Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (12 page)

Terzian and Stephanie spent a day wandering the center of town, on occasion taking shelter from one of the pelting rainstorms that shattered the day. At one point, with thunder booming overhead, they found themselves in the Basilica di Santa Croce.

“Holy Cross,” Terzian said, translating. “That’s your outfit.”

“We have nothing to do with this church,” Stephanie said. “We don’t even have a collection box here.”

“A pity,” Terzian said as he looked at the soaked swarms of tourists packed in the aisles. “You’d clean up.”

Thunder accompanied the camera strobes that flashed against the huge tomb of Galileo like a vast lightning storm. “Nice of them to forget about that Inquisition thing and bury him in a church,” Terzian said.

“I expect they just wanted to keep an eye on him.”

It was the power of capital, Terzian knew, that had built this church, that had paid for the stained glass and the Giotto frescoes and the tombs and cenotaphs to the great names of Florence: Dante, Michelangelo, Bruni, Alberti, Marconi, Fermi, Rossini, and of course Machiavelli. This structure, with its vaults and chapels and sarcophagi and chanting Franciscans, had been raised by successful bankers, people to whom money was a real, tangible thing, and who had paid for the centuries of labor to build the basilica with caskets of solid, weighty coined silver.

“So what do you think he would make of this?” Terzian asked, nodding at the resting place of Machiavelli, now buried in the city from which he’d been exiled in his lifetime.

Stephanie scowled at the unusually plain sarcophagus with its Latin inscription. “No praise can be high enough,” she translated, then turned to him as tourist cameras flashed. “Sounds overrated.”

“He was a republican, you know,” Terzian said. “You don’t get that from just
The Prince
. He wanted Florence to be a republic, defended by citizen soldiers. But when it fell into the hands of a despot, he needed work, and he wrote the manual for despotism. But he looked at despotism a little too clearly, and he didn’t get the job.” Terzian turned to Stephanie. “He was the founder of modern political theory, and that’s what I do. And he based his ideas on the belief that all human beings, at all times, have the same passions.” He turned his eyes deliberately to Stephanie’s shoulder bag. “That may be about to end, right? You’re going to turn people into plants. That should change the passions if anything would.”

“Not
plants,
” Stephanie hissed, and glanced left and right at the crowds. “And not
here
.” She began to move down the aisle, in the direction of Michelangelo’s ornate tomb, with its draped figures who appeared not in mourning, but as if they were trying to puzzle out a difficult engineering problem.

“What happens in your scheme,” Terzian said, following, “is that the market in food crashes. But that’s not the
real
problem. The real problem is, what happens to the market in
labor?
”

Tourist cameras flashed. Stephanie turned her head away from the array of Kodaks. She passed out of the basilica and to the portico. The cloudburst had come to an end, but rainwater still drizzled off the structure. They stepped out of the droplets and down the stairs into the piazza.

The piazza was walled on all sides by old palaces, most of which now held restaurants or shops on the ground floor. To the left, one long palazzo was covered with canvas and scaffolding. The sound of pneumatic hammers banged out over the piazza. Terzian waved a hand in the direction of the clatter.

“Just imagine that food is nearly free,” he said. “Suppose you and your children can get most of your food from standing in the sunshine. My next question is,
Why in hell would you take a filthy job like standing on a scaffolding and sandblasting some old building?
”

He stuck his hands in his pockets and began walking at Stephanie’s side along the piazza. “Down at the bottom of the labor market, there are a lot of people whose labor goes almost entirely for the necessities. Millions of them cross borders illegally in order to send enough money back home to support their children.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“The only reason that there’s a market in illegal immigrants is that
there are jobs that well-off people won’t do
. Dig ditches. Lay roads. Clean sewers. Restore old buildings. Build
new
buildings. The well-off might serve in the military or police, because there’s a certain status involved and an attractive uniform, but we won’t guard prisons, no matter how pretty the uniform is. That’s strictly a job for the laboring classes, and if the laboring classes are too well-off to labor, who guards the prisons?”

She rounded on him, her lips set in an angry line. “So I’m supposed to be afraid of people having more choice in where they work?”

“No,” Terzian said, “you should be afraid of people having
no choice at all
. What happens when markets collapse is
intervention
—and that’s state intervention, if the market’s critical enough, and you can bet the labor market’s critical. And because the state depends on ditch-diggers and prison guards and janitors and road-builders for its very being, then if these classes of people are no longer available, and the very survival of civil society depends on their existence, in the end, the state will just
take
them.

“You think our friends in Transnistria will have any qualms about rounding up people up at gunpoint and forcing them to do labor? The powerful are going to want their palaces kept nice and shiny. The liberal democracies will try volunteerism or lotteries or whatever, but you can bet that we’re going to want our sewers to work, and somebody to carry our grandparents’ bedpans, and the trucks to the supermarkets to run on time. And what
I’m
afraid of is that when things get desperate, we’re not going to be any nicer about getting our way than those Sovietists of yours. We’re going to make sure that the lower orders do their jobs, even if we have to kill half of them to convince the other half that we mean business. And the technical term for that is
slavery
. And if someone of African descent isn’t sensitive to
that
potential problem, then I am very surprised!”

The fury in Stephanie’s eyes was visible even through her shades, and he could see the pulse pounding in her throat. Then she said, “I’ll save the
people,
that’s what I’m good at. You save the rest of the world,
if
you can.” She began to turn away, then swung back to him. “And by the way,” she added, “fuck you!” turned, and marched away.

“Slavery or anarchy, Stephanie!” Terzian called, taking a step after. “That’s the choice you’re forcing on people!”

He really felt he had the rhetorical momentum now, and he wanted to enlarge the point by saying that he knew some people thought anarchy was a good thing, but no anarchist he’d ever met had ever even
seen
a real anarchy, or been in one, whereas Stephanie had—drop your anarchist out of a helicopter into the eastern Congo, say, with all his theories and with whatever he could carry on his back, and see how well he prospered. . . .

But Terzian never got to say any of these things, because Stephanie was gone, receding into the vanishing point of a busy street, the shoulder bag swinging back and forth across her butt like a pendulum powered by the force of her convictions.

Terzian thought that perhaps he’d never see her again, that he’d finally provoked her into abandoning him and continuing on her quest alone, but when he stepped off the bus in Montespèrtoli that night, he saw her across the street, shouting into her cell phone.

A day later, as with frozen civility they drank their morning coffee, she said that she was going to Rome the next day. “They might be looking for me there,” she said, “because my parents live there. But I won’t go near the family, I’ll meet Odile at the airport and give her the papilloma.”

Odile?
Terzian thought. “I should go along,” he said.

“What are you going to do?” she said. “Carry that gun into an
airport?
”

“I don’t have to take the gun. I’ll leave it in the hotel room in Rome.”

She considered. “Very well.”

Again, that night, Terzian found the tumbled castle in Provence haunting his thoughts, that ruined relic of a bygone order, and once more considered stealing the papilloma and running. And again, he didn’t.

They didn’t get any farther than Florence, because Stephanie’s cell phone rang as they waited in the train station. Odile was in Venice.
“Venezia?”
Stephanie shrieked in anger. She clenched her fists. There had been a cache of weapons found at the Fiumicino airport in Rome, and all planes had been diverted, Odile’s to Marco Polo outside Venice. Frenzied booking agents had somehow found rooms for her despite the height of the tourist season.

Fiumicino hadn’t been re-opened, and Odile didn’t know how she was going to get to Rome. “Don’t try!” Stephanie shouted. “I’ll come to
you
.”

This meant changing their tickets to Rome for tickets to Venice. Despite Stephanie’s excellent Italian, the ticket seller clearly wished the crazy tourists would make up their mind which monuments of civilization they really wanted to see.

Strange—Terzian had actually
planned
to go to Venice in five days or so. He was scheduled to deliver a paper at the Conference of Classical and Modern Thought.

Maybe, if this whole thing was over by then, he’d read the paper after all. It wasn’t a prospect he coveted: he would just be developing another footnote to a footnote.

The hills of Tuscany soon began to pour across the landscape like a green flood. The train slowed at one point—there was work going on on the tracks, men with bronze arms and hard hats—and Terzian wondered how, in the Plant People Future, in the land of Cockaigne, the tracks would ever get fixed, particularly in this heat. He supposed there were people who were meant by nature to fix tracks, who would repair tracks as an
avocation
or out of boredom regardless of whether they got paid for their time or not, but he suspected that there wouldn’t be many of them.

You could build machines, he supposed, robots or something. But they had their own problems, they’d cause pollution and absorb resources and, on top of everything, they’d break down and have to be repaired. And who would do
that?

If you can’t employ the carrot, Terzian thought, if you can’t reward people for doing necessary labor, then you have to use the stick. You march people out of the cities at gunpoint, like Pol Pot, because there’s work that needs to be done.

He tapped his wedding ring on the arm of his chair and wondered what jobs would still have value. Education, he supposed; he’d made a good choice there. Some sorts of administration were necessary. There were people who were natural artists or bureaucrats or salesmen and who would do that job whether they were paid or not.

A woman came by with a cart and sold Terzian some coffee and a nutty snack product that he wasn’t quite able to identify. And then he thought,
labor
.

“Labor,” he said. In a world in which all basic commodities were provided, the thing that had most value was actual labor. Not the stuff that labor bought, but the work
itself
.

“Okay,” he said, “it’s labor that’s rare and valuable, because people don’t
have
to do it anymore. The currency has to be based on some kind of labor exchange—you purchase
x
hours with
y
dollars. Labor is the thing you use to pay taxes.”

Stephanie gave Terzian a suspicious look. “What’s the difference between that and slavery?”

“Have you been reading Nozick?” Terzian scolded. “The difference is the same as the difference between
paying taxes
and
being a slave
. All the time you don’t spend paying your taxes is your own.” He barked a laugh. “I’m resurrecting Labor Value Theory!” he said. “Adam Smith and Karl Marx are dancing a jig on their tombstones! In Plant People Land, the value is the
labor itself!
The
calories!
” He laughed again, and almost spilled coffee down his chest.

“You budget the whole thing in calories! The government promises to pay you a dollar’s worth of calories in exchange for their currency! In order to keep the roads and the sewer lines going, a citizen owes the government a certain number of calories per year—he can either pay in person or hire someone else to do the job. And jobs can be budgeted in calories-per-hour, so that if you do hard physical labor, you owe fewer hours than someone with . . . a desk job—that should keep the young, fit, impatient people doing the nasty jobs, so that they have more free time for their other pursuits.” He chortled. “Oh, the intellectuals are going to just hate this! They’re used to valuing their brain power over manual labor—I’m going to reverse their whole scale of values!”

Stephanie made a pffing sound. “The people I care about have no money to pay taxes at all.”

“They have bodies. They can still be enslaved.” Terzian got out his laptop. “Let me put my ideas together.”

Terzian’s frenetic two-fingered typing went on for the rest of the journey, all the way across the causeway that led into Venice. Stephanie gazed out the window at the lagoon soaring by, the soaring water birds, and the dirt and stink of industry. She kept the Nike bag in her lap until the train pulled into the Stazione Ferrovia della Stato Santa Lucia at the end of its long journey.

Odile’s hotel was in Cannaregio, which, according to the map purchased in the station gift shop, was the district of the city nearest the station and away from most of the tourist sites. A brisk wind almost tore the map from their fingers as they left the station, and their vaporetto bucked a steep chop on the grey-green Grand Canal as it took them to the Ca’ d’Oro, the fanciful white High Gothic palazzo that loomed like a frantic wedding cake above a swarm of bobbing gondolas and motorboats.