Pallas Read online

  Things that sometimes left permanent marks.

  It wasn’t enough that she’d been black. Voters on the wine-and-cheese side of the spectrum, the Volvo side of the spectrum—his own side of the spectrum—were always very careful to conceal their prejudices, but they were real nonetheless (otherwise, what political profit would there have been in appealing to them with three-quarters of a century’s worth of condescending social programs?) and ran much deeper than the mere crude, open bigotry of the right. It was only later that he’d learned—because the press had informed him and the rest of the world in ten-centimeter headlines—that she’d been sixteen years old.

  And she’d often brought her younger sister along.

  Before six years of guilt and anger overwhelmed him as they’d done so often before, a feeling that was almost satisfaction came to his rescue. Out in the silvery moonlight, the first of his cultivation teams appeared in the distance, shuffling back from the fields they’d tended all day. And they were right on time, according to his grandfather’s antique gold pocket watch which he consulted, as he always did at this time, from this very spot on the verandah. Return too soon and they’d lose valuable daylight and person-hours, an inefficiency that, repeated too often, might someday add up to disaster for the still-struggling colony. Return too late and the fleeting moon would set, leaving the night too dark for weary feet to find the narrow pathways laid between the furrows.

  Even in this failing light he could see that the colonists’ simple pullovers and loose trousers weren’t quite as splendidly creased and spotless as they’d been this morning, lined up for assembly. That would soon be remedied. Accompanied as they always were by their Education and Morale counselors whose pale blue paramilitary outfits were nearly as wrinkled and dirty as their own, they would discard their work-soiled clothing in the Project laundry, step through the communal showers, be issued fresh white denims for tomorrow, and be led to their assigned seats in the Project kitchen for a simple, balanced, and nutritious meal. All three facilities were already in full swing—being put to use by clerical, maintenance, and other service personnel—in anticipation of the mass return from the fields. Some might have thought the mingled odors of laundry, showers, and kitchen disagreeable. For the Senator they had the smell of good things being done rationally, without a murmur of disturbance from anything or anyone.

  The E&M staff were an International Peace Corps detachment on indefinite loan by the United Nations to serve as the Senator’s hands and arms on Pallas. The shock batons swinging at their belts—once known as “cattle prods” before animal rights activists demanded otherwise—might be used on an occasional boisterous colonist (they could be such children, after all), but the presence of such weapons, he’d long since persuaded himself, was more for their protection from any Outsiders who might break in through the Rimfence. His colonists might be children. They weren’t barbarians. They worked hard and obeyed, building a future for themselves and, he hoped, for all mankind, in which there would be no more Outsiders to disturb the peace.

  In the midst of the compound, where the colonists could appreciate it as they ate, stood an heroic-scale bronze of Horace Greeley, after whom the colony was named, the nineteenth-century founder of the New York Tribune, a decent, inexpensive paper meant to uplift the laboring class. Greeley had hired some powerful journalistic talent in his day but his editorials had made the paper, supporting a protective tariff—an issue so hot it had sparked the Civil War—advocating governmental and cultural reform, and dabbling in experimental socialism.

  The Tribune had been popular on the American frontier, many of its readers having acted on its famous editor’s even more famous advice, “Go West, young man, go West!” Nor was this the first time Greeley’s name had been tied to a project like this. The “Cooperative Union Colony” had named a town for him in 1870, a few dozen kilometers north of Denver. Mr. Greeley, however, had ignored his own advice, stayed East, and unsuccessfully run for President in 1872.

  Altman suspected the name “Greeley Utopian Memorial Project” had been chosen by a Colombo bureaucrat who wasn’t a native English speaker. With the new century, due to increasing hostility from rich Western countries, the UN had been forced to relocate to Sri Lanka. In any case, no American would have chosen the acronym GUMP.

  In its way, the statue of Greeley was fully as incongruous. It had been commissioned on Earth and freighted here at an obscene cost, money that might have been better spent. The sculptor had either been a romantic fool or historically illiterate. Greeley, who’d also died in 1872, wore a spacesuit, holding the bulky mirror-visored helmet under one arm. None of the colonists had worn a spacesuit during their two-year voyage to Pallas, nor even seen a crewman doing so.

  For some reason, the thought of his own seemingly endless voyage (two full weeks aboard one of the new fusion-powered constant-boost spacecraft) brought the Senator full-circle. He’d seen the aurora borealis once, on a Strategic Defense junket to Greenland. He realized now that it was a pale thing compared to a Pallatian sunset which was visible all over the asteroid. What was more, the same outrageous spectacle occurred each morning when the sun came up.

  Unpredicted as it had been, the colorful display apparently harmed no one. Nor did it indicate any structural failure of the atmospheric envelope. It was pretty, he guessed. But with the notorious exception of various young women, he’d never cared much for pretty things as such. His publicly devoted, conspicuously long-suffering wife privately maintained that he had no poetry in his soul. For his part, he’d never claimed to have a soul, let alone one containing poetry.

  The sunset was impressive. Some might call it garish. He felt that was appropriate somehow. It almost constituted the signature of the individual responsible for it. He, too, had been described as colorful, unpredictable, impressive, even garish. No one, however, had ever thought to describe the man as pretty.

  What the Senator did appreciate, what the sunset mainly meant to him, was that an overbearing robber-capitalist and his pack of arrogant world-making engineers had proven imperfect, failing utterly to anticipate a phenomenon this...blatant. What else, in the name of suffering, bleeding humanity, had they failed to anticipate?

  Pallas was half a billion kilometers from the sun, a quarter billion from Earth at closest passage. It was dark out here, he understood, and bitterly cold. Deep space was a living thing: hungry, vicious, determinedly clawing at a molecule-thin fabric which was their one and only protection against its ravages. And the frail lives of thousands upon thousands of helpless human beings lay in precisely the same hands whose owner had failed to predict this gaudy sunset.

  Greedy hands.

  Worst of all, the hands of an individual who would never have to live with the results of his failures, whatever they might be. Someone who would never take the same risks as those he’d schemed for all of his long, wasted life to exploit.

  Dirty hands.

  A dead man’s hands.

  The hands of William Wilde Curringer.

  Whither Thou Goest

  Keep your overall goal in mind above all. Those who swerve to avoid a few cuts and bruises defeat themselves. Understand from the very minute the fight begins that you’re going to take damage. accept it. You’ll suffer far worse from the idiots and cowards on your own side.

  —William Wilde Curringer, Unfinished Memoirs

  It was hot in the Residence kitchen.

  True, the room was air-conditioned, and every appliance within its walls was powered by the Project’s catalytic fusion reactor which, with thousands of others scattered across Pallas—small-scale, decentralized, and designed to produce oxygen and water as a by-product—supplemented a pair of huge mylar mirrors in orbit as a source of energy, and helped replenish the asteroid’s atmosphere.

  The kitchen was the largest room in the building, but it wasn’t the sort of homey, hospitable refuge she’d grown up expecting to find at the heart of even the most formal executive residence. The ceili
ng overhead was very high, supported by stainless steel I-beams with rows of circles cut from them—which had lowered their weight for transport through space—that lent the ambience of an industrial plant and at the same time looked spindly, having been engineered for the low gravity of the asteroid, so that in the back of her mind she kept expecting them to come down on her head at any moment. The roof itself was some sort of translucent fiberglass, and the light it allowed into the room felt clinical to her, although she’d felt that way about skylights back on Earth, as well.

  The stainless “motif” was echoed in fixtures and countertops surrounding her, throwing the intolerable heat and a series of smeary reflections from their semipolished surfaces. If she’d leaned forward—and if the table before her hadn’t been covered with the preparations for dinner—she’d have seen the image of a tall, slender woman who appeared between five and ten years older than her thirty-four years. The strain marking her face was part of an overall tension which shaped her movements and affected everyone around her. She’d heard someone remark, not knowing she was listening—or maybe knowing perfectly well—that she lit up any room she walked into, but that her light was as discomfiting as that of an oxyacetylene welding torch. To a degree, she’d always been that way, she knew, even as a girl. And the years with Gibson hadn’t helped.

  She was still reasonably attractive, she thought, for a mother of three who’d gone through everything she had. The most frustrating thing about her marriage was that not one of the women Gibson chased had ever been prettier than she was, or even a fraction as dynamic or intelligent. They were always younger—sometimes a great deal younger. She’d been quite young herself when they’d first met. And equally, they were—here her thinking hesitated as it invariably did, searching for a phrase she could somehow never remember the next time and had to search for all over again—well, they were less inhibited.

  But in the first place, why hadn’t Gibson ever managed to take her away from herself and make her feel that way? She’d always believed he could have helped her if he’d ever cared enough to try. In some ways that had been the greatest betrayal of all. Or was he a prisoner, too, paralyzed like a seaside souvenir cast in a block of transparent plastic, which was the way she’d felt all her life?

  And in the second place, there must be something more to life than sex.

  There had to be.

  Gwen Altman, wife of ex-Senator Gibson Altman, glanced at the servants to make sure neither was watching, then ducked her head and gave her face a quick swipe with the hem of her apron. Neither of the women appeared particularly uncomfortable. Perhaps the unbearable heat was something personal, a sign of premature menopause. Perhaps it was just that every day, no matter how bad the day before might have been, she felt more confused and increasingly unhappy.

  She shook self-pity off for the moment—although the heat remained unbelievably oppressive—and returned to her inspection of the stainless tableware and place settings. Tonight’s dinner guest was very important—not in and of himself, she corrected herself hastily, what an absurd idea—but to her husband’s work here at the Project. And that, of course, made this guest important to her. Gwen was the great-granddaughter, granddaughter, daughter, niece, cousin, and sister to a long, distinguished line of congressmen, senators, and Supreme Court justices. She’d also been resigned since girlhood to practicing the virtues of a patient, pragmatic political spouse.

  Thus she’d spent six endless three-hundred-sixty-five-day years—the solar year on Pallas was much longer—with her disgraced husband on this isolated frontier worldlet the Party had sent him to, helping him as best she could. Until recently (she wasn’t exactly certain when her feelings had begun to change), she’d been as stoic about it all as she’d always believed proper. Sometimes she’d been almost cheerful. She’d always believed—perhaps only because she wanted to—that they were simply waiting out here for Gibson’s earlier power and prestige to be restored to him once his public reputation was somehow rehabilitated.

  But to Gwen’s utter amazement—and helpless revulsion—these past six years seemed to have made him content simply exercising what amounted to life-and-death authority over an unwashed, ignorant rabble of ten thousand Third World peasants.

  The best evidence of that was that he no longer drank the way he did in office, nor did he beat her at irregular intervals as he had on Earth before the public ugliness which ruined his brilliant career. (The consummate politician at every turn, he’d made certain never to bruise her anywhere that would show on television or in newspaper or magazine photographs—for her part, she’d been horrified to discover that bearing beneath her clothing the marks he did make on her body was the closest she’d ever come to feeling like a woman.) But worst of all, he seemed to have forgotten all his earlier, grander, and, in her estimation, nobler aspirations which had somehow made it endurable for her.

  Maybe even a little enjoyable.

  One of the servants, Nansey, asked her a question about the salads which the girl should have been able to answer for herself. Oh well, Gwen sighed inwardly, that’s why she had to be out here in the kitchen. Alice, their housekeeper, would have been supervising ordinarily, but with important company coming, she was feeding the children an early dinner in their own suite. In Gwen’s opinion, Alice was the only one of these colonial women who had any brains at all.

  Gwen wished that her opinion had been asked for in the matter of their exile in deep space, but it hadn’t been, neither by her father’s old cronies in the Democratic Union Party nor by her own husband. To her, the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project—and along with it, each and every godforsaken square centimeter of this miserable ball of rock they called Pallas—would never be anything but an empty wasteland. She remembered doubting, as a coed, the stories of Walter Prescott Webb about pioneer women living in sod shanties on the Great Plains of North America who were supposed to have died of nothing more than loneliness. She didn’t doubt them any more. She hated to contemplate living out the rest of her life—and most of all, trying to raise her children here.

  As the casserole was taken from the microwave—an all-vegetarian entree consisting exclusively and conspicuously of produce grown here at the Project—filling the kitchen with even more heat and steam, Gwen unconsciously moved away, toward the open window.

  The United Nations had seen fit to situate its experimental agricultural cooperative in a broad, shallow impact feature—in other words, she thought, a big hole in the ground—a little under a hundred miles in diameter, the Residence and attached workers’ compound occupying a low central prominence. Consequently, there was nothing to look at in any direction but a crater-pocked prairie ringed by mountains, their impossibly jagged ridges as yet unsoftened by the weather (a relatively new phenomenon itself on Pallas) or by the stands of forest growth everyone promised would someday put in an appearance.

  She admitted to herself that the prairie everywhere she looked was dotted by a thousand deep blue, perfectly circular lakes. Well-managed cultivated fields were finally beginning to supplant the ragged, weed-choked “natural” meadows they’d found here when they arrived. And, thanks to patient gardeners requisitioned from the ranks of the colonists her husband watched over, equally well-tended flower beds bloomed all around the Residence itself in brilliant profusion.

  All in all, she supposed, she and her husband and their children lived a life that would have been the envy of any British second son sent to the West Indies to make his fortune, or of any southern American plantation owner of two centuries ago. And what they did here was democratic, progressive, for the benefit of workers whom British and southern aristocrats would merely have exploited like cattle.

  But the value of any of it was lost on her, calculated against—just to single out one terrible example—the absolutely shocking rate of suicide and spontaneous abortion occurring among the Project’s peasants and (according to what little they heard about the subject through authorized channels) the Pallatian colo
nists beyond the Rimfence whom everybody in the Project called “Outsiders.”

  Of course a great many men and women—courageous or foolhardy, depending on who told it—had already perished simply in the tremendous undertaking of terraforming Pallas. It was a frequent topic of discussion at her husband’s table. Some had made lethal miscalculations in the deceptively low and surprisingly variable gravity of the asteroid. Others had suffered from the predictable but unavoidable hazards of the bitter cold and vacuum of space. Still others had succumbed, even as they might have back on Earth, to ordinary industrial accidents with high explosives and machinery. In the end, there had been over a thousand such victims, more than one for each kilometer of Pallas’s diameter, after whom the first landmarks on its surface had been named. And what had it accomplished?

  She remembered the way, on Earth, that elected and appointed officials of various national governments and the UN—conscientious and courageous public servants whom William Wilde Curringer had arrogantly written off as “safety fascists”—began to rage impotently over the mounting death toll on Pallas, while at the same time, despite the most urgent warnings, construction workers from all over the planet had continued to sign up by the thousands to take the places of the fallen.

  Little did she know—she’d have been about twenty-two at the time, she guessed, and still preoccupied with trying to make her marriage work—that it was her future home they were all talking about. Otherwise she might have paid better attention.

  For the most part, it must have been the obscenely spectacular amounts of money Curringer had offered his workers, along with promised land grants on the asteroid, which attracted them despite the well-publicized dangers—just another example of the kind of exploitation Gibson was determined to stop here. But there were many among the survivors who claimed that they—no more or less than those who had died—were no different from millions of earthbound dam and bridge and tunnel builders who’d come and gone before them. They believed that the accomplishment—or even merely the attempt—was worthy of the risk.