James P. Hogan (17 page)

Exclamations of amazement broke out all around, with some scattered applause. On the terrace above, people outside the casino entrance were stopping and coming across to see what was going on. At the front of the crowd, a man was rubbing the top of his head and looking upward, at the same time proclaiming, “I
feel
it! I can feel the energy!”

The Master put a hand to his brow and signaled weakly with a wave of the other that his strength was fading. As he stood back, mopping his face with a handkerchief, the rest of the troupe converged to catch Nyea and lower her back to the ground before the power expired. In moments the table was dismantled and returned to a stowage space in the platform, and the carpet folded into a stack – not rolled, as would have been more natural – doubtless to accommodate the sections of the concealed metal footing. People were coming forward with questions and comments, which the Master’s assistants stepped in to deal with.

Ronti turned to Korshak. “Do you see it?”

“Oh, sure. The setup looked odd from the start.”

“Not a bad act, though.”

“How do they do it?” Brel asked them.

“That pole and the table aren’t what they seem,” Korshak said. “You wouldn’t bend them with a sledge hammer. There’s another part under the carpet. She’s strapped to a harness underneath the robe, that supports the side of her body and connects to a ratchet fixing in the top of the pole.”

Brel nodded slowly as the principle became clearer, if not in every detail. “Is that why they use someone skinny?”

Ronti grinned. “Well, it probably wouldn’t help things much if she were three hundred pounds,” he agreed.

“I’m not sure what you mean by a ratchet fixing.”

Leaving Ronti to explain, Korshak made his way around the throng toward the Master, and reached him just as a couple who had been pressing him on some point walked away, nodding and uttering profuse thanks. He stepped in before anyone else could intervene.

“I have a question.”

“I am extremely exhausted. If it’s about what I just demonstrated, one of my understudies will deal with it.”

“No, nothing like that. It’s about something that happened around two weeks ago.”

Suspicion flickered across the Master’s face. “What?”

“It was on another day when you were speaking right here. There was an unusual listener in the crowd. Very unusual. A robot.”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

Korshak saw immediately that he was holding something back. Besides, a robot in the crowd was hardly something that would escape notice, and Brel had said the Master was there on that day.

“That’s unfortunate,” Korshak said. “Would it help your memory if I talked about leather corsets and a frame that runs under a carpet?”

The Master peered at him more closely, and then glowered. “Korshak! I should have spotted you sooner. So, what’s the story? Have you taken to crusading for moral righteousness now?”

“No, I live and let live. I’m here on personal business. But the robot was here, and so were you. You must have seen it. So, you tell me the story.”

“There isn’t much of a story to tell.”

“Then tell me as much as you know.”

The Master sighed. “It just appeared. We didn’t have anything to do with that, or know where it came from. But it was a believer, all right. Asked me all kinds of questions afterward about how to learn more. Said it wanted to become one of the family.”

“What? You mean the Mediators?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It wanted to join your sect at Etanne.”

“That’s right.”

And Korshak had thought this couldn’t get any stranger. Although, talking with Masumichi had half prepared him for something like this. In terms of its ability to conceptualize, Tek was a precursor of Kog, who had been able to perform the ball-vanishing trick effectively because it had an intuitive grasp its significance. Unlike their earlier predecessors, who hadn’t seen anything remarkable in such illusions at all, Tek would know that what it saw was impossible by the normal rules of how the world worked, but without the analytical ability to do other than accept it at face value. Hence, it had all the makings of a True Believer.

“So what happened?” Korshak asked.

The Master shook his head. “It was too weird. I didn’t know what kind of an outfit it belonged to, or what we might have gotten ourselves into. I just wanted it to get lost.”

“So what did you say?”

“The usual stuff when someone looks as if they could be trouble: that you have to be properly prepared, which I told it meant getting closer to what’s natural. All the dependence on technological stuff that life has become brings the wrong vibes.” The corners of the Master’s mouth twitched upward for an instant. “I figured that ought to keep a robot busy for a while.”

“And that’s it?” Korshak asked.

“That’s it. It went away. I never saw it again. That’s all I know.” The Master’s body language confirmed it. Korshak nodded. The Master waited for a few seconds, then leaned closer and winked an eye. “So, hey, we’re both in the same line, right? Kinda like partners. You meant what you said about live and let live, eh?”

Back at the Rainbow, Brel had bent a flattened drinking straw through two right angles to form three sides of a square. She stood it on the bar and held it with one of the parallel sides resting on the surface, the center part vertical. “That’s how I think you’re telling me they do it,” she said to Ronti. “Nyea is the top part. The pole and the table are the upright. And this is the bit under the carpet. Only the whole thing is rigid.” She made motions of trying to tilt the figure. “See, it won’t fall over.”

Ronti nodded over another Envoy. “You’ve got the idea.”

Osgar, watching from the other side with his elbows resting on the bar, nodded. “I’ve wondered about that one. It had to be something like that. You wouldn’t believe some of the explanations some people come up with, that I’ve listened to. Magnets, local suppression of the gravity simulators, vortexes in the ether….”

“You get the believers coming in and talking about it?” Korshak said. “Why here? It seems a bit out of the way.”

Osgar shook his head. “I didn’t mean here. When I was on Plantation.”

“What were they doing there?” Ronti asked.

“It’s a regular thing for them to spend a bit of time there. Supposedly they need to ‘go natural’ and get all the technical stuff from the other worlds out of their heads before they move on to Etanne. But what it is really, the cults connive with the farmers to keep them supplied with willing bodies to help out with the work. They do everything the old way, so there’s never enough.”

“Kind of a spiritual purification,” Brel offered. “Before they’re admitted to Etanne.”

Osgar nodded. “Something like that. And the cults get good deals from the farmers. So I guess everyone’s happy.”

Aspiring novices seeking preparation for Etanne would find themselves being steered to Plantation. Korshak and Ronti looked at each other as the same obvious thought came to both of them. “Hundreds of people would have seen it going there,” Ronti pointed out after a few seconds. “They couldn’t miss something like that. Masumichi’s been asking around for over a week. How could it have disappeared?”

“Istella has people coming and going all the time who don’t want to be noticed,” Korshak answered.

It took Ronti a moment to see what Korshak was getting at. “You mean it could have disguised itself? Big coat? Hat and beard?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“A robot? It’s too crazy.”

“That’s why I like it. Anyhow, got any better ideas?” It was clear that Ronti hadn’t.

Brel was giving them a puzzled look. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

Korshak grinned at her, then shifted his gaze to Osgar, who was wearing an equally baffled expression. “I think it’s time to turn our attention to Plantation,” he told them.

Plantation had been completed a little under three years previously. Its founding was motivated by a growing nostalgia among many of the
Aurora
’s population for the natural environments of Earth, and their desire for a change from artificial vistas. It was inevitable, of course, that whatever might be contrived to convey other impressions would rest totally on underpinnings as synthetic as anything that human ingenuity had ever devised, but the illusion was felt worth the effort by a sufficient number of people to get the project launched. Its subsequent success as a sanctuary where traditional farming skills could be practiced and preserved, and wildlife brought from Earth kept in more natural conditions, along with its popularity as a place for vacations and day trips, seemed to have vindicated the decision.

Sonja and Helmut Goben had moved there from
Aurora
a year after the newly completed miniworld began accepting residents. Their former place in the Evergreen module, set amid plant-conservation zones and recreational parkland, had suited them well through the earlier years of the voyage. But with the mission’s population increasing as a new generation began to arrive, more of Evergreen’s park space was converted to food production, and its recreational facilities transferred to Plantation. Helmut’s work as a microbiologist involved a lot of field time studying microorganisms in their natural habitats, which Evergreen’s wildlife preserves had supplied initially, so it was expedient, as well as in keeping with their personal tastes, for them to move, too. Sonja had filled a teaching place in Plantation’s junior school, which was located near a village-style community called Huan-ko, huddled together amid the farmscapes and tracts of natural greenery.

Their abode was very different from the ultramodern integrated duplex that they had enjoyed in Evergreen. There were no electronics bringing life and news from other parts of Constellation; no transit tubes or runabouts; no constant reaffirmation of their dependence on technology by the ubiquitous presence and watchfulness of machines. Instead, they had a two-story house with windows and a roof, that superficially claimed to be of wood, along with an adjoining outbuilding and a patch of land that served as a kitchen garden and supported a mix of chickens, ducks, and several other kinds of animals; no part of Plantation that could be put to use was overlooked. Inspired by Masumichi’s layout, they lived in the upper part, and Helmut kept a field laboratory below. And they had finally kept a promise they made to themselves years before by also following Masumichi in having a tree growing up through the center. The children liked it, too. They had friends who came fifty miles from
Aurora
to see the Forest on Plantation. But they could point to their own personal one right here, forming one of the walls of their bedroom.

Sonja stood at the sink by the kitchen window, watching Helmut out in the yard feeding the two goats from a bucket of scraps and peelings. Some friends who had visited them recently while making the obligatory outing to bring the children to Plantation had been astonished to see somebody washing dishes by hand. Sonja hadn’t been able to convey the feeling of inner fulfillment that she experienced from doing things in simple, uncomplicated ways. It gave a sense of being in control of her life, of knowing she could get by on her own abilities if she had to – even if it was no more than a fond illusion out here, in an artificial island surrounded by billions of miles of empty vastness from any natural world or star. But beyond that, nobody knew what circumstances might lie in store for that future generation in the years following landfall on Hera. Sonja was one of those who liked to think that she was helping to keep alive the spirit of human self-reliance and resourcefulness that might one day prove indispensable in building the new world that was to be.

Oh, she knew of course that the images that Plantation presented were a facade. But whereas this had never been denied by the high-intensity, nuclear-energized, air-fertilized agricultural levels and manicured surface park of Evergreen, at least Plantation made the effort to pretend at being a natural planet. Even if it did cheat a bit by crowding things together and making the houses too high for their ground plan, it provided a constant reminder that would become more important as years passed by of the origins the human race had sprung from, how far it had progressed, and the qualities that had enabled it to do so.

Sonja could remember her early exhilaration on joining
Aurora
as a teacher, at the prospect of helping to bring about education as it should be: teaching minds how to think and discover their own creative potential, as opposed to indoctrinating them with the destructive prejudices and survival politics that came as part of the cultural legacies on Earth. And in the burgeoning that had taken place since in things like the arts, sciences, and innovative engineering, her expectations had been largely fulfilled.

However, more recent times had seen movement in directions that gave her misgivings. Sonja had always felt unbounded confidence in the power of human creativity to solve its problems of today and continue building better tomorrows. In particular, she believed in the ability of human inventiveness to create new resources out of what hadn’t been resources before. A resource wasn’t a resource until the knowledge and the means existed to make use of it. At the time of
Aurora
’s departure, large areas of Earth had existed where there was no use for oil or gasoline. Until the development of catalyzed fusion in Sofi, deuterium had been nothing more than a trace curiosity in the oceans. And new discoveries seemed to happen consistently on scales that dwarfed everything that had gone before. There was no principle in Nature that said the process of breaking through into new regimes of understanding and energy control couldn’t continue indefinitely, pointing to a future unbounded in terms of what could be known and achieved. The old world’s inability to grasp this had driven it to self-destruction in fighting over access to resources that it thought were shrinking and finite, when instead, it could have been creating more on an unlimited scale.
Aurora
represented a distillation of that potential from an environment threatened with being overrun by the weeds of finite thinking, and its concentration into a seed that would one day grow into a world that Earth could probably never become. That her own children and those that she taught would be a part of bringing alive that vision was what brought meaning to her life.