Ceres Read online

  By the great-grandson of the most malignant capitalist in history (second only to William Wilde Curringer), inventor-industrialist Emerson Ngu.

  “And your predecessors did try to shut Wild Bill Curringer down,” Luegner went on. “Only the crafty old devil offered the United Nations a land grant for an experimental agricultural collective—that’s the way I heard it, anyway—and the UN turned right around and ordered your people to lay off! Funny thing is, that UN agricultural colony didn’t last long. Most of the peasants—I mean, colonists, escaped—er, emigrated to other parts of Pallas, including the Emerson Ngu, himself. Anyway, by the time anybody really knew what was going on, Curringer had already liquidated or abandoned most of his assets here on Earth, and shifted operations to his huge fleet of factory ships, orbiting Pallas.”

  Savage looked up at Luegner from the book she was signing. “Yes, Paul, I know the relevant history, and now the disease is beginning to spread, all over again! Do you realize this business on … where is it? Ceres—could lead to thousands of asteroids being terraformed? And there’s no way to stop it! William Wilde Curringer may be dead— thank goodness for small favors—but his vile corporation just goes on and on and on, despoiling the natural purity and balance of the Solar System!”

  Tears welled in her eyes. The whole idea was just too painful, too infuriating, too … She broke off for lack of suitable vocabulary. People mustn’t be allowed to leave the Mother Planet, not until they’d solved all of their problems here. Then, of course, they wouldn’t want to leave; they’d have no reason. Wasn’t humanity ever going to learn its proper place in the natural scheme of things, instead of always swaggering around like the lords of the universe? Not with men like Curringer and Ngu to lead them into hubris and disaster time and time again!

  Gasping for her mental breath, Savage gazed out her hard-earned corner windows across the timeless, changeless vista that was her own beloved Amherst, Massachusetts. It was the home of the Mass Movement, and the home of her heart, as well. It was timeless and changeless because, sometime early in the 21st century, the voters and officials of the City of Five Colleges had decided that progress had gone too far—or was about to, anyway. From that moment on, nothing visible outdoors within the city limits could appear to be from any later than the year 2000.

  The cut-off year had only been arrived at after long debate and bitter wrangling. And in the end, in the opinion of the law’s original advocates, the choice of the year 2000 had defeated the whole purpose of the effort. They’d have preferred the year 1900—or better yet, 1800, with electricity and the internal combustion engine purged from human culture.

  Those who had opposed the new law altogether felt that they, too, had been betrayed by politicians they thought they’d bought and paid for. Thus the decision was hailed as a monumental achievement, especially by those in media and politics to whom compromise is the very spirit of democracy, and democracy the only real measure of a civilization.

  The population of Amherst began to diminish steadily. That had suited Savage’s predecessors, although Zero Population Growth and others like it complained that it was merely being displaced. The day would come, Savage knew, when the cowards and deserters would have no place left to run.

  Outside, high over the city, a squadron of the Air Force’s brand new plasma-pulse fighters snarled their way across the sky, heading northwest.

  Half a century ago, Vermont and New Hampshire—and very possibly Maine, it was difficult to tell through the haze of propaganda and counter-propaganda—had taken it upon themselves to imitate the territories west of the Webb Line, and stop being part of Lincoln’s sacred Union. The leaders of that movement had to be put down by force.

  Even so, every few years, it seemed a handful of the inhabitants and neighbors of the “Live Free or Die” states grew restive, and it was deemed necessary to demonstrate the futility of such an attitude, not only for the benefit of New Englanders, but anybody else who might be getting secessionist ideas. These days the government made a practice of planning regular military flights across all major cities as a reminder and a warning.

  In Amherst, it hadn’t quite become illegal to dress in styles anachronistic to the year 2000, but people would stare and frown at you if you did. To the satisfaction of some, the new law worked—not without an occasional bobble. Popular national restaurant chains like Ali Wanna or Zeefo’s, compelled by local laws to disguise themselves as parts of the quaint but long-defunct MacDonald’s or Arby’s or KFC franchises, elected instead to relocate, despite punitive lawsuits threatened by the city.

  The minority still privileged to drive automobiles in East America soon discovered that they had to park their clean, efficient Ngu Departure Electrics and Fusion-Brasilias well outside the Amherst city limits, and rent ancient, noisy, stinking internal combustion-powered Fords, Chevrolets, Volkswagens, and Volvos that were historically faithful to the period. Some visitors were inconsiderate enough to point out that this was hardly a desirable outcome. On the other hand, vehicles of Korean, Japanese, and Malaysian manufacture were now prohibited altogether because—in the view of the Amherst city fathers—they never should have been permitted on American soil to begin with.

  “You’ve gotta take the long view, Annie, and not worry,” Luegner laughed. “We’re working on young Pallatians of the third and fourth generations right now, those who know absolutely nothing about what their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents went through to terraform and settle the asteroid, who take what they’ve always had for granted. I do admit it would be a damn sight easier if Pallas had compulsory public schools that we could move into and take over, but they’ll be ours, eventually, and Curringer’s bunch won’t know what hit them.”

  Savage made a huffing noise. “Maybe so, Paul, but in the meantime, while you’re taking the long view and not worrying, Curringer’s bunch are busy terraforming another, even bigger asteroid, where millions of people, maybe, will go through exactly the same struggle, learn from it, and undo everything you say we’re accomplishing on Pallas. And from there, they’ll go on to the next asteroid, and then to the next. And on top of that, they’ll keep right on sending their tons and tons of manufactured and raw materials to Earth, every day, threatening our precious Mother Planet with crustal shifting and slippage that could wipe out every—”

  Luegner held up a hand. “Earth naturally receives a hundred tons of micrometeorites every day. Don’t tell me you actually believe all that crap.”

  For a moment, their attention was captured by a colorful West American ad for a family hovercraft. Since their de facto secession, Westerners had let their previously tax-supported infrastructure— the part that wasn’t converted into private, profit-making businesses—fall apart completely. Streets, roads, and highways were now merely vegetation-covered tracks, traveled over by huge, wasteful, dangerous 350-mile-per-hour vehicles—built largely from exotic materials manufactured in space—that didn’t need streets, roads, and highways.

  Savage reached out abruptly and shut the hated images off. Her watery blue eyes widened and the nostrils of her narrow, knifelike nose flared. It wasn’t a pretty sight, Luegner thought. Some women are definitely not beautiful when they’re angry. Some aren’t beautiful at the best of times. Of course he was accustomed to having his choice of young, succulent college coeds on the lecture circuit, always eager—anxious, really—to help ‘the movement’ out in any way he might suggest.

  “The people who contribute money to this organization,” she told him, “and help keep you in caviar and champagne, ‘believe all that crap’!”

  “Never cared for either, myself, but point taken, nonetheless. Annie,” he admitted amiably, still thinking about those coeds. They believed it, too, dear things, and saw him as a noble, romantic, even revolutionary hero, locked in mortal combat with the evil tentacles of capitalism.

  It didn’t hurt that he looked ten years younger than his 45 years, retained all of his dark, wavy hair, and had a
livid scar across one shoulder that he told them was where the police had shot him during an otherwise peaceful demonstration in some always faraway city. How they loved to run their fingers along that scar! In fact, a pipe bomb he’d been building in Scranton had gone off accidentally and almost killed him. It had killed the girl he’d been sleeping with at the time, whose basement apartment it destroyed. It sometimes bothered him a little that he couldn’t remember her name. “I certainly can’t argue with you there.”

  Savage opened her mouth to accept his apology.

  “Me neither!” Savage’s office door slammed open, threatening to shatter its carefully lettered glass, and a youthful figure virtually leapt into the room. He wore a white “ice cream” suit currently the rage in Amherst, and a matching Panama straw. Savage and Luegner both recognized Johnnie “the Fish” Crenicichla, the only individual in the world who worked for both organizations, the Mass Movement and Null Delta Em—although his paycheck came from neither group, but from an ancient Boston bank.

  “You’ve got to stop meeting like this!” he told them in a light, bantering tone. He threw himself into the room’s second most comfortable seat, a short divan on the opposite side of the door from Luegner. “You pay me obscenely—somebody pays me, anyway—to act as a credibly deniable liaison between you. You guys should let me liaise!”

  “We do, Johnnie, we do,” Luegner told him. “I figured this came pretty close to an emergency, and I happened to be in North America this morning, anyway … ”

  Crenicichla threw his head back and laughed sarcastically. “Damned right it’s an emergency! The Curringer Corporation’s planning to give that trigger-happy Ngu kid some kind of award, and broadcast it on System-wide 3DTV!”

  “Shit!” Luegner sat up straight.

  “Oh, dear,” Savage muttered. It was all she could manage.

  “Oh, it gets even better, folks!” Crenicichla went on. “To top it all off, like cherries on a sundae, two of the seven of our people that the kid took alive have offered full confessions in exchange for amnesty.”

  There was a long silence. Then: “I wasn’t aware,” Luegner said, very slowly and quietly, “that the Curringer Corporation condones torture.”

  Crenicichla shook his head. “Amnesty. That’s what the Corporation is claiming, any—oh, I get it. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.”

  Luegner nodded, but said nothing else. Savage buried her face in her hands. “I didn’t hear that. I wasn’t here. I didn’t hear that. I wasn’t here. I didn’t hear that. I wasn’t here. I didn’t hear that. I wasn’t—.”

  “That’s the plan, then,” said Crenicichla, his usual enthusiasm apparently restored. “And a damned good thing, too. Guess who the stool pigeons named as their boss, Paul! Luckily, they can’t touch you here in the Formerly United States. I checked with the Mass Movement’s legal people before I came here. They’re the criminals—anyone who works for the Curringer Corporation, that is—in the eyes of the East American government.”

  “Yes, Johnnie, but we can’t just react to this situation,” Luegner objected. “We’ve got to take the offensive again, make them react.” Unlike Savage, he knew exactly who he meant by “them”, and so did Crenicichla.

  “Stool pigeons?” Savage raised her eyes. She had never heard the ancient expression before, and didn’t care for any of the images it brought to mind. “They didn’t—”

  Crenicichla shook his head. “No, Annie, they didn’t mention you. You’re perfectly free to issue your regular outraged disavowal of Null Delta Em.”

  He turned to Luegner. “Paul, it’s time you got your famous and photogenic face the hell out of this building. We’ll make some time for planning tomorrow. Naturally, not before we check upstairs with You-Know-Who.”

  That was the way Crenicichla was in the habit of referring to the individuals who had selected each of them in the first place, and from whom all other blessings ultimately flowed. He reclaimed his Panama hat.

  “Take the freight elevator and leave by way of the basement.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN: BETWEEN THE PIERS

  While it’s undeniably true that not everyone who benefits from public works (so-called) on Pallas helps to pay for them, if those of us who do stopped to worry about “free riders”, nothing would ever get done and we’d all be squatting in our own dung in a cave somewhere. —The Diaries of Rosalie Frazier Ngu

  If Pallas had been the Earth, Curringer would have been right in the middle of the north temperate zone, like Brussels, or Peoria. The trip to the asteroid’s north pole by ionopter took slightly less than two hours, during which Ardith and Jasmeen gave a small part of their attention to an old movie, and Llyra, having sworn she wasn’t tired, slept.

  It was here, around the mile-high, mountainous circumference of an impact crater ten miles in diameter, that Pallas’s vast atmospheric envelope—and the mighty spun-steel cables that held it in place—dipped down to touch the asteroid’s surface. (At the equator, they stood a full two miles above it.) Here they came to an end, anchored by hundreds of colossal stainless steel columns set more than a mile deep—the most massive monolithic steel fabrications, R.G. Edd, their ionopter pilot, proudly told his passengers, ever to have been manufactured.

  Outside the north polar crater, inside the atmospheric envelope, it was warm. Rain fell, and occasional snow. Wind blew, and green things grew. Little children laughed and played. Inside the crater, outside the envelope, there was hard vacuum and temperatures that varied from two hundred degrees below zero to two hundred above, depending on whether the thermometer in question stood in shadow or in sunlight.

  The two vastly-differing realms were separated at the lowest level by the circular mountain range, through which dozens of tunnels— with mammoth doors to seal the air in every couple of miles—had been bored.

  As the ionopter approached the little town of Curley’s Gulch—white houses, picket fences, and a tall church steeple (Our Lady of Discord, as it happened, Reformed)—nestled in the lower folds of the rim range, Jasmeen nudged Llyra awake and the two of them strained to see everything at once. Through the curved plastic windows in the roof of the ionopter, they could actually see the atmospheric envelope, held down by cables as big around as Llyra was. They could actually see the individual twisted strands of which they were composed. As the cables curved toward the waiting mountain peaks re-engineered to receive them, the aircraft was forced to fly lower and lower.

  At one point, the ionopter actually flew close enough to the “roof of the world” for its passengers to see repairs being made to it from the outside. The “smart” plastic that W.W. Curringer had invented for terraforming Pallas was remarkably durable and self-healing, but a continuous bombardment by micro- and not-so-micrometeorites, and the steady solar ultraviolet baking it was subjected to, eventually took their toll.

  Outside, dozens of skilled workmen in rocket-powered envirosuits were struggling to position an enormous replacement patch under one of the great cables—Edd informed them he had done that sort of work himself, when he was a younger man, and that the patch they worked with was the size of two football fields, side by side—employing jacks of some kind to create sufficient space between the cable and the canopy.

  The patch had been lowered from an orbiting factory ship—one of the older, smaller fleet that had been employed to terraform this world three generations ago—and would be hand-welded in place using sonic “torches”.

  The continuous growling of the ionopter’s propulsive screens made unassisted conversation almost impossible. “Once the edges have healed seamlessly to the original canopy,” Ed informed them over the cabin intercom, “the section it replaces will be carefully cut away from underneath, by workmen using flying belts inside the envelope. Getting it down to the ground gently is an art in itself. The worn out section will then be cut up, taken outside, and recycled up in one of the factory ships, where it will eventually serve as replacement material elsewhere.”

  “Is
like gigantic cataract operation.” Sitting beside Llyra on a passenger seat, Jasmeen had an approving expression on her face. “Only much more economical! This is almost Martian!”

  The pilot laughed. “Well, Miss, somebody once said—it mighta been me—that Curringer wanted to be called ‘Every Part of the Buffalo Bill’.”

  “And who pays for all this work?” Jasmeen asked. “Is no such thing as free lunch.”

  Ardith, seated on the other side of Llyra, leaned forward and across her daughter so that she could see Jasmeen. “Why, the Curringer Corporation does, dear. Every single individual who is born on Pallas is a stockholder—as is anyone who pays to immigrate here and signs on to the Stein Covenant. The Curringer Corporation makes money from exports and from patents, and that’s what keeps a roof over all our heads.”

  “Isn’t that socialism?” Jasmeen asked. “Is called ‘Social Credit System’.”

  Ardith sighed. “I see why you’d say that, but it’s not socialism at all. For most of us, it’s an inheritance from our parents and grandparents and great grandparents who risked and toiled and lived and died to have something to pass on to us. No one is asked to contribute involuntarily, and if they receive something they didn’t earn and don’t deserve, they’ll lose it soon enough to somebody smarter.”

  “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves,” Edd offered, “in only a single generation. That’s progress!”

  Jasmeen nodded. Things were different on Mars. For one thing, its atmosphere, however artificial, was the product of purely biological processes that required no maintenance. She knew generally that Ardith headed up an important laboratory on Pallas, experimenting constantly with newer and better means of asteroid capture, handling, and utilization. “So you are source,” she said, “of Curringer Corporation patents?”

  Ardith smiled. “Absolutely. Some of them, anyway. The Curringer Corporation pays me very well, and I also receive a share of the royalties.”