Against Infinity (18 page)

His boots made no sound on the matted insulation, but the rattle and hum of buried factories came through the walls. He rounded the corner onto the Rotonde plaza. Two young men were loitering there, dressed in faded pants and fiber shirts that looked rough as burlap. One was short and intense-looking; his small eyes flicked nervously over all the passersby. The taller one eyed Manuel and then stood up straight and held up a fist. “De—,” he said with an elaborate, overbearing accent, opening the palm, “—liver.”

“What?” Startled, Manuel stopped, took his hands out of his pockets.

“You got plenty of nonesses there, friend.”

“Non…”

“Nonessentials—is the way—the Council phrases it,” the short one declared in staccato rushes of words.

Manuel said irritably, “What the hell’s that?”

“Anything not required for—immediate health—or safety—that smacks of luxury—of privilege.”

Manuel had read something about that, some collective resolution, but he couldn’t fetch up a memory of what it meant The tall one brushed hair out of his eyes with a slow, confident Anglo gesture. He drawled to his companion, “ ’Nother citizen not keeping up with the times, Enrico. Guess we’ll have to educate him.”

Manuel said nothing, just inched his feet apart and loosened his stance, unlocking his knees.

“See, the Council finally reacted to the will of the people, the real people, and admitted we had too damn much conspicuous wealth aroun’ here.”

“You want wealth, you got to ask somebody else, boys.”

“Possessions—luxury possessions—they’re an insult—to the collective.”

“Didja inherit that sweater ya got on?”

“This?” Manuel looked at what he was wearing—he never noticed what he pulled on in the morning—and tried to recall. “No.”

“Inherited goods—possessions gotten by private dealings—dealings in the market—they are all symptoms of chance advantage.” The short, dark one seethed with energy as he spat out this list, clenching and unclenching his hands. “That sweater—made with wool—looks to me like market goods. Definite—market gains. You bought that—
sí
?”

Manuel backed up a step. Now he was remembering. The Council had gotten a bad review Earthside, and three of them had been demoted, pushed back down into a laboring category. It wasn’t supposed to be a failure for them, just a readjustment and a natural recycling of workers onto the Council, but everybody knew it was because Earthside didn’t like the sociometric profile of the Jovian moons. Now, with three Earth-approved replacements, the Council was erasing the effects of neocapitalist inroads. To smooth out the harsh contrasts of luck and exploitation, the Council had authorized each citizen to demand any possession that reflected this past error. And you could ask it of anyone, any other citizen.

“Ya don’t want to be a posser, do ya?” the tall one said ominously.

“What’s that?” Manuel asked, stalling for time.

“False possession—profiting from another—enslaving him with contractural labor—
that
is a posser—for sure—and you look to be one.”

“No. I got this sweater fair. I got the yarn through usual channels and I knitted it up myself.”

He knew he could cover that claim because he had an entry for yarn on his last month’s billing. It wasn’t for this sweater, but they wouldn’t know that. Or be able to prove him wrong.
But prove it to who?
Manuel thought, and realized there wasn’t any authority he could go to.

“Huh!” The tall one shifted his feet and his face hardened. “We hear that one a lot, friend. Give us—”

“No—wait.” The short one held up his hand in caution. He wasn’t going to be thrown off. The Council gave them the right to demand only one item per citizen. “Gaudy—eye-catching—bright colors—bangles, even—looks like market goods. But he could’ve made it up—so obvious, yeah—to look that way.”

“Tryin’ to sucker us?”

“Maybe. These guys—think they’re smart. Here—what’s that?”

Manuel didn’t move, just looked at them. The short one’s hand leaped forward and grabbed his belt buckle.

“Getting friendly?” Manuel said sarcastically.

“Getting our due, citizen. That—the belt—market, right?”

Manuel couldn’t prove it wasn’t, which to these two was good enough proof that it was. In fact he
had
bought it on the black market—the only market—when there was a clothing shortage. Everybody did. You couldn’t wait for a Supply Commissioner from Outsystem Control to approve a new batch of longjohns; you’d freeze.

“Suppose I say it isn’t.”

“Well, we just check up on it for you, citizen,” the tall man said, casually brushing back his hair again and shifting his weight, this time meaning business.

“The Council lets
mierda seca
like you hang around, taking—”

“Redistributing—that’s the fact—redistributing.”

“Don’ think I like what you said there, citizen,” the tall one muttered, moving closer. Anticipation filled his face. He folded one hand into the other, making a fist and cracking the knuckles. Manuel could tell he didn’t know what the curse meant, but the tone had carried the intention. The short one’s eyes began to dance around. Manuel carefully tensed himself and then weighed the odds. Not good.

Manuel took off the belt. “Okay, okay.” He handed it to the short man. “Now what’s to stop me taking it back from you, huh?”

The tall man snickered, and the short one said, “In principle—you could. But we have—the Council gave—special orders. We are special designates. We collect—redistribute—penalize the exploiters. Until the envy—and malice—are gone.”

“Soldiers for equality, uh? Glad you warned me. I’d have thought you were just thieves.”

The tall one said threateningly, “Now, you watch what—” but the nervous, short one held up a hand.

“We are working for you—citizen—we’re your friends. And remember that—the Council—they are not timid.”

“What’s that mean?”

“They will strike—boldly—and prevail.”

Manuel swore under his breath:
“Qué gente estúpida!”

“What was ’at?” the tall man said, his face clouding.

“You’ve got your booty—get out of my way.” Manuel brushed by the two and went on, not looking back.

He thought of stopping, a block further on, and yelling back into the Rotonde plaza,
Me cago en la leche de tu puta madre!
But that was the sort of thing a boy would have done, and anyway might have brought them running after him. Instead he turned right and walked on toward the Basquan Café. He had thought of going to the Quondon Stande, where there was a ring in the middle of a lush garden and the boxers served as waiters between the matches. But the mood had passed; he did not want to see women pounding at each other and breaking and bloodying their smooth skins, even though the injuries were healed or replaced before the customers had recovered from their hangovers.

The Basquan Café was big and hot. Bars were always overheated here, in perpetual rejection and denial of the everlasting chill beyond. Only in Hiruko had he seen corridors kept as toasty warm as a living room back at Sidon; here there was energy to spare. People came for a two-year rotation and never felt the sting of the true world outside, never left this pocket of humanity.

He went by the crowded tables, through the illusion smoke, and out onto the sweeping veranda. It was cooler out here, even tolerable if he took off his jacket. He liked this place best, under the pungent eucalyptus trees that were always shedding bark and leaves. He chose a small table near the statue of Romérez, a bulky figure holding perpetually aloft an ice pick and a map. The face was clouded with concentration, peering forward as if trying to see further into one of the alien artifacts Romérez had uncovered and dissected and catalogued but never figured out.

He ordered an infusion and watched the great beams of yellow light pull dust motes from the fragrant soil beyond the veranda. An unseen skylight sent blades of sunlight, reflected from Jupiter, down the large air shafts, where it dispersed among riots of greenery. He liked this garden; it had jacaranda and jade trees and dry, still air. Gardens sprouted every third of a kilometer in any direction, keeping the air clean, each reflecting a different locale back on old Earth. He watched the light change and redden in the tall stringy eucalyptus branches as the sun came nearer the limb of the planet, reflecting from the mottled pink clouds. He thought of getting one of the empty-spined books from inside and filling it with a trade-manual cartridge he should be studying. Like everything in the café, it was free. Back at Sidon he had spent his own pay to get hours on an interactive book—it cut your study time and was more fun—but for the moment it was very fine to sit and smell the fragrant breeze that came off the luminous garden, carrying away the buzz of the cafe behind him.

A door opened to his right and someone came out. He turned, hoping, but it was a man, and worse, somebody he knew.

“Ah, knew you’d be around.” It was Ortiz Gutiérrez, and he was breathing heavily through a drooping mustache. He wore a cape that looked like velvet but that Manuel knew was made from fuzz-fiber grown in the hydroponics. There were scarlet slashes across the velvet in a rakish Spanish design that Manuel recognized from a popular Earthside show.

“May I sit with you while you wait?” Gutiérrez asked, sitting down with a swirl of the cape that fanned up a little breeze, bringing Manuel a trace of the man’s smell. Some of it was a cologne and some of it wasn’t.

“How you know I’m waiting?”

“You’re a creature of habit, Manuel. Don’t think you go totally unnoticed, my boy.”

“I was kind of hoping I would.”

Gutiérrez took no notice of Manuel’s meaning, because he was turning to left and then to right, waving for a waiter. “Will you have a drink with me?”

Manuel had nearly finished his iced infusion. He saw that the best thing would be to have one more and then get away somehow. He had learned that you never turned down an invitation here. For parties it was easy: you always said you would be glad to come and then later you could be sorry, could have something come up that made it impossible. For a chance meeting like this, though, there was no easy way out. “Sure.”

The waiter came over and Gutiérrez el, who ordered another infusion. Then Gutiérrez said, “No, no. Make it a rum
adopolc
.”

“Rum
adopolc
: I see.” The waiter went away.

Gutiérrez noticed after a moment that Manuel was wearing no belt. This led to an explanation, which Manuel was halfway glad to relate, because it gave him something to talk about and also because he still did not understand the whole thing. After he had finished, Gutiérrez said, “So you simply weren’t prepared. Don’t you pay attention to the Council?”

“Don’t see the point.”

“Well, if you want to be stripped in the streets—”

“They said nonessentials. They can’t—”

“Get them nasty and I wouldn’t speak for how far they will go. A word to the wise.” He tapped his forefinger to his nose significantly.

“Why doesn’t Earthside keep their
chingado
faces out of here?”

“Why, they cannot. It is implicit in the dynamics of society. Earth is fully socialist. Earth understands itself scientifically—the first society to do so. Let me tell you how to look at these things, Manuel.”

Manuel gazed out over the oval garden with its stands of slender trees and the baked, hard-packed sandy soil. He had come here to watch the light, had looked forward to it all day. It was a thing you had to watch carefully. The eclipse of the sun by Jupiter had come, bringing amber glows, and he had missed the change. Gutiérrez went on.

“Every civilization up until now has evolved because of internal contradictions—conflicts within it that forced change. Capitalism proceeded by contradition to produce socialism—it was inevitable.”

“Uh-huh.” He was watching the light.

“The Marxists thought that under socialism, alienation and class warfare would stop. They ignored the fact that the dialectical model of change
never
predicted an end to contradictions, or to evolution. Socialism requires a bureaucracy, and that means an administrative class. The administrators faced a problem Marxism never discussed: how
well
socialism works, versus capitalism. What is the good of being exactly equal to everybody else, if that means you have to be poor? The last century has taught us—or rather, Earth—that socialism is less efficient than capitalism at producing goods.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So to stop socialism from sinking into the mud, the bureaucrats had to promote expansion—off-planet, out into the system. But socialism is an historical necessity that arises when you get a certain density of population. Once people spread out…” He opened his hands. “The population density in the new worlds is low, of course. The dynamics of economics drives them to adopt individualist, capitalist measures. They must, to survive and prosper in harsh places. So the internal contradiction of socialism is that it must expand, to make up for its own inefficiencies. Expansion, though, produces capitalism at the frontier. Your Settlement is really a small, communal capitalist unit. It interacts with Earthside through a market, not by edicts.”

The waiter came, and Manuel reached eagerly for his drink. This was worse than he’d thought it would be. The waiter put down the rum and Gutiérrez corrected him. “It wasn’t rum
adopolc
,” he said helpfully but severely. “I wanted mulled wine.”

“It’s all right,” Manuel said. “I’ll take the rum. I’ll pay. Bring what he orders now, please.”

“What I ordered,” corrected Gutiérrez.

The waiter returned quickly with the mulled wine. They sat in silence, one drinking of the cold, bronze, finely textured infusion, with its malty aroma and sweet-clean, yeasty flavor; the other lifted the cup of swarming warmth and drank off half of it in one long swallow, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Manuel hoped there wouldn’t be much more of the social theory—it all sounded like Earthside chat. Gutiérrez was influential, he knew, and it was a puzzle why the man paid any attention to a petroworker from an obscure Settlement. There was the Aleph thing, but Manuel refused to talk about that and he hoped that everyone had by now forgotten it.