Pallas (35 page)

The screeching of a chair leg across the floor brought him back to the present. “It seems t’me,” Brody began, startling no one in the room but Altman, “having given ’em due consideration, that the Senator’s long list of complaints an’ charges against the defendant here tend t’sort the
m
selves into two general categories.”

Altman glanced over at his adversary, hating the very sight of him. As with everything else on this occasion, he was startled to see, in the place of the nasty little Asiatic brat he always envisioned, a solidly built man in his mid-thirties, battered and prematurely gray from his experiences of life. Altman tended to think of it as the inevitable wear and tear of a profligately selfish existence.
Ngu
was a trifle scarred about the face, and still affecting the eye patch he’d begun wearing to divert public co
n
demnation for his part in Junior’s death. (For that matter, he was always startled to see an old man’s face staring back from the mirror.)

After the affair of Vesta,
Ngu
had returned to what his kind regarded as civilization. Whatever else it had achieved, his flight from justice, wandering in the wilderness, had served a typically evil purpose. From subsurface deposits he’d somehow discovered near the South Pole, he’d started an ice-mining company at a time when there had been a seemingly endless supply of water on Pallas and everyone, including his erstwhile partners, had thought him still a bit crazed by previous events. Within ten years, he’d extended a pipe network all over the rapidly developing and increasingly water-hungry asteroid.

To the Senator’s helpless dismay, the slowly dying Project soon b
e
came dependent on the network’s services. Through a series of infuriating screen conversations and humiliating correspondence, he’d continued to insist that Ngu owed an obligation to his first home on Pallas; yet the younger man had consistently charged all the traffic would bear for whatever water he sold, which was why he, Altman, was here today, trying to set reasonable and humane limits on what Ngu claimed were his rights, in order to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number.

“Lookin’ over the Senator’s briefs,” Brody continued, “no pun i
n
tended, it seems his initial basis fer complaint’s a bill of articles the d
e
fendant’s folks signed when they enrolled in the Greeley Utopian M
e
morial Project. From what we’re after bein’ told by his counsel, freighted up at enormous expense by the Senator’s rich and powerful friends in Sri Lanka and what’s left of the United States—an’ on that account t’be taken with grave import—certain parties in authority on Earth, if nowhere else, still honor those articles, no matter how ethically questionable or ou
t
moded they appear to us, benighted as we be.”

The makeshift magistrate paused in his maddening way to shuffle papers before he went on. With everything else that had changed over the years, Altman had been just as surprised to observe that Brody looked and sounded the same as ever. Perhaps there was something to the longevity reports he’d been receiving for the past decade—and perhaps it was not an unmixed blessing they foretold.

“Later on, the good Senator attempts other forms of chicanery—which we’ll not hold against him, bein’ a lawyer himself after all an’ merely followin’ his own second nature—rooted in a UN doctrine declarin’ Pallas ‘the common property of all humanity’ despite the fact that no arbitrator here is likely t’recognize such a claim made by them or any other governmental organization. But we’ll be after givin’ him points fer gall, as well as consistency.”

The attorney was on his feet. “
Your
Honor, I object—!”

Brody interrupted with a nod. “So would I in yer place, Counselor, bein’ associated with silliness like this. I uphold yer objection an’ find ye in contempt of client, which is no crime and a view I happen t’share. Should yer contempt extend further, say to this court or meself, all I can reply is that, unlike the planet ye come from, yer welcome to yer own opinion, and that’s no crime, either.”

The lawyer sat, beyond disbelief or exasperation. Altman wanted to tell him there would be another time, but there wasn’t any point, since he’d have another lawyer, as well.

Dismissing the attorney, Brody caught Altman’s eye. “Now, this isn’t an exercise in malice, Senator
darlin
’, no matter what ye may think of it. It’s a question of law I tried t’warn ye about twenty years ago an’ ove
r
looked fer all that time until now, when ye force me t’make a rulin’. I’ve no choice but t’declare the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project’s articles
invalid, null, an’ void, since, among other reasons, most of those the
o
retically bound by it were born after it was signed.”

Brody sighed. “By default, an’ lackin’ a valid precedent in the matter, I hereby find that this makes you, former Senator Gibson Altman, ow
n
er-of-record under the terms of the Stein Hyperdemocratic Covenant, of an enormous, unprofitable, labor-intensive agricultural enterprise, on a planet otherwise populated by high-tech hunters. Worse, you must begin payin’ yer former serfs forthwith, whose shares in the Curringer Trust ye may no longer vote—or let them go.”

Altman heard ringing in his
ears,
saw his vision narrow to a hazy tunnel at the far end of which Ngu sat looking straight at him, his face utterly devoid of expression.

“I suspect,” Brody droned on, “ye’ll have no choice but t’subdivide an’ turn most of the Project over t’those who’ve farmed it so arduously these many years, that they’ll turn their new land into game farms or huntin’ preserves and, as individual entrepreneurs, promptly begin t’prosper. Yer socialist Utopian dream, Senator Altman, yer second most important reason fer comin’ t’Pallas, is dead.”

He slammed the gavel down. “I assess ye court costs. Yer lucky I don’t award damages fer the annoyance ye’ve put the defendant to. Court’s adjourned an’ the bar’s open!”

There is no “balance of nature.” Ask the dinosaur. Nature is a braided, continuous
transition
that witless preservationism or religious ec
o
logism can’t handle intellectually or emotionally, in which the pri
n
ciple of the “invisible hand” works as well—being a basic natural law—for wildlife and wilderness as for industry and finance. Create an environment to serve selfish human ends—as long as that selfis
h
ness remains consistent—instead of those of marginal or unfit species, and it will serve the ends of healthy plants and animals, as well.

—Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy,
Hunting and Humanity

“Don’t wish me luck,” Cherry insisted, sniffing back a tear. “You’re
supposed to say, ‘Break a leg.’”

Emerson blinked, having a little trouble with tears himself. “Why am I supposed to say that?”

Behind her, he heard a low, thrumming noise and a contrasting hiss as the TransPallatian hoverbus began to inflate its pneumatic skirts and warm the motors that drove its impeller blades. For the first time, he was sorry he’d invented something.

“Because, silly, it’s traditional, I don’t know why. Don’t look like you’re losing your best friend—”

“But I am!” And they both knew it was true.

She patted his cheek gently. “Look, best friend, I’ll probably fall on my face and be back on the next ship—it’s bound to happen once they find out how old I am!”

Suddenly, in his one good eye, Cherry looked very small and frig
h
tened, and, as usual, no more than half her real age, although they’d celebrated her fiftieth birthday the previous week. She didn’t look that different from the day he’d first seen her, sitting around in her “working clothes”—brief swatches of bright, satiny color—with several other girls from Galena’s at a table toward the back of the Nimrod, a little blond hardly older than himself, eyeing him speculatively. Her hair was still a golden froth hovering about her head like a pale cloud. She’d long since given up her overpowering perfume. She still avoided makeup and there was still the faintest scattering of freckles across her nose.

She was almost as beautiful as Gretchen had been. She always looked that way. Her face (and her body, he was fondly aware) was as firm, smooth, and lovely as ever. Pallas had a way with people, according to folklore, and the scientific data he’d been receiving the last decade tended to confirm it. He looked only a fraction of his own forty-seven years, although his people were inclined to bear their age gracefully even back in the monstrous gravity of Earth—where Cherry was headed in another minute, via TransPallatian, the North Pole, and Curringer Lines.

She laughed before he could voice a gallant denial. “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. The only thing that worries me is—are the three weeks of exe
r
cises I’ll be doing twelve hours a day aboard that new centrifugal space
station before the Curringer Lines’ insurance company will let me set foot on Earth! It isn’t as if I’ll get stranded without any money. You’ve seen to that with your inventions over the years. In an odd way, I’m the same as our old enemy the Senator.” She winked at him. “Or his opposite, I’m not sure. He can stay here on Pallas, mourning self-inflicted losses and nursing grudges in solitude, because his livelihood is secured by i
n
vestments on Earth. Gosh, I could probably buy this producer and his company outright! It isn’t the money at
all,
it’s the compliment, being told I oughta be in pictures, and the adventure. You understand, don’t you, Emerson? You’ve had a few adventures of your own.”

He nodded back, inwardly miserable, sorry now he’d never married her. Cherry was the only woman who’d never made him feel nervous the way others did. She’d stayed with him and helped make the most terrible hours of his life endurable. On the other hand, what if they’d been married and this offer had come along? He knew the answer without giving it further consideration. He could never have denied Cherry her own wonderful hazard. They’d either be playing this scene exactly as they were now, or he’d be going with her back to that cramped, dirty, heart-wrecking, bone-deforming planet he and his parents had escaped from.

Even thinking about it made him sick. But he smiled and hugged her to him one last time, his cheek hard against hers as he whispered hoarsely, “I can always say I knew you when!”

“Yeah,” she giggled, “in the biblical sense!”

He grinned, the memory vivid of an angel perched across his legs in long mesh stockings and a red satin corset which left her breasts and everything below her navel exposed. On another occasion it had been pink velvet shorts with a matching top, her arms around his neck, his hands resting on the bare flesh of her waist.

I’m tired of looking at you across a Monopoly board
, he could hear her saying.
If I see one more little green plastic house or red hotel, I’m going to scream. I’m taking you back to my place and you won’t get out of jail free this time!

For whatever credit it was worth, his image was just as clear of Cherry
in the overstuffed office of the overstuffed president of the First Pallatian Bank of Curringer, an elderly .45 automatic in one hand, the prototype of his own invention in the other, hefting each, then swapping them in her hands and hefting them again.

Today she wore a conservative business suit. Her
Ngu
Departure pistol was tucked safely away in her unpretentious luggage since she was slated for landing at a spaceport in West America, where the surviving polit
i
cians were summarily jailed for even introducing the subject of gun control. Her bags were already onboard the machine which, for some reason known only to those who write bus schedules, awaited only the arrival of its opposite number from the other Pole. Clutched firmly in her consciousness, if not literally in her hand, was the preliminary contract she’d been faxed last week from Denver, which, since California had been utterly destroyed half a century earlier, had become the motion picture capital of West America, and therefore of the solar system.

The opportunity was genuine enough—a windfall from a documentary some television network had done the previous year on Curringer’s “peculiar” social institutions—and the contract was appropriately signed, sealed, and certified. Being the shrewd businesswoman she was, Cherry had employed a reputable Earthside law firm to check out the movie company and the producer who’d seen and admired her on TV. Unknown to Cherry – he hoped – Emerson had hired another law
firm,
he hoped to check up on them.

At last the second bus whooshed down the street and sighed to a stop in front of Galena’s. Curringer had no terminal of any kind and probably never would. Emerson had never envisioned these big, clumsy vehicles as anything but a stopgap until his flying yoke was improved enough to render them unnecessary. He was getting close to that point now, and in that sense, hoverbuses were already on the verge of obsolescence. It would be a few more years, though, before enough of the current gene
r
ation of personal flying machines were out in the market to put mass transportation out of business altogether.

Cherry gave him a final kiss, one he’d remember the rest of his life, and climbed aboard, sitting on the opposite side of the machine so they
wouldn’t be waving good-bye for the next ten agonizing minutes. Emerson understood and approved. He was just turning away to walk back to the Nimrod, where he’d planned to have lunch with Aloysius, Nails, and Mrs. Singh—who had made their good-byes to Cherry in their own way earlier—when he heard a familiar voice.

“Emerson Ngu, is that really you?”

He turned,
then
eagerly strode toward the arriving bus with his hand out. “Mrs. Drake-Tealy!”

Resting an elbow on the hoop of her flying yoke, Mirelle Stein peered over the rims of her glasses to give his hand a disapproving look he could tell was counterfeit from the way her eyes sparkled. “Whatever happened to Miri—and a big hug?”

He laughed and put his arms around her. Like Cherry, she didn’t seem to have aged. In fact, she looked a decade younger. “My god, I haven’t seen or heard from you since—”

“Since you sent me the current generation of this.”
She patted the hoop with a hand. “And you need not call me God when we’re alone, dear boy. It has been at least six or seven years. I have toured the planet, thanks to you. I have written one book and have a fair beginning made on another. Would you believe I have even been back to Earth—briefly and never again—this thing does not work at all down
there.
I was back in a wheelchair and could never breathe right.”

Emerson glanced a little guiltily at the departing bus, vanishing in the distance, taking the woman he came closest to loving off to her new life half a billion miles away. There was something important about that thought, some insight he’d never had before, but he didn’t have time to pursue it now. “I know exactly what you mean. I was just going to have lunch with Aloysius Brody and some other friends. Would you join me? Where’s Digger and what’s he been up to?”

Stein opened her mouth, then reconsidered and closed it. “Let us talk of this later, shall we? In the meantime, I would love to have lunch with you and your friends, Emerson, if there is somewhere to wash up and you promise not to announce to the general public who I am. I am weary of feeling like George Washington, and I am especially weary of idiots i
n
forming me that they thought I was dead.”

Emerson chuckled and made the requested promise.

“After that,” she added in a different tone of voice, momentarily losing the sparkle and her ageless enthusiasm, “I had better begin looking for a place to stay.”

Worried over what seemed to have gone wrong between his two old friends, Emerson nodded, picked up the bags the bus driver had placed at her feet while they were talking, and led the famous philosopher down the street toward the Nimrod.

Their entrance into the tavern was greeted with exclamations of su
r
prise and delight from the landlord’s corner table. Apparently Mrs. Singh had known Miri in the old days, as Aloysius had and even Nails was excited by the presence of a woman who would probably rather not have been referred to as a living legend.

“What brings you to our fair city?” Aloysius asked as Miri and Emerson found chairs for themselves. The process was complicated by the philosopher’s flying yoke.

“This.” She reached into the large handbag she carried and tossed a book down on the table, the gesture losing some of its expected dramatic quality in the feeble gravity of the asteroid. “It is an advance copy, sent to me for review. The book is not officially scheduled for release on Earth until next month.”

What they saw before them on the table was a dreary-looking soft-covered volume, the sort of thing a government printing office in Bulgaria might have produced, Emerson thought. Badly printed on the drab, pulpy cover was,
NonHuman Beings:
The
Discovery of Alien Art
i
facts among the Asteroids
by Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy, and just above that, “Uncorrected Proof for Review Purposes Only.”

They were all familiar with the subject, one way or another. Prelim
i
nary developmental surveys carried out by Emerson’s company, fo
l
lowing his original “footsteps” in the Pocks, had already brought back thousands of the peculiar objects. As Emerson leafed through the book, he saw that it was filled with full- page photographs and drawings, many
of them things he’d seen and handled at Digger’s cabin, and some few of which he now possessed himself. He’d even brought back a handful of the first such items, a gift from Drake-Tealy after they’d remained on the mantelpiece in the anthropologist’s home for years as simple curiosities.