Pallas Read online

  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 observers 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 worldwide 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.

  Unauthorized Enterprise

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

  —Barbara Tuchman

  Fourteen-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 addressing 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 attention beneath his gaze—wore a face Emerson’s parents seemed to remember 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 humanity.”

  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 Nations 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 technically the United States, he didn’t know the words “precociously cynical.” He remembered secondhand his grandparents’ tales of dirty Asian politics 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 socially 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 disbelief. 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, Communist-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 laborers beside him smirked.

  A generation later, the refugees’ American children, Emerson’s parents, 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 OPPORTUNITY OF A LIFETIME! TO PALLAS, FOR A LIFETIME OF OPPORTUNITY!”—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 parents had won, they’d taken their two-year-old son and emigrated to Pallas, only to discover, when they’d gotten here after a cramped and arduous two-year voyage, that they’d sentenced themselves and their growing family—all forms of contraception being condemned and unavailable 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 humane influence of our Project, the barbaric notions of that crackpot Mirelle 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 mainstream”? 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 thousand. A major purchaser of Outsider goods and services, cheap labor had given it a decisive advantage. There was a ready market for its agricultural produce, and its collective opinion, as. expressed by the Chief Administrator, had carried weight all over the asteroid and beyond. However, 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 Administrator—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 Administrator, 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 despicable 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.

  Instead, they could leave him lying in a dark rear stall of the communal showers all night on a cold, damp concrete floor, driven nearly to madness by echoes from the rough-surfaced, leaky pipes they’d strapped him to, helpless to prevent small, many-legged creatures from crawling over his face. The only thing that had ever helped him at times like these was filling his mind with fantastic, heartfelt images of someday, somehow flying over the hated Rimfence to freedom.

  For identical reasons, United Nations Education and Morale counselors couldn’t be issued anything as brutal as handcuffs. That, too, might destroy their sponsors’ illusions of a brave new world. But they could cinch him to a water pipe by the neck and bind his wrists and ankles, with plastic zip-ties saved for them in a particular refuse bin over at Central Receiving, that restricted circulation in his hands and feet until he couldn’t move or feel anything in them.

  Similarly, they couldn’t whip him or strike him with fists—and every use of their shock batons was supposedly monitored remotely by their supervisors. What they could do was drub him in shifts, for hours on end, with meter-long sections of concrete reinforcement rod wrapped in plastic foam and duct tape—more largesse from some generous soul at Central Receiving—until he could hardly move for the pain, even if he hadn’t been trussed up, and it felt like every bone in his body had been broken, even though he never had a single scratch or bruise to show for it.

  And, of course, since the Chief Administrator had recently broadened the communalistic charter to forbid personal possessions of any kind, they invariably relieved him of everything he carried in the little pouch he wore on a string around his neck—like every other colonist he knew—beneath his pocketless Project-issues.

  Emerson had long understood with the clarity of a born victim—in this respect his cynicism was genuine—that there was always more the blue goons might have done to him if they’d been inclined, and probably would someday unless he found a way to fulfill his desperate fantasies of flight. For now the worst part, once he’d been taken from the stall, cleaned up, and shoved into the breakfast line before assembly, was that his fatigue and pain were more or less invisible. His stiffness and exhaustion would be interpreted by the Chief Administrator as sullen stupidity. His lack of fear—because he’d already survived far worse—would resemble defiance. And more and more, with every day that passed, the resemblance was appropriate.

  Many times before he’d reached his present age—not nearly as often as he’d broken the rules successfully—he’d been brought before the Chief Administrator to receive what was invariably represented as the Judgment of the Community. It had begun years ago when he’d retrieved bruised oranges from the Residence trash, cut out the spoiled parts, squeezed the juice, and was caught trading homemade refreshments to field workers for odd bits they themselves had salvaged elsewhere. That was how he’d gotten the spool-ends of wire for his radio. Luckily, no one had ever summed up what he’d acquired and accused him of the additional infraction of “hoarding.”

  Yesterday, he’d been caught buying admission chits—scalping tickets—from a few of the more amiably corruptible guards who didn’t want them, to a charity performance by a visiting Earthie entertainer a little past her prime and the peak of her fame, but gushingly enthusiastic about the Project. There seemed to be many of that type.

  Each time they met this way, face to face in his private office, the Chief Administrator threatened to send him Outside into what he claimed was a jungle where every split second represented a life-or-death struggle for mere subsistence. His embarrassed parents—the Chief Administrator’s housekeeper and Emerson’s father, called in from the fields—always begged their master for leniency, and their humble pleas were always granted. To their distress, Emerson neither experienced nor expressed gratitude at these reprieves. What they’d never have believed, after all the years of forcing themselves to adapt to their own fate, was that, each time he was caught, the blue goons used the excuse to terrorize and rough him up, sometimes claiming afterward that he’d resisted them.

  Somehow he had resisted them all these years, and the P
roject’s psychovultures as well—partly with his mental images of flying—and survived. He couldn’t fight directly, but executed his revenge with cold intelligence. In the beginning, he’d waited until the next spontaneous rash of vandalism to commit his own, better-planned acts of sabotage—bits of hay snipped off flush in building and vehicle locks, blocked and overflowing plumbing in the goons’ quarters—damage carefully calculated to equal his losses.

  He’d never destroyed anything his parents or their coworkers had labored to produce. He hadn’t touched the catalytic fusion reactor—yet. As he matured, he’d eventually given up these nonproductive forays, along with their attendant risks, just as he’d given up childish fantasies about miraculously flying over the Rimfence, vowing to pursue revenge only when he could have it at a profit.

  He knew the Chief Administrator would always be kindly and forgiving—in public—but that one day, sooner or later, Emerson’s many and varied enterprises were bound to earn the boy a convenient accident at the hands of the blue goons, ridding the Project of an individual the older man must see as a perpetual annoyance. Before that could happen, Emerson vowed, he must escape into what he thought of as the real world.

  Someone near him coughed, bringing him back from his reverie. The senior Education and Morale counselors were responsible for continuing the assembly after the Chief Administrator’s customary introduction. The first thing they did this morning, after he’d stepped off the verandah, presumably headed for his office, was to call a single individual forward by name and all alone, for judgment and punishment—the idea of any kind of trial would have sent both sides into hysterical laughter—which they were privately aware he’d already received.