Edge of Infinity (38 page)

Sometimes, there was a steep price to pay for self-knowledge – young men learned about themselves in a hurry. Mature men learned from experience.

“Lucy,” he ventured at last, in a low voice, “if I asked you to visit my barracks room, what would you do?”

“I didn’t mean to suggest anything disgraceful,” she said. “But men always come here, through these Anteroom airlocks. Women never visit your half of this world, not at all. How can that be fair?”

“Fair? The rules of decorum are very clear on those matters.”

“Please don’t look at me like that,” Lucy begged. “Truly, I’m proud that my husband has decorum and defends my honour. It would be awful if you were some vile coward. But anyone – man or woman – can see there’s something very strange about our customs! Men inside other planets don’t duel!”

“Men on other planets don’t live ‘inside’ of their planets,” Pitar corrected. “Mercury’s moral code may not be perfect – I will grant you that. It may even be that the men of this world, who are just so many fools like me, are all stupid brutes. But even if that’s so – at least the ladies here are true ladies! You can admit that much to me, can’t you?”

“Well,” said Lucy, “being a ‘lady’ doesn’t work in the way that you imagine it does, but... All right, fine, I married you, I’m your lady. I can see you’re angry now. You’re always angry when I’m not a lady, when I talk about what’s just and fair.”

“Let’s be objective,” said Pitar. “Let’s consider those sleazy women who orbit Venus. No one ever calls them proper ladies!”

“Well, no, of course not,” Lucy admitted. “Those women can’t even fly down to their own planet’s surface! That’s quite sad.”

“And what about the Earth, that so-called motherworld? Earth women were all Earth-mothers once, and look what became of them! They’re polluted, they’re filthy, a laughing-stock! Don’t get me started on those Martian women! Preening around on Mars, freezing on red sand, pretending that they can breathe!”

“I’m sure those women are doing their best to be decent women.”

“Oh come now. Those women orbiting Saturn and Jupiter? Let’s not be ridiculous here! And I hope you’re not defending those post-female entities around Neptune and Uranus.”

“Foreign women live quite properly inside the asteroids.”

“Not like ladies live in our own society! Asteroidal women don’t have our giant canyons, and our polar water-glacier! I will grant you – the asteroids have some fine resources. They have ice, and some metals, they’re upscale in the gravity well. But us, the genteel people here inside Mercury, we have much purer, finer metals than they do! Metals, in planetary quantities! And we possess tremendous solar energy! Every Mercurian day, our robots harvest more power than some puny asteroid could generate in ten years!” Pitar drew a deep breath of the Anteroom’s stuffy air. “You certainly can’t deny all those facts!”

Lucy said nothing, and therefore denied nothing.

“I don’t want to be ungallant,” Pitar concluded, “but those women bred in the asteroids, they have no gravity! Not one trace of decent gravity. So they are grotesque! What decent man could be doomed to marry some flabby, blob-shaped, boneless woman, with hands on her legs, instead of human feet? I shudder at the thought! Their lives are unimaginable.”

Lucy ran both her hands along her elongated skull and through her lustrous, thin, white hair. “Pitar, that’s all true. Those foreign people are contemptible.”

“I’m glad that you can see that. And there’s an important corollary to your conclusion,” said Pitar in triumph. “If those foreigners are grotesque – and we both agree, they certainly are – then that proves that we are not. Maybe we suffer – me, and you, too, we both suffer some oppression, maybe – life, and honour, and decency, they aren’t all about fun and amusement... But when it’s all it’s said and done, you and I are Mercurian people. I am who I am, and so are you.”

“I am a Mercurian woman,” Lucy said. “But too much is always left unsaid.”

Lucy gazed suggestively at the airlock, but he did not leave, having become too interested.

“Mrs. Peretz, it’s all mere custom,” Pitar said at last. “Sometimes, we behave so proudly here, as if we owned the Peak of Eternal Light... And yet, the texture of our existence is mere tradition. The truth is, speaking metaphysically, it’s all social habit! Once, in the past, this whole world was like this sorry Anteroom that we’re stuck in now...”

Pitar lifted his arms. “I know that life isn’t just and fair. And I wish I could change that, but how? If you want to reform gender relations, you should take up those issues in the political councils of your elder ladies. What can you expect
me
to do? Those old witches treat men of my age as if we were larvae.”

“I didn’t ask you to do anything,” Lucy pointed out. “I even told you that it wasn’t your fault.”

“Well, yes, you said that, but... isn’t it strongly implicated that there’s something I should do? Surely we don’t meet in here, face to face, it’s our anniversary... We can’t just whine.”

A very long silence passed. Pitar began to regret that he had complained about complaining. This act of his was meta, and recursive. No wonder she was confused.

“We have bicycles,” Lucy offered.

“What?”

“We have bicycles. Transportation devices, the ones with two wheels. Men and women can meet outside of the purdah, when they ride on bicycles. No one can accuse us of impropriety when we’re seated on rolling machines.”

“Mrs. Peretz, I have seen bicycles – but I’m not taking your point.”

“Suppose that we say,” Lucy offered haltingly, “that we’re exploring the modern world. There are lots of new mineshafts where only machines have gone. If we ride a few kilometres – I mean
together
, but on bicycles – how can they say that we’re harming custom? Or offending decency?”

“What do you mean now, bicycles? Aren’t those contraptions dangerous? You could fall off a bicycle and break your neck! Bicycles are mechanically unstable! They only have two wheels!”

“Yes, it’s hard to learn to ride a bicycle. I fell off several times, and even hurt myself. But I learned how! Bicycles are perfect for low-gravity planets. Because bicycles stress the legs. They strengthen the bones. Bicycles are a healthy and modern invention.”

Pitar considered this set of arguments. Of course he’d seen women riding on bicycles – and the occasional man as well, maybe one in ten – but he’d paid no real attention to this fad. He’d considered bicycling some girlish affectation – those women in their faceless helmets and their black, baggy clothes. Speeding about on these gaily coloured devices...

But maybe it made engineering sense. Bicycles had appeared in the world because the mine-shafts were expanding. Ever-active robots, steadily gnawing new courses through the planet’s richest mineral seams. The world was growing methodically.

Modern Mercury was no longer that old, cramped world where people lurked in chambers and airlocks, and walked only a few hundred metres. Robots were ripping through the planet’s crust, and behind them came human settlers, as always on Mercury. That was common sense, and no conservative could deny that.

“I could build a bicycle,” Pitar declared. “I could fabricate and print one. Not a ladylike kind, of course – but a proper transportation machine.”

“With your bicycle helmet, you wouldn’t have to wear your veil anymore,” Lucy said eagerly. “No one would know that it was you, on your bicycle... except for me, of course, because, well, I always know it’s you.”

“Then it’s settled. I’ll set straight to work! I’ll give you a progress report, next time we meet.”

They shook hands, and departed through their separate iron doors.

A
N OFFICIAL DAY
of mourning had been declared for the late Colonel Hartmann Srinivasan DeBlakey. As a gesture of respect toward this primal Mercurian pioneer, his mourning period occupied an entire ‘Mercurian Day.’

Colonel DeBlakey had been an ardent calendar reformer. To thoroughly break all cultural ties with Earth, DeBlakey had struggled to reform Mercurian pioneer habits around the 88-day ‘Mercurian Year’ and the 58-day ‘Mercurian Day.’

Of course, DeBlakey’s elaborate, ingenious calendar scheme had proved entirely hopeless in practice. Human beings had innate 24-hour biological cycles. So, the practical habits within a sunless, subterranean city had quickly assumed the modern, workaday system of three 8-hour shifts.

But DeBlakey had never surrendered his cultural convictions about calendar reform, just as he had fought valiantly for spelling reform, gender relations and trinary computation. DeBlakey had been an intellectual titan of Mercury. In acknowledgement of his legacy, it was agreed that gentlemen would wear their mourning veils for one entire Mercurian Day.

Being a mere boy of eight, Pitar’s son, Mario Louis Peretz, wore only a light scarf, rather than the full male facial veil. Mario had his mother’s good looks. Mario was a fine boy, a decent boy, a source of proper pride. Life in his juvenile crèche was entirely ruled by women, so Mario had refined and dainty habits: long hair, painted fingernails, a skirt rather than trousers, everything as it should be.

Through his mother’s gene-line, young Mario was closely related to the late Colonel DeBlakey. So it was proper of Mario to attend the all-male obsequies, up on the planet’s surface.

Of course Pitar had to accompany his son as his paternal escort. The blistering, airless surface of Mercury was tremendously hostile and dangerous. It was therefore entirely proper for children.

Pitar hadn’t worn his spacesuit in two years – not since the last celebrity funeral. For his own part, young Mario Louis sported a brand-new, state-of-the-art suitaloon. His mother had bought this archigrammatical garment for him, and Lucy had spared no expense.

The boy was childishly delighted with his fancy get-up. The suitaloon had everything a Mercurian boy could desire: a diamond-crystal bubble-helmet, a boy-sized life-support cuirass, woven nanocarbon arms and legs, plus fashionable accents of silver, copper, gold and platinum. Mario was quite the little lordling in his suitaloon. He tended to caper.

The crowd of male mourners queued to take the freight elevators to the Peak of Eternal Light.

“Dad,” said Mario, gripping Pitar’s spacesuit gauntlet, “did Colonel DeBlakey ever fight duels?”

“Oh, yes.” Pitar nodded. “Many duels.”

“Martial arts are my favourite subject at the crèche,” Mario boasted. “I think I could be pretty good at fighting duels.”

“Son,” said Pitar, “duelling is a serious matter. It’s never about how strong you are, or how fast you are. Men fight duels to defend points of honour. Duelling supports propriety. You can lose a duel, and still make your point. Colonel DeBlakey lost some duels. So he had to apologise, and politically retreat. But he never lost the respect of his peers. That’s what it’s all about.”

“But Dad... what if I just beat people up with my baton? Wouldn’t they have to do whatever I say?”

Pitar laughed. “That’s been tried. It never works out well.”

Thanks to some covert intrigue – his mother’s, almost certainly – Mario was allowed into the elevator along with the casket of his revered ancestor. DeBlakey’s casket was simply his original, pioneer spacesuit. This archaic device was so rugged, solid and rigid that it made a perfect sarcophagus.

The old elevator, like the old spacesuit, was stoic and grim. It was crammed with suited gentlemen and boys, veiled behind their faceplates.

No one broke the grave solemnity of the moment. At last, the shuddering, creaking trip to the surface was over.

Pitar followed the economic news, so he was aware of the booming industrial developments on the surface. But to know those statistics was not the same as witnessing major industry at first hand.

What a vista of the machinic phylum! He felt almost as much sheer wonderment as his eight-year-old son.

The cybernetic order, conquering Mercury, algorithmically pushing itself into new performance-spaces... It had crisply divided its ubiquity into new divisions of spatial and temporal magnitude!

The roads, the pits, the mines, the power-plants and smelters, the neatly assembled slag... The great, slow, factory hulks... the vast caravans of ore-laden packets... the dizzying variety of scampering viabs, and a true explosion of chipsets.

And, at the nanocentric bottom of this semi-autonomous pyramid of computational activism, the smartsand. Amateurs gaped at the giant hulks – but professionals always talked about the smartsand.

Entropy struck these machines, as it did any organised form. Machines that veered from the wandering Mercurian twilight zone were promptly fried or frozen. Yet the broken systemic fragments were always reconstituted, later. No transistor, gasket or screw was ever abandoned. Not one fleck of industrial trash, though the cratered landscape was severely torn by robot mandibles.

The human funeral procession marched toward the solemn Peak of Eternal Light.

This grandiose polar mountain never passed within solar shadow. The Peak of Eternal Light was the most famous natural feature of Mercury, the primal source of the colony’s unfailing energy supply.

At the Peak’s frozen base, which was never lit by the Sun, was a great frosty glacier. This glacier was the only source of water on or within the planet.

This glacier had been formed over eons by the bombardment of comets. Steam as thin as vacuum had accumulated in this frozen shadow, layering monatomically. Those towering layers of black ice, the product of billions of years, had seemed enough to quench the thirst of a million people.

Nothing left of that mighty glacier today but a few scarred ice-blocks, slowly gnawed by the oldest machines.

The polar glacier had, in fact, vanished to quench the thirst of a million people. This ancient ice had passed straight into the living veins of human beings.

This planetary resource was whittled down to a mere nub now. Yet one had to look here, to know that. The polar glacier existed in permanent darkness. Only the radar in Pitar’s suit allowed him to witness the frightening decline.