Pallas Page 10

  The first color photograph, still bright under a protective covering, was of the asteroid itself, taken through a spaceship window. Against a starry backdrop hung gray-brown, crater-scarred Pallas as it had appeared before an atmospheric envelope had masked its color and contours in shades of blue and white and green.

  “Curringer’s idea was to start a permanent colony here under a unique corporate agreement.”

  “The Hyperdemocratic Covenant?” It was another thing Emerson had already heard about.

  “That’s it, ‘One man, one veto.’ The immigrants’d be shareholders in the Curringer Trust, which, in turn, would be governed by a hyperdemocratic principle thought up by Curringer’s old friend—and, the gossips had it, lover—Mirelle Stein the philosopher. I have a picture of her somewhere...”

  What Emerson saw was another blurry newspaper photograph, one of a rather grim-faced, firm-jawed woman. Her dark hair was cut to pageboy length, with severe bangs across the forehead.

  “In any case,” Mrs. Singh went on, “the Curringer Trust would own the atmospheric envelope, the largest artificial structure ever undertaken. Still is, far as I know. Curringer started with a bang—in ‘blatant contravention of international law,’ like it says in these here clippings. A few well-placed nukes—make that ‘clean atomic devices’—modified Pallas’s natural orbit and rotation. Horatio, rest his soul, helped plant more than one of those little bombs, himself.”

  Pictures supported her claim: men in bulky, helmeted suits, one stenciled “SINGH, H.H.,” bending over mysterious canisters. One photo, enlarged until it took up a whole page, showed an unbearable light surrounded by multicolored clouds streaming into space. This, too, was consistent with what he’d been told. Any application of atomic power, however peaceful or constructive, was always presented by the UN E&M counselors as an ultimate evil. Only Mrs. Singh seemed to think it was a good thing. And perhaps, he thought, it was. It appeared to have worked. Here they all were, and he’d never heard of any harm—two-headed babies was the example that popped into his mind—having come of it.

  The next pictures, more of Horatio’s snapshots, were of the same men—or men wearing the same sort of space-suit—arranging huge sheets of plastic over the barren surface. In some ways it was like pictures the boy had seen of a circus tent about to be erected, except that this “canvas” was perfectly transparent.

  “They carried the terraformation out according to a simple plan, but on a scale so big few folks were capable of visualizing it. What they accomplished was no less than the conversion of an airless, frozen wasteland into a habitable world.”

  Mrs. Singh flipped pages, showing pictures of one construction site after another. “Ten-mile circles were laid out around each pole, marking locations for tens of thousands of anchors set in the soil with laser bores, explosives, vacuum-hardening concrete, and epoxoids. At the same time, a thin, tough, ‘smart’ plastic was extruded from the bellies of orbiting factory vessels.”

  Emerson grinned. “Smart plastic?”

  “You betcha. Curringer figured meteorites and future gun-toting colonists would present a hazard here, so he made his envelope self-repairing—plastics were his business, you’ll recall. It also filtered out excess U.V. and other harmful wavelengths, while passing visible and infrared light to the surface.”

  She turned a page, to a sequence of a dozen pictures. “Here’s Horatio’s crew arranging ribbons of extruded plastic on the surface, each of them miles long and hundreds of yards wide. No telling where this is today, could be the back of beyond or the heart of beautiful downtown Curringer! But by the time they’d finished, they’d given this ball of rock a second skin over every inch of its 1,187-mile equator, the 594 miles between there and each pole, and laser-welded the whole shebang at the edges. A job like that—it’s still hard to picture in your mind. A lot of brave men and women died in the process, let me tell you.”

  The next pictures showed a bewildering array of men and machinery. Some background objects looked like spaceships with complex mechanical attachments in odd places. Other scenes reminded Emerson of what he’d read about the building of suspension bridges on Earth. A common feature of each picture was a huge white concrete structure, like a great curved dam sweeping from one horizon to the other, into which metal cleats the size of houses were set at a steep angle.

  “Meanwhile,” Mrs. Singh continued, “steel cables, spun gleaming from the heart of an iron-nickel asteroid, were woven into a loose net around Pallas and locked into the ring of anchors you see here at the poles. Horatio and his people sealed the edges of the envelope, and that put paid to the mechanical phase of terraformation. The rest was up to biology and chemistry.”

  She turned a page and it was back to clippings, the paper of a different color and texture. “Here’s some typical East American wailing,” she observed, running a nail down the collected articles. “These are faxes. In those days, it took years to get a paper delivered out here. What it boils down to is that after the envelope was in place, limp and empty on the surface, an artificial bacterium designed for the environment was introduced beneath it at a number of widespread locations.” The next photo was of a pair of spacesuited figures, one large and one small, standing arm in arm on what looked like a plastic dropcloth used for painting a house. “I was on the bio team, and that’s how I met Horatio. Thanks to various international statutes prohibiting genetic innovation, the whole thing wasn’t a bit less illegal than the atomics used to alter the asteroid’s motion, and we were proud of ourselves just for breaking that damn silly law.”

  Emerson sat up. He’d never heard anyone say something like that before, although he’d thought it many times himself. Right or wrong, he believed abruptly that he understood what the Outside—and the Outsiders—were all about.

  Mrs. Singh didn’t seem to notice his sudden enlightenment, but went on, warming to her own specialty. “Energized by the greenhouse effect,” she told him, “supplemented by big flimsy aluminized mylar mirrors fabricated in space like the envelope and cables and placed in orbit around Pallas, our little customized bug went to work converting carbonaceous chondrite into sterile soil, free water, and a mixture of noxious gases. This primitive, poisonous atmosphere gradually inflated the cable-reinforced plastic envelope until, at the equator, it stood twenty-five thousand feet above the primordial crater-scarred surface.”

  Emerson shook his head, confused again. “The atmosphere was poisonous?”

  “Better believe it, boy. Ate spacesuits pretty handily, too. But this ‘reducing’ atmosphere was quickly altered by a second microorganism—there went International Law again—an artificial species of algae, into breathable air. Just as we’d planned, the oxygen killed off the first bacterium, leaving behind trillions of tons of nitrogen-rich fertilizer as a residue.”

  Emerson closed his eyes, trying to imagine what it had been like to build a world, trying to see ideas and feelings that didn’t show in Mrs. Singh’s old photographs.

  “Clouds formed beneath the envelope and rain fell, maybe for the first time here since the birth of the solar system,” she mused, lost in her memories. “Gossamer-winged aircraft sowed the surface with the seeds of ground-covering weeds, grasses, fast-growing trees. The gray-brown surface of Pallas began to show some green. We had a spruce, developed by a pulp-and-paper outfit back on Earth named Weyerhauser, that’d grow forty feet in ten years even in standard gravity. Which is why we still refer to the boonies as the weyers.”

  “The boonies?”

  “Meanwhile, here’s a couple of orbital pictures of the asteroid’s poles. Look kinda like the tonsure of a monk, don’t they? That’s because they’re outside the envelope, where they remain airless and barren—but far from deserted. Having served as construction campsites, they became perfect spots for landing spaceships. Cargo and passengers enter the artificial environment here, through a series of airlocks, and—”

  She was going to say more, but a bell rang. “Come in, Aloysius!�
�� she shouted. “It’s only a mile and a half. What took you so long?”

  What Was Your Name in the States?

  The second American civil war will be fought over that little strip of ground in your front yard between the sidewalk and the street.

  —Mirelle Stein, The Productive Class

  When Emerson went to open the door, Brody was still standing on the steps to the front porch, stamping mud off his boots. When he appeared satisfied with their condition, he nodded to the boy, climbed to the porch itself, and paused again to shake accumulated rainwater from the plastic poncho he wore over his clothing.

  “I’ll be after discussin’ this with Weather Control,” he grumbled as he entered the house. “They’re supposed t’limit this grand enthusiasm of theirs for precipitation t’nighttimes,”

  “Weather Control?” Emerson asked as the man brushed past him. He was temporarily ignored as Mrs. Singh greeted Brody with a two-handed shake and a peck on the cheek, invited her new guest to remove his poncho and sit himself, and offered him a cup of coffee.

  “It’d be greatly appreciated, to be sure,” the man answered, shucking out of the poncho. Laying a small bundle he’d been carrying underneath it on the sofa beside him, he nodded with apparent familiarity toward the picture book still lying open on the table. “Ah, I see that y’drug the family album out, after all.”

  She riffled idly through its pages. “Why, yes I have, Aloysius, and I’ve just finished telling Emerson here about as much as I can myself about the way we terraformed Pallas.”

  Emerson sat down in a chair placed at right angles to the couch.

  “Emerson Ngu.” The Curringer innkeeper squinted his eyes, peering at the boy. “Y’look that familiar t’me. Have we met? I do get out to the ant farm now an’ then t’buy produce.”

  Still full of unanswered questions himself, Emerson shook his head and answered politely, “I don’t believe we have, sir. My father, Walter Ngu, is a foreman. My mother, Alice Ngu, is the housekeeper at the Chief Administrator’s Residence.”

  “Indeed she is. I’ve met them both, then.” Brody nodded, grinning. “A strong family resemblance.” The man accepted a steaming mug from Mrs. Singh, raised his eyebrows and received a nod, then dug in a shirt pocket to extract a cigar. As he lit it, Mrs. Singh touched something under the edge of the coffee table. After that, Emerson noticed, the smoke was drawn to it and vanished into its surface.

  “If ye’ve gotten as far as the terraformin’, then the next thing young Emerson here should know is that soon afterward, Wild Bill Curringer an’ his merry band began sendin’ the glad tidin’s out over TV back on Earth, an’ radio, an’ compunets—”

  Mrs. Singh laughed. “And in print, of every language and format, from Afrikaans to Zuni.”

  “An’ everywhere an’ anywhere, from Azerbaijan t’Zimbabwe, to a war-weary, history-jaded planetary population which had long since come t’believe itself beyond astonishment.”

  “‘To Pallas!’” Mrs. Singh quoted the well-worn advertising slogan which Emerson had heard over and over from his parents and teachers. “‘For the opportunity of a lifetime!’”

  “‘T’Pallas!’” Brody finished with another of his broad grins. “‘Fer a lifetime of opportunity!’”

  Both of them fell silent for a moment, remembering. Brody puffed on his big cigar, his gaze concentrated on the cover of the photo album. Mrs. Singh got up with a sigh, went out to the kitchen, and returned with the coffeepot to refill their mugs.

  Brody heaved a deep sigh of his own, then spoke to them without looking up. “Pallas, the Curringer Trust’s advertisements proclaimed, had enough room for everybody an’ anybody.”

  “Anybody willing to make a two-year interplanetary voyage packed in like sardines,” Mrs. Singh agreed, setting the pot aside and seating herself on the couch once more.

  “Enough room”—Brody looked directly at Emerson—“for eighty million forty-acre farmsteads.”

  “Or enough room for twenty thousand cities the size of Manhattan,” Mrs. Singh stated, “although both were just the opposite of what Curringer intended doing with the place.”

  Brody shook his head. “Room for a fresh start an’ a chance at a dacent an’ rewardin’ life.”

  “Fully transferable land title—” Mrs. Singh began.

  “—the exact location t’be determined by a random drawin’—”

  “—start-up supplies, and membership in the Curringer Trust were built into the price of the fare.”

  “’Twasn’t a plan entirely without precedent,” Brody told Emerson. “’Tis more or less the same way the famous James Jerome Hill an’ his equally famous Northern Pacific Railroad company developed the northwestern United States in the nineteenth century an’ populated it with eager European immigrant families who’d paid for their land, a transatlantic boat ride, a long train ride across the continent, an’ sometimes even another boat ride at the end of their arduous journey, all in the same package.”

  “And the price they paid for coming here,” offered Mrs. Singh, “was about the same, allowing for four centuries of inflation, as what the Pilgrims paid to get to Plymouth Rock.”

  “Although some folks like us were paid t’come out here an’ only decided afterward t’stay.” Brody turned where he sat to face the boy squarely. “Now what y’may not know, boy, is that everywhere on Earth, every possible sort of religious, political, linguistic, an’ cultural resentment had been simmerin’, just below the surface, sometimes for millennia. At any given moment, almost anyplace y’care t’name, there was a war already goin’ on or another simply waitin’ its turn t’happen.”

  Mrs. Singh nodded, remembering. “But before too long all of the Ainu, Pakistanis, Japanese-Koreans, West Indians, East Indians, and Eurasians were leaving England and Japan—”

  “—so pristinely an’ prissily pure—” Brody observed.

  “—and sublimely race-conscious—” Mrs. Singh wrinkled her nose.

  “—seekin’ more equitable treatment in an environment they were willin’ t’labor t’create for themselves.”

  “Within a few months of Curringer’s announcement,” asserted Mrs. Singh, “even the Moros ceased a thousand years of pointless struggle and departed the Philippines for the frontier of space, joining their fellow Moslems from war-ravaged Lebanon, war-ravaged Jordan, war-ravaged Iran, war-ravaged Iraq, and war-ravaged Afghanistan.”

  “The Walloons willin’ly gave up their hard-won corner of tiny Belgium,” Brody declared.

  “And they were followed in surprisingly short order,” Mrs. Singh commented, “by the Flemish.”

  “Which began t’set a pattern,” Brody laughed, “quickly imitated by the Catalans an’ the Basques in Spain—”

  “And insurgents on all sides from Angola and Madagascar,” noted Mrs. Singh, “even sides nobody else had known existed because the media couldn’t be bothered to talk about them.”

  Brody nodded. “Like the poor Miskito Indians from Nicaragua.”

  “And the anti-Marxist faction of the Quebecois,” added Mrs. Singh, “from the People’s Republic of Canada.”

  “Before we earlier pioneers knew quite what was happening, every racial, ideological, ethnic, an’ religious minority was represented on Pallas, exactly as Curringer meant it t’be.”

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Singh told him. “If it matters, Emerson, you’ll find a good many people like yourself here on the Outside—Vietnamese, Thais, and Cambodians of Chinese ancestry.”

  “An’ plenty of good Irish-Americans like me,” added Brody, before Emerson could tell them that it didn’t matter to him what color a person was, only what they did, “though the majority of the Irish here are northerners from the auld sod of Catholic an’ Protestant persuasion, who just got tired of lobbin’ grenades at one another.”

  Mrs. Singh nodded. “Just as there are Sikhs and other kinds of Indians—and all sorts of Palestinians—formerly mortal enemies living together now, side by side in peace,
because they’re all newcomers on an equal footing here, and they all have something vastly better to do with themselves than killing one another.”

  “Indeed,” Brody agreed, “Danikil an’ the survivors of other decimated tribes from the now uninhabitable wastes of Ethiopia, not t’mention many another ruined part of Africa.”

  Emerson had been trying, not altogether successfully, to take it all in. “Sikhs,” he asked, “is that how your late husband happened to come here, Mrs. Singh, from India?”

  Mrs. Singh looked startled, then laughed. “Dear me, no. Horatio was from Butte, Montana. I think his grandparents might have belonged to some kind of religious cult at one time, but the only natural enemies he ever acknowledged were prairie dogs.”

  “Who haven’t made much headway here as yet, I’m afraid,” Brody observed. “Somethin’ wrong about the soil, I’m given to understand. As t’the rest of the immigrants, one an’ all they were warned, long before leavin’ Earth, t’forget their ancient arguments.”

  Mrs. Singh began to pour more coffee and noticed that the pot was empty. “It was pointed out that succeeding generations of their offspring would inevitably mingle their blood and genes.”

  “An’ hard as it may have been for them to imagine it when they arrived, in the fullness of time, all of their old feuds would eventually be irrelevant an’ forgotten, anyway.”

  Mrs. Singh stood up, taking the coffeepot in hand. “So why not go ahead and recognize that now—”

  Brody looked up and grinned, “—an’ get along together on their new homeworld from the outset?”

  They both paused, as if expecting some kind of answer from Emerson. The idea certainly made sense to him—in fact it almost seemed self-evident—and he told them so.

  “And to me, as well,” Mrs. Singh agreed, “but it’s equally true, and we must always remember it, that there were more than simple matters of race, religion, or politics involved.”