Pallas (5 page)

The kitchen door swung aside, temporarily stopping conversation. Once the cook and her helpers, colonists like Alice, had served them and departed, Gwen raised her eyebrows prettily. “You’re not really a judge, then, Mr. Brody?”

Altman watched with amusement and sympathy—for Brody. Gwen had lusty instincts for a few things, power being highest on the list. Had she been convinced that Brody was a nobody—were she to become convinced even now—she’d drop out of the conversation and let her husband carry
on.
He’d seen the same thing happen thousands of times and was convinced she was unaware she did it.

The man grinned, turning up the Santa effect. “I’m after adjudicatin’ the occasional dispute. Mostly I’m no more than the humble innkeeper y’see before ye—thank y’kindly, I will have another. Y’wouldn’t be r
e
lated t’Dad Hathaway, now?”

“I’m his daughter.” She
smiled,
her eyes downcast modestly on her plate.
Her own
enthusiasm tonight for the wine they made themselves here was unusual. Ordinarily she’d let her first glass sit through a meal, hardly condescending to touch it.

Alden “Dad” Hathaway had been the last Democratic governor of California. He’d wanted to be the first President from the newly formed Democratic Union Party, but fate—at 9.5 on the Richter
Scale—
had i
n
tervened. The party, large and diverse as it was, solidly rooted in Ame
r
ican political tradition, had so far failed to put a candidate in the White
House. There were reasons for that—Altman himself was presently foremost among them—but there were other reasons, as well.

Reluctantly on the couple’s part, they talked about it over dinner. The Outsider seemed more interested in discussing events on Earth, which he hadn’t seen for years, than business. In a buyer’s market he felt free to antagonize them with his peculiar ideas, whereas they—Gwen was aware of the Project’s desperate need for customers—couldn’t afford to ant
a
gonize him by telling him how peculiar his ideas were.

In the ancient Chinese sense, the opening years of the twenty-first century had proven “interesting.” Sweeping changes—welcome and long overdue, in Brody’s opinion—had imposed
themselves
on an incre
a
singly confused and confusing world.

Most notable was a shift in the century-old balance of political and military power. Prodigious, domestically unpopular amounts of Amer
i
can aid had failed to keep the Soviet Empire from crumbling after decades of wildly swinging temperament, liberal reforms alternating with brutal strictures often tightened overnight. Those subsidies, along with a last hysterical flurry of foreign military adventures, had only helped cripple that once-great Western nation’s own economy and had eventually d
e
stroyed both the Democratic and Republican parties.

“Not t’mention their old management, so proud of their bipartisan aid programs,” Brody declared, “at least as far as runnin’ under the old labels was concerned.”

At about the same time, reacting as it had over two millennia to outside influence, split by linguistic and cultural differences little appreciated in the West, China had divided itself into a dozen conflicting principalities, some independent, some controlled by other governments, and some—it was impossible to tell.

“The Chinese picture still seems to change every day,” Altman i
n
formed his guest.

“But
it’s
fair t’say that socialism as a force in human history seems finally t’have run its course.”

Altman watched Gwen, who’d studied Marxist economics at Berkeley, the one university in the world still offering it, until conversation moved to
safer ground. In mostly English-speaking Europe, borders meant less each year. Mirroring America’s economic problems, Europe had eliminated trade barriers on that continent, along with internal economic regulation.

“They were desperate,” Brody observed, “unlike what’s left of the States so far.”

“And yet today, their most marketable commodity”—Gwen, too, was trying to prevent raised voices and hard feelings at her table—“seems to be nationalism.”

Brody laughed. “Now that nobody gives a damn, whole peoples who lost their identities in the fine print of many an ill-considered treaty after many a great war have reemerged as harmless curiosities. Armenians fight Turks each afternoon for theme-park visitors, with extra shows on Saturday and Sunday!”

Gwen seemed grateful to arrive at what was almost a neutral subject. “Fierce Montenegrins with moustachios
a foot long pose
for the cameras with absurdly huge revolvers.”

“While ads,” Altman tried to help, “argue over which parliament, Scottish or Welsh, it’s more fun to be Member-for-a-Day in.”

“An’ they all agree that y’can do it on Visa or MasterCard!”

“The effort hasn’t paid off yet,” the Senator answered. “Most o
b
servers feel it’s only a matter of time.”

“So,” Brody offered, “though everybody’s broke, whatever trouble people’re losin’ sleep over these days, they’re enjoyin’ the first worl
d
wide cease-fire in a dozen decades.” He raised his glass. “Here’s t’the War Century, over at long last!”

They raised their glasses. “The War Century,” repeated the Senator.

“Over,” his wife responded, “at long last!”

It was a sentiment they all could share sincerely.

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

—Barbara Tuchman

F
ourteen-year-old Emerson yawned.

“What has happened so far on Pallas is regrettable,” declared the Chief Administrator, who made an egalitarian habit every morning of a
d
dressing the assembled colonists.

Emerson yawned. His hair was still wet from the shower he’d been forced to take, he ached with the stiffness of another night spent lying propped against a damp concrete wall, his arms and legs trembled with newly restored circulation—all of which had kept him from eating much breakfast.
Again.
His stomach growled in protest. Like the other peasants around him, he’d heard it all before, what this man was blathering about. As far as he knew, he was the only one who had never believed any of it.

“
Two Lions Consortium of Siskei
claimed this asteroid as private property thirty years ago, in 2007...” The figure posing at parade-rest high on the Residence verandah—far from the plebeian ranks frozen at atte
n
tion beneath his gaze—wore a face Emerson’s parents seemed to r
e
member only vaguely from TV or the movies of a previous generation. Emerson, who by now had seen that same face, closer up and more times than he cared to remember, knew better. “...in an arrogant and abusive violation of the universally acclaimed 1999 United Nations Convention rendering all such astronomical bodies the common property of all h
u
manity.”

It was the same crap every morning. He resisted an urge to scratch beneath one shoulder blade, knowing from long experience that it would only start him itching in a dozen other places.

“It’s more regrettable...” Despite his bruises, and the ordeal he knew too well by now still lay ahead of him, Emerson yawned again. Even the compliant morons either side of him in their fresh white denims—adults, but as figuratively wet behind the ears as he was literally himself—had begun shifting from one foot to another. “...that neither the United N
a
tions nor other governments on the face of our Depression-ravaged home planet possessed spaceships of its own or the resources necessary to build an atmospheric envelope and develop Pallas.”

Because, Emerson finished the thought, there wasn’t anybody left to steal them from. At his age—the same as the Chief Administrator’s son, he’d heard—born on Earth in the western half of what were still techn
i
cally the United States, he didn’t know the words “precociously cynical.” He remembered secondhand his grandparents’ tales of dirty Asian pol
i
tics before, during, and after the war in Vietnam: life had been cheap, liberty a joke, the pursuit of happiness a privilege reserved to politicians and their families who did whatever they wished with ordinary people and then—the only difference democracy had ever made—went through the motions of justifying it afterward. Nor, according to what he’d learned bit by bit from his highly apolitical parents, had it been much different in the gerrymandered satrapies of Los Angeles. And Pallas was only smaller and farther away.

“Instead”—the Chief Administrator’s petulance came clearly over the public address system—“Two Lions’s ultrareactionary founder, William Wilde Curringer, the infamous South African trillionaire polluter and exploiter, was able to use his obscene wealth to foist Mirelle Stein’s s
o
cially regressive ‘Hyperdemocratic Covenant’ on anyone who wished to pioneer this asteroid.
As if he hadn’t already inflicted enough damage on the fragile biosphere and the political ambience of Earth.”

The political ambience of Earth.
Seeing his fellow workers in the long white rows around him taking it all in, Emerson shook his head in disb
e
lief. He always felt embarrassed for them, and it wasn’t a feeling he liked. His grandparents had been “boat people”—among millions of political and economic refugees who’d escaped from war-shattered, Commu
n
ist-controlled Southeast Asia in the latter part of the last century. They’d been among the fortunate thousands who’d actually made it to the promised land of opportunity in America—only to find that most avenues to personal betterment they’d looked forward to
had
been barred decades earlier by a tangle of arbitrary rules and regulations, as well as by long-established attitudes and practices which discriminated against
Asians.

Life had been better in California than in Vietnam or Cambodia, or at least more secure, and their standard of living undeniably higher. In the end, they’d swallowed their disappointment and settled down to become the most unquestioning Americans they could. It wasn’t always easy. Each day, it seemed, another law was passed to impoverish and diminish them, punishing them for whatever success they achieved and rewarding their less competent and industrious neighbors.

Another wave of itching swept his body. He resisted with inadequate, invisible twitches set to the tune of a growling stomach. One of the l
a
borers beside him smirked.

A generation later, the refugees’ American children, Emerson’s pa
r
ents, thrilled by rumors leaking past the biased mass media of an open, market-oriented society being built among the asteroids, had believed the Curringer Trust’s advertisements which were saturating TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines—“TO PALLAS, FOR THE OPPORT
U
NITY OF A LIFETIME!
TO PALLAS, FOR A LIFETIME OF O
P
PORTUNITY!”—embellished by promises and reassurances from thousands of unemployed social workers hired to recruit exclusively for the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project.

The only means of getting there they could afford, however, was under UN sponsorship. Nevertheless, hoping for a better future than their pa
r
ents had won, they’d taken their two-year-old son and emigrated to Pa
l
las, only to discover, when they’d gotten here after a cramped and a
r
duous two-year voyage, that they’d sentenced themselves and their growing family—all forms of contraception being condemned and u
n
available within the Project—to conditions comparable to medieval serfdom. In some ways, he realized, it was like an Outsider’s description of the maximum-security prisons many of them had apparently come here to avoid. And there was no way of going home—nobody could afford to. The fact that it was meant as a template for larger societies made him shudder.

But the Chief Administrator was going on: “Outside, beyond the h
u
mane influence of our Project, the barbaric notions of that crackpot M
i
relle Stein—and those of South African anthropologist Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy, another of the renegade trillionaire’s cronies and even more regressive than Stein, if possible—have achieved popular acceptance, diverting life on Pallas from the civilized mainstream.”

Now what did the Chief Administrator mean by “the civilized mai
n
stream”? The moonshining, drug-running, vandalism, pilferage, burglary, gang-fighting, assault, and rape threatening to become epidemic among the Project’s mostly illiterate second generation, which had begun transforming the Chief Administrator’s Utopian dream into a nightmare of violence and fear? Or did he refer to his recently augmented security forces, conducting increasingly frequent and intrusive household and personal searches for weapons, stolen goods, addictive substances, and contraceptives—measures permitted in the fine print of the Project’s articles—without producing any desirable effect?

One of nature’s rebels against authority, Emerson felt that he’d been
born
more politically sophisticated than his
parents,
and, thanks to his clandestine radio and salvaged books, was better informed. Outside, progress tried to march on. Across Lake Selous, the only radio station in Curringer had yet to acquire competition, despite having offered to divide the frequency to which it had staked a claim under the Hyperdemocratic Covenant and sell slots to other broadcasters. Now it promised to transmit pictures in the distant future. He was determined, somehow, to be among the first to see them.

He’d heard much over his hidden receiver that he didn’t understand, but certain points had been clear at once. At the onset of the asteroid’s development, the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project had boasted the largest single segment of a total population of about twenty-five tho
u
sand. A major purchaser of Outsider goods and services, cheap labor had given it a decisive advantage. There was a ready market for its agricu
l
tural produce, and its collective opinion, as.
expressed
by the Chief A
d
ministrator, had carried weight all over the asteroid and beyond. Ho
w
ever, the Project—for some reason, it came as no surprise to the voices he listened to in secret—had begun to suffer at the same time the Outsider economy began flourishing.

Emerson desperately wanted to flourish with it.

To him the Chief Administrator, famed for his passionate advocacy of Democratic Union tariffs, a tightly regulated economy, and stifled hopes for individuals, was almost indistinguishable from the Khmer Rouge butchers who at least had possessed enough integrity to murder their millions outright in his mother’s native Cambodia. It was clear—if only from his aristocratic, patronizing face and voice—that the man regarded himself as little less than their feudal master. For the boy, because he’d come to represent everything that had destroyed his parents’ dreams—and his grandparents’ before them—the Chief Administrator’s many lectures, edicts, and opinions carried no weight. No matter what was done to him, this morning or in time to come, they never would.

But the Chief Administrator was ignorant of the judgment being passed on him. “Today,” he informed them, “what was promoted as an equitable, progressive, and pluralistic social order under the Curringer Trust and the Hyperdemocratic Covenant has degenerated into a violent, brutal, dog-eat-dog travesty of a society where the strong prey on the weak and the rich prey on the poor. If you doubt it, you can hear the gunfire for yourself, in the fields near our protective Rimfence.”

This time, the effort of not scratching tensed every sore muscle in his body and brought tears to his eyes. Despite his carefully practiced attitude of detached cynicism, he was outraged at the lie the Chief Administrator had just gotten away with. Gunfire was certainly there to be
heard,
the sound of hunting and target-practice. He’d heard it many times himself, crouched in his cave, listening to the radio. But it had nothing to do—very little, anyway—with the manner in which Outsiders chose to order their affairs. And they certainly held no monopoly on violence, brutality, or predation.

It was true there were rules of a sort. Whatever he was caught at, the United Nations personnel who enforced the whims of the Chief Admi
n
istrator—Project kids called them “blue goons” whenever they thought grown-ups were out of earshot, although he’d heard the same words on the lips of many an adult—couldn’t imprison him. Like the Chief A
d
ministrator, most of them were exiles, the dregs of law enforcement in
their respective nation-states. Their white-collar superiors were no more than armed social workers, would-be criminal behaviorists he knew from bitter experience would soon capitalize on his battered condition, just as they’d done so many times before, to brutalize him in their own despi
c
able way, violate his mental privacy, his sense of personal dignity, and his individual sovereignty with their intrusive and intensive attempts at “understanding” and “rehabilitating” him. Anyway, the Project had no jail to be construed by visiting observers as inhumane.