Enemies of the System (2 page)

Still reassuringly chaperoned, the tourists were conducted to their rooms in the Unity Hotel. The hotel was sumptuous but not entirely finished. Every room, besides a spectacular view of the broken, tawny country outside, boasted a living wall which showed a close-up of Dunderzee Lake. As Kordan and Sygiek entered their room, they felt compelled to stand before the wall and gaze at the waterfall that fed the lake. With slow thunder, the water dropped free from almost one thousand meters down the carmine sides of Dunderzee Gorge. Cumbersome birds glided down the face of the gorge, dipping into the column of white water, flashing in the spray.

Turning away to place his kit on the shelf, Kordan said, “Though I have traveled most of the System, and twice visited the Argyre Ocean since they released the waters, Dunderzee Gorge impresses me. We shall enjoy visiting the reality.”

She was surprised that he spoke so subjectively, and said nothing, standing to watch a pack of man-like creatures which swam strongly in the foam of the lake.

“Millia, tell me more about yourself,” Kordan said.

“You can judge me for yourself.” She met his eyes. Both were silent, contemplating each other.

“Where were you born? On Earth?” he inquired.

“I was born in a township on the Ust'-Urt Plateau, two hundred and fifty kilometers from the Aral Sea.” She indicated the falling water, the troubled lake. “I never saw anything but flatness until I was twelve years old, so perhaps this great gorge strikes me as against nature. It's unsophisticated, I can see that.”

“The day after tomorrow, you and I shall stand beside that waterfall in reality, Millia.”

“Yes, that should be a worthwhile cultural expedition. Also I wish to become more acquainted with our fellow tourists. They form an interesting cross-section of the middle echelons of our system society. You may escort me down to the bar, if you wish.”

“Let's stay alone here together, Millia. I enjoy your company. There will be time for the others tomorrow, inevitably.”

“Don't utter anti-social remarks. Unity is a quality which needs perpetual renewal. We had a good time alone on the gulfhopper. Now let's integrate with our new community.”

He looked back longingly at the waterfall as they left the room.

II

The Unity Hotel held some two thousand guests, all of them important in their own right, back in the System. Jerezy Kordan was an historian specializing in the Classified period of pre-utopian Europe before the introduction of Biocom. He was a full Academician of the IPUS, the Institute of Pre-Utopian Studies, and likely to rise to Chancellor in time. Millia Sygiek announced herself as a commutation supervisor with System Population Mobility. As such, it was her job to travel the planets and satellites of the System, seeing that communities remained balanced in size and genetic heritage and did not degenerate; the enormous task of controlling migratory circulation fell to her and the SPM bureau.

During the afternoon, freshly arrived tourists were encouraged to walk in the safety of the grounds of the hotel, to accustom themselves to gravity, atmosphere, and angstrom differences. There was much to see, including a zoo which housed some of the autochthonous species of Lysenka. Sygiek and Kordan teamed up with another couple of tourists, an exobotanist called Ian Takeido, a quiet young man who had spent most of his life in the Jovian sub-system, and Jaini Regentop, a pallid girl who was a DNA specialist on the Technoeugenics Advisory Council.

The voice of a commentator, deep and paternal, followed them as they walked down one of the broad avenues of the zoo.

“Most of the trees on either side of you are classified as Lysenkan calamites, or horsetails. Their structure is very similar to that of trees which grew on Earth during the Carboniferous Age. Always remember that Lysenka II is only just emerging from its equivalent of the Devonian Age and entering its own Carboniferous. In other words, it is at the same stage of development as was Earth some 370 million years ago.

“You will already have noticed the trees we call cage trees. Such phyla never developed on Earth. Each tree is in fact a small colony of trees of up to fifteen in number. Their trunks grow first outward from a common base, then upward. Then, as they age, the trunks curl inward again, to meet in a knot of foliage some twelve feet above the ground. So a cage is formed—hence their name.” The voice deepened into a chuckle. “We like to think that this habit of unity makes the cage trees the first example of socialist unity to be found in the vegetable world on Lysenka.”

“Charming,” Jaini Regentop said. “Charming. Such a constructive little joke, too.”

That evening, the council of the Unity Hotel held a grand reception, with a banquet and many toasts and speeches, followed by dancing and a folk group brought over from Bohemia City on Titan.

Next morning, when the tourists stirred, it was to find that their living walls were blank, and their radio and vision screens not functioning. Only the internal communications of the hotel still operated. An embarrassed management council put out a hasty apology and explained why.

“The temporary suspension of external communications will in no way affect the expedition to Dunderzee Gorge planned for today. The LDBs, your vehicles, are micro-nuclear-powered. Unfortunately, all our communications are via comsat, while most of the power is beamed from the sun Lysenka to us also by satellite; these functions are in suspension temporarily, owing to a strike at Satellite Control in Peace City. We are happy to say that the hotel has its own power store with plentiful reserves for a week. Meanwhile, we apologize for any inconvenience and the loss of your living walls. As guests will appreciate, Lysenka II is a very primitive planet, which sometimes has its effect on the natures of people. Thank you.”

The guests regarded one another unappreciatively.

“The powermen and the satellite engineers are trying to renegotiate their contract with the Planetary Praesidium,” Ian Takeido told Kordan and Sygiek in a low voice, over breakfast. “I was talking to one of the hotel's technicians last night. It seems that because they are working on an extra-solar planet, they have to serve a full ten-year term before returning to the System. They want the term reduced to seven years.”

“Gulfhopping is considerably expensive, you know,” Sygiek said mildly.

“But
striking
!” Regentop exclaimed, looking over her coffee cup. “How primitive—Ian had to explain the term to me. I thought the penalty for striking was …” She let her voice tail away.

“If you want something, then you have to negotiate for it,” said Kordan. “A platitude, but true.”

“They got tired of negotiating,” said Takeido. “I hope you don't mind my speaking so freely, but they've been negotiating for years, to no effect.”

“But public life is negotiation, as long as it does not interfere with the march of government,” said Kordan. “The process is part of a general dialectic.”

Takeido shook his head.

“These technicians see it as an emotional matter. What they are saying is, ‘Earth is our Id—we must have it or die.'”

“‘Id!' Another word I had never heard before,” complained Regentop, laughing and looking anxiously at their faces.

“As an academician, I can assure you that it is an archaic word indeed,” said Kordan, pursing his lips. “And in this case almost inevitably misused.”

“Probably declared a non-word,” said Sygiek, regarding the others in turn. “In which case, it should be neither used nor misused.” She frowned.

There was a pause. Regentop leaned forward confidentially.

“Use your authority to explain to us what ‘id' means, Jerezy Kordan,” she said. “We are all of the élite—and out of the System. No harm can be done by a little talk here.” She looked excited and smiled nervously at him as she spoke.

Sygiek folded her hands in her lap and looked out of the tall windows. “If words drop out of use, there is generally good reason for it,” she said warningly. “They may serve as counters in subversive systems of thought. You understand that well, Jerezy Kordan.”

“In this case, the explanation is only instructive,” Kordan said placatingly. She continued to stare out of the windows. He turned to the others. “Id was an entity of ancient superstition, like a ghost. Briefly, long ago in the epoch before the advent of Biocom, several perverted interpretations of the nature of man flourished. Most of them assumed that man was not a rational economic being. Such may arguably have been the case before communalism provided him with the necessary rational sociopolitical framework within which he could function as a unit. ‘Id' was a term coined by one of those perverted interpretations—a particularly pernicious system, a blind alley of thought which, I'm happy to say, was always opposed, even by our first communist ancestors.”

He had fallen into an easy lecture style. Sygiek looked down; the others stared at his face with some admiration. Kordan continued, “In those bygone days, the physiological conflict between the brain, the central nervous system, and the autonomic nervous system was not understood. Misunderstanding of man's nature inevitably arose. The physiological conflict was interpreted as psychological, as originating in some hypothetical depth of the mind. The mind was regarded as very complex, like a savage independent world almost. In this erroneous model of human physiology—that's what ‘mind' really was—there was presumed to lurk in its muddy recesses various savage and socially destructive elements, waiting to overthrow reason. Those elements were bundled together under the term ‘id.' It was a regressive force.”

They had finished their meal. As Takeido pushed the sofa back, he said, “Instructive! How did the ancient term materialize here on Lysenka II a million or more years later, do you suppose, Jerezy Kordan?”

“As I thought I had made clear, the term was coined in some long-vanished capitalist system—in part to explain and explain away its own organizational deficiencies. If you understand the retrogressive nature of the animals on this world, then you can understand that the—er, striking technicians must have picked up the term here.”

“They should be criticized,” said Regentop, in a shocked voice. “It all sounds disgracefully non-utopian.”

Sygiek stood up and remained looking down on the others, but Takeido leaned forward, clearly wishing to carry the subject further. Clasping his hands together earnestly, he said, “This is most interesting, Jerezy. If you are right—and of course I don't doubt that—then the striking technicians have it wrong. ‘Earth is our Id'… Lysenka is the subversive forbidden place, so
it
should be the id and Earth should be … I don't know the term. I'm just a simple exobotanist.”

Regentop patted his back and smiled proudly.

“‘Super-ego,'” said Kordan. “Earth should be the super-ego.” He laughed dismissively, disowning the term, and glanced up to see how Sygiek was taking the conversation.

“This discussion is too self-indulgent,” she said. “‘Speaking of error is itself error.' Let's finish and get into the buses. Most of the others have already gone ahead.”

“These old theories were nonsense, inevitably,” Kordan said to her, taking her arm as they left the dining room. “Medieval. Like alchemy.”

She regarded him with slightly raised eyebrows and a smile he had not seen before. “But alchemy
led
somewhere, Jerezy Kordan, Academician. It provided one of the foundations of scientific advancement. Whereas psychoanalysis was a dead end.”

“Ah ha, then you are also familiar with these ancient and interdicted models.
Psychoanalysis
!”

“It is part of my job to acquaint myself with what is forbidden.”

He looked searchingly at her. She met his gaze. He said nothing, and they moved out into the open. Kordan stood on the steps, breathing deeply as he looked ahead.

Buses waited like great slumbering beasts.

The exobotanist, Takeido, caught Kordan's attention, coughed, and said apologetically, “It was a pleasure to listen to you talking at the breakfast table, Jerezy Kordan. Working on the Jovian moons, one is much alone. One thinks, one longs to talk … to talk about many things, such as the topics you touched on. May Jaini Regentop and I ride with you to Dunderzee?”

Kordan looked at the youth, as if thinking how young and thin he was. He watched the black eyebrows twitch nervously on Takeido's forehead.

“You are at liberty to choose any seat you wish in the bus,” he said. “But language is much more precious and must be guarded. Better to be resolute than curious. ‘Resolution is the foe of deviation,' as the saying has it. I imagine that applies as much on Jupiter and Lysenka as on Earth.”

“Of course …” said Takeido, and swallowed.

“Let's get aboard the buses, then,” said Kordan smiling. He nodded at Sygiek. She nodded contentedly back, and they walked down the steps, fully in command of their world, toward the waiting buses.

The gates in the fortified perimeter of the Unity Hotel slid open. Above them fluttered a banner with the device of the United System and the legend:

STRIVE TOWARD THE SECOND MILLION YEARS OF BIOCOM-UNITY!

As the LBD rolled through the gateway, Sygiek noticed that she was seated next to the stocky man who had made the remarks about chessputers on the gulfhopper not experiencing glee. He nodded genially, as if they were old companions.

“A session of idle sightseeing!” Sygiek exclaimed to Kordan, turning away from the other man. “I have never done such a thing in my life, and half-doubt the propriety of it now. Days are more to be valued when fruitfully occupied.”

Kordan scrutinized her, as if trying to read her thoughts. “Don't reproach yourself with such sentiments, Millia. We are not idle. We are on Lysenka to restore our energies, so that we can return to the System better equipped to work for it and to appreciate its values.”