Island Worlds

For Ulla and Beth

ONE

Just outside Denver there was a pinging under the hood. Thor keyed the engine statistics and stuck his finger into the computer contact. The car swerved as the numbers flashed before his eyes and he bit off a curse as he dragged it back on course manually. He wished for an old-fashioned digital display. He had bought the car when he was sixteen and gadget-happy. In recent years he had tried to have a visual display installed, only to be met with expressions of horrified incredulity. "Alter a Porsche 2045 classic? You can't be serious!" Now he no longer bothered, because he wasn't going to be driving it or any other car for much longer.

He saw the plume of smoke even before the sprawl of Greater Denver hove into view. It appeared to be coming from the Ukrainian section, a rundown area once inhabited principally by wealthy Arabs. Over the years the Arabs had moved elsewhere and developers had divided the estates into cheap housing projects. The last wave of immigrants had been the result of the People's Republic of the Ukraine breaking away from the Soviet Union seven years before. Within four years, the Ukraine had been bloodily forced to rejoin, but not before more than seven million people had emigrated, mostly to the United States. Now the suburb of Little Burma was expanding into the Ukrainian sector and there were frequent riots.

He would avoid the inner-city area in any case. His destination was the mansion-studded mountainside community known locally as "Spaceville" because the fortunes of most of the mansion owners had been founded on the exploitation of extraterrestrial resources. The name had always struck him as funny, because he had grown up there and had hardly ever met anyone who had even been in space. It was like the old "Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading Into Hudson's Bay," most of whom had never governed, adventured or even traveled to Hudson's Bay, but instead had sat for generations in their London clubs while other, better men had reaped the wealth of Canada for them. The paper in his pocket was to be a break with that unworthy tradition.

As he climbed the road which hung magically off the mountainside, he looked down on the whole Denver complex. The smoke was coming from the Ukraine-Burma interface, all right. Once Denver had been proudly called "the mile-high city," but these days hardly anybody remembered what a mile was and somehow "the one-point-six-one-kilometer-high city" didn't have quite the same ring to it. For a long time it had boasted practically the only breathable urban air to be found on the North American continent, but the deindustrialization of the U.S. and the gradual disappearance of the internal combustion engine had restored clean air, although not without price.

The Porsche's engine cut out automatically as it neared a picturesque, chalet-type building situated next to the road. It was part of the ring of heavily-armored forts surrounding Spaceville. A man came out, dressed in Old West clothes and wearing a laser pistol molded to look like a Western six-shooter. His clothing was bulletproof and an ornament on the front of his Stetson hat holographed everything in his line of vision. "Howdy, Mr. Taggart."

"Good evening, Stuard." He punched the inspection control and hood, trunk lid and doors opened simultaneously. Stuard inspected each compartment while sensors embedded in the road scanned the undercarriage.

"You headed for the big party at the McNaughton estate?" the guard asked.

"That's right. I take it they've laid on heavy security for tonight?

Stuard shook his head. "Heavy as I've ever seen. Senator Jameson came through about two hours ago. Since he may be running for President, he's got special protection paid for by his big money backers and you know what that means. Them Pinkerton guys always treat us like hick backwoods cops. There's a bunch of D.N. people here, too, and they all got their own security, and I have to reassure them all that we keep this place safer'n the Federal Reserve Bank. Twenty years without a snatch or bombing, though there's been plenty that tried."

"Nobody's ever had cause to complain, Stuard." The procedures were tedious, but Thor knew the value of good security. Spaceville's system had been set up by his paternal grandfather, Sam Taggart, who had been an intelligence agent of no mean repute back in his Earthbound days. "Were the U.N. people headed for the McNaughton party?"

"Yup. Okay, Mr. Taggart, you're clean. Be careful and don't drive that bomb off the road. We're no longer equipped for traffic accidents."

Thor buttoned up the car and sped off. The Porsche burned its precious gasoline so cleanly that it left not even a whiff of exhaust. It had better be efficient, he thought. His annual I-C engine tax was more than the price of a conventional, electric car. He wondered what the U.N. people were doing at the McNaughton party. Old Murdo McNaughton was not known as a supporter of that organization. It probably had something to do with Jameson's presence. He was heartily sick of the increasingly Byzantine political climate. He vowed not to let it bother him tonight. He would be shut of it all soon. Tonight he was going to have one last try at bringing Karen around.

Karen McNaughton's ski lodge was set amid tall aspens in a high valley with a breathtaking view of the lights of Denver. Like most large American cities, Denver was far more beautiful from a distance than from close range. The moon was setting in the west, a fingernail sliver. He killed the engine and then caught his breath when he saw the bright light shining from the dark eastern sector. Only heavy saturation illumination over hundreds of square kilometers could be so visible from Earth.

"Going to let me in on it?" Thor whirled to see Karen standing beside the Porsche. He was confused and embarrassed, as always when someone caught him unawares, daydreaming.

"Look at the moon!" he said. "The Mare Nubium settlement project must be under way. Have you ever seen such a sight?" He returned his gaze to the surrealistic view.

"I never paid much attention. I've spent the day looking in the other direction, down. Have you noticed that Denver is on fire?"

He swatted the dashboard impatiently. "What city in the world isn't burning most of the time? Earth is no longer where it's happening. Where it's happening is out there." He jabbed a finger in the general direction of Mare Nubium. "Climb in, we're late for the party already."

She looked at the new light doubtfully. "The moon? Who'd want to go there? You're not still serious about emigrating to the moon, are you?"

"Nope," he said. "Not the moon and not Mars, either. The asteroids!"

She sighed wearily. "I'd hoped you'd have outgrown that foolishness by now. Are you going to drive this thing manually again?"

"Of course. I like to drive my own car and pilot my own plane and sail my own yacht. I don't like to be the passive prisoner of a piece of machinery that I own."

"It's not safe. Do you know how many people used to
die
because they tried to control these machines?"

"I know," he said. He could not remember exactly when this change had come over Karen. Always before she had been enchanted by his predilection for dangerous pursuits. Dangerous! Driving a car had been what people used to do just to get to work. Lately, she had grown impatient. She acted as if, by putting his life at a slight risk, he had been endangering some personal investment of hers. Had she really changed, or was it just that you never really saw someone you were raised with?

At some time, by a sort of tacit consent, it had been determined by both families that they would marry, to the greater good of both family portfolios. In childhood and in their young adult years, she had shared his enthusiasm for space. Somewhere, he was not really sure just where, they had grown apart.

"Asteroids?" she said. "You can't want to live there! You know what the Russians call the asteroids?'siberia without air.' "

"Not me," he said, "us. Karen, our future is out there. Do you want our children to live in a world where a thousand little ethnic and religious groups slaughter people who never heard of them just for the sake of media exposure?"

"You're still not over your parents' deaths, are you?"

"That was anarchists," he said, "not ethnics."

"And what do you mean by 'our children'? This is a pretty lame proposal, if it means what I think it does."

This wasn't turning out right. He'd had a wonderful, unanswerably persuasive speech all prepared for her, and somehow she had preempted him. Had he really neglected to propose to her? It had always been assumed and now he realized that he had never gone through the formalities. It also occurred to him that he might not want to.

He studied her, trying to look at her as if seeing her for the first time. She was petite, pretty and blonde. That much was common enough. Only a slight upward tilt at the outer corners of her eyes bespoke the tinge of Ameri-Indian blood passed down from her maternal grandmother, Frederike Schuster-Ciano, known to one and all as Fred. If family legend were to be believed, Old Lady Ciano had been a pistol-packing agent as dangerous as her contemporary, Sam Taggart, before becoming the mother of the incredibly numerous Schuster-Ciano family. He had loved Karen all his life. Or had he? Had he just been infatuated with the swashbuckling image of Fred Schuster-Ciano?

"Look, Thor, we'll discuss this later. There are important people at the party tonight that you'll have to talk to."

He put the car into gear, backed around, and accelerated downhill. "You mean Jameson? Or the U.N. people?"

"Good," she said with satisfaction. "You've been doing your homework. These people will be very important to you, I mean to us, of course, in the future. Especially Senator Jameson. He's going to be President someday, and probably Secretary-General before he's through. He's a fraternity brother of Karl's, you remember?" Karl was Karen's older brother. Thor detested Karl the way the Popes had detested Martin Luther. If Jameson had been a fraternity brother of Karl's, then it was a strike against Jameson.

"Why are these people important to us?" he asked.

"Because you're a Taggart and I'm a McNaughton. Between us, we're an important part of world economy."

Thor snorted derisively. "World economy! You mean the world's economy depends on space exploitation."

"That's not how they see it," she said, coolly. "You'd better start seeing it differently, too. Maybe the wild men go out there to the frontier to mine in barren rocks, but all the really important, powerful people live here on Earth."

"They can stay here for all I care," Thor said. He patted his breast pocket. "What I have here is official permission to emigrate, and I'm taking advantage of it as soon as I graduate."

To his utter astonishment, she turned furious. "Thor! You didn't I Why didn't you talk to me first? That was one of the reasons I was so anxious for you to come to this party, so you could talk to these people. I know they'd change your mind about emigrating. You're such a fool!" She turned away from him angrily. He could make nothing of it. He had worked for years to get permission to emigrate. Not that it was really so difficult; all you had to do was commit a crime, especially a political one. But, if you were rich and well-educated, there was a lot of red tape to go through before you could be permitted to leave. The Earth-to-space brain drain was much in the news lately.

She said nothing more until they pulled into the parkway-pad of the immense McNaughton estate. Then she caught sight of a shabby, ancient Harley-Davidson two-wheeler. "Oh, no! Uncle Bob is here."

"Hey, Bob's at the party?" It was the first cheering news he'd had this evening. Bob Ciano was one of his favorite people. More than sixty years old, he looked much younger in spite of his heroic efforts to drink himself to death. Bob was the youngest of Fred Schuster-Ciano's children. He rarely came out west, preferring to live in his father's ancestral domain of Brooklyn, where he ran a gang of septuagenarian motorcyclists like himself. In a world gone progressively more bizarre, he scarcely attracted attention.

Karen got out of the car and Thor turned the keys over to a Pinkerton man disguised as a parking attendant. She ignored him as they entered the front door and he surrendered his cape to the butler. "Don't announce Mr. Thor and me together," she told the robot. She turned to Thor. "It's not fitting yet, if ever." She said the last part through gritted teeth. "Let me go make some preparations." She swished off in a huff and he looked around for some inconspicuous place to hide temporarily.

Opening off the foyer was the family gallery, occupied only by a few peripheral types, lesser family members and the flunkies of the more important guests.

This was the only part of the McNaughton mansion that he liked anyway. The walls were lined with the portraits of family and historical associates and some of them were of his own ancestors.

First came a long line of sour-faced McNaughtons, clipper-ship entrepreneurs, opium smugglers and slavers who were far enough back in the family line to be respectable. His grandfather, Sam Taggart, was there, solemn in his Space Marine dress blues, replete with decorations and holding a calabash pipe. Next to Sam was his wife, Laine Tammsalu, even in old age a spectacularly beautiful woman. Fred Schuster was there, her German and Mexican-Indian heritage lightening the heavy north European tone of the ancestral gene pool. Ian McNaughton was there, co-founder of General Spacecraft, Spacecraft Underwriters, Space Technologies, Inc., and several other companies that had made U.S. space exploitation all but a McNaughton feudal fief.

Only one portrait was missing. It wasn't that the old bastard was larcenous, Thor thought, taking a glass of champagne from a robot waiter. It was the way the Western world had changed. After the freewheeling license of the latter Twentieth Century, the Twenty-First had lapsed into a veritable Victorian smugness and respectability. Great family fortunes, founded by piratical knaves, had to be made respectable. None had been more piratical than Ian McNaughton's partner, Ugo Ciano. Even in the popular press and in school textbooks, the McNaughton family fortune had managed to suppress any likeness of the fabulous Ugo.