Pallas (9 page)

The plastic dome comprising the upper half of the hull was brightly lit from within, providing a view of dozens of outlandishly costumed dancers and musicians waving and smiling to the loudly cheering crowd. At first there was no sign of their employer—until the lights dimmed, allowing people to shift their attention, and their clapping and whistling,
to a small railed platform high atop the dome in which, lit by a spot hanging from a slender upright behind her, the famous actress stood in a minimal black outfit cut almost to the waist front and back, and upward at the sides, its edges finished in some sparkly material.

Her hair was short, straight, and as red as it had ever been. Emerson, who recognized her now that she was here, could see her famous freckles even where he stood, fifty meters away, on the Residence verandah. Sarah Murdoch grinned and seemed to wave a crookless cane and exaggerated top hat directly at him and him alone.

All at once it was difficult for Emerson to remember what he’d heard of this woman, that she was responsible for his family becoming the property of the Chief Administrator and that she was far worse in terms of what she believed and advocated than even the former Senator. Emerson took a deep breath and straightened his back, determined tonight to keep the promise he’d made to himself. It would be relatively easy, he b
e
lieved, since nobody except him seemed to think of the Project as a place to escape
from
, or the Outside as a place to escape
to
.

His moment came at last, when the brightly colored rollabout came to a halt directly before the Residence and everyone’s attention was di
s
tracted by Sarah Murdoch mounting a long metal ladder someone had placed for her and sliding down on the sides of her slippered feet to the verandah steps. People all around him crowded forward. The Chief A
d
ministrator’s wife extended both hands to her guest.

He had time for one brief moment of disappointment. The woman who had seemed so glamorous and beautiful on her platform above the ro
l
labout looked much older this close up, her thickly layered makeup cracked and chalky, her hair almost a helmet of hard plastic. Even her freckles had been painted on. Her perfume reminded him of the pungent insecticides his father and the others sometimes sprayed on the fields. Emerson quietly stepped back, slipped around a corner of the house, and, squeezing between the porch rails, let
himself
down easily into the flower bed below.

Except for the front of the Residence, the entire compound appeared to be deserted, although how ten thousand individuals could pack the
m
selves into the space enclosed by the circular driveway—or why they would want to try—he didn’t know. Without taking any particular trouble to remain out of sight, he hurried to the shed where the other rollabout was kept, slipped inside, and closed the doors behind him.

The rack beneath this machine had also been stripped of equipment there was no use for on Pallas. It held half a dozen spare tires, lying on their sides, and other odds and ends experience had taught them might be necessary on the long, rough road around the lake. Climbing onto the rack, he pushed himself through the narrow space between one tire and the underside of the hull, concealing himself within the
tire,
where there was even more room than he’d anticipated. The air he breathed was very rubbery and also smelled of lubricants.

After a great deal of thought, he’d decided against taking anything with him. It would have been too risky, and there was little to take in any case. He’d miss his homemade radio receiver, but doubted he’d have to build another. Someday, perhaps, having fulfilled certain other promises to himself, he’d be in a position to come back and retrieve it, provided that no one had found his little cave first.

Inches above his head, the cargo compartment had already been loaded with produce, mostly potatoes, before it had been put away. He had wondered how he’d manage the many hours before dawn when the rollabout headed for Curringer on its regular delivery route, especially with everyone else having such a terrific, noisy time only a few hundred yards away. But he promptly fell asleep and didn’t wake again until the machine hit the coarse gravel roadbed outside the Project gates.

He woke when the many-wheeled rollabout began to bounce on the half-finished road and he alternately struck the top of his head on the hull and the point of his chin on the sidewall of the tire. Shaking his head as briskly as he could to recover consciousness he peeped over the rim at the uncultivated grasslands all around him.

He was free.

Like the hunter in the absolute
outside
of the countryside, the ph
i
losopher is the alert man in the absolute
inside
of ideas, which are also an unconquerable and dangerous jungle.

—José Ortega y Gasset,
Meditations on Hunting

N
ot a stylish way to travel, she thought, or the most comfortable. She and her children might as well have crawled in among the trunks on the rack beneath the rollabout’s hull.

By now, her furtive conference with Sarah Murdoch had begun to seem unreal. The woman had been cordial as long as she’d continued to see Gwen as the wife of the Chief Administrator of her pet social exp
e
riment. Eye contact had been minimal and conversation superficial until Gwen had changed the tone—and her identity as far as the movie star was concerned. In an instant Gwen had transformed herself into the object of a conflict between the public relations value of the Project and Sarah Murdoch’s long-standing policy of generous support for Wives who Wanted Out.

In the end the woman agreed, a little grudgingly, to find a place for them aboard the rollabout when it left for the North Pole—in exchange for Gwen’s promise to accomplish her disengagement quietly. That suited Gwen. She hadn’t planned to tell Gibson she was leaving him until the Curringer Liner had lifted off for Earth.

Now here she was, with Gibson Junior, little Vanessa, and fou
r
teen-month-old Terence, over the first physical and emotional hurdle, and squeezing in among the duffels and other light luggage at the very back of the rollabout where she’d feel well hidden and secure during the hour or so before the wheels began to turn. Gibson Junior, the only one of her three born on Earth, seemed unusually quiet, even for him. She’d come to think of him as her dark child, given to disturbing episodes of cruelty toward small animals, younger siblings, and Project youngsters not in a position to defend themselves. The boy kept peeping over the edge of the window he’d insisted on sitting by, staring at who knew what.

The rollabout began to fill with passengers, themselves rather subdued
after a long evening of entertaining the Project’s inhabitants and hours afterward of entertaining themselves. Gwen heard an unmistakable hangover groan from several of them. The air in the rollabout began to reek of stale alcohol and too many cigarettes the night before. She hoped the children wouldn’t be carsick.

At the same time she heard the whine of motors warming up, she peeked cautiously through the window herself and watched Gibson on the verandah, receiving a kiss on the cheek from Sarah Murdoch. Gibson had an expression of annoyed perplexity on his face. He cast about, probably wondering where his wife was. He bore the movie star’s small talk—her gestures were plain even at this distance—stoically, but his mind was elsewhere. Gwen began to have second thoughts.

Then his expression and demeanor changed completely. At his shoulder Walter
Ngu
, a field foreman and the housekeeper’s husband, had a hand raised, pointing at the fields. Gibson looked in that direction, nodded, said something to Sarah Murdoch, and descended the verandah steps with Walter, suddenly purposeful and energetic. With the rest of her retinue safely aboard and the engines ready, Sarah Murdoch climbed on—looking tired, hung over, and a bit miffed at such an unceremonious sendoff—let the door shut behind her, and sat down. The rollabout began to move, and before too many minutes had passed, they were doing two hundred kilometers an hour—once outside the Project, their pace would slow appreciably—over the only paved road on the asteroid.

They paused briefly while a guard opened the Rimfence gate. There was a small disturbance at the back of the rollabout. Gwen’s eldest son suddenly stood up in his seat, looked down at his mother, then climbed over her and out into the aisle.

“Gibbie, sit down before the machine starts moving again!”

He gave her an odd look. He’d always been closed to her, indifferent to anything outside the circle of his whims, and she couldn’t read him the way she could her other children.

“When the machine starts moving again, Mother, I won’t be on it. I’m staying here, with Father.”

“Your father...” Gwen, surprised and suspicious at the boy’s sudden,
inexplicable loyalty, failed to observe that she was having a grown-up argument with a child. “The Chief Administrator is too preoccupied to notice that we’re leaving. You think he’ll notice that the son he’s never had time for is staying?”

“It doesn’t matter. Here I can be—whatever. On Earth...” He made a face as if the rest of his sentence were self-evident. Without a word, he glided down the aisle, demanded to be let off the rollabout, descended the half-dozen steps in a single bound, and skimmed toward the guard post without looking back. The machine started again, rolled through the gate, and began crunching its way southwest toward the rim of Lake Selous, where it would head north past Curringer.

Inside, Gwen Altman held her baby, put an arm around her daughter, and wept quietly.

Emerson was free.

Even at his age, he knew it would be a long while before he understood exactly what that meant.

He’d never seen a map of the region in which the Project lay—or even one of Pallas in general—for the same reason his family’s quarters, unlike the Chief Administrator’s Residence, lacked windows. How could maps or windows be of use to an individual whose existence began and ended with the cultivation of the Project’s crops?

Thus he was unaware that it occupied the middle and largest of three shallow, slightly overlapping impact features stretching east to west over a quarter of the northern hemisphere in what would have been the te
m
perate zone on Earth. The easternmost was smallest, undeveloped, mostly unexplored. The westernmost was deepest. Having filled with water during terraformation, it was called Lake Selous.

The country north of Lake Selous, which might have offered a direct route to the town of Curringer, sitting perched on a bluff overlooking the shore, was too rough for surface travel, pocked with many small, deep craters whose interlocking ridges formed a complex, mountainous terrain. Southward, at the junctions which the broad bowl of the Project made with similar neighbors,
lay
another pair of deep features, perhaps thirty
miles in diameter, but between them lay an uninterrupted plateau stre
t
ching south and curving west with a relatively smooth topography that properly sprung and powered wheels could negotiate.

The rollabout’s wheels were properly sprung and powered—for Earth’s moon. For so large a vehicle, it was almost silent, running on powerful electric motors in each wheel hub, fed by solar panels making up a section of the domed roof that hadn’t been replaced. Within an a
t
mosphere, which reduced available light, they were supplemented by batteries it had taken all night to charge and which would be recharged overnight in Curringer before the return trip.

He had no way of knowing that he’d set out on a journey of three hundred miles without water, provisions, or other amenities. He only knew it seemed to last forever, that there were limits to how much anyone could sleep to kill time, especially in a machine bouncing about in lower gravity than it had been designed for, over roads that were no more than lanes cleared of the biggest boulders—usually by rolling them into the smallest craters—and that, by the time he caught his first glimpse of the lights of Curringer twinkling in the distance, he’d be cold, hungry, d
e
hydrated, blackened by the rubber that concealed his presence, and bruised everywhere from his random, brutal contact with it. By then he’d know the freedom to suffer the consequences of his own bad planning.

At moments when the path was smooth and level and he could peep over the wall of his neoprene fortress without fear of having his eyeballs shaken out, he began to see what Pallas had been like before it had been tamed, as it was inside the Rimfence. Something about the pale sun and flawless blue overhead, the ground gently rolling to the golden line that met it, maybe even the prairie wind swirling invisibly between them, alternately warm and cool, always full of strange scents, was different from anything he’d felt before. The words he knew to describe it
acc
u
rately—
“empty,” “barren,” “deserted,” “bleak,” “desolate”—were neg
a
tive and therefore somehow incorrect. At the same time that the prairie made him feel a little afraid, it gave him a soaring sensation so welcome it almost took his breath away. It might have been the open plains all around him, or his first real taste of freedom.

The ground was dry, sparsely covered everywhere to waist height with what his father, seeing it poke through the Rimfence, called buffalo grass, coarser than the carefully trimmed Residence lawn, more yellow-brown than green. By the road lay patches of prickly pear cactus he was familiar with. Mingled in the grass were dozens of different plants, freestanding and in bunches, he couldn’t identify as readily, although from some arose a spicy odor like that of a broken bottle of light green powder his mother had once had him clean up in the Residence kitchen. Sage, she’d called it.

Standing over the undergrowth were small clumps of trees hardly taller than
himself
. He knew nothing about trees—he’d never been to the precious, heavily guarded Project orchards and had only seen trees in books—but he knew the closer ones were different from those he saw marching up the sides of hills two or three miles away from the road. Those nearby had flat, pale leaves, branched stems, and trunks that looked like they’d been painted white and lightly sanded until brown showed again on the high spots. Those further away were dark, somewhat taller, and somehow...pointier. Occasionally the breeze would bring him another exotic aroma which might be coming from those faraway trees, or might simply be the smell of freedom.

What fascinated him most, however, were the animals. Even the flowers, purple and white, yellow, pink, every other color he had a name for, failed to rivet his attention the way a long-eared jackrabbit could, startled by the vehicle, bounding across the track in front of it. Once he saw a fat porcupine—it couldn’t have been anything else—lumbering along beside the road, oblivious to the machine and its passengers, going from one well-chewed tree to another where the bark was tastier. On another occasion, the rollabout frightened a skunk, which sprayed a te
r
rible warning as it passed. He recognized the black and white stripes from childhood picture books. For some reason he found the odor—at least at this distance—a bit exhilarating, rather than disgusting, and knew he was discovering the freedom to react differently than expected by others.

There were many birds: tiny quail running in a file behind their mother with her antenna-feather erect, grouse exploding from the high grass, gobbling and clattering their wings. Off over the horizon, a predatory bird
rode the updrafts, patrolling for small, furry food. He’d never seen a meadowlark, but he’d enjoyed their melodious trilling at the edge of the Project where he’d kept his secrets hidden. He appreciated the company they gave him now as he always had. Nobody had ever had to explain to him that demanding freedom often meant being lonely.

For the most part, the vast silence of the uninhabited prairie was broken only by the crunch of wheels on the road and the buzzing of i
n
sects. For some reason this was deeper than that of the houseflies that swarmed the refuse bins at the back of the Residence or gathered around a newly plowed furrow. At one point an eight-inch dragonfly swept past his face on four shiny, transparent wings—looking like a World War I bi
p
lane he recognized from books and magazines he’d salvaged over the years from the same bins—and on essentially the same mission as the bird of prey he’d seen earlier. At another point he jumped, bitten by a mu
s
tard-colored fly. He’d remember the pain for the rest of his life, as another taste of freedom.