Pallas Page 6

  “Any idea who it is or what it’s about?”

  “No, sir,” Alice replied. “The operator would only tell me that it’s a triple-A priority call from Washington, using one of the United Nations keycodes.”

  He arose reluctantly from his paper-cluttered desk where a hundred more important matters awaited his attention, briefly dabbed at his mouth with a napkin and threw it on the dinner tray, ran a hand through his hair even though he wouldn’t really be talking to anybody for a long while yet—if at all—and went to answer the call, feeling put upon and deeply annoyed. Earth seemed very far away these days, in much more than mere physical distance.

  What people really needed, he thought as he settled into a comfortable chair before the wall-sized screen and waited for the unscrambling software to finish loading itself, was some kind of faster-than-light radio now, long before any hypothetical departure of humanity for the stars. He doubted that would ever happen anyway. Mankind had far too much unfinished business in its own backyard. But faster-than-light communication was supposed to be impossible.

  On the other hand, so had household fusion, and look at the way that had changed the world. Thinking back, it seemed obvious. An unexpected natural phenomenon had been discovered in what everyone else considered an academic backwater—Utah, of all places. Large institutions, dependent on government grants invested in high-temperature, high-pressure technology, had been unable to replicate these “cold fusion” experiments, while smaller institutions had done so with insulting ease.

  It helped that these small institutions had followed the original design faithfully while those who “knew better” had modified it to suit outmoded prejudices. One intelligent change, consistent with the newfound principle, had been made by Israelis who’d eliminated an irrelevant electrolytic process, lowered a rod of palladium into a can of deuterium gas, and gotten neutrons, heat, and helium.

  Power lines had started coming down and gasoline pumps vanishing from the world’s highways. No matter how authorities tried to laugh it off, how many conservative journals ridiculed it, how many frightened oil, coal, and natural gas companies hated it, or how many state-run utilities tried to suppress it, the Fusion Age of cheap, freely available energy had arrived.

  Someday someone working in a basement somewhere, ignorant or contemptuous of the rules that men—rather than nature—imposed on science, would find a way to send a message that took less than fourteen minutes to travel from Earth to Pallas. The Senator wondered why that idea suddenly made him feel afraid.

  “Gibbie!”

  Altman realized that his mind had wandered. He hated being called “Gib” or “Gibbie.” His name was Gibson. It had a long, distinguished history in his family.

  The call, however, was from Senator Elwood Dodd, one of the few friends he had left in public life, a longtime Union Democratic wheelhorse who’d served two terms as governor in Hartford before taking up what now seemed permanent residence in the national legislature. Altman knew that Dodd was responsible for his having been given this post on Pallas rather than something unimaginably worse. The man had such close ties in the United Nations his opponents often charged that he represented Colombo rather than Connecticut.

  Altman had to suppress a reflexive impulse to return his old colleague’s greeting. Communication across interplanetary distances consisted of a series of monologues. This message had been sent no less than fourteen minutes ago. It would take another fourteen for any answer to get back. Dodd’s genially alcoholic features projected from the screen almost as if he were here in the room, although he raised his voice as if it were a bad two-way long-distance connection.

  “I thought I’d spend a little of the taxpayers’ money to let you know what’s going on down here before you see it garbled and distorted by Atlanta! I’m afraid we lost another one, my friend. Daniel Webster will be spinning in his grave! Young Lucero managed to force the bill out of committee because we thought we had enough support on the floor, but the goddamned Conservatives and Libertarians joined forces at the last minute and wiped our asses for us on a roll-call vote!”

  So that was it. Another failed attempt, this time in the Senate, to fill the “vacant” Western seats. For more than ten years there had been constant pressure, mostly from his own party, to accomplish that highly necessary task. They even had historical precedent: exactly the same thing had been done to the South during the nineteenth century. It had been the major issue of his career, responsible for vaulting him to prominence—which was why Dodd was calling him about it—but Altman was surprised now at how little he cared. After nine years in exile, it was difficult remembering how the “Cold Civil War” had started in the first place.

  Money, he supposed.

  What else would it be?

  The Second Great Depression had been brought about by Third World debts amounting to fourteen figures, the widespread and enthusiastic repudiation of which had devastated the American banking system. Of course the bankers had understood from the beginning that the gaggle of dictatorships and people’s republics they were showering with credit were bad risks. They’d counted on taxpayers to bail them out—with a little coercive assistance from Congress. And why not? Weren’t both parties doing essentially the same thing with their Russian aid program?

  And hadn’t Congress helpfully destroyed the only competition American banks had ever had, the savings and loan institutions, toward the end of the twentieth century?

  Then the economy of California had been destroyed by a long-predicted earthquake which, despite expensive (some said repressive) civil defense measures, had killed twenty million in the Greater Los Angeles area alone, inflicting trillions of Old Dollars’ worth of damage. Suddenly the money wasn’t there to bail out the banks, even if a new three-sided Congress—composed of Democratic Unionists, Conservatives, and Libertarians rather than Republicans and Democrats—had been willing.

  “Something you won’t hear about at all—from Atlanta or from anywhere else, with any luck—is that the goddamned Jackelopes apparently took over another nuclear waste facility and they’ve been mailing that crap, an ounce at a time in foil-lined envelopes, to members of both houses! And still we lost the vote! Sometimes I think I ought to give up politics, Gibbie, and look for honest work like you!”

  Altman gasped. This was more important than a lost vote in the Senate, and far more dangerous than the ecoterrorism of the last century because it was part of an incredibly popular movement rooted in respect for individual rights and private property. It was the closest thing so far to a provocation that couldn’t be overlooked, and it couldn’t have been accomplished without the cooperation of Western postal officials. However, owing to the Great Depression II and countless other stresses (which, to give Aloysius Brody credit, much like the San Andreas Fault had been long overdue for relief), a dramatic—although not yet officially acknowledged—political, economic, social, and geographic reshuffling had followed in North America without respect to offices and titles.

  Westerners had often complained bitterly of what they felt amounted to colonial treatment by the Northeast, of three-quarters of their land being perpetually tied up for the sake of a future which somehow never arrived, of their involuntary status as the Northeast’s dumping ground, its bottomless food, water, and mineral reserve, its hiding place for the Pentagon’s most dangerous toys.

  Privately, Altman admitted that there was substance to their complaints. His own party had always taken pains to assure that the West was represented by transplanted easterners—“carpetbaggers,” some called them—or by westerners with eastern values. The eastern-based media followed the same policy: for sixty years, there hadn’t been a news anchor in Denver, to name one example, who truly spoke for western values, although that never stopped them from claiming otherwise.

  Nothing lasts forever, of course. During the same sixty years, American industry had become almost universally decentralized as a result of the fairly recent development of small, rela
tively inexpensive fusion plants, computer-driven machine tools of tremendous versatility which freed the entrepreneur from union labor, and a remarkable process of ion-impregnation which made it possible to fabricate anything from bottle-cap lifters to fusion-electric locomotives out of easily worked materials which could be hardened afterward to any desired toughness.

  With each startling innovation, the stranglehold of America’s traditional industrial region and the factions that controlled it was broken a bit more, the vital, energetic West, in effect, gradually seceding economically from the moldering, overpopulated Rust Belt which had dominated its existence for two centuries.

  “What I don’t understand is what the Libertarians gain from acting as de facto representatives for the West.” On the screen before him, Altman watched his old friend squirm uncomfortably. “Times are changing too much, Gibbie. I’m getting too old.”

  Altman smiled sadly. It wasn’t Dodd’s age, but the age he’d lived in most of his life. He was a survivor of an era of “broker parties,” political entities representing no idea or collection of ideas (although they might pretend otherwise when tactics called for it), but which simply accrued power for its own sake.

  In a sense, the Republicans and Democrats had been professional athletic teams, striving mightily to defeat each other for the money, the spectacle, for victory itself, but for nothing else. They might even exchange members, who would be expected to play as hard for their new team as they had for their old.

  Straddling the transition between two eras, Altman could understand and sympathize with Dodd, but following the worldwide economic collapse, more had changed than the names of two outdated political parties. Altman knew the Libertarians as ideologues who claimed to value principle above all else, including short-term political gain. In his view, they’d remained consistent enough over the years to contaminate the other parties, which now represented ideologies of their own.

  In time, the “Sagebrush States,” also known as the “Jackelope Republic”—those west of the ninetieth meridian, popularly called the “Webb Line” after historian Walter Prescott Webb—had no longer bothered sending delegates to Congress. Even worse, the myriad mandates of Washington were increasingly ignored as water, gas, electricity, trash hauling, postal, telephone, and other vital services to government buildings became mysteriously unreliable overnight. Thousands of outraged federal bureaucrats, tax collectors, and law enforcement officials found themselves harassed, disarmed, arrested, even jailed.

  Afterward, they invariably received apologies from local authorities for the “terrible mistake.”

  Others, falling into less temperate hands, simply disappeared, never to be heard from again.

  With its brightest Presidential hope attuned to the Age of Ideology and foremost among the advocates of harsher policies toward the West, the Union Democratic Party was willing to reimpose Washington’s authority by military means. In light of the location of most of America’s missile silos, obsolete fission plants, and radioactive dumps, however, this was seen as provocative by others. The Presidency and both houses of Congress belonged to a coalition of Conservatives (who’d followed Democratic example by changing the name of their party) and Libertarians (who’d established themselves as a permanent feature of American politics following the disaster they’d warned was coming for thirty years).

  What Brody had said of international politics was true as far as it went. Although the people of Earth neither fully understood nor entirely trusted the circumstances which had brought it about, the Cold War had ended. Sometimes, however, it seemed as if everyone was waiting around nervously to see what would replace it. Preoccupied with what they perceived as dangerous worldwide instability, and in the continuing absence of any sort of open declaration by the states west of the Webb Line, the ruling coalition, at least for the moment—which had so far lasted more than a decade—refrained from acting against the West.

  Meanwhile, in what people and the media everywhere were now calling “West America”—and in “East America,” as well—a series of everyday economic and social realignments with the Canadian provinces, which had long suffered many of the same regional divisions manifested to the south, had, for all practical purposes, rotated the international border ninety degrees.

  But Dodd was going on. “One more thing. I understand that little bitch Martie Mough is headed out your way and plans to drop by the Project for an interview. She came along a little after your time, Gibbie, so you may not know much about her. The story I get from my media people is that she used to pay lip service to Lyle Latheman over at LiteLink, where she started in the secretarial pool, then switched to GIGO last year for a cool fifty million NADs. Watch her, Gibbie my boy. She’ll flap those eyelashes at you and waggle her cute little ass, then fuck you the first chance she gets. And not in a nice way.”

  Altman chuckled, but wondered what the penalty was for not succumbing to the charms of Martie Mough.

  “That’s all for now, Mr. Chief Administrator. I know you’re doing God’s work out there, and doing it damned well. Let me hear from you soon. I’ll be looking forward to it.”

  The screen blanked.

  Altman sighed wearily, thought about the unfinished work still lying on his desk in the next room, then sighed again and began composing a reply to his old friend back on Earth.

  “Elwood!”

  Dodd hated being called by his first name.

  The Wells Fargo Wagon

  Individuals obtained recognition of their freedom by fighting and bargaining, or—failing in this—they could run away. This running away was possible because they had somewhere to go.

  —Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Frontier

  Looking out the window and seeing dust on the horizon made Gwen think of the historian Walter Prescott Webb again, and of the women of the Great Plains who knew in the morning, because the prairie was so flat, that they’d have guests to feed before sundown.

  Finally satisfied, more or less, with the state of what was unfortunately and undeniably a rather well-worn carpet, she pulled the vacuum hose from its outlet in the wall, rolled it up, and tucked it behind some boxes on a top shelf of the closet.

  She was nervous about meeting Sarah Murdoch.

  It wasn’t just because the aging actress had once been the brightest star of Hollywood and Broadway. Gwen admired her for many more things than that. It was true she’d started in the chorus line and gone from there to musicals and comedies to become the most celebrated singer, dancer, and comedienne in show business. But Sarah Murdoch hadn’t been content merely to remain pretty—although it was wonderful what plastic surgeons could do these days to stave off old age—she’d kept in physical shape, as well. At fifty, she’d been pictured on the cover of a national magazine kicking an exceptionally well-turned leg higher than her head, rehearsing for a revival of one of her most successful shows.

  Gwen shut the closet door—with considerable difficulty, as it stood open most of the time—glanced out at the horizon again, then turned her attention to the toys and stuffed animals she’d tossed onto the unmade bed to get them out from underfoot. The toy population had long since outgrown the toy box. She’d anticipated that and brought a large carton from the kitchen, filling it and hiding it in the knee-well behind the ruffled pink skirt of the vanity.

  Being pretty had never been enough for Sarah Murdoch. In younger days, she and her actor-producer-director brother had stood bravely on the side of every humanitarian issue that the world around them seemed to be turning away from—higher taxes, nature preservation, aid to distressed and developing countries alike, democratic limitations on scientific research, gun control, nationalized industry, animal welfare, state health and housing programs—and for some reason it had never seemed to hurt their enormous, well-deserved popularity.

  Now what to do with all these overly cute pelicans, tigers, leopards, and so forth? For a child without grandparents—her own mother and father were dead and Gibson’s pare
nts had all but disowned him during the scandal—this one did surprisingly well, thanks to a number of childless maternal uncles and aunts anxious to make up for the fact of their exile as well as the lack of grandparents. Most—the solid Union Democrats—sent soft, cartoonlike replicas of endangered species, the profits from which went to conserving the originals. There was even an appealing, padded bristlecone pine tree around here somewhere.

  Sarah Murdoch was pretty solid herself, now that Gwen considered it. In the wake of the collapse and reorganization of the major American political parties, she’d had the sense to abandon the foolish consistency of long-outmoded liberal values and publicly oppose the repeal of pornography and drug laws, as well as fighting a noble but similarly losing battle against the Curringer Trust’s pet resolution in the UN proclaiming a so-called human right to vote with one’s feet—in other words, to abandon your homeland simply because you think you’ll be better off somewhere else, selfishly depriving your native country of badly needed intelligence and talent which weren’t truly yours to begin with, anyway.

  Shaking her head, Gwen tried hiding the stuffed animals atop the canopy of the four-poster. Its ruffles, and those of the bedclothes, matched those of the vanity, but the fabric was faded and threadbare from too many washings. And the animals were all too apparent, unfortunately, from the perspective of someone lying on the bed. It looked like a bushel of potatoes was about to fall onto one’s face.

  Sarah Murdoch had lent her name to the most controversial ideas. Wages for housework, which had fizzled during the last century, she’d raised from the dead almost single-handedly. Later, she’d written best-sellers on near-death experiences, telepathy, astrology, spiritualism, prehistoric astronauts, clairvoyance, telekinesis, the I Ching, the Tarot, reflexology, and nonsecular faith healing.