A Boy and His Tank (4 page)

And then I fell asleep.

"Good morning, Mickolai," said a pleasant feminine voice.

"Who are you?" I said, groggy without my morning caffeine pill.

"I'm Kasia, of course. You won't be talking to anybody else until the training course is over."

"You sound different. Better." I was feeling much better today, not as closed in and confined as I had been yesterday. I guess a man can get used to anything, after a while.

"Thank you. It's part of the calibration procedure, and things will get much, much better as time goes on, and I really get the feel of your spinal column."

"Right. So just how long is this training period, anyway?" I asked.

"That depends on you, Mickolai. It's over when you complete the course. The record for basic training is three months, but most people take five or so."

"What's the worst record? I just might beat that."

"Oh, I hope not. Some people never do pass, you know. They have to be sent back."

"What happens to them then?"

"That depends. If they were really volunteers, they simply go back to their old civilian jobs. Those who were sent here by the courts go to their alternate punishment."

That meant the vats for me. I decided that maybe I should start taking this whole training course a lot more seriously, even if it did mean staying submerged for a few months.

"Right, Kasia," I said in my best perky fashion. "What's on the agenda for today?"

"I'm still not well enough calibrated to start your actual training program, so we'll spend today completing the calibration. But first some breakfast."

"I'm not very hungry."

"You are seventeen kilos underweight, and you can't pass this course while being a weakling."

"Food is scarce on New Kashubia, or hadn't you heard?"

"It's not scarce in here. Everything is recycled, my stocks of make-up chemicals are full, and you can have as much as you want."

"It's this recycled business that bothers me," I said.

"That's irrational, Mickolai. You have been eating reprocessed food all your life. On Earth, it was reprocessed through the natural biosystem, and on New Kashubia, it has been reprocessed through the hydroponic vats. The only difference is that now it is reprocessed through your own, personal, private system. You should feel good about that."

"I should feel good about eating my own shit?"

"Would you feel better about eating someone else's? Because that is precisely what you do with a large, public system, be it natural or hydroponic."

"But I didn't have to think about it then," I said.

"You don't have to think about it now, Mickolai. It's time for another nap. You're getting sleepy, Mickolai. Very, very sleepy . . ." she said with her soothing, wonderful voice.

I woke up feeling hungry, and Kasia came up with something that tasted just like the beef we sometimes used to get back on Earth! After breakfast, I asked about the day's agenda.

"More calibration, I'm afraid. Only this time, I want you to subvocalize rather than to actually talk. I'll be picking up what you mean to say from the nerve impulses in your spinal column. You were telling me about your trip to New Kashubia."

"Please, one thing first. I'd like to contact my relatives and tell them that I am all right."

"That is not allowed, Mickolai. During the training period, you are forbidden to have outside contacts. Your relatives have been informed that you are in good health, and I assure you that they are all fine as well. Should these statuses change, you and/or they will be informed. No further contacts are permitted."

"Is that legal, to stop my mail?"

"At this point it would be legal to stop your heart! I can legally kill you and send your body to the hydroponic tanks for fertilizer."

"Uh, yes. Well. What was it you wanted me to do next?"

"I want you to continue your story, but rather than speaking, I want you to subvocalize."

Okay, I thought. Is this what you want?

"Just fine. Keep it up, Mickolai."

"Yes, ma'am." Like I was saying yesterday, as soon as we got to New Kashubia, we were divided into two groups, men and women, and we never saw the women again, not legally anyway, except on television. They had us strip off our filthy clothes, for washing, we thought, but we never saw them again, either. Actually, they just burned them, and the ashes and fumes were fed through hydroponic vats. We needed organic chemicals that badly. They sprayed us all down at the same time as the mattresses were washed and stripped of their plastic covers, which were carefully saved for reprocessing into electrical insulation. Then we were handed the mattresses as one of the few bits of personal property we owned. The interior of the canister was steam cleaned, with the garbage carefully saved, and the bunks were folded up.

The space thus available was filled with such metals as had been ordered from Earth. Gold, mostly, and the canister was evacuated, since we needed every bit of air we could get.

Our ship was sent back by the same route for another group of colonists. On the average, one shipload of them had been arriving every five minutes for two and a half years. Now and then a canister came in with air or food, but not quite often enough.

We refugees of an uncaring system were forced to live in bunk beds with one hundred men to a room, with foul air to breathe and not nearly enough to eat. Yet the walls of our rooms were of solid gold!

We were forced to import the air that we breathed, the water that we drank and fed to our food plants, and the raw materials for much of what we absolutely needed. Furthermore, these things had to be imported from outsystem, since all of the usual debris of a solar system, even the cometary belt, had been blown into interstellar space when our star went supernova. Ours was a singularly empty system.

Transportation costs were kept artificially high by the Wealthy Nations Group, who by this time owned Pildewski Interplanetary Transport, Inc., and thus the Hassan-Smith transporters. The cost of bringing in a shipload of water is only slightly less than the Earth price of a shipload of gold. Not that it costs them anything to send it to us. I mean, the power required comes from the sun, and the equipment is all just sitting there idle, most of the time. The explanation the bastards give is that it is necessary to recover the high costs of the initial and continuing exploration of human space. In reality, of course, practices like this are the reason why the Wealthy Nations stay that way.

"You sound very bitter, Mickolai," my tank said.

"Bitter?" I said out loud, "You're damn right I'm bitter! Look, I was a student in school, minding my own business and getting decent grades. Then just because my great-grandfather pulled an innocent little con job, I got yanked out of class a week before graduation! I was robbed of all of my property, even my underwear! I got stuffed into a tin can half full of floating vomit and shit and piss and screaming people for almost a whole day! I was stripped naked and forced to live in a barracks with a hundred other smelly men! I've spent almost three years breathing foul air and eating half rations that wouldn't satisfy a rabbit, and you ask me if I'm bitter? I'm forced to go two years without even seeing a female human being, and you ask me if I'm bitter? And when I finally do manage to meet a nice girl, we're limited to what you can do through a goddamn hole in the wall! And then, despite all I've done for this colony, they murder our child and sentence the two of us to death or life sealed up in a goddamn tank, and you ask if I'm bitter?
Hell yes I'm bitter!
I'm bloody fucking goddamn well pissed off is what I am!
"
 

"Yes, Mickolai. You have a very real grievance. I would like you to tell me about it. But would you subvocalize, please? I need to complete my calibration," she said in a sweet and all too reasonable voice.

Okay, I thought to her, we'll go at it again. You see, the Japanese had never kept more than a hundred people on New Kashubia, there being limits to what even a Japanese engineer will put up with. With that low a population and plenty of ships returning empty, anyway, they had simply imported all of the food, air, and other things they needed for survival. No attempt had been made to recycle anything locally.

Things had to be done much differently with eleven million largely untrained Kashubians to somehow support.

There were plenty of automatic factories around, although they were mostly set up to build heavy industrial goods and metal components for the various luxury products in demand. While the automatic factories couldn't directly produce many of the things that were desperately needed, they could produce other factories that could make useful stuff, providing that the engineering and the raw materials were available.

There weren't many of us with a technical background, but we could get the engineering done. Raw materials were the problem. We had almost no light elements at all. I helped design a factory that made growing lights for the food production tunnels, but sand had to be imported from Earth to make the glass. Copper for wires was available by the megaton, but the plastic to insulate the wires had to be imported. Plumbing was cheap, but the sewage in the pipe was vastly expensive and had to be reprocessed quickly. This forced us to use very small drain pipes that were constantly getting plugged.

Some things could be improvised using local materials. We're pulverizing gold and palladium and using it as soil to support the roots of food plants. It's a lot cheaper than importing dirt. At least we don't have to build reflectors for the lights. The drilled tunnels are already bright and shiny.

In the early days, clothing wore out and, being organic, could not be replaced except at huge cost. Long before I got here, a program was instituted to make nudity popular, and the tunnels were warmed up to compensate. There was plenty of waste heat available from the power reactors that were being built as fast as possible.

Nudity caused fewer changes than would have been expected since even before it was instituted, the sexes had been absolutely segregated in both living quarters and in work situations. Nothing else had proved effective for
totally
stopping the birth rate, and the one thing that New Kashubia did not need was more people.

That's what got me into trouble. At first, I was put to work with a crew stringing communication cables, which sure beat what they had most other people doing. The hydroponic vats could have been tended by machines, but not as efficiently as humans could do it. It was vitally important that every square inch of soil and light was used to support green plants. We were producing less than we absolutely needed to survive, and there was no slack at all. Most of our people spent twelve hours a day working as no Chinese coolie ever did for long. We couldn't keep it up forever. We were all losing weight.

For entertainment, we had television and not much else. Tapes and discs could be sent from Earth cheaply enough, and we had a factory that built the sets. Home-grown entertainment mostly didn't happen. After working twelve or fourteen hours a day, nobody much felt like playing a violin.

Most of us got to going to church a lot more than we had on Earth. When times are rough, people turn to God, I guess. Anyway, it started meaning a lot more to me than it had before.

But like I said, I was put to stringing wires, when I wasn't pulled off the job to do engineering work. Communications and controls had to be installed throughout the living sections, since heat and ventilation had to be right or people died. The women's sections had their own crews, of course, but the systems had to tie together, and that's when I met Katarzyna Garczegoz, whom everybody called Kasia. Not you. The real Kasia.

"Perhaps you should choose another name for me, Mickolai," the tank said.

Stop interrupting. So there was this eight-inch hole, and I was feeding wires through for her to terminate. I had to tell her which wires were what, and naturally we got to talking, even if it was against the law. She must have been looking forward to the job, because she already had a way worked out where we could talk later, using some of the spare wires as phone lines, and that's how I got to spending my spare time, even though that was against the law, too. After years of only male companionship, even
talking
to a woman on the phone was worth the risk, something to spend the whole day looking forward to.

What else can I say? I'd found the one woman that I wanted in all the world, and I don't even fantasize about anybody else. We fell in love with each other and we promised to marry as soon as we possibly could.

So my personal life improved a bit, but things on the whole were getting worse.

Despite our best efforts, some air and water were still being lost, around seals or even right through the metal walls. Everything is at least a little bit porous. Our losses weren't really all that much, but we weren't able to import much to replace them, either.

Despite the most severe privations, and despite the maximum possible shipments of metals and manufactured goods back to Earth, the balance of payments was still negative, and interest rates were at an all-time high for the century. Projections showed that it would be at least two hundred years before we colonists could have a standard of living comparable to that which we had been forced to leave behind on Earth.

Despite our fabulous wealth in metals and despite the vastly expanded system of automated factories, for a long time, life would be hungry, dirty, and cramped.

I stretched as best I could in the confinement of my liquid filled coffin to get the kinks out of my muscles, and started back in on my story to calibrate my tank.

"There were just too many people," I said.

"Please subvocalize, Mickolai."

Sorry. So if we could have had twenty or thirty years to build up slowly, the story would have been different, but as things were, we could never get ahead of the game. Everything had to be done on an emergency basis, just to stay alive. We never had a chance to make any really long term investments.