The Complete Karma Trilogy (33 page)

Percy said, “You’re blaming things on Rex Darcy that he had nothing to do with. If the food plants are producing less than they used to under Karma, it’s because those plants were far too dependent on Karma, and with Karma gone, there’s no way to recover their full potential. That was one of the faults of the old Government, one of the things we’re working to correct as we move forward into the future. The New Karma is purely a reward system—not a political leader, and not an economic powerhouse.”

With slow deliberation, Hardin argued with Percy. “The factories weren’t dependent on Karma in that way. You keep making these broad, accusatory statements about things you don’t understand. These factories are deliberately being slowed down. And it’s simply because of the selfishness of one man, a man we need to destroy before humanity becomes a casualty to his greed.”

“What makes you think you know all of this better than me?” Percy asked, instinctively straightening his spine to stand taller, whereas Hardin merely sat in an office chair.

“How many times to I have to prove to you, and in how many ways, that I know things that you’ll never comprehend?”

“I’ll never believe you.”

“Then I can do this without you,” Hardin replied.

To his group of twenty people, Hardin said, “In exactly two weeks, nine of you are going to get on a shuttle to Mars. The arrangements have already been made. Six of you will immediately be going to a firefighter academy, to be trained as firefighters. You’ve already been enrolled. And the other five will be staying here. I’ll be going to Mars with the nine. I have a few other things I need to take care of, before we go. I’ll be spending some time away from the commune, getting supplies. But I will always be in contact—I’ll still be evaluating you all. So be on your best behavior.”

He didn’t have to ask if they were willing to join him on his adventure, or if any of them had any hesitations. He already knew.

Mars 9

Better Than Karma at a Zoo

“On the day
Karma died, I was sitting in the City Park, reading a book. I read a lot of books—if you looked around the room at all, you might have noticed.

“Did you know that over half of these books were banned, under Karma? Banned is a strong word—they were silently buried, and hardly anyone noticed. There aren’t too many readers out there, there aren’t too many people that care—I don’t have to tell you, you’re a writer, you already know. If there’s one thing I can say that I definitively disagreed with Karma about, it was with its censoring of literature and knowledge. The verb
censor
comes from the Latin ‘to assess’. And the Roman that held the office of Censor had this as his job description—to improve the morality of the public. So it seems perfectly appropriate that Karma, the judge of all morality, would censor a book every now and then. It’s in the job description. I just don’t agree with it. If a person can be ruined by knowledge, maybe they should be ruined.

“Anyway, I was reading a book, and suddenly the Karma Tower exploded. You must have some idea of how many people that affected—the Karma Tower was the second largest building in the world, before it fell. I was several kilometers away, and still I was hit by the cloud of debris. I’ve been told by a number of doctors that I’ll probably need a lung transplant by the time I’m sixty. I’m partly to blame for that diagnosis—I spent a lot of time helping people out of the rubble in the aftermath of the collapse, even though I was advised not to. But still I made it out alive—that’s more than a lot of people could say, that day.

“Up until that point, I had made a commitment to live a civilian life, out of the face of the public. And then Karma was destroyed, and the fabric of society was torn. Thousands of other people could have stepped up to fulfill the role that I took, the role of the mender, and yet I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it had to be me. I want to try to give a sense of what made me change my mind, that day. To do that, I feel like I’ll have to discuss Karma a little more.

“I believe there’s a tendency in humanity to rely heavily on tradition, even when tradition is the least appropriate answer to a problem. A lot of my opponents, Martin being the most noteworthy, wanted to simply reinstate the old system. It had been working for so long, so why wouldn’t it continue to work again, right? Never mind the fact that it had literally just imploded on itself. Just the day before Karma died, all of the Privacy Rooms were deactivated, and by Karma. Did you know beforehand that it had so much power that it could arbitrarily overturn one of its most important limitations? There was a reason that such a limitation was imposed on it—to guarantee basic human rights, first and foremost a right to privacy. What other powers did it have, hidden away? What other human rights could it have done away with, to serve itself? If we would have reinstated the Karma system, we eventually would have found that answer out. Maybe not in our lifetime, or even the next, but eventually. We were on our way to the enslavement of the human race, if you want to know my opinion on the matter. I don’t mean to suggest that I endorse the rebels’ actions, blowing Karma up and killing millions of innocent bystanders in the process—they were tried and executed for their inappropriate actions, under my direction. But in a way they were right, there was a problem. They said as much in their testimony. ‘If we didn’t do it, who would?’ But the methodology was wrong. There were much more humane ways that we could have addressed the problem. All the people you hear every day chanting to bring the old system back don’t see that this issue was never resolved. It’s logically possible to do the same things, just better next time, but that’s reactionary thought. Read Marx if you haven’t already, it’s great.

“I, on the other hand, preferred a new system. That’s why it had to be me, when Karma died and the political void threatened to destroy everything. I was the only one looking forward, at a new solution. One that gave humanity something to do with its free time again. Is there a reason to have a computer oversee the world, when humans can oversee themselves? Is there a reason to have machines grow food, when it is just as easy and far more rewarding for humans to grow it themselves? Read Marx, seriously—it’ll change the way you see value.

“The assumption I’m making, by suggesting that people replace Karma, is that people will inherently do the right thing—the free market of morals, if you will. Even if the market occasionally deviates, and there are sometimes surpluses and shortages, it will eventually correct itself, in time. Doesn’t that sound appealing to you? You’ve been living in the world I’ve created for five years, and you’ve been working on the wonderful Martian fields these past few days—what do you think of what I’ve done? Honest answers, please. The greatest thing about being human is that we can have these human interactions, discussions, and make improvements.”

“It’s great. Very great,” the writer replied, without really seeming to think about the question. Then he followed that indifference up by asking Darcy’s least favorite question, out of the infinite possible. “It’s a solution that works very well for the present, at least, but what’s next? Who comes after you? And when? No doubt that’s a sensitive subject, but I feel like a lot of people would like to know the answers, and with good reason. You seem to have thought through all these things pretty thoroughly, so surely you have some answer?” He said it with such levity that Darcy seriously had to fight the impulse to tear the man’s throat out.

Darcy replied, because he had to, “There’s still a lot of work to be done, before that question needs answered.”

“I don’t mean to suggest that you should, or even could, be replaced. All I mean to say is that, in the unlikely yet possible event of your death… you said yourself you have an increased likelihood of lung cancer… if your concern is that so many people don’t share your view on what should be done to address society’s problems, and that those views are overly popular, then would you not want to have a backup plan? To ensure the completion of your life’s work? That’s what I meant.” After considerable backpedaling, the writer was finally able to make the question seem inoffensive.

“Let me ask you a question in return,” Darcy said.

“Ok.”

“Do you have any children?”

“No, no I don’t.”

“I don’t either, but I think that the point I’m about to make is still valid—parents aren’t always asking themselves who will raise their children in the unlikely event of their death. Maybe once or twice in their lives, when they have a close brush with it, but my guess is that for a majority of people the question never enters their mind. And yet parents often die unexpectedly. My parents died when I was eleven, protesting for coffee. They had no plan about who would raise me in their absence—and it worked itself out. I still managed to become a moderately successful person. What I’m trying to say is that it’s not always necessary to plan for the worst case scenario.

“It might even do more harm than good. For instance, if I told people I would abdicate in two years, and then a year and a half from now some calamitous thing happens that only I could undo—what then? Do I rescind my promise and stay? Do I still go on to abdicate and let my creation disintegrate behind me? I would much rather make no commitments until I know that our society has reached a stable place, where I could let it go without worry or feelings of an unfulfilled obligation. Does that make sense?”

“It does, you’re absolutely right.”

“Please, if I’m doing something wrong, during these interviews or as Rex, let me know. I can only try my best.”

For a change of pace, later that night Darcy arranged an outing with his biographer to the Ares Zoo. Darcy always preferred to go at night, since the zoo was closed to the public after 9 pm. He enjoyed himself much better without all of the noises, the crowds, and the attention that his subjects were bound to give him. Because he was Rex, he had free reign of the place.

They took a Humvee with an open roof, since the weather was nice. It had been raining for days, but suddenly the sky cleared up and the humidity of the world abated. Despite the recent rain there were fires in the distance, a soft, ominous glow on the south horizon, a second sun setting, but Darcy did his best to ignore it. His companion did the same, since he knew that the fires were a sore subject for him.

Darcy’s mansion was a one-hour ride from the city—a compromise between being close to his citizenry and being the hermit he often wanted to be. As they drove, the Martian sun finally set in the distance.

Darcy was looking at the exorbitant amount of stars above him when the writer said, “It’s strange to actually see a moon in the sky. That’s Phobos, isn’t it? Where’s Deimos?”

He turned his attention to the oblong moon, careening through space. “That’s Phobos, yes. Deimos won’t show up for another… tomorrow. Deimos will rise tomorrow. And you can’t really see it very well anyway, it just looks like a bright star.”

The writer nodded his head, and continued to look up in dull fascination.

Darcy took a moment to gather his thoughts, then said, “The closest celestial body to Mars is fear—
Phobos,
fear—do you think that means anything? You’re a literary type, you probably read a lot into things like that. It rises in the west and sets in the east—nothing on Earth does that. Nothing natural, at least. Phobos will rise and set twice tonight, it travels that quickly.

“And Deimos. That one means terror. Strange things to be orbiting such a pleasant planet, don’t you think? Fear and terror. But those are the kind of things that can’t be renamed, once they’ve been named. Like the days of the week. Or Leningrad. Do you know how many years it took for the world to completely adopt uniform standards of measurement, after the Government declared it to be official policy? I read about this in an article, thought it was very interesting. Ninety years. Three generations of human beings. And that’s subtracting the five years that the Americans were trying to insist on English units—when they conquered the world and told their subjects all to learn English, everyone obliged willingly. When they told their subjects to measure distances in ‘feet’ and liquid in ‘gallons’, the Americans got a massive ‘fuck you.’ And then the sides were reversed—the Americans told their own people to use the metric system, and it took ninety years for them to comply. And that’s amongst the academic community, in peer-reviewed literature by people that should ‘know better’—the guy that researched this used scholarly articles from the time as indicators of common usage. It’s very possible that it took much longer than that for the parochial types. What I’m trying to say is that if I told my fellow Martians to call our moons Happiness and Peace, it would probably take ninety years before everyone actually did it. So what’s the point? At least we have moons, whatever they’re called, right?

“It would be a shame if the same thing happened to Mars that happened to Earth. I couldn’t stand to lose this sky too. Fortunately, I think it’s safe—there’s an overwhelming consensus now that we’ve got to do better as conservationists. No doubt you know what I mean, but just wait until we get to the zoo. It’ll make more than a believer out of you.”

Soon they were there, and walking around all of the different exhibits. Armed guards were close behind them, ready to shoot anything that might threaten the leader of two worlds and his biographer. Darcy smoked a cigar, and took a leisurely pace. So many light poles extended over imitations of lost habitats, and so many resurrected animals basked in their artificial light.

“What’s that over there?” the writer asked.

“A crocodile, I think. Maybe an alligator. They’re practically the same thing.”

“It looks so… prehistoric. Like a dinosaur. Is it a dinosaur?”

“No, I don’t think it is. I might be wrong though.”

They spent a while looking out at the lonely reptile, as Darcy made a cloud of slowly drifting smoke around them. Then they wandered off to the elephants, which were nearby.

“It’s amazing that something so big can even exist,” the writer commented, before they moved on.

The next area contained various breeds of dogs. There were a couple of Dalmatians, some St. Bernards, and a single Chihuahua. Darcy and his biographer spent quite a bit of time there, in front of the grating, as the dogs pawed at the bars of their cage. “Apparently everyone used to have one of these,” Darcy told his companion. “Can you imagine that? Caring for a wild animal, all the time. Of course they were domesticated, but it still stretches the imagination.”

“It must have been a lot of work,” the writer responded, looking down uncomfortably at the creatures. The Chihuahua wouldn’t stop barking, in its unapologetically shrill voice. “I’m somewhat repulsed,” he added.

“Roll over,” Darcy told the nearest St. Bernard. It only stared at him with large, unblinking eyes. “Roll over. I’ve been told they know tricks, but I have yet to see it. Supposedly they possess some kind of real intelligence, then, right? It really makes you wonder, what exactly it takes to achieve consciousness. They experience pain, but do they feel it? Does it hurt? They’re locked in this cage—do they care? Do they have higher aspirations, a longing for open pastures? And if so, what about smaller animals, like rats? They’ve got rats in that building over there, and a bunch of other little rodent-like things. These animals get smaller and smaller, more and more insignificant—at which point do their lives seize to have value? No one cares about bacteria.”