Pallas (6 page)

Instead, they could leave him lying in a dark rear stall of the communal showers all night on a cold, damp concrete floor, driven nearly to ma
d
ness by echoes from the rough-surfaced, leaky pipes they’d strapped him to, helpless to prevent small, many-legged creatures from crawling over his face. The only thing that had ever helped him at times like these was filling his mind with fantastic, heartfelt images of someday, somehow flying over the hated Rimfence to freedom.

For identical reasons, United Nations Education and Morale couns
e
lors couldn’t be issued anything as brutal as handcuffs. That, too, might destroy their sponsors’ illusions of a brave new world. But they could cinch him to a water pipe by the neck and bind his wrists and ankles, with plastic zip-ties saved for them in a particular refuse bin over at Central
Receiving, that
restricted circulation in his hands and feet until he couldn’t move or feel anything in them.

Similarly, they couldn’t whip him or strike him with fists—and every use of their shock batons was supposedly monitored remotely by their supervisors. What they could do was drub him in shifts, for hours on end, with meter-long sections of concrete reinforcement rod wrapped in pla
s
tic foam and duct tape—more largesse from some generous soul at Ce
n
tral Receiving—until he could hardly move for the pain, even if he hadn’t been trussed up, and it felt like every bone in his body had been broken, even though he never had a single scratch or bruise to show for it.

And, of course, since the Chief Administrator had recently broadened the communalistic charter to forbid personal possessions of any kind, they invariably relieved him of everything he carried in the little pouch he wore on a string around his neck—like every other colonist he
knew—beneath his pocketless Project-issues.

Emerson had long understood with the clarity of a born victim—in this respect his cynicism was genuine—that there was always more the blue goons might have done to him if they’d been inclined, and probably would someday unless he found a way to fulfill his desperate fantasies of flight. For now the worst part, once he’d been taken from the stall, cleaned up, and shoved into the breakfast line before assembly, was that his fatigue and pain were more or less invisible. His stiffness and e
x
haustion would be interpreted by the Chief Administrator as sullen st
u
pidity. His lack of fear—because he’d already survived far worse—would resemble defiance. And more and more, with every day that passed, the resemblance was appropriate.

Many times before he’d reached his present age—not nearly as often as he’d broken the rules successfully—he’d been brought before the Chief Administrator to receive what was invariably represented as the Judgment of the Community. It had begun years ago when he’d retrieved bruised oranges from the Residence trash, cut out the spoiled parts, squeezed the juice, and was caught trading homemade refreshments to field workers for odd bits they themselves had salvaged elsewhere. That was how he’d gotten the spool-ends of wire for his radio. Luckily, no one had ever summed up what he’d acquired and accused him of the add
i
tional infraction of “hoarding.”

Yesterday, he’d been caught buying admission chits—scalping tic
k
ets—from a few of the more amiably corruptible guards who didn’t want them, to a charity performance by a visiting Earthie entertainer a little past her prime and the peak of her fame, but gushingly enthusiastic about the Project. There seemed to be many of that type.

Each time they met this way, face to face in his private office, the Chief Administrator threatened to send him Outside into what he claimed was a jungle where every split second represented a life-or-death struggle for mere subsistence. His embarrassed parents—the Chief Administr
a
tor’s housekeeper and Emerson’s father, called in from the fields—always begged their master for leniency, and their humble pleas were always granted. To their distress, Emerson neither experienced nor
expressed gratitude at these reprieves. What they’d never have believed, after all the years of forcing themselves to adapt to their own fate, was that, each time he was caught, the blue goons used the excuse to terrorize and rough him up, sometimes claiming afterward that he’d resisted them.

Somehow he had resisted them all these years, and the Project’s psychovultures as well—partly with his mental images of flying—and survived. He couldn’t fight directly, but executed his revenge with cold intelligence. In the beginning, he’d waited until the next spontaneous rash of vandalism to commit his own, better-planned acts of sabotage—bits of hay snipped off flush in building and vehicle locks, blocked and ove
r
flowing plumbing in the goons’ quarters—damage carefully calculated to equal his losses.

He’d never destroyed anything his parents or their coworkers had l
a
bored to produce. He hadn’t touched the catalytic fusion reactor—yet. As he matured, he’d eventually given up these nonproductive forays, along with their attendant risks, just as he’d given up childish fantasies about miraculously flying over the Rimfence, vowing to pursue revenge only when he could have it at a profit.

He knew the Chief Administrator would always be kindly and fo
r
giving—in public—but that one day, sooner or later, Emerson’s many and varied enterprises were bound to earn the boy a convenient accident at the hands of the blue goons, ridding the Project of an individual the older man must see as a perpetual annoyance. Before that could happen, Emerson vowed, he must escape into what he thought of as the real world.

Someone near him coughed, bringing him back from his reverie. The senior Education and Morale counselors were responsible for continuing the assembly after the Chief Administrator’s customary introduction. The first thing they did this morning, after he’d stepped off the verandah, presumably headed for his office, was to call a single individual forward by name and all alone, for judgment and punishment—the idea of any kind of trial would have sent both sides into hysterical laughter—which they were privately aware he’d already received.

“Ngu comma Emerson: unauthorized enterprise!”

He straightened his back and strode through the ranks of his fellow
peasants toward the Residence.

Again.

The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

—Robert A. Heinlein,
The
Notebooks of Lazarus Long

“R
eady, Senator?”

He hadn’t come to admire the fence, but admire it he did. Sixteen meters high, 245 kilometers long, it enclosed just short of two million hectares—1.6 percent of the asteroid’s surface—along with ten thousand colonists, their UN sheepdogs, and his family.

He wasn’t sure why, but it made him feel secure for the first time in his life. This morning’s confrontation with Alice’s young son, an otherwise undistinguished youngster about the same age as his own, had left him with a hollow feeling and he needed a little reassurance. The boy’s transgression was always the same—unauthorized enterprise—differing in an ominous way from Gibson Junior’s pranks and the general run of juvenile delinquency they’d been having so much trouble with recently.

“Senator?”

He turned to the reporter who was his real reason for being here this morning. Her impossibly long eyelashes, moist, full lips, long, clean legs revealed by a pair of tight khaki safari shorts, her narrow waist, slender hips, and assets that strained the buttons of a self-consciously proletarian work shirt all hinted, and not very subtly, that she might be willing to stay for another day or two if the famous sexy Senator could just find som
e
thing to do with the wife and kiddies.

He’d carefully deafened himself over the years to overtures like this—from bitter experience traversing the sexual minefield that was Washington—deliberately blinded
himself
, concentrating instead on the Project. It would have taken someone considerably more attractive to him than this shopworn young woman to change that.

Today the youthful-looking Senator wore the same running shoes, faded jeans, and plaid sport shirt open at the neck that a series of relaxed and wildly successful campaign spots had made him famous for. His attention—and his best political smile—were on the reporter. The shoulder-stocked camera her assistant pointed at him looked unco
m
fortably like a weapon. Then again, he supposed it was more powerful and destructive than any gun. So far the idiot, awkward in low gravity, had spent his time tripping over furrows and had already ruined several plants, angering the workers. But it was a small price to pay for publicity friendly to the Project.

“Ready when you are, Martie.”

She nodded cheerfully into the camera. “We’re here, two hundred fifty million miles from Earth, for the Global Information Gathering Organ
i
zation. With us is former United States Senator Gibson Altman, Chief Administrator of the United Nations’ Greeley Utopian Memorial Project on Pallas—and oh yes, his little son, Gibson Junior.”

Altman glanced at the sour-faced child fidgeting beside him, tousled the boy’s hair, tried to look paternal—something he’d never been much good at—then up again, more at the reporter than the camera. It was o
b
vious that the boy hadn’t been dressed by his nurse. This was Gwen’s kind of joke, outfitting her son in Levi’s, Kevlar shoes, and a shirt ide
n
tical to his father’s. Having the boy with him was a good idea, given past publicity. Having Gwen, their daughter, and baby son would have been even better, but he didn’t want them out here in the fields.

“Pallas,” the reporter continued, reading from a smart-card concealed in her palm, “is six hundred eight kilometers in diameter and follows a mildly eccentric orbit in a broad band between Mars and Jupiter co
n
taining tens of thousands of such miniature planets. Its surface area is 1,161,820 square kilometers, about the same as Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico—the so-called West American ‘four corners’ states—combined, with maybe a quarter of Wyoming thrown in for good measure.”

Martie Mough was unquestionably pretty, tall, blond, voluptuous in the extreme—and utterly sexless. He’d noted this before with female
reporters, supposing it must be a professional asset in a trade where half the customers were men, subconsciously (or otherwise) dissatisfied with their domestic arrangement, and the other half women, innately jealous and suspicious. Her name, pronounced “moe,” was often mangled, most often by her colleagues, in accordance with her physical assets (and some said her intelligence), to rhyme with “cow” or “moo.” Personally, he thought “muff” would have been funnier, but at a little under thirty, he guessed, she was at least ten years too old to interest him that way.

“Second largest of the asteroids, Pallas was the first to be explored and settled, thanks to its unique combination of resources: soil, water, and low gravity. Vesta, next-largest of the so-called Big Five Asteroids, is brighter and more easily seen from Earth, but it’s composed of granite, is therefore lifeless, and will probably remain so forever, having none of what Pallas has to offer humanity.”

Astronomers had known for a century that Pallas’s low reflectivity indicated that it was probably composed of carbonaceous chondrites, rather than meteoric stone or nickel-iron, which meant that somewhere between five and ten percent of its mass could be expected to be water, chemically locked into its substance. As a result, with little effort or e
x
penditure of energy, the hydrocarbon-rich surface could be processed into soil. In some senses, it already was soil.

Pallas’s size, however, and its consequent attraction, implied that it was an “accretion body”—the little world had proven to be heavily cr
a
tered—which for billions of years had collected smaller asteroids of di
f
fering composition. Impacting on its surface, they’d left large, discrete deposits of useful minerals and metals. Moreover, certain twe
n
tieth-century astrophysicists had held that petroleum did not stem from biological sources—dinosaurs or Carboniferous plants—as popularly believed, but had been produced by the titanic events in which the solar system had created itself from a swirling cloud of interstellar dust and gases. Their theory had been confirmed when oil was discovered within the structure of a body which presumably had never known life of any kind.

The reporter looked up just in time to catch the Senator’s eye and warn
him wordlessly that Gibson Junior, who had quietly left his father’s side, was just as quietly sifting a handful of fine dirt into the big galvanized tub containing the workers’ drinking water. Hoping she’d have the decency to edit this little drama out, he reached for the boy, snagged the neck of his shirt, and dragged him back.

The reporter suppressed a grin.

Maybe she had children of her own.

“But enough of these dry, flavorless statistics.
Senator, once one gets past that gorgeous sunrise we stopped to record this morning on the way out here, this doesn’t look all that different from, say, Iowa. What makes it worth all the trouble and expense to build a farm community a quarter of a billion miles from Earth?”

The fact was that she and her assistant had staggered out of their guest quarters well after sunrise, almost terminally hung over, and the gorgeous sunrise they’d “recorded” would come from stock footage. They’d a
r
rived the previous evening after an apparently uproarious time spent at Aloysius Brody’s sleazy establishment across the lake. This time, ho
w
ever, Altman’s smile was completely sincere, and for good reason: from here, countless perfect furrows swept away in beautiful, green concentric circles, following the shape of the meteoric bowl the Project lay in and delaying runoff before it settled into a sort of shallow moat around the vast crater’s low central peak—or in one of thousands of lesser astro
b
lemes that also marked the landscape and served as irrigation reservoirs.

The green was broken only by white dots, dwindling in the distance before the eye met the horizon, of colonists silently laboring between the furrows, and by the occasional pale blue of one of their E&M counselors spurring them on in the endless battle against insects and weeds which were never supposed to have been permitted in this controlled enviro
n
ment in the first place, but which had taken to the rich soil and moderate climate in the same wholehearted manner as the crops—just another little phenomenon Curringer and his people hadn’t predicted.

Even so, saying before a world audience that the place looked like Iowa was tremendously flattering, and, in addition, she’d handed him a wonderfully open question.

“Well, Martie, as you know, the South African billionaire William Wilde Curringer intended Pallas to be a country club for rugged indiv
i
dualism. Just to be here, its mostly middle- and upper-class settlers all paid an amount far beyond the reach of Earth’s underprivileged—on average, about four million New American Dollars.”

“About the same, allowing for inflation, as the Mayflower’s passe
n
gers.”
The reporter smiled without wrinkling the delicate tissues around her eyes, a long-term media survival tactic he’d first heard about in the revival of an old Broadway play. “And for that price, they were all a
s
signed plots of land by random drawing?”

“In those areas Curringer and his people deemed suitable for imm
e
diate habitation, yes.”

He had to stop again. Now his fifteen-year-old was following along behind the workers, pulling up young soybean plants the same way he’d seen them pull up the weeds. It appeared that all of the white-clad c
o
lonists were afraid to say anything about it.

“And they all vote equal shares”—the reporter diplomatically turned to the camera—“on the rare occasions when they’re allowed to vote at all.” She turned back to him once he’d dealt with Gibson Junior. “Under a contract requiring the unanimous consent of all the settlers for any si
g
nificant changes to occur?”

“Any changes at all,” he answered. Better and better, he thought. “Fortunately, through an unintentional loophole written into Mirelle Stein’s infamous covenant—“

She winked. “Which I understand was closed immediately afterward by its embarrassed author.”

“Yes—it’s been possible for a more humane form of society to gain something of a foothold here.”

“You’re referring to cooperative agrarianism, Senator?” At present, the idea was all the rage with a cocktail-party set on Earth who would never be called upon to try it.

Nevertheless, he nodded.
“As practiced within the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project—just a minute.”

This time, Gibson Junior had taken the biggest armful he could
manage of the weeds some of the colonists had pulled up and others had collected, and
was
lifting them into the air a little at a time, letting them scatter back across the field on the breeze. Concealing what he did with his body, the Senator snatched what was left of them from the boy, and threw them back at the hopper they’d come from.

It was some time before peace and quiet were restored sufficiently to go on with the interview, and Altman vowed he’d never repeat this pa
r
ticular mistake again. From now on, Junior would be kept out of sight.

“Er, can you explain the principles of cooperative agrarianism for our TV audience, Senator?”

Knowing perfectly well that what he was about to say would be edited out or—far more likely—voiced over before it went on the air, he went ahead, hoping that the background he was providing would help her make an accurate summary.