipstick. And my hair must have looked wild, floating uncombed.

“God, you’re beautiful!” said Sam, in an awed whisper. “A goddess made of copper.”

Immediately I distrusted him.

“You have a legal paper for me?” I asked, as coldly as I could. I had no idea of what it was; perhaps something from the university in La Paz about the new grant I had applied for.

“Uh, yeah …” Sam seemed to be half dazed, unfocused. “I, uh, didn’t bring it with me. It’s back aboard my ship.”

“You told me you had it with you.”

“No,” he said, recovering slightly. “I said I was supposed to hand it to you personally. It’s back on the ship.”

I glared at him. How dare he invade my privacy like this? Interrupt my work? My art?

He did not wilt. In fact, Sam brightened. “Why don’t you come over and have a meal with me? With us, I mean. Me and my crew.”

I absolutely refused. Yet somehow, several hours later, I was on my way to his transfer ship, riding on the rear saddle of a two-person jet scooter. I had bathed and dressed while Sam had returned to his ship for the scooter. I had even found a bright golden yellow scarf to tie around the waist of my best green coveralls, and a matching scarf to tie down my hair. Inside my space suit I could smell the perfume I had doused myself with. It is surprising how you can find things you thought you had lost, when the motivation is right.

What was my motivation? Not to accept some legal document, certainly. Sam’s sudden presence made it painfully clear to me that I had been terribly alone for such a long time. I had not minded the loneliness at all—not until he punctuated it as he did. My first reaction had been anger, of course. But how could I remain angry with a man who was so obviously taken with my so-called beauty?

My asteroid was in shadow as we sailed toward his ship, so we could not see the figures I had already carved upon it. It bulked over us, blotting out the Sun, like some huge black pitted mountain, looming dark and somehow menacing. Sam kept up a steady chatter on the suit-to-suit radio. He was asking me questions about what I was doing and how my work was going, but somehow he did all the talking.

His ship was called Adam Smith, a name that meant nothing to me. It looked like an ordinary transfer vehicle, squat and ungainly, with spidery legs sticking out and bulbous glassy projections that housed the command and living modules. But as we approached it I saw that Sam’s ship was large. Very large. I had never seen one so big.

“The only one like it in the solar system, so far,” he acknowledged cheerfully. “I’m having three more built. Gonna corner the cargo business.”

He rattled on, casually informing me that he was the major owner of the orbital tourist facility, the Earth View Hotel.

“Every room has a view of Earth. It’s gorgeous.”

“Yes, I imagine it is.”

“Great place for a honeymoon,” Sam proclaimed. “Or even just a weekend. You haven’t lived until you’ve made love in zero-gee.”

I went silent and remained so the rest of the short journey to his ship. I had no intention of responding to sexual overtures, no matter how subtle. Or blatant.

Dinner was rather pleasant. Five of us crowded into the narrow wardroom that doubled as the mess. Cooking in zero gravity is no great trick, but presenting the food in a way that is appetizing to the eye without running the risk of its floating off the plate at the first touch of a fork—that calls for art. Sam managed the trick by using plates with clear plastic covers that hinged back neatly. Veal piccata with spaghetti, no less. The wine, of course, was served in squeeze bulbs.

There were three crew persons on Adam Smith. The only woman, the communications engineer, was married to the propulsion engineer. She was a heavyset blonde of about thirty who had allowed herself to gain much too much weight. Michelangelo would have loved her, with her thick torso and powerful limbs, but by present standards she was no great beauty. But then her husband, equally fair-haired, was also of ponderous dimensions.

It is a proven fact that people who spend a great deal of time in low gravity either allow themselves to become tremendously fat, or thin down to little more than skin and bones, as I had. The physiologists have scientific terms for this: I am an agravitic ectomorph, so I am told. The two oversized engineers were agravitic endomorphs. Sam, of course, was neither. He was Sam—irrepressibly unique.

I found myself instinctively disliking both of the bloated engineers until I thought of the globulous little Venus figures that prehistoric peoples had carved out of hand-sized round rocks. Then they did not seem so bad.

The third crewman was the payload specialist, a lanky dark taciturn biologist. Young and rather handsome, in a smoldering sullen way. Although he was slim, he had some meat on his bones. I found that this was his first space mission, and he was determined to make it his last.

“What is your cargo?” I asked.

Before the biologist could reply, Sam answered, “Worms.”

I nearly dropped my fork. Suddenly the spaghetti I had laboriously wound around it seemed to be squirming, alive.

“Worms?” I echoed.

Nodding brightly, Sam said, “You know the Moralist Sect that’s building an O’Neill habitat?”

I shook my head, realizing I had been badly out of touch with the rest of the human race for three years.

“Religious group,” Sam explained. “They decided Earth is too sinful for them, so they’re building their own paradise, a self-contained, self-sufficient artificial world in a Sun-circling orbit, just like your asteroid.”

“And they want worms?” I asked.

“For the soil,” said the biologist.

Before I could ask another question Sam said, “They’re bringing in megatons of soil from the Moon, mostly for radiation shielding. Don’t want to be conceiving two-head Moralists, y’know. So they figured that as long as they’ve got so much dirt they might as well use it for farming, too.”

“But lunar soil is sterile,” the biologist said.

“Right. It’s got plenty of nutrients in it, all those chemicals that crops need. But no earthworms, no beetles, none of the bugs and slugs and other slimy little things that make the soil alive”

“And they need that?”

“Yep. Sure do, if they’re gonna farm that lunar soil. Otherwise they’ve gotta go to hydroponics, and that’s against their religion.”

I turned from Sam to the biologist. He nodded to confirm what Sam had said. The two engineers were ignoring our conversation, busily shoveling food into their mouths.

“Not many cargo haulers capable of taking ten tons of worms and their friends halfway around the Earth’s orbit,” Sam said proudly. “I got the contract from the Moralists with hardly any competition at all. Damned profitable, too, as long as the worms stay healthy.”

“They are,” the biologist assured him.

“This is the first of six flights for them,” said Sam, returning his attention to his veal and pasta. “All worms.”

I felt myself smiling. “Do you always make deliveries in person?”

“Oh no.” Twirling the spaghetti on his fork beneath the plastic cover of his dish. “I just figured that since this is the first flight, I ought to come along and see it through. I’m a qualified astronaut, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Yeah. Besides, it lets me get away from the hotel and the office. My buddy Omar can run the hotel while I’m gone. Hell, he runs it while I’m there!”

“Then what do you do?”

He grinned at me. “I look for new business opportunities. I seek out new worlds, new civilizations. I boldly go where no man has gone before.”

The biologist muttered from behind a forkful of veal, “He chases women.” From his dead-serious face I could not tell if he was making a joke or not.

“And you deliver ten tons of worms,” I said.

“Right. And the mail.”

“Ah. My letter.”

Sam smiled broadly. “It’s in my cabin, up by the bridge.”

I refused to smile back at him. If he thought he was going to get me into his cabin, and his zero-gee hammock, he was terribly mistaken. So I told myself. I had only taken a couple of sips of the wine; after three years of living like a hermit, I was careful not to make a fool of myself. I wanted to be invulnerable, untouchable.

Actually, Sam was an almost perfect gentleman. After dinner we coasted from the wardroom along a low-ceilinged corridor that opened into the command module. I had to bend over slightly to get through the corridor, but Sam sailed along blithely, talking every millimeter of the way about worms, Moralists and their artificial heaven, habitats expanding throughout the inner solar system and how he was going to make billions from hauling specialized cargos.

His cabin was nothing more than a tiny booth with a sleeping hammock fastened to one wall, actually just an alcove built into the command module. Through the windows of the bridge I could see my asteroid, hovering out there with the Sun starting to rise above it. Sam ducked into his cubbyhole without making any suggestive remarks at all, and came out a moment later with a heavy, stiff, expensive-looking white envelope.

It bore my name and several smudged stamps that I presume had been affixed to it by various post offices on its way to me. In the corner was the name and address of a legal firm: Skinner, Flaymen, Killum and Score, of Des Moines, Iowa, USA, Earth.

Wondering why they couldn’t have sent their message electronically, like everyone else, I struggled to open the envelope.

“Let me,” Sam said, taking one corner of it in two fingers and deftly slitting it with the minuscule blade of the tiniest pocket knife I had ever seen.

I pulled out a single sheet of heavy white parchment, so stiff that its edges could slice flesh.

It was a letter for me. It began, “Please be advised …”

For several minutes I puzzled over the legal wordings while Sam went over to the control console and busied himself checking out the instruments. Slowly the letter’s meaning became clear to me. My breath gagged in my throat. A searing, blazing knot of pain sprang up in my chest.

“What’s wrong?” Sam was at my side in a shot. “Cripes, you look like you’re gonna explode! You’re red as a fire engine.”

I was so furious I could hardly see. I handed the letter to Sam and managed to choke out, “Does this mean what I think it means?”

He scanned the letter quickly, then read it more slowly, his eyes going wider with each word of it.

“Jesus Christ on a crutch!” he shouted. “They’re throwing you off the asteroid!”

I could not believe what the letter said. We both read it half a dozen times more. The words did not change their meaning. I wanted to scream. I wanted to kill. The vision came to my mind of lawyers stripped naked and staked out over a slow fire, screaming for mercy while I laughed and burned their letter in the fire that was roasting their flesh. I looked around the command module wildly, looking for something to throw, something to break, anything to release the terrible, terrible fury that was building inside me.

“Those sons of bitches!” Sam raged. “Those slimy do-gooder bastards!”

The lawyers represented the Moralist Sect of The One True God, Inc. The letter was to inform me that the Moralists had notified the International Astronautical Authority that they intended to capture asteroid Aten 2004 EA and use it as structural material for the habitat they were building.

“They can’t do that!” Sam bellowed, bouncing around the bridge like a weightless Ping-Pong ball. “You were there first. They can’t throw you out like a landlord evicting a tenant!”

“The white man has taken the Indian’s lands whenever he chose to,” I said, seething.

He mistook my deathly quiet tone for acquiescence. “Not anymore! Not today. This is one white man who’s on the side of the redskins.”

He was so upset, so outraged, so vociferous that I felt my own fury cooling, calming. It was as if Sam was doing all my screaming for me.

“This letter,” I hissed, “says I have no choice.”

“Hell no, you won’t go,” Sam snapped. “I’ve got lawyers too, lady. Nobody’s going to push you around.”

“Why should you want to involve yourself?”

He shot me an unfathomable glance. “I’m involved. I’m involved. You think I can sit back and watch those Moralist bastards steal your rock? I hate it when some big outfit tries to muscle us little guys.”

It occurred to me that at least part of Sam’s motivation might have been to worm his way into my affection. And my pants. He would act the brave protector of the weak, and I would act the grateful weakling who would reward him with my somewhat emaciated body. From the few words that the taciturn biologist had said at dinner, and from my observation of Sam’s own behavior, it seemed to me that he had a Casanova complex: he wanted every woman he saw.

And yet—his outrage seemed genuine enough. And yet—the instant he saw me he said I was beautiful, even though clearly I was not.

“Don’t you worry,” Sam said, his round little face grim and determined. “I’m on your side and we’ll figure out some way to stick this letter up those lawyers’ large intestines.”

“But the Moralist Sect is very powerful.”

“So what? You’ve got me, kiddo. All those poor praying sonsofbitches have on their side is God.”

I was still angry and confused as Sam and I climbed back into our space suits and he returned me to my pod on my—no, the asteroid. I felt a burning fury blazing within me, bitter rage at the idea of stealing my asteroid away from me. They were going to break it up and use it as raw material for their habitat!

Normally I would have been screaming and throwing things, but I sat quietly on the two-person scooter as we left the airlock of Sam’s ship. He was babbling away with a mixture of bravado, jokes, obscene descriptions of lawyers in general and Moralists in particular. He made me laugh. Despite my fears and my fury, Sam made me laugh and realize that there was nothing I could do about the Moralists and their lawyers at the moment, so why should I tie myself into knots over them? Besides, I had a more immediate problem to deal with.

Sam. Was he going to attempt to seduce me once we were back at my quarters? And if he did, what would my reaction be? I was shocked at my uncertainty. Three years is a long time, but to even think of allowing this man …

“You got a lawyer?” His voice came through the earphones of my helmet.

“No. I suppose the university will represent me. Legally, I’m their employee.”

“Maybe, but you…” His voice choked off. I heard him take in his breath, like a man who has just seen something that overpowered him.

“Is that it?” Sam asked in an awed voice.

The Sun was shining obliquely on The Rememberer, so that the figures I had carved were shown in high relief.

“It’s not finished,” I said. “It’s hardly even begun.”

Sam swerved the little scooter so that we moved slowly along the length of the carvings. I saw all the problems, the places that had to be fixed, improved. The feathered serpent needed more work. The Mama Kilya, the Moon Mother, was especially rough. But I had to place her there because the vein of silver in the asteroid came up to the surface only at that point and I needed to use the silver as the tears of the Moon.

Even while I picked out the weak places in my figures I could hear Sam’s breathing over the suit radio. I feared he would hyperventilate. For nearly half an hour we cruised slowly back and forth across the face of the asteroid, then spiraled around to the other side.

The one enormous advantage of space sculpture, of course, is the absence of gravity. There is no need for a base, a stand, a vertical line. Sculpture can be truly three-dimensional in space, as it was meant to be. I had intended to carve the entire surface of the asteroid.

“It’s fantastic,” Sam said at last, his voice strangely muted. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I’ll be hung by the cojones before I’ll let those double-talking bastards steal this away from you!”

At that moment I began to love Sam Gunn.

True to his word, Sam got his own lawyers to represent me. A few days after Adam Smith disappeared from my view, on its way to the Moralists’ construction site, I was contacted by the firm of Whalen and Krill, of Port Canaveral, Florida, USA, Earth.

The woman who appeared on my comm screen was a junior partner in the firm. I was not important enough for either of the two senior men. Still, that was better than my university had done: their legal counsel had told me bleakly that I had no recourse at all and I should abandon my asteroid forthwith.

“We’ve gotten the IAA arbitration board to agree to take up the dispute,” said Ms. Mindy Rourke, Esq. She seemed very young to me to be a lawyer. I was especially fascinated by her long hair falling luxuriantly past her shoulders. She could only wear it like that on Earth. In a low-gee environment it would have spread out like a chestnut-colored explosion.

“I’ll have my day in court, then.”

“You won’t have to be physically present,” Ms. Rourke said. Then she added, with a doubtful little frown, “But I’m afraid the board usually bases its decisions on the maximum good for the maximum number of people. The Moralists will house ten thousand people in their habitat. All you’ve got is you.”

What she meant was that Art counted for nothing compared to the utilitarian purpose of grinding up my asteroid, smelting it, and using its metals as structural materials for an artificial world to house ten thousand religious zealots who want to leave Earth forever.

Sam stayed in touch with me electronically, and hardly a day passed that he did not call and spend an hour or more chatting with me. Our talk was never romantic, but each call made me love him more. He spoke endlessly about his childhood in Nebraska, or was it Baltimore? Sometimes his childhood tales were based in the rainy hillsides of the Pacific Northwest. Either he moved around ceaselessly as a child or he was amalgamating tales from many other people and adopting them as his own. I never tried to find out. If Sam thought of the stories as his own childhood, what did it matter?

Gradually, as the weeks slipped into months, I found myself speaking about my own younger years. The half-deserted mountain village where I had been born. The struggle to get my father to allow me to go to the university instead of marrying, “as a decent girl should.” The professor who broke my heart. The pain that sent me fleeing to this asteroid and the life of a hermit.

Sam cheered me up. He made me smile, even laugh. He provided me with a blow-by-blow description of his own activities as an entrepreneur. Not content with owning and operating the Earth View Hotel and running a freight-hauling business that ranged from low Earth orbit to the Moon and out as far as the new habitats being built in Sun-circling orbits, Sam was also getting involved in building tourist facilities at Moonbase as well.

“And then there’s this advertising scheme that these two guys have come up with. It’s kinda crazy, but it might work.”

The “scheme” was to paint enormous advertisement pictures in the ionosphere, some fifty miles or so above the Earth’s surface, using electron guns to make the gases up at that altitude glow like the aurora borealis. The men that Sam was speaking with claimed that they could make actual pictures that could be seen across whole continents.

“When the conditions are right,” Sam added. “Like, it’s gotta be either at dusk or at dawn, when the sky looks dark from the ground but there’s still sunlight up at the right altitude.”

“Not many people are up at dawn,” I said.

It took almost a full minute between my statement and his answer, I was so distant from his base in Earth orbit.

“Yeah,” he responded at last. “So it’s gotta be around dusk.” Sam grinned lopsidedly. “Can you imagine the reaction from the environmentalists if we start painting advertisements across the sky?”

“They’ll fade away within a few minutes, won’t they?”

The seconds stretched, and then he answered, “Yeah, sure. But can you picture the look on their faces? They’ll hate it! Might be worth doing just to give ’em ulcers!”

All during those long weeks and months I could hardly work up the energy to continue my carving. What good would it be? The whole asteroid was going to be taken away from me, ground into powder, destroyed forever. I knew what the International Astronautical Authority’s arbitrators would say: Moralists, ten thousand; Art, one.

For days on end I would stand at my console, idly fingering the keyboard, sketching in the next set of figures that the lasers would etch into the stone. In the display screen the figures would look weak, misshapen, distorted. Sometimes they glared at me accusingly, as if I was the one killing them.

Time and again I ended up sketching Sam’s funny, freckled, dear face.

I found reasons to pull on my space suit and go outside. Check the lasers. Adjust the power settings. Recalibrate the feedback sensors. Anything but actual work. I ran my gloved fingers across the faces of the hauqui, the guardian spirits I had carved into this metallic stone. It was a bitter joke. The hauqui needed someone to guard them from evil.

Instead of working, I cried. All my anger and hate was leaching away in the acid of frustration and waiting, waiting, endless months of waiting for the inevitable doom.

And then Sam showed up again, just as unexpectedly as the first time.

My asteroid, with me attached to it, had moved far along on its yearly orbit. I could see Earth only through the low-power telescope that I had brought with me, back in those first days when I had fooled myself into believing I would spend my free time in space studying the stars. Even in the telescope the world of my birth was nothing more than a blurry fat crescent, shining royal-blue.

My first inkling that Sam was approaching was a message I found typed on my comm screen. I had been outside, uselessly fingering my carvings. When I came in and took off my helmet I saw on the screen:

My eyes flicked to the digital clock reading. He would be here in a matter of minutes! At least this time I was wearing clothes, but still I looked a mess.

By the time his transport was hovering in a matching orbit and the pumps in my airlock were chugging, I was decently dressed in a set of beige coveralls he had not seen before, my hair was combed and neatly netted, and I had applied a bit of makeup to my face. My expression in the mirror had surprised me: smiling, nearly simpering, almost as giddy as a schoolgirl. Even my heart was skipping along merrily.

Sam came in, his helmet already off. I propelled myself over to him and kissed him warmly on the lips. He reacted in a typical Sam Gunn way. He gave a whoop and made three weightless cartwheels, literally heels over head, with me gripped tightly in his arms.

For all his exuberance and energy, Sam was a gentle, thoughtful lover. Hours later, as we floated side-by-side in my darkened quarters, the sweat glistening on our bare skins, he murmured:

“I never thought I could feel so … so ..

Trying to supply the missing word, I suggested, “So much in love?”

He made a little nod. In our weightlessness, the action made him drift slightly away from me. I caught him in my arms, though, and pulled us back together.

“I love you, Sam,” I whispered, as though it were a secret. “I love you.”

He gave a long sigh. I thought it was contentment, happiness even.

“Listen,” he said, “you’ve got to come over to the ship. Those two nutcases who want to paint the ionosphere are on their way to the Moralists’ habitat.”

“What does that have to do with …”

“You gotta meet them,” he insisted. Untangling from me, he began to round up his clothes, floating like weightless ghosts in the shadows. “You know what those Moralist hypocrites are going to call their habitat, once it’s finished? Eden! How’s that for chutzpah?”

He had to explain the Yiddish word to me. Eden. The Moralists wanted to create their own paradise in space. Well, maybe they would, although I doubted that it would be paradise for anyone who deviated in the slightest from their stern views of right and wrong.

We showered, which in zero-gee is an intricate, intimate procedure. Sam washed me thoroughly, lovingly, using the washcloth to tenderly push the soapy water that clung to my skin over every inch of my body.

“The perfect woman,” he muttered. “A dirty mind in a clean body.”

Finally we dried off, dressed and headed out to Sam’s ship. But first he maneuvered the little scooter along the length of my asteroid.

“Doesn’t seem to be much more done than the last time I was here,” he said, almost accusingly.

I was glad we were in the space suits and he could not see me blush. I remained silent.

As we moved away from The Rememberer, Sam told me, “The lawyers aren’t having much luck with the arbitration board.” In the earphones of my helmet his voice sounded suddenly tired, almost defeated.

“I didn’t think they would.”

“The board’s gonna hand down its decision in two weeks. If they decide against you, there’s no appeal.”

“And they will decide against me, won’t they?”

He tried to make his voice brighter. “Well, the lawyers are doing their damnedest. But if trickery and deceit won’t work, maybe I can bribe a couple of board members.”

“Don’t you dare! You’ll go to jail.”

He laughed.

As we came up to Sam’s transport ship, I saw its name stenciled in huge letters beneath the insect-eye canopy of the command module: Klaus Heiss.

“Important economist,” Sam answered my question. “Back fifty years or so. The first man to suggest free enterprise in space.”

“I thought that writers had suggested that long before space flight even began,” I said as we approached the ship’s airlock.

Sam’s voice sounded mildly impatient in my earphones. “Writers are one thing. Heiss went out and raised money, got things started. For real.”

Klaus Heiss was fitted out more handsomely than Adam Smith, even though it seemed no larger. The dining lounge was more luxurious, and apparently the crew ate elsewhere. There were four of us for dinner: Sam and myself, and the two “nutcases,” as he had called them.

Morton McGuire and T. Kagashima did not seem insane to me. Perhaps naive. Certainly enthusiastic.

“It’s the greatest idea since the invention of writing!” McGuire blurted as we sat around the dining lounge table.

He was speaking about their idea of painting the ionosphere with advertisements.

McGuire was a huge mass of flesh, bulging in every direction, straining the metal snaps of his bilious green coveralls. He looked like a balloon that had been overfilled to the point of bursting. He proudly told me that he was known as “Mountain McGuire,” from his days as a college football player. He had gone from college into advertising, gaining poundage every passing day. Living on Earth, he could not be classified as an agravitic endomorph. He was simply fat. Extremely so.

“I’m just a growing boy,” he said happily as he jammed fistfuls of food into his mouth.

The other one, Kagashima, was almost as lean as I myself. Quiet too, although his oriental eyes frequently flashed with suppressed mirth. No one seemed to know what Kagashima’s first name was. When I asked what the “T” stood for he merely smiled enigmatically and said, “Just call me Kagashima; it will be easier for you.” He spoke English very well: no great surprise since he was born and raised in Denver, USA.

Kagashima was an electronics wizard. McGuire an advertising executive. Between them they had cooked up the idea of using electron guns to create glowing pictures in the ionosphere.

“Just imagine it,” McGuire beamed, his chubby hands held up as if framing a camera shot. “It’s twilight. The first stars are coming out. You look up and—POW!—there’s a huge red and white sign covering the sky from horizon to horizon: Drink Coke!”

I wanted to vomit.

But Sam encouraged him. “Like skywriting, when planes used to spell out words with smoke.”

“Real skywriting!” McGuire enthused.

Kagashima smiled and nodded.

“Is it legal,” I asked, “to write advertising slogans across the sky?”

McGuire snapped a ferocious look at me. “There’s no laws against it! The lawyers can’t take the damned sky away from us, for god’s sake! The sky belongs to everyone.”

I glanced at Sam. “The lawyers seem to be taking my asteroid away from me.”

His smile was odd, like the smile a hunter would have on his face as he saw his prey coming into range of his gun.

“Possession is nine-tenths of the law,” Sam muttered.

“Who possesses the sky?” Kagashima asked, with that oriental ambiguity that passes for wisdom.

“We do!” snapped McGuire.

Sam merely smiled like a cat eying a fat canary.

At Sam’s insistence I spent the night hours aboard his ship. His quarters were much more luxurious than mine, and since practically all space operations kept Greenwich Mean Time, there was no problem of differing clocks.

His cabin was much more than an alcove off the command module. It was small, but a real compartment, with a zipper hammock for sleeping and a completely enclosed shower stall that jetted water from all directions. We used the shower, but not the hammock. We finally fell asleep locked weightlessly in each other’s embrace and woke up when we gently bumped into the compartment’s bulkhead, many hours later.

“We’ve got to talk,” Sam said as we were dressing.

I smiled at him. “That means you talk and I listen, no?”

“No. Well, maybe I do most of the talking. But you’ve got to make some decisions, kiddo.”

“Decisions? About what?”

“About your asteroid. And the next few years of your life.”

He did not say that I had to make a decision about us. I barely noticed that fact at the time. I should have paid more attention.

Glancing at the digital clock set into the bulkhead next to his hammock, Sam told me, “In about half an hour I’m going to be conversing with the Right Reverend Virtue T. Dabney, spiritual leader of the Moralist Sect. Their chief, their head honcho, sitteth at the right hand of You-Know-Who. The Boss.”

“The head of the Moralists?”

“Right.”

“He’s calling you? About my asteroid?”

Sam’s grin was full of teeth. “Nope. About his worms. We’re carrying another load of ’em out to his Eden on this trip.”

“Why would the head of the Moralists call you about worms?”

“Seems that the worms have become afflicted by a rare and strange disease,” Sam said, the grin turning delightfully evil, “and the hauling contract the Moralists signed with me now contains a clause that says I’m not responsible for their health.”

I was hanging in midair, literally and mentally. “What’s that got to do with me?”

Drifting over so close that our noses were practically touching, Sam asked in a whisper, “Would you be willing to paint the world’s first advertisement on the ionosphere? An advertisement for the Moralists?”

“Never!”

“Even if it means that they’ll let you keep the asteroid?”

Ah, the emotions that surged through my heart! I felt anger, and hope, and disgust, even fear. But mostly anger.

“Sam, that’s despicable! It’s a desecration! To turn the sky into an advertising poster…”

Sam was grinning, but he was serious about this. “Now don’t climb up on a high horse, kid….”

“And do it for the Moralists?” My temper was boiling over now. “The people who want to take my asteroid away from me and destroy the memory of my own people? You want me to help them?”

“Okay, okay! Don’t pop your cork over it.” Sam said, taking me gently by the wrist. “I’m just asking you to think about it. You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”

Completely bewildered, I allowed Sam to lead me up to the ship’s command module. The same two husband-and-wife engineers were there at their consoles, just as blond and even more bloated than they had been the last time I had seen them, it seemed to me. They greeted me with smiles of recognition.

Sam asked them to leave and they wafted out through the main hatch like a pair of hot-air balloons. On their way to the galley, no doubt.

We drifted over to the comm console. No one needs chairs in zero gravity. We simply hung there, my arms floating up to about chest height, as they would in a swimming pool, while Sam worked the console to make contact with the Moralist Sect headquarters back on Earth.

It took more than a half hour for Sam to get Rev. Dabney on his screen. A small army of neatly scrubbed, earnest, glittering-eyed young men and women appeared, one after the other, and tried to deal with Sam. Instead, Sam dealt with them.

“Okay, if you want the worms to die, it’s your seventy million dollars, not mine,” said Sam to the young lawyer.

To the lawyer’s superior, Sam spoke sweetly, “Your boss signed the contract. All I’m doing is informing you of the problem, as specified in clause 22.1, section C.”

To his boss, “All right! I’ll dump the whole load right here in the middle of nowhere and cut my losses. Is that what you want?”

To Rev. Dabney’s astonished assistant administrator, “The lawsuit will tie you up for years, wiseass! You’ll never finish your Eden! The creditors will take it over and make a Disney World out of it!”

To the special assistant to the High Pastor of the Moralist Sect, “This has gone beyond lawyers. It’s even beyond the biologists’ abilities! The damned worms are dying! They’re withering away! What we need is a miracle!”

That, finally, brought the Right Rev. Virtue T. Dabney to the screen.

I instantly disliked the man. His face was largely hidden behind a dark beard and mustache. I suppose he thought it made him look like an Old Testament patriarch. To me he looked like a conquistador; all he needed was a shining steel breastplate and helmet. He seemed to me perfectly capable of burning my people at the stake.

“Mr. Gunn,” he said, smiling amiably. “How may I help you?”

Sam said lightly, “I’ve got another ten tons of worms for you, as per contract, but they’re dying. I don’t think any of ’em are gonna survive long enough to make it to your habitat.”

It took more than a minute for the messages to get back and forth from Earth to the Klaus Heiss. Dabney spent the time with hands folded and head bowed prayerfully. Sam hung onto the handgrips of the comm console to keep himself from bobbing around weightlessly. I stayed out of range of the video and fidgeted with seething, smoldering nervous fury.

“The worms are dying, you say? What seems to be the matter? Your first shipment made it to Eden with no trouble at all, I believe.”

“Right. But something’s gone wrong with this load. Maybe we got bad worms to start with. Maybe there’s a fault in the cargo containers’ radiation shielding. The worms are dying.” Sam reached into his hip pocket and pulled out a blackened, twisted, dried out string of what must have once been an earthworm. “They’re all going like this.”

I watched intently for all the long seconds it took the transmission to reach Dabney’s screen. When it did, his eyes went wide and his mouth dropped open.

“All of them? But how can this be?”

Sam shrugged elaborately. “Beats the hell out of me. My biologist is stymied, too. Maybe it’s a sign from God that he doesn’t want you to leave the Earth. I dunno.”

Dabney’s bearded face, when that line of Sam’s finally hit him, went into even greater shock.

“I cannot believe the Lord would smite his faithful so. This is the work of evil.”

“So what do we do about it?” Sam asked cheerfully. “My contract guarantees full payment for delivery. I’m not responsible for the condition of the cargo after your people inspected my cargo bay and okayed the shipment.”

Sam blanked out the screen and turned to me. “Have you made up your mind, kiddo?”

“Made up my mind?”

“About the ads in the ionosphere.”

“What do his dying worms have to do with me? Or with painting an advertisement on the ionosphere?”

“You’ll see!” he promised. “Will you do it?”

“No! Never!”

“Even if it means saving your asteroid?”

I was too angry even to consider it. I turned my back to Sam and gritted my teeth with fury.

Sam sighed deeply, but when I whirled around to face him once more, he was grinning at me in that lopsided cunning way of his. Before I could say anything, he flicked on the screen again. Dabney’s expression was crafty now. His eyes were narrowed, his lips pressed tight.

“What do you suggest as a solution to this problem, Mr. Gunn?”

“Damned if I know,” said Sam. “Seems to me you need a miracle, Reverend.”

He took special delight in Dabney’s wince when that “damned” reached him.

“A miracle, you say,” replied the Moralist leader. “And how do you think we might arrange a miracle?”

Sam chuckled. “Well—I don’t know much about the way religions work, but I’ve heard that if somebody is willing to make a sacrifice, give up something that he really wants or even needs, then God rewards him. Something about casting bread upon the waters, I think.”

I began to realize that there was nothing at all wrong with the Moralists’ worms. Sam was merely holding them hostage. For me. He was risking lawsuits that could cost him everything he owned. For me.

Dabney’s expression became even more squint-eyed than before. “You wouldn’t be Jewish by any chance, would you, Mr. Gunn?”

Sam’s grin widened to show lots of teeth. “You wouldn’t be antiSemitic, would you, Reverend?”

Their negotiation went on for the better part of three hours, with those agonizing long pauses in between each and every statement they made. After an hour of jockeying back and forth, Dabney finally suggested that he—and his sect—might give up their claim to an asteroid that they wanted to use for building material.

“That might be just the sacrifice that will save the worms,” Sam allowed.

More offers and counteroffers, more tiptoeing and verbal sparring. It was all very polite. And vicious. Dabney knew that there was nothing wrong with the worms. He also knew that Sam could open his cargo bay to vacuum for the rest of the trip to Eden, and the Moralists would receive ten tons of very dead and desiccated garbage.

Finally, “If my people make this enormous sacrifice, if we give up our claim to this asteroid that we so desperately need, what will you be willing to do for me … er, us, in return?”

Sam rubbed his chin. “There’s hundreds of asteroids in the Aten group, and more in the Apollos. They all cut across Earth’s orbit. You can pick out a different one. It’s no great sacrifice to give up this one little bitty piece of rock that you’re claiming.”

Dabney was looking down, as if at his desktop. Perhaps an aide was showing him lists of the asteroids available to help build his Eden.

“We picked that particular asteroid because its orbit brings it the closest to Eden and therefore it is the easiest—and least expensive—for us to capture and use.”

He held up a hand before Sam could reply, an indication of very fast reflexes on his part. “However, in the interests of charity and self-sacrifice, I am willing to give up that particular asteroid. I know that some Latin American woman has been carving figures on it. If I—that is, if we allow her to remain and give up our claim to the rock, what will you do for the Moralist Sect in return?”

Now Sam’s smile returned like a cat slinking in through a door open merely the barest crack. I realized that he had known all along that Dabney would not give in unless he got something more out of the deal than merely the delivery of the worms he had already paid for. He wanted icing on his cake.

“Well now,” Sam said slowly, “how about an advertisement for the Moralist Sect that glows in the sky and can be seen from New England to the Mississippi valley?”

No! I screamed silently. Sam couldn’t help them do that! It would be sacrilegious.

But when the transmission finally reached Dabney, his shrewd eyes grew even craftier. “What are you talking about, Mr. Gunn?”

Sam described the concept of painting the ionosphere with electron guns. Dabney’s eyes grew wider and greedier with each word.

Finally his bearded face broke into a benign smile. “Mr. Gunn, you were right. The Bible describes our situation perfectly. ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters and it shall be returned unto you a thousand fold.’ ”

“Does that mean we’ve got a deal?” Sam asked flatly.

I pushed over toward him and banged the blank key hard enough to send me recoiling toward the overhead. Sam looked up at me. There was no surprise on his face. He looked as if he had expected me to fight him.

“You can’t do this!” I said. “You’re playing into his hands! You can’t…”

“You want to stay on the asteroid or not?”

I stopped in mid-sentence and stared at him. Sam’s eyes were flat gray, boring into me.

“This is the way business is done, kid,” he said. “You want the asteroid. They want the asteroid. I make a threat they know is phony, but they pretend to consider it—as long as they get something they don’t have now. What it boils down to is, you can stay on the asteroid if Holier-Than-Thou gets to paint his advertisements across the ionosphere. That’s the deal. Will you go for it or riot?”

I couldn’t speak. I was too furious, too confused, torn both ways and angry at Sam for putting me in this agony of indecision. I wanted to stay on the asteroid, yes, but not at the price of allowing the Moralists to deface the sky!

The message light on the screen began blinking. Sam touched the blank key again, and Dabney’s face filled the screen once more, smiling an oily smile, the kind of unctuous happiness that a salesman shows when he’s finally palmed off some shoddy goods at a shameful price.

“We have a deal, Mr. Gunn. We will rethink our options on acquiring that particular asteroid. Your, ah … friend,” he made a nasty smirk, “can stay and chip away at the rock to her heart’s content. In return, you will help us to produce our ads in the ionosphere.”

Sam glanced at me. I could negate the whole thing with merely a shake of my head. Instead, I nodded. And bit my lip so hard I tasted blood in my mouth.

Sam grinned at the display screen. “We’ve got a deal, Bishop.”

“Reverend,” corrected Dabney. Then he added, “And I presume our cargo of worms will arrive at Eden in a healthy condition?”

“That’s up to you,” said Sam, straight-faced. “And the power of prayer.”

They chatted amiably for a few minutes more, a pair of con men congratulating each other. Each of them had what he wanted. I began to realize that Sam would make a considerable amount of money from producing the Moralists’ ionospheric advertisements. My anger took a new turn. I could feel my face turning red, my cheeks burning with rage.

Sam finally ended his conversation with Rev. Dabney and turned off the comm console. It seemed to me that Dabney’s bearded image remained on the screen even after it went dark and dead. It burned in my vision like the afterimage of an explosion.

Sam turned to me with a wide grin splitting his face. “Congratulations! You can stay on the asteroid.”

“Congratulations yourself,” I said, my voice trembling, barely under control. “You have put yourself into the advertising business. You should make a great deal of profit out of defacing the sky. I hope that makes you happy.”

I stormed out of the bridge and headed for the locker where I had left my space suit. Yes, I could stay on my asteroid and finish my work. But my love affair with Sam Gunn was shattered completely.

He let the fat engineer fly me back to my quarters. Sam knew I was furious and it would be best for him to leave me alone.

But not for long. After four or five sleepless hours, bobbing around my darkened quarters like a cork tossed on a stormy sea, I saw the message light of my comm console flick bright red. I reached out and turned it on.

Sam’s face appeared on the screen, a half-guilty boyish grin on his face. “Still mad at me?”

“No, not really.” And I realized it was true even as I spoke the words. I was angry at Dabney and his smug Moralist power; angry at myself, mostly, for wanting to carve The Rememberer so much that I was willing to let them do whatever they wanted, so long as they left me alone.

“Good,” said Sam. “Want me to bring some breakfast over to you?”

I shook my head. “I think not.”

“Got to make a course change in another couple hours,” he said. “So I can bring this can of worms to Eden.”

“I know.” He would be leaving me, and I could not blame him if he never returned. Still, it was impossible for me to allow him to come close to me. Not now. Not this soon after the deal he had struck. I knew he had done it for me, although I also knew he had his own reasons, as well.

“Listen—I can get somebody else do design the pictures for the Moralists. You don’t have to do it.”

He was trying to be kind to me, I knew. But my anger did not abate. “Who draws the pictures doesn’t matter, Sam. It’s the fact that the advertisements will be spread across the sky. For them. That disgusts me.”

“I’m doing this for you, kid.”

“And for the profits,” I snapped. “Tell the whole truth.”

“Yep, there’s a pot full of money in it,” Sam admitted. “You wouldn’t have to depend on your university grant anymore.”

“Never!” I spat.

He grinned at me. “That’s my girl. I would’ve been disappointed if you agreed to it. But I had to ask, had to give you the first shot at the money.”

Money. Art and money are always bound together, no matter what you do. The artist must eat. Must breathe. And that requires money.

But I stubbornly refused to give in to the temptation. I would not help that slithering Dabney to spread his advertising filth across the world’s sky. Never.

Or so I thought.

Things happened so fast over the next few weeks that, to this day, I am not entirely certain how the chain of events began. Who did what to whom. I am only certain of one thing: Dabney had no intention of carrying out his part of the bargain he had struck with Sam, and he never did.

I was alone again, and missing Sam terribly. For three years I had lived in isolation without a tear or a regret. I had even relished the solitude, the freedom from the need to adjust my behavior to the expectations of others. Sam had burst into my life like a joyful energetic skyrocket, showering pretty sparks everywhere. And now that he was gone, I missed him. I feared I would never see him again, and I knew if he forgot me it would be my own fault.

Suddenly my sorrowing loneliness was shattered by the arrival of a team of two dozen propulsion engineers, with legal documents that stated they were empowered to move my asteroid to Eden, where it was to be broken up and used as structural material for the Moralists’ habitat.

Without thinking twice I put in a frantic call for Sam. It turned out he was halfway around the Earth’s orbit. He had delivered his worms to Eden and was now on his way back to the Moon to pick up electronics components for a new construction site at the L-4 libration point.

There were no relay stations around Earth’s orbit in those days. My call had to fight past the Sun’s coronal interference. Sam’s image, when he came onto my comm screen, was shimmering and flecked with pinpoint bursts of light, like an old hologram.

As soon as he said hello I unloaded my tale of woe in a single burst of unrelieved fury and fear.

“They’re taking possession of the asteroid!” I finished. “I told you they couldn’t be trusted!”

For once in his life Sam was silent and thoughtful. I watched his expression change from mild curiosity to shocked surprise and then to a jaw-clenched anger as my words reached him.

At last he said, “Don’t go off the deep end. Give me a few hours to look into this. I’ll call you back.”

It took almost forty-eight hours. I was frantic, my emotions swinging like a pendulum between the desire to hide myself or run away altogether and the growing urge to take one of the high-powered lasers I used for rock carving and slice the propulsion team into bite-sized chunks of bloody dead meat.

I tried to reach Sam a thousand times during those maddening horrible hours of waiting. Always I got one of the crew members from his ship, or a staff person from his headquarters at the Earth View Hotel. Always they gave me the same message: “Sam’s looking into the problem for you. He said he’ll call you as soon as he gets everything straightened out.”

When he finally did call me, I was exhausted and ready for a straitjacket.

“It doesn’t look good,” said his wavering, tight-lipped image. Without waiting for me to respond, Sam outlined the situation.

The Right Reverend Virtue T. Dabney (his T stood for Truthful, it turned out!) had screwed us both. The Moralists never withdrew their claim from the IAA’s arbitration board, and the board had decided in their favor, as Dabney had expected. The Moralists had the right to take my asteroid and use it as construction material.

Worse still, Sam’s cargo of worms had arrived at Eden in fine, slimy, wriggling earthwormy health. And even worse than that, Sam had signed the contract to produce the ionospheric advertisements for the Moralist Sect. The deal was set, as legal and legitimate as an act of the world congress.

“If I don’t go through with the ads,” Sam said, strangely morose, “the bastards can sue me for everything I’ve got. They’ll wind up owning my hotel, my ships, even the clothes on my back.”

“Isn’t there anything we can do?” I pleaded to his image on my screen.

For long minutes he gave no response, as my words struggled across nearly three hundred million kilometers to reach him. I hung weightless before the screen, suspended in the middle of my shabby little compartment while outside I could feel the thumps and clangs of the propulsion team attaching their obscene rocket thrusters and nuclear engines to my asteroid. I felt like a woman surrounded by rapists, helpless and alone.

I stared so hard at Sam’s image in my screen that my eyes began to water. And then I realized that I was crying.

At last, after a lifetime of agony, Sam’s face broke into a sly grin. “Y’know, I saw a cartoon once, when I was a kid. It was in a girlie magazine.”

I wanted to scream at him. What does this have to do with my problem? But he went on calmly, smiling crookedly at his reminiscence, knowing that any objections from me could not reach him for a quarter of an hour.

“It showed these two guys chained to the wall of a dungeon, ten feet off the floor. Chained hand and foot. Beards on them down to their kneecaps. Totally hopeless situation. And one of the guys—” Sam actually laughed! “—one of the guys has this big stupid grin on his face and he’s saying, ‘Now here’s my plan.’ ”

I felt my lungs filling themselves with air, getting ready to shriek at his nonsense.

“Now, before you blow your top,” Sam warned, “let me tell you two things: First, we’re both in this together. Second—well… here’s my plan.”

He kept on speaking for the next hour and a half. I never got the chance to object or even get a word in.

That is how I came to paint the first picture in Earth’s ionosphere.

Sam had expected me all along to draw the advertisements for him. He never planned to use another artist. “Why should some stranger make all that money?” was his attitude.

While the propulsion engineers fitted out my asteroid with their nuclear rocket systems and supply ships from the Moon towed huge spherical tanks of gaseous propellants, Sam relayed the Rev. Dabney’s rough sketches of what the ionospheric advertisements should look like.

They were all photographs of Dabney himself, wrapped in pure white robes with heavenly clouds of gold behind him and just the hint of a halo adorning his saintly head.

I would have trashed them immediately if I had not been aware of Sam’s plan.

The timing had to be perfect. The first ad was scheduled to be placed over the midwestern section of the United States, where it could be seen from roughly Ohio to Iowa. If everything went the way Mountain McGuire and T. Kagashima claimed it would, the picture would drift slowly westward as the day/night terminator crawled across the Earth’s surface.

Sam himself came to visit me on the day that the first ad was to be produced. He was in the latest and largest of his cargo carriers, the Laissez Faire, which he jokingly referred to as “The Lazy Fairy.”

My asteroid was already on its way to Eden. The propulsion engineers had connected the last of their propellant tanks, turned on their systems, and left me alone to glide slowly, under the low but steady thrust of the nuclear rockets, to a rendezvous with Eden. They would return in a few days to make final course corrections and take me off the asteroid forever.

Sam looked absolutely impish when he stepped into my compartment. His grin was almost diabolic. My place was an even bigger mess than usual, what with the sketches for the advertisements floating here and there and all my other sketches and computer wafers hanging weightlessly in midair.

“How can you ever find anything in here?” Sam asked, glancing around.

I had remained at my drawing board, behind it actually. It formed something of a defensive shield for me. I did not want to fling myself into Sam’s arms, no matter how much I really did want to do it. I couldn’t let him think that I was willing to be his lover again in return for the help he was giving me. I couldn’t let myself think that, especially because it was very close to being true.

He gave no indication of expecting such a reward. He merely eyed me mischievously and asked, “You really want to go through with this?”

I did not hesitate an instant. “Yes!”

He took a deep breath. “Okay. I’m game if you are. The lawyers have checked everything out. Let’s do it.”

I slid out from behind my drawing board and went to the computer. Sam came up beside me and activated my communications console. For the next half-hour we were all business, me checking my drawing and Sam connecting with McGuire and Kagashima.

“I’m glad they attached the rockets and that other junk to the end of the asteroid you haven’t carved yet,” Sam muttered as we worked. “Would’ve been a crime if they had messed up the work you’ve already done.”

I nodded curtly, not trusting myself to look into his eyes. He was close enough to brush against my shoulder. I could feel the warmth of his body next to me, even while I sweated with cold apprehension.

Working together as a team linked across hundreds of millions of kilometers, Sam, McGuire, Kagashima and I painted the first picture high in the ionosphere of Earth. From my computer my design went forth to a set of electron guns on board the same orbiting station that housed Sam’s hotel. In the comm screen I saw the picture forming across the flat midsection of North America.

The Virgin of the Andes.

I had no intention of spreading the pompous Dabney’s unctuous features across the sky. Not even the Norte Americanos deserved that. Instead I had drawn a picture from my heart, from my childhood memories of the crude paintings that adorned the whitewashed walls of my village church.

You must understand that it was years before I myself saw my creation in the way it was meant to be seen, from the ground. All I had to go on that day was the little screen of my comm system, and even there I was seeing the Virgin backwards, like looking at a stained glass window from outside the cathedral.

Everyone was caught by surprise. A few startled gringos tried to photograph the picture that suddenly appeared over their heads at sunset, but none of the photos showed the true size or scope or even the actual colors of my Virgin. The colors especially were impossible to capture, they were so pale and shimmering and subtly shifting each moment. By the time television stations realized what was happening and dispatched their mobile news units, the Virgin had disappeared into the darkness of night.

All of North America went into startled, shocked turmoil. Then the word spread all across the world.

Ionosphere paintings last only for those precious few minutes of twilight, of course. Once the Sun dips below the horizon, the delicate electrical effects that create the subtle colors quickly disappear, and the picture fades into nothingness.

Except that the information which created the picture is stored in a computer, gracias a Dios. Many years later, when it was safe for me to return to Earth, I allowed the university to paint my Virgin over the skies of my native land. I saw it at last the way it was meant to be seen. It was beautiful, more beautiful than anything I have ever done since.

But that was not to happen for many years. As Sam and I watched my Virgin fade into darkness he turned to me with a happy grin.

“Now,” he said cheerfully, “the shit hits the fan.”

And indeed it did. Virtually every lawyer in the solar system became involved in the suits, countersuits, and counter-countersuits. Dabney and his Moralists claimed that Sam had violated their contract. Sam claimed that the contract specifically gave him artistic license, and indeed those words were buried in one of the sub-sub-clauses on the next-to-last page of that thick legal document. The advertising industry was thunderstruck. Environmentalists from pole to pole screamed and went to court, which prompted art critics and the entire apparatus of “fine art”—the museums, magazines, charitable associations, social clubs, wealthy patrons and even government agencies—to come to the defense of a lonely young artist that none of them had ever heard of before: Elverda Apacheta. Me!

Sam and I paid scant attention to the legal squabbles. We were sailing on my asteroid past the Moralists’ half-finished Eden and out far beyond Earth’s orbit. Sam’s “Lazy Fairy” was crammed to its sizable capacity with propellants for the nuclear rockets attached to The Rememberer. He jiggered the propulsion engineers’ computer program so that my asteroid headed for deep space, out past even the orbit of Mars, out to the Belt where its brother and sister asteroids orbited by the millions.

When the Moralists’ engineers tried to come out and intercept “their” runaway, Sam gleefully informed them:

“This object is a derelict, under the definition stated in the IAA’s regulations of space commerce. It is heading for deep space, and any attempt to intercept it or change its course will be regarded by the IAA and the world government as an act of piracy!”

By the time the Moralists’ lawyers came to the conclusion that Sam was bluffing, we were moving fast enough and far enough so that Dabney decided it would not be worthwhile trying to recover my asteroid. The Rememberer sailed out to the Asteroid Belt, half a dozen propulsion engineers were fired by the Moralists (and immediately hired by S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited) and Sam and I spent more than a year together.

“And that is how I became famous.” Elverda Apacheta smiled slightly, as if someone had paid her a compliment she did not deserve. “Even though I am a sculptress, I am known to the public for that one painting. Like Michelangelo and the Sistine ceiling.”

Jade asked, “And Sam? You say he spent more than a year with you on your asteroid?”

Now the sculptress laughed, a rich throaty sound. “Yes, I know it sounds strange to imagine Sam staying in one place for two days on end, let alone three hundred and eighty. But he did. He stayed with me that long.”

“That’s … unusual.”

“You must realize that half the solar system’s lawyers were looking for Sam. It was a good time for him to be unavailable. Besides, he wanted to see the Asteroid Belt for himself. You may recall that he made and lost several fortunes out there.”

“Yes, I know,” said Jade.

Elverda Apacheta nodded slowly, remembering. “It was a stormy time, cooped up in my little workshop. We both had other demons driving us: Sam wanted to be the first entrepreneur to set up operations in the Asteroid Belt….”

“And he was,” Jade murmured.

“Yes, he was. And I had my own work. My art.”

“Which is admired and adored everywhere.”

“Perhaps so,” admitted the sculptress, “but still I receive requests to produce the Virgin of the Andes. No matter what I do, that painting will haunt me forever.”

“The Rememberer is the most popular work of art off-Earth. Every year thousands of people make the pilgrimage. Your people will never be forgotten.”

“Perhaps more tourists would go to see it if it were in a lower orbit,” the sculptress mused. “Sam worked it out so that it swung through the Asteroid Belt, returned to Earth’s vicinity, and was captured into a high orbit, about twelve thousand kilometers up. He was afraid of bringing it closer; he said his calculations were not so exact and he feared bringing it so close that it would hit the Earth.”

“Still, it’s regarded as a holy shrine and one of the greatest works of art anywhere,” Jade said.

“But it’s rather difficult for people to get to.” Elverda Apacheta’s smooth brow knitted slightly in an anxious little frown. “I have asked the IAA to bring it closer, down to where the tourist hotels orbit, but they have not acted on my request as yet.”

“You know how slow bureaucracies are,” said-Jade.

The sculptress sighed. “I only hope I live long enough for them to make their decision.”

“Did the Moralists try to recapture your asteroid?”

“Oh no. That was the beauty of Sam’s scheme. By pushing The Rememberer into such a high-velocity orbit, he made it too expensive for the Moralists to go chasing after us. They screamed and sued, but finally they settled on another one of the Aten group. More than one, I believe.”

“And Sam left you while you were still coasting out in the Belt?”

She smiled sadly. “Yes. We quarreled a lot, of course. It was not entirely a honeymoon trip. Finally, he detached his ship to investigate some of the smaller asteroids that we had discovered. He said he wanted to register a priority in their discovery. ‘It’s the only way I’ll ever get my name in the history books,’ he told me. That was the last I saw of him.”

“No further contact at all?”

“Oh, we called each other. We spent hours talking. But he never came back to me.” Elverda Apacheta looked away from Jade, toward the view of Earth in the lounge’s lone window. “In a way I was almost glad of it. Sam was very intense, and so was I. We were not meant to stay together for very long.”

Jade said nothing. For long moments the only sound in the lounge was the faint whisper of air coming through the ventilating ducts.

“The last time I spoke with him,” Elverda Apacheta said, “he had a premonition of death.”

Jade felt her entire body tense. “Really?”

“Oh, it was nothing dark and brooding. That was not Sam’s nature. He merely asked me someday to do a statue of him exactly as I remembered him, without using a photograph or anything else for a model. Strictly from memory. He said he would like to have that as his monument once he is gone.”

“His statue on the Moon.”

The sculptress nodded. “Yes. I did it in glass. Lunar glass. Have you seen it?”

“It’s beautiful!”

Elverda Apacheta laughed. “It does not look like Sam at all. He was not a tall, dauntless explorer with a jutting jaw and steely eyes. But it’s the way he wanted to be, and in a strange sort of way, inside that funny little body of his, that is the way he really was. So that is the way I made his statue.”

And she laughed. But the tears in her eyes were not from joy.

Jade found her own vision blurring. For the first time since she had found out the truth about her birth, she realized that Sam Gunn, her own father, would have loved her if he had only known she existed.