Pallas (4 page)

Well, she thought—as she had done a thousand times before—if the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project succeeded, in the future, decisions like that would be made only by the people who were qualified to make them. The idea was a source of comfort to her, and she cherished it.

Gwen was an educated woman and knew that the stress of a new e
n
vironment was taking its inevitable hideous toll. She understood the principle of natural selection, although like her husband, she was co
m
mitted to seeing that it remained natural, rather than man-inflicted. But it was like having all these spectacular rainbow-colored sunrises and su
n
sets—which she felt were highly overrated anyway: what good were they when only one new baby out of every seven or eight conceived survived to enjoy them, as if it were still the Dark Ages?

Pressured—among others by a husband who seemed stimulated only by duty and was otherwise uninterested in her body—to provide a worthy example in what she privately referred to as the “Be Fruitful and Multiply Department,” Gwen herself had miscarried more than once. In the final analysis there was, she felt, a fundamental
wrongness
about Pallas which she couldn’t adjust to, no matter how she tried.

Lesser examples of that wrongness occupied the shelves and tabletops about her now. Except for rare, expensive imports, everything which would have been made of wood or plastic back home was fabricated here from metal or glass—the cheapest, most convenient materials on a mi
n
eral-rich world still poor in organics.

Overhead, the cloud-fleeced sky was blue enough, but of an alien shade. Two suns, the genuine primary—too far away and small—and one of its orbiting mirror-reflected counterfeits, were always visible in the daytime. The nights, thanks to those same orbital mirrors, seemed unn
a
turally brief, embellished by a natural moon which seemed the right size, but of the wrong color and pattern.

Trees, for the most part seeded by ultralight aircraft during the final stages of terraformation, were all exactly the same height, giving the landscape a contrived look which was appropriate but oppressively su
r
real, like living in a cartoon. It was estimated that in the low-mass regions of Pallas they might eventually grow to be a thousand yards tall.

Even worse, like the trees, the children who managed to be born alive and healthy were beginning to turn out gangly, attenuated, their growing bodies responding to a feeble pull of gravity which varied, depending on the location and its underlying geology, from just one-tenth of Earth normal to the merest twentieth.

And worst of all, Pallas was dull. Having long ago—and not without sufficient reason, thoroughly and humiliatingly laundered in public—lost
interest in the intimate aspect of marriage herself, Gwen felt deprived of the cultural and social benefits to which any Washingtonian of wealth and status becomes accustomed. Her husband had argued that, through r
e
cordings and realtime transmissions to the Residence from the home planet, she was free to enjoy any drama, dance, or spectacle that anyone enjoyed on Earth. She’d replied that, while everything he said might be true, no one of any importance could
see
her enjoying them.
And this telling if somewhat irrational point had long since settled the argument.

At least for her.

From 1917, Americans wondered why they aided Russia with food she could not grow herself. The truth
was,
those who had saddled them with a federal reserve and income tax did more than just keep Soviet Marxism going, they had created it. During the first half of the
century, government grew
500 times faster than the
population.
Could that have happened without an enemy to frighten voters and reluctant taxpayers?

—Mirelle Stein,
The
Productive Class

A
s it was intended to be, stepping into the official residence of the Chief Administrator was like stepping a quarter of a billion kilometers, all the way back to Earth.

“Dinner’s ready, Senator, and Mr. Brody is at the gate.”

As she always did at this time, Alice
Ngu
had come to fetch him in from the verandah. Short, plump, and brown, wearing a plain dress which failed as a servant’s uniform only because nobody else here wore one like it, she was second- or third-generation Cambodian or Vietna
m
ese—Altman could never remember which—and delivered her English with that lilt Orientals seemed to retain no matter how many of their a
n
cestors had lived and died in America. Her husband and children had been among those he’d watched returning from the fields.

As usual, he’d already started in and met her in the family’s private living room. “Thank you,
Alice,
I’ll talk to the gate. Please tell Mrs.
Altman I’ll be there shortly.”

As she left, closing the double doors behind her, it struck him all over again how Gwen had made a point of maintaining things as if they were still living on Earth. Given certain constraints, the place combined the ambience of the executive mansion she’d grown up in with the self-conscious rusticity of the high-tech hideaway where she’d spent most of her vacations. Altman had to concentrate sometimes, remember to slide his feet along as he did outdoors,
avoid
lifting them too far from the carpet in a pull of gravity only a tenth as powerful as that of Earth, in order to keep from dashing his brains out on the ceiling beams.

The room appeared pine-paneled. There wasn’t a tree on Pallas that could have provided the boards—not that anybody was willing to cut, anyway. The cost of importing the rolls of photoprinted plastic had e
x
ceeded what many a family had spent simply getting here, but the pan
e
ling—and the chairs and sofas upholstered in dark colors, the yellow incandescent light of the fabric-shaded bulbs in end-table lamps—lent a welcome warmth to this room, and to others Gwen had decorated, which seemed lacking anywhere else on the little planet.

He reached an intercom set into the wall beside the doors and touched a key. Its tiny liquid-crystal screen, until now merely displaying the time, date, and temperature, dissolved into a wide-angle view inside the g
a
tehouse, where an International Peace Corpsman waited to hear from him.

“Altman here.”

“Sir!
Subject identifies himself as Brody, Aloysius, no middle initial, no real ID.”

Before Altman could focus on the well-scrubbed face beneath a baseball cap of sky blue (Earth’s sky—Pallas’s was tinged with
a reddish
purple Gwen often complained of), a vast hand engulfed the picture, wrenching it about until it settled on a seamier face he recognized. A
n
noyance colored the young Corpsman’s voice, just as reddish purple c
o
lored the sky. It was a common reaction which the Senator understood perfectly but couldn’t train his people out of. Outsiders made a point of
never
carrying documents, and under the Stein Covenant—the agreement they’d all signed before immigrating to Pallas—they couldn’t be required
to.

Brody grinned into the camera. “A good evenin’ to ye, Senator
darlin
’, an’ will y’kindly be lettin’ me in?” Altman was sure the accent was a phony. Not only did it seem to come and go with the weather and the time of day, but his intelligence sources had told him that Brody had been born in an industrial suburb of Boston.

“Sorry for the wait, Mr. Brody. The corporal will have someone escort you to the Residence.”

Altman rang off, savoring the room about him for a final minute. Thanks to Gwen, nothing but the gravity reminded him of the world he stood on. The drapes had been drawn before dark and—a welcome di
f
ference from Earth—a fire burned in the hearth. At home, with the dwindling resources and draconian pollution laws of eastern North America, it would have been a hologram. Here there was certainly no scarcity of agricultural waste,
nor
of hydraulic rams and labor to shape it into “logs,” and between the chimney precipitators and a selectively permeable atmospheric envelope, no pollution.

Meanwhile, without a crackle or a grain of “snow,” the latest digit
a
lized disinformation from LiteLink in Atlanta, admittedly delayed by never less than fourteen minutes, splashed across a large high-definition room screen as it might have done in any home on Earth, without an a
u
dience at the moment to appreciate the technical—if not the journali
s
tic—accomplishment it represented.

On the other walls, Gwen had hung framed prints, young girls in su
n
light-dappled gardens, quaint bridges arching over their own reflections in quiet, lily-patterned water. On the piano—small, but representing yet another conspicuous expense—stood a picture of her parents. Never mind that it was an old campaign photo taken just before the Big One murdered them and twenty million other Californians. The truth, which he’d never spoken in his wife’s company, was that dear old Dad Hathaway’s political posterior—or at least his reputation with posterity—had been rescued by the earthquake everybody had been expecting for decades.

Shaking his head at the remembrance, he dismissed it and made his way to the formal entrance, where Alice was answering the door. “Good
evening, sir, may I take your—”

At first glance, there seemed nothing to take. From the way Brody leaned on his cane, he wasn’t about to part with that. A head shorter than Altman, he wasn’t large but somehow gave a contrary impression. Behind antique rimless glasses, his eyes glittered with good-natured m
i
schief—some cosmic joke he was willing to share with anyone who asked—the lines radiating from their corners making him look like a Coca-Cola Santa Claus. He could have been described as broad. His clothes, and the sweeping gestures that formed a part of his vocabulary, accentuated it.

At least he looked clean. Like all Outsiders, he was dressed and groomed abominably, tonight in faded denim trousers, leather sandals, and an off-white smock dyed in primitive splashes of color. His beard and hair were gray-shot, the latter shoulder-length and parted painstakingly in the middle, held behind his prominent ears with a thong. Altman’s sources stated that the man was sixty-two years old and had come to Pallas earlier than most immigrants as a laser operator with the original terraforming crew. Having lost his right leg in a construction accident, he’d apparently decided to stay where the gravity was kinder.

From under the obnoxious shirt, strapped to his left thigh, hung a big, heavy-looking pistol which the Senator wished he’d had the Corpsman confiscate at the gate. Unfortunately, that would have breached the so-called governing document cooked up by pop-philosopher Mirelle Stein and foisted on the locals by Curringer simply because it had been his billions—along with those of a Japanese consortium he’d had under his thumb—which had financed the entire terraformation.

More to the point, Outsiders could be very touchy about what they’d been led to believe were their rights, and the Project badly needed new markets for what it grew. Much as the proliferation of personal arms on Pallas infuriated Altman—he’d been the Senate’s foremost advocate of stripping America clean of that particular evil—he was reluctant to offend any potential customer, especially the widely respected landlord of the Nimrod Saloon & Gambling Emporium, which formed whatever social focus the ramshackle town across the lake laid claim to.

Brody gave Alice a searching look. Winking broadly at Altman, standing a couple of meters behind her, he handed her his cane, unfa
s
tened the tie-down above his knee, reached up under his shirt and pulled the rig off, pistol and all, handed it to her, and reclaimed his cane. Arm sagging more under the emotional than the physical mass of the belt, weapon, and spare ammunition, she handled the ensemble as if it were a poisonous snake, but accepted it without comment and hung it on a knob of a coatrack near the door.

Altman led the man to what served as a dining room—there wasn’t time for the customary drink and small talk in the parlor Gwen kept for such occasions—where they both sat, only to find themselves on their feet again when she entered from the kitchen.

“Justice Aloysius Brody,” the Senator began, “my wife, Gwendolyn Hathaway Altman.”

Gwen, who’d been supervising the cooking, removed her small apron, wiped her hands, and extended one to match the paw Brody offered. Altman thought he was going to lean down and kiss it.

“Charmed t’be sure, Mrs. Altman, an’ at yer service.”

“Please be seated,” she answered, “
Justice
Brody?”

Gwen had been a thin, pretty, tightly wound platinum blond of s
e
venteen, nine years younger than himself, when he’d first become en
c
hanted with her at an Inauguration ball in 2012. At the time, he hadn’t known that she was the elder daughter of the most powerful individual in his own political party. He was still pleased to recall that his ardor hadn’t heated noticeably when he’d found out who she was. It had pleased him somewhat less, after their wedding in 2013—during a period when pr
e
marital intimacy was less common than it had been generations earl
i
er—to discover that she brought her innate nervousness to bed with her.

She had been the picture-perfect political wife. Sixteen years had given her fine lines at the corners of her eyes (nothing like the mesh d
e
corating Brody’s), put a little flesh on her, and added some premature silver to the platinum.

All the patience he could muster had failed to warm the personal side of their life together. In the end, to her visible relief, he’d sought sati
s
faction elsewhere. They hadn’t slept in the same room since their first child, Gibson Junior, had been conceived; a rare exception had allowed the delighted tabloids to show her, eight months into a second pregnancy, at the height of the scandal which had destroyed him. True to her u
p
bringing—for Gwen life imitated the art of the possible—she blamed him less for extramarital adventuring than for getting caught at it. She mon
i
tored her blood chemistry and made appointments with him by the c
a
lendar, a monthly chore he relished less and less.

“I thank y’very kindly, ma’am.” Cane between his knees, Brody folded his hands atop the crook as she refilled his wineglass. “’Tis an honorary title, dear lady.”