Pallas (3 page)

The sunset was impressive. Some might call it garish. He felt that was appropriate somehow. It almost constituted the signature of the individual responsible for it. He, too, had been described as colorful, unpredictable, impressive,
even
garish. No one, however, had ever thought to describe the man as pretty.

What the Senator did appreciate, what the sunset mainly meant to him, was that an overbearing robber-capitalist and his pack of arrogant world-making engineers had proven imperfect, failing utterly to anti
c
ipate a phenomenon this...blatant. What else, in the name of suffering, bleeding humanity, had they failed to anticipate?

Pallas was half a billion kilometers from the sun, a quarter billion from Earth at closest passage. It was dark out here, he understood, and bitterly cold. Deep space was a living thing: hungry, vicious, determinedly clawing at a molecule-thin fabric which was their one and only protection against its ravages. And the frail lives of thousands upon thousands of helpless human beings lay in precisely the same hands whose owner had failed to predict this gaudy sunset.

Greedy hands.

Worst of all, the hands of an individual who would never have to live with the results of his failures, whatever they might be.
Someone who would never take the same risks as those he’d schemed for all of his long, wasted life to exploit.

Dirty hands.

A dead man’s hands.

The hands of William Wilde Curringer.

Keep your overall goal in mind above all. Those who swerve to avoid a few cuts and bruises defeat themselves. Understand from the very minute the fight begins that you’re going to take damage.
accept
it. You’ll suffer far worse from the idiots and cowards on your own side.

—William Wilde Curringer,
Unfinished Memoirs

I
t was hot in the Residence kitchen.

True, the room was air-conditioned, and every appliance within its walls was powered by the Project’s catalytic fusion reactor which, with thousands of others scattered across Pallas—small-scale, decentralized, and designed to produce oxygen and water as a by-product—supplemented a pair of huge
mylar
mirrors in orbit as a source of energy, and helped replenish the asteroid’s atmosphere.

The kitchen was the largest room in the building, but it wasn’t the sort of homey, hospitable refuge she’d grown up expecting to find at the heart
of even the most formal executive residence. The ceiling overhead was very high, supported by stainless steel I-beams with rows of circles cut from them—which had lowered their weight for transport through space—that lent the ambience of an industrial plant and at the same time looked spindly, having been engineered for the low gravity of the ast
e
roid, so that in the back of her mind she kept expecting them to come down on her head at any moment. The roof itself was some sort of translucent fiberglass, and the light it allowed into the room felt clinical to her, although she’d felt that way about skylights back on Earth, as well.

The stainless “motif” was echoed in fixtures and countertops su
r
rounding her, throwing the intolerable heat and a series of smeary re
f
lections from their semipolished surfaces. If she’d leaned forward—and if the table before her hadn’t been covered with the preparations for di
n
ner—she’d have seen the image of a tall, slender woman who appeared between five and ten years older than her thirty-four years. The strain marking her face was part of an overall tension which shaped her movements and affected everyone around her. She’d heard someone remark, not knowing she was listening—or maybe knowing perfectly well—that she lit up any room she walked into, but that her light was as discomfiting as that of an oxyacetylene welding torch. To a degree, she’d always been that way, she knew, even as a girl. And the years with Gibson hadn’t helped.

She was still reasonably attractive, she thought, for a mother of three who’d gone through everything she had. The most frustrating thing about her marriage was that not one of the women Gibson chased had ever been prettier than she was, or even a fraction as dynamic or intelligent. They were always younger—sometimes a great deal younger. She’d been quite young herself when they’d first met. And equally, they were—here her thinking hesitated as it invariably did, searching for a phrase she could somehow never remember the next time and had to search for all over again—well, they were less inhibited.

But in the first place, why hadn’t Gibson ever managed to take her away from herself and make
her
feel that way? She’d always believed he could have helped her if he’d ever cared enough to try.
In some ways that
had been the greatest betrayal of all.
Or was he a prisoner, too, paralyzed like a seaside souvenir cast in a block of transparent plastic, which was the way she’d felt all her life?

And in the second place, there must be something more to life than sex.

There
had
to be.

Gwen Altman, wife of ex-Senator Gibson Altman, glanced at the servants to make sure neither was watching, then ducked her head and gave her face a quick swipe with the hem of her apron. Neither of the women appeared particularly uncomfortable. Perhaps the unbearable heat was something personal, a sign of premature menopause. Perhaps it was just that every day, no matter how bad the day before might have been, she felt more confused and increasingly unhappy.

She shook self-pity off for the moment—although the heat remained unbelievably oppressive—and returned to her inspection of the stainless tableware and place settings. Tonight’s dinner guest was very impo
r
tant—not in and of himself, she corrected herself hastily, what an absurd idea—but to her husband’s work here at the Project. And that, of course, made this guest important to her. Gwen was the great-granddaughter, granddaughter, daughter, niece, cousin, and sister to a long, distinguished line of congressmen, senators, and Supreme Court justices. She’d also been resigned since girlhood to practicing the virtues of a patient, pra
g
matic political spouse.

Thus she’d spent six endless three-hundred-sixty-five-day years—the solar year on Pallas was much longer—with her disgraced husband on this isolated frontier worldlet the Party had sent him to, helping him as best she could. Until recently (she wasn’t exactly certain when her fee
l
ings had begun to change), she’d been as stoic about it all as she’d always believed proper. Sometimes she’d been almost cheerful. She’d always believed—perhaps only because she wanted to—that they were simply waiting out here for Gibson’s earlier power and prestige to be restored to him once his public reputation was somehow rehabilitated.

But to Gwen’s utter amazement—and helpless revulsion—these past six years seemed to have made him content simply exercising what
amounted to life-and-death authority over an unwashed, ignorant rabble of ten thousand Third World peasants.

The best evidence of that was that he no longer drank the way he did in office, nor did he beat her at irregular intervals as he had on Earth before the public ugliness which ruined his brilliant career. (The consummate politician at every turn, he’d made certain never to bruise her anywhere that would show on television or in newspaper or magazine phot
o
graphs—for her part, she’d been horrified to discover that bearing b
e
neath her clothing the marks he did make on her body was the closest she’d ever come to feeling like a woman.) But worst of all, he seemed to have forgotten all his earlier, grander, and, in her estimation, nobler a
s
pirations which had somehow made it endurable for her.

Maybe even a little enjoyable.

One of the servants, Nansey, asked her a question about the salads which the girl should have been able to answer for herself. Oh well, Gwen sighed inwardly, that’s why she had to be out here in the kitchen. Alice, their housekeeper, would have been supervising ordinarily, but with important company coming, she was feeding the children an early dinner in their own suite. In Gwen’s opinion, Alice was the only one of these colonial women who had any brains at all.

Gwen wished that her opinion had been asked for in the matter of their exile in deep space, but it hadn’t been, neither by her father’s old cronies in the Democratic Union Party nor by her own husband. To her, the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project—and along with it, each and every godforsaken square centimeter of this miserable ball of rock they called Pallas—would never be anything but an empty wasteland. She reme
m
bered doubting, as a coed, the stories of Walter Prescott Webb about pioneer women living in sod shanties on the Great Plains of North America who were supposed to have died of nothing more than lonel
i
ness. She didn’t doubt them any more. She hated to contemplate living out the rest of her life—and most of all, trying to raise her children here.

As the casserole was taken from the microwave—an all-vegetarian entree consisting exclusively and conspicuously of produce grown here at the Project—filling the kitchen with even more heat and steam, Gwen
unconsciously moved away, toward the open window.

The United Nations had seen fit to situate its experimental agricultural cooperative in a broad, shallow impact feature—in other words, she thought, a big hole in the ground—a little under a hundred miles in d
i
ameter, the Residence and attached workers’ compound occupying a low central prominence. Consequently, there was nothing to look at in any direction but a crater-pocked prairie ringed by mountains, their imposs
i
bly jagged ridges as yet unsoftened by the weather (a relatively new phenomenon itself on Pallas) or by the stands of forest growth everyone promised would someday put in an appearance.

She admitted to herself that the prairie everywhere she looked was dotted by a thousand deep blue, perfectly circular lakes. Well-managed cultivated fields were finally beginning to supplant the ragged, weed-choked “natural” meadows they’d found here when they arrived. And, thanks to patient gardeners requisitioned from the ranks of the c
o
lonists her husband watched over, equally well-tended flower beds bloomed all around the Residence itself in brilliant profusion.

All in all, she supposed, she and her husband and their children lived a life that would have been the envy of any British second son sent to the West Indies to make his fortune, or of any southern American plantation owner of two centuries ago. And what they did here was democratic, progressive, for the benefit of workers whom British and southern ari
s
tocrats would merely have exploited like cattle.

But the value of any of it was lost on her, calculated against—just to single out one terrible example—the absolutely shocking rate of suicide and spontaneous abortion occurring among the Project’s peasants and (according to what little they heard about the subject through authorized channels) the Pallatian colonists beyond the Rimfence whom everybody in the Project called “Outsiders.”

Of course a great many men and women—courageous or foolhardy, depending on who told it—had already perished simply in the tremendous undertaking of terraforming Pallas. It was a frequent topic of discussion at her husband’s table. Some had made lethal miscalculations in the dece
p
tively low and surprisingly variable gravity of the asteroid. Others had
suffered from the predictable but unavoidable hazards of the bitter cold and vacuum of space. Still others had succumbed, even as they might have back on Earth, to ordinary industrial accidents with high explosives and machinery. In the end, there had been over a thousand such victims, more than one for each kilometer of Pallas’s diameter, after whom the first landmarks on its surface had been named. And what had it acco
m
plished?

She remembered the way, on Earth, that elected and appointed off
i
cials of various national governments and the UN—conscientious and courageous public servants whom William Wilde Curringer had arr
o
gantly written off as “safety fascists”—began to rage impotently over the mounting death toll on Pallas, while at the same time, despite the most urgent warnings, construction workers from all over the planet had co
n
tinued to sign up by the thousands to take the places of the fallen.

Little did she know—she’d have been about twenty-two at the time, she guessed, and still preoccupied with trying to make her marriage work—that it was her future home they were all talking about. Otherwise she might have paid better attention.

For the most part, it must have been the obscenely spectacular amounts of money Curringer had offered his workers, along with
pro
m
ised land
grants on the asteroid, which attracted them despite the well-publicized dangers—just another example of the kind of exploit
a
tion Gibson was determined to stop here. But there were many among the survivors who claimed that they—no more or less than those who had died—were no different from millions of earthbound dam and bridge and tunnel builders who’d come and gone before them. They believed that the accomplishment—or even merely the attempt—was worthy of the risk.