Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330) (30 page)

“What?” 

He looked up. “Think about it
objectively for a minute. All these years, Al Frederick’s been
making the big decisions for the world. Turning the universe into
his
vision of Utopia. But maybe his Utopia isn’t
mine.”

“Go on,” she said, arms folded across
her chest.

He rose and walked to the sliding
glass door that opened onto Rayna’s patio. “Look at that,” he said,
jerking his head in the direction of the scene outside. “Look at
all these buildings. Apartments and co-ops and condominiums.
There’s someplace for everybody now.
But  we’re all the
same!
  There’s no real incentive to excel anymore. No
rewards for achievement.”

Rayna came up beside him as he
continued to look out the patio door. “Frankly,” he said, whirling
to face her, “I’m beginning to feel like a sucker. Look at me,
living in a ridiculous little apartment in a building that used to
be a house fit for a king!  A king, Rayna, not a bunch of
nobodies!”

She stared at him, lips mouthing some
inaudible protest.

“How do we know what great inventions
were never created,” he railed, “what wonderful opportunities we
never had?  How do we know what kind of place the world might
have been if Al Frederick had just let things alone?”

“Keith,” she said after several
uncomfortably quiet seconds, “I don’t under—”

“You don’t understand?  How could
you understand?  How can any of us understand?  We’re all
just babies, Rayna. Don’t you see that?  The world according
to Al Frederick was such a comfortable, easygoing place that we
never had the chance to grow up. We never got tough, because we
never needed to be tough. You don’t have to be tough to survive in
the Garden of Eden. Well, now that we’re out of the garden, I’m not
so sure he did us a favor!”

She backed away, her face pale.
“Keith, what I don’t understand is why you’re talking this way all
of a sudden. Unless....”

“Unless what?”

 
The fear in her eyes made the
hair prickle at the back of his neck. “Maybe,” she said, “maybe
there’s more to what’s been happening than my grandfather’s death.
If he could change reality to match his vision of Utopia, maybe
other people have that ability, too.”   

Rayna didn’t have to say which people
she meant, which notion of the perfect world was making her shiver.
Keith knew the answers all too well. He squeezed his eyes shut and
tried to ignore the image that had sprung forth in his mind—the
image of Henry Tauber.

 
The debate was scheduled for
noon on Monday, Nov. 22, at the historic open-speech area of
downtown’s John Martin Roberts Park. Initially, only a small
audience was expected, as holovision coverage made public debates
easily accessible to those who preferred the comforts of home. It
was quite a shock, then, when the Police Department announced, on
the Friday before the big event, that because of unexpected
interest in the Milgrom-Rensselaer confrontation, tickets would be
carefully inspected, and only holders of valid ones would be
admitted to the open-speech area. Just thinking about the police
announcement chilled Rayna’s backbone with vague
foreboding.

A light breeze jostled branches and
flapped the bunting on the platform in the center of the
open-speech area. Fourteen students had joined her on the field
trip. Not too bad, she thought. All but eight of the students in
her class on contemporary American concerns.
That’s a clear
majority for freedom of speech.

Heeding advice from a friend in the
Park Service, she had insisted on arriving an hour early. Even
shortly after 11 a.m., however, most of the 150 seats in the
semicircular rows around the speaker’s platform were already taken.
Unable to find 15 seats together, she grouped 12 students into
threesomes. The remaining pupils would sit with her. As they
awaited the start of the program, she reassured herself that all
was well by  making the rounds from one group to another
before she finally returned to her own seat, a few rows from the
back of the ticket-holders’ area.

The sun was nearing its zenith when
the official entourage left the recreation building—about 200 yards
distant—and began making its way to the concrete-and-woodstone
platform. The park’s open-speech center was one of the first
undertakings of Project New Start’s Youth Corps, established in the
aftermath of the 1971 riots. A very fitting place for a historic
debate, Rayna mused, pretending not to notice the nervous flutter
in her stomach.

 
The area behind them was dense
with spectators now, as knots of people clustered in back of the
rope barricades the police had erected to separate the seated
ticket-holders from any curious onlookers who might wander by.
Rayna realized, however, that the throng she’d seen develop over
the past hour had to include more than the merely
curious.

A buzz, growing to a steady rumble,
oozed from the crowd as the speakers neared the platform. Rayna
strained to see as the contingent of three men and two women
mounted the steps to the stage. All but one, that is. Althea
Milgrom couldn’t use the steps. Instead, she directed her powered
wheelchair up a gently sloped ramp and took her place on the left
side of the podium. Imposing in his navy-and-red Merchant Fleet
uniform, Adm. Ethan O. Rensselaer sat on the opposite side of a
woodstone lectern.

“She’s a funny-looking old bird,” said
Damon Taylor, one of the students with Rayna. “Why’s she using that
chair?  She lose her MediNet card or something?”

 ”
They can’t help her any more,
dummy!” said the dark-haired girl seated next to Damon. “Don’t you
know who that is?”  As usual, Ginny Winokis skipped the
niceties. “For Pete’s sake!  It’s Althea Milgrom!”

Damon’s face turned a deep crimson.
“Oh,” he muttered.

Rayna’s classes had been discussing
Milgrom and Rensselaer for days. The students knew about
Rensselaer’s years of service in the Asteroid Belt. They knew he’d
been honored for his courage and ingenuity in helping to establish
life domes on some of the most inhospitable of the colonized
asteroids. And, of course, they all knew about the accolades heaped
upon him for his handling of the Nitinol crisis.

The students also knew that, despite
the miracles of modern medicine, Althea Milgrom still needed her
wheelchair. The chair was a token of the multiple sclerosis that
plagued her from the age of 24. A vaccine developed 14 years later
led to treatment that halted progression of her MS, and other
treatments had managed to turn back some of her symptoms, but by
that time, her condition was too advanced to be fully
reversible.

Milgrom discovered that she had a
special aptitude for computers, and she worked hard to develop and
apply it. Five years ago, at age 62, she was appointed to head the
Consolidated Data Network—a job she had filled admirably and
without incident until she began to speak out about the Nitinol
controversy.

A tall, stout man dressed in a
loose-fitting gray business tunic and black trousers whispered to
the others on the stage and then approached the lectern.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “I’m
Franklin Wentworth, chairman of the Los Angeles Public Issues
Society. Our organization is dedicated to the proposition that full
and open discussion of controversial public policy questions is the
hallmark of our democracy.”

He stopped talking and scanned the
audience—rather nervously, Rayna thought. She unfastened her
cardigan, enjoying the unexpectedly balmy climate.
Must be close
to 75,
she thought as Wentworth introduced the speakers and
others on the dais.
And the weather man said it wouldn’t get
past the mid 60s today!
  She inhaled deeply. It felt good
to be here. There was nothing quite like seeing one of these
debates liv
e
.
It’s not just what you hear or see. It’s knowing that what’s
around you is more than a holographic projection—knowing that it’s
real!

A sudden bump jarred her out of her
reverie. “Stop fidgeting, Damon,” she urged as her student
contorted his body for a better view of the stage. He stopped
squirming but looked puzzled.

“What is it?” she
whispered.

“I was just trying to see where they
set up the sound-envelope generator.”

Rayna sighed and patted Damon on the
shoulder. “Save your investigation of the sound equipment for some
other time. We’re here for the debate.”

He scowled but settled down. Rayna
couldn’t help smiling. Lately, Damon had lost the enthusiasm and
creative energy she remembered from last year. At least, now he was
actively interested in
something
.

And the sound system here was a marvel
of acoustical engineering, a new design especially suited to
outdoor performances. It was based on a special field, a “sound
envelope,” within which the sound from the stage was modulated so
that it could be heard at normal, conversational volume. Outside
the field, sounds remained unaltered—and thus, often
unheard.

Rayna pulled her sweater close about
her throat. True, the sound-envelope generator was a wonderful
innovation, but using it today?  Presumably, the rope barriers
indicated the limits of the sound envelope. All those people beyond
the ropes would be cut off from the sound as effectively as if they
were outside a building looking in. Yet only a few cords of twisted
fibers separated them from the speakers and ticketed
guests—including Rayna and her students.

“As you know,” Wentworth was saying,
“Earth’s energy systems were recently dealt a serious blow by the
diversion of a shipment of Nitinol wire and by colonial demands for
triple payment.”

Was that an unhappy protest from the
crowd behind her?  Rayna twisted around for a look. The people
behind the ropes made her nervous.

“Both of today’s guests are very well
informed about the situation,” Wentworth announced, “but they have
come to quite different conclusions about what to do.”

“We know all about Milgrom’s
conclusions!” a voice called out. “She wants to sell us out to the
rock farmers!”

Although the comment was loud and
clear to Rayna, Wentworth either didn’t hear, or else he chose to
ignore it.

“And now,” the moderator continued,
“it is my pleasure to present our speakers. They have agreed that
Adm. Rensselaer will make his presentation first.”

Rensselaer slowly rose to his full
height, walked to the lectern, and shook hands with Wentworth, who
then joined the others seated at the rear of the stage.

Rensselaer recited the standard
thank-you’s to Wentworth and his organization, then slowly
scrutinized the audience with an almost hypnotic gaze. Rayna’s
flesh erupted into goose bumps.
I could swear he’s looking
directly at me.
Of course, that was just her imagination. Good
eye contact was a basic public-speaking technique. Still, she had
never before encountered anyone who did it quite so
effectively
.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Rensselaer
said in a commanding baritone, “energy is the lifeblood of our
planet. Without it, most of the advances of the modern world would
have been impossible. Without it, most of the things we now accept
as commonplace would be useless.”  Again, the turn of the
head, the establishment of eye contact with a new section of the
audience. “Energy is of vital importance in every facet of our
lives, from transportation, to medicine, to agriculture. Yes, even
to production of the very food we put into the mouths of our
children.”

 
Rayna heard a groan to her right
and quickly shot Ginny a stern look, but the teacher couldn’t help
being pleased by her student’s recognition of Rensselaer’s brand of
old-fashioned political posturing.

“Decades ago,” the admiral was saying,
“Earth established colonies in the Asteroid Belt. Among the raw
materials we found on the asteroids were rich deposits of nickel
and titanium, the elements needed to produce the Nitinol we must
use to meet most of our present energy needs. By mutual consent, we
developed healthy trade relations with those colonies.”

Rayna craned her neck until she
finally spotted her other students in the audience. The separation
couldn’t be helped, but it made her uneasy to be so far from some
of her charges.

“I am proud to say that I was
instrumental in helping to establish some of those colonies,” said
Rensselaer, “but I’m not proud of what the colonists are doing
today. By holding our Nitinol supplies for ransom, they have
committed nothing less than an act of war!”

Rayna bent her head and closed her
eyes. Rensselaer’s position on the Nitinol question was well-known
and shared by many throughout the world, but that didn’t make her
like it any better. The speech continued in the same, familiar
vein:  The colonists had hijacked property bound for Earth, in
clear violation of the laws of interplanetary trade. They had been
unresponsive or threatening in their communications with Earth.
They demanded a price increase that would bankrupt some nations and
cause severe economic repercussions all over the world.

As he spoke, he grew more animated and
his language became simpler. Simple words for simple solutions,
Rayna thought.