Foundation (10 page)

Little by little, along with the scientists, had come the well-to-do people who had decided that Earth was so old an article it had gone out of fashion. Aquaria was the new trend to follow. Aquaria was the new El Dorado.

Beside the three founding cities of Aquariana, Thalassos and New Greenwich, more cities had risen, more often than not illegally, built without a rational plan, in total disregard of waste control policies. Big mining companies had followed and started drilling everywhere, looking for the renowned “Aquarian White,” a diamond so pure and perfect it could be sold everywhere for huge loads of money.

In a couple of years, the first baby was born on Aquaria. Twenty years later, natural Aquarians had grown to the considerable number of ten thousand. It was they—who considered themselves the true guardians of the planet’s environmental integrity—who first realized that the uncontrolled toxic waste and the savage exploitation of the ores was destroying Meridian Island and contaminating Aquaria.

Fearing that Aquaria would soon follow Earth’s destiny, the natural Aquarians founded a political party for the safeguard of the planet. They demanded a binding vote for the Aquarian administration to curb immigration first, and then to enforce strict regulations to stop waste production and force the companies to clean up both the land they had polluted and the water they had fouled.

Strangely enough, there were more who cared for the blue planet than the big corporations thought and the vote passed with big numbers.

The largest mining corporations shut down—it was more convenient to leave the planet than comply with the Aquarian directives. Many companies decided to move to the increasingly remunerative tour-operator business. “Expensive as an Aquarian cruise” had soon become a true-enough simile. It didn’t look like it at first, but people from all over the colonized planets were willing to pay good money for a glimpse or, even better, a close encounter with one of the many huge and bizarre marine dwellers of Aquaria.

Time went by. By now, all Aquarians had become fervent environmentalists who believed in the sacredness and the uniqueness of their planet.

Aquarian immigration policies were now possibly the strictest in the whole universe. Only selected individuals who were going to be an asset for Aquaria would be granted Aquarian citizenship.

The rest could apply for a weekly visa.

Trumaine moved past the rows of dark-blue stylish, high-backed chairs that were arranged on either side of the hall, arriving in front of a tall haughty-looking attendant wearing an aquamarine suit. The two spoke briefly, then the attendant motioned Trumaine to one of the many booths on the far wall, above which a caption read:
Visa and Requests of Citizenship.

With a resigned sigh, Trumaine queued up in a long line of applicants.

Only now that Starshanna had gone for real had he realized how much he missed her. Even if he could see her anytime he wanted by summoning her on the large monitor he had installed in the living room for that purpose, it wasn’t the same thing as having her around; alive, sweet-smelling and warm between his arms. What worried him most was that she hadn’t been gone for a year, or a month; she’d been gone for one week.

Trumaine looked at the clock hanging on the far wall. The second hand crawled along slower than a dozing snail, while the minute hand didn’t seem to move at all. When, at long last, it did, Trumaine thought an hour had gone by.

He didn’t know exactly how many hours had passed since he had entered the embassy, but when the man in front of him had finished, Trumaine was relieved beyond telling and stepped forward eagerly.

The clerk behind the booth was a perfect sample of what a natural Aquarian was: tall, strong, wide-shouldered and tight-waisted as only hard swimmers are. The clerk wore a tailored suit the color of bright silver woven with blue threads that, depending on the way the light fell on them, kept shifting from silver to blue.

He held his fingertips joined in a sort of absent, meditating stance. He looked up, revealing dark-blue, inquisitive eyes, and smiled vaguely.

“May I help you?” he asked with a supercilious note.

Trumaine handed over the folder in his hands. The clerk took it and threw a fleeting glance at the first page.

“May I inquire as to why you intend to become Aquarian?” he asked, giving Trumaine the once over.

“Because of my wife. She works and lives on Aquaria as a marine biologist, but my marrying her has not made me an Aquarian.”

“Indeed. Our immigration policies are very strict. As are our resources, Mr. Trumaine. We do evaluate carefully every single request we receive, before we can give out one more citizenship.”

The clerk inspected the form.

“I see here your income is quite low. It doesn’t seem you can count on a lot of wealth to support yourself. What do you expect to do for a living, were you granted Aquarian citizenship?”

“I’m a detective investigator. I thought that, maybe, I could enlist in the Aquarian police ...”

“I doubt it,” said the clerk with a knowing smile. “We have very little demand for alien cops. We pride ourselves in preventing crime and unlawful behavior.”

He filed Trumaine’s request quickly.

“Come back next month, Mr. Trumaine. We’ll let you know.” Again, he joined his fingertips in a vague meditating stance.

“Next!” he said.

Trumaine groaned with disappointment.

As he turned on his heels, about to leave the embassy, everything was swallowed in a bedazzling whiteness ...

Chapter Eight

Trumaine snapped his eyes open.

He sat up and swept his hand over his face, trying to understand where he was. He looked around him and realized he was back to the level one in the gallery.

He lifted his eyes to see Benedict and Matthews standing at the foot of his couch, patiently waiting for him to come to. Matthews held her inseparable pad in her hands; from time to time, she would tap a command or scribble a note in it.

“That’s it? That’s the empty feed?” he asked.

Benedict nodded.

“You have been in the chamber precisely eight hours. What did you see?”

“Bits ... of my life ...”

“Was it from a specific period of time? Do you remember which?”

“That was long ago. I think it was about ... thirteen years ago? It must be so. When my wife and I had first moved to the beach house. I must have dreamed images from back then.”

“That’s all you saw? Your old house?”

“The house ... Shanna ... The clerk at the Aquarian embassy. That’s all I remember ...”

“The Aquarian embassy? I don’t understand,” said Benedict with a frown.

“I used to ask for weekly visas to go see my wife,” explained Trumaine. “She worked on Aquaria. I applied for citizenship, but they never gave me one. It’s just a dream of the embassy. There’s nothing odd about it—it’s just the embassy as I recall it.”

“Did you see anything queer, or strange in your dream? Something unusual?”

“I’m afraid not ...”

“Think about it. Nothing? Nothing at all?”

Trumaine shook his head and rubbed his forehead.

“Everything’s the way it should be.”

“Very well,” said Benedict. “Don’t try too hard for now, Detective. It’s your first attempt, after all. It is important that you get used to the feed, first.”

“It will take forever ...” protested Trumaine.

“I’m afraid it’s our only chance ...”

Trumaine came out from the turnstiles and glanced at the large signboard hanging above him, which now read:
501
and
6:30 AM
, then
looked toward the check-in booth, where a second guard had replaced the one who had appointed him with the transmitter.

He walked back, arriving at a fork in the corridor. A soft rustle and a vague smell of coffee came from his left. He couldn’t help but take a full sniff at it, when his stomach let out a loud grumble—it was hungry.

Without thinking twice, Trumaine stepped into the branching corridor.

The noise increased in tone as he approached, until it was clear it was the pleasant, unhurried and casual chatter of people who were having breakfast together.

Credence’s canteen was wide and tall, large enough to accommodate two hundred believers. As the vast majority of Credence’s halls, this too had no windows.

Lamps mounted behind the opalescent ceiling provided the required lighting, so that the canteen was eternally bathed in the soft, diffused light of a cheerful morning.

Believers, fresh believers and apprentice believers, wearing white, yellow and orange suits respectively, peacefully enjoyed their meal, exchanging a few words with their chair neighbor.

Trumaine got himself an empty tray from a nearby stack. He set it down on the long rail that coasted the fully automatized self-service counters. Now and then, he would stop to pick up one of the many sealed packs on display. He didn’t pay much attention to what he was collecting. He was more interested in the neat, efficient way every counter immediately replaced whatever packet he chose with an identical one, obliterating right away the choice he had just made—as if he had never been there.

That was one of the things about machines that drove Trumaine mad: they treated individuals like processing material. To machines, individuals were more than equals—they were just numbers to shove, or sweep, or pile up as quickly as possible.

Trumaine was sure that in a not so distant future, personal machines would have been invented, with the only purpose of serving and assisting individuals from the moment they were born to the moment they would die; taking overzealous, scrupulous care of them for all their life, cleaning and tidying after them, to the point that not even the faintest trace of them would remain after they had gone. And that was a very depressing thing, thought Trumaine, because no one would be remembered.

He slid the food tray toward a cashier’s scanner, which blipped cheerfully, automatically detecting the items that lay on the tray. Two streaks of data would be sent: one that added to the virtual list of supplies that needed to be restocked, the other that added to the virtual check that was going to be charged to the administrative section of Credence at the end of the month.

Trumaine wasn’t even supposed to show his credit card or anything. The transmitter sitting in his breast pocket had handled all that for him. With a scowl, he realized that in far less time it had taken him to think about it, the machine had done it all without the slightest error or glitch.

Damn computers, he thought.

Trumaine lifted his tray, then moved to the dining hall, looking for a spot.

He passed a table occupied by a blond-haired young man with bulging muscles, a red-haired girl with a pointy nose and a small chin, and a pretty athletic girl with her braids in a bun and black opals for eyes. They sat facing each other, seemingly intent on breaking the ice and getting acquainted with each other.

Trumaine couldn’t know, but Benedict’s nose had been right. Those were the three applicants he had spotted the previous day. They had passed both the interview and the preliminary tests and were now sporting the orange suits of apprentice believers they had just earned.

Trumaine walked past them when, suddenly, someone crashed into him ...

It was a blissful young woman of about twenty-five, wearing the spotless-white suit of a full believer. The tray she was carrying went askew, scattering all over the floor the packets of food it contained. Both dived down to retrieve them and slammed into each other a second time.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t see you—” apologized Trumaine.

“No, it’s my fault,” said the woman. “I should pay attention to where I’m going instead of looking at the tag on my milk carton.”

Both fumbled about in the awkward attempt to get hold of their respective packages. The girl pointed at a white cube lying at Trumaine’s feet.

He picked it up for her.

“What’s wrong with your milk?”

“It always says full cream, but I’m sure it’s all skim,” chirped the woman.

“Don’t girls only drink skim?” he replied, teasingly.