The Complete Karma Trilogy (39 page)

Mars 11

The Void on the Other Side

To facilitate the
increased amount of interplanetary travel, the Government built an evacuated Cylinder that stretched all the way from the surface of planet, past the Solar Kite, into space above. Besides the Solar Kite, it was the largest man-made construction ever built. It served for three functions—outgoing rockets didn’t have to worry about air resistance, or more importantly adverse weather, which had become more and more of a problem; there was no chance the rocket would miss one of the small openings in the Solar Kite, interrupt power for millions of people, and blow up in so many tiny pieces; and the shuttle boosters that were let go in stages would be guided straight back down to where they would be reused for the next shuttle.

Incoming rockets didn’t use the Cylinder—the opening would have been too hard to aim for, since it was still too close to Earth’s gravitational pull for easy maneuvering, and the atmosphere helped decelerate landing ships anyway. Instead, they took their chances with the Solar Kite, entering at the North Pole where there were larger gaps between the panels. The launch pad was located in Antarctica, for similar reasons.

Because the space shuttle was situated in a vacuum, the engineers had to cross a small, airtight bridge that led to the cabin of the shuttle. The shuttle itself was very narrow, which was necessary for it to fit into the Cylinder—it was a situation where the engineering considerations for the Cylinder, which required for it to be as small as possible in order not to collapse in on itself from pressure, dictated the design of all rockets that were made after its completion. So instead of a spacious room on the inside there was a long corridor, with only one seat on each of its sides. Since the engineers were taking seats in an orderly fashion, with the first people that entered going all the way to the front, and on down the line, Hardin ended up sitting at the very back, with Lucretia across the aisle and 399 directly in front of him.

The flight to Mars was fifteen hours, which was a long time to be sitting in chairs that were so thoroughly un-ergonomic, but it was a small price to pay to get so much closer to Darcy, Hardin thought. And it gave him time for something he was working on, which was the thorough mapping of the psyche of the nine people that were with him, as well as the ten that remained on Earth.

It was a delicate process. He could see everything that was going on in the present tense, for all nineteen, but the present didn’t tell enough about their emotional system, the causality that led from one emotional state to the next. Over time it would have been enough, perhaps over the course of years—given enough time, there was a high probability that each person would go through enough emotional states, in connection to diverse emotional stimuli, that Hardin could develop a decent map of each. But he didn’t have a few years.

Nor could he just dive through their minds—they would feel his violation of their thoughts, since he could only get to memories through electrical currents, and they would see where he was in their mind. Instead he had to slowly provoke old memories, memories that were contiguous enough to their conscious thoughts that they wouldn’t seem abnormal to the person’s mind he was directing. The past was a vast repository of emotional causality. With careful consideration, and with a few unavoidable guesses made correctly, he knew that he could get pretty deep into their psyche. But he hadn’t started yet, because he knew that an emotional time would be most appropriate—the mind was more prone to wandering, to reminiscing, when it was going through some sort of ordeal. An ordeal like the mind leaving the only planet it had ever known.

Because she was situated closer, and because Hardin wanted to also get an idea of their physical reaction to his mental probing, he chose to start with Lucretia. To focus, he blocked out the other eighteen people, so that he had more mental power devoted entirely to solving her.

In a sense, he nearly became her. There was his own presence, which he couldn’t prevent, but it was small, looming in the background, making calculations of its own and occasionally issuing simple directives for her to follow. He became a ghost at Lucretia’s side, in her mind. For a while, he just watched. And participated.

She was scared—they were scared. Already they had left the confines of the Cylinder, and they were outside of Earth’s atmosphere. There were small portholes to the side of each seat, but even when she put her face all the way up to it they couldn’t get a glimpse of Earth behind them. Only the blackness of space, interrupted without being softened by the most starlight they had ever seen.

And it was terrifying. They were surrounded by a void, by nothing at all. They could vividly imagine what it was like on the other side—even air sometimes felt ominously vacuous, and there wasn’t even air anymore. It was the complete absence of existence, for an unbelievably large space. And they were on their way to Mars, a place they’d only heard about for so long, never actually thinking they would go there. So far away from the sun, and so hard to believe in.

When Hardin believed that he could faithfully mimic her inner voice, he asked, “Have I ever been this far from home?” And they went to the place. It was when she had left to join New Karma—she didn’t even move that far away.

She was from Bamberg, a small Bavarian town. It was almost absurdly filled with the past—in many respects, it was still a medieval town. There were cobblestone roads, old churches, and bronze sculptures that had turned green after so many centuries. It was one of the few towns that still employed an above-ground transportation system, in the form of antiquated buses. There were too many old, historical buildings for a more sophisticated system to be installed. They started on one of those buses, on their way out of the town.

The scenes skipped without warning. They walked down the cobblestone streets, the sun was setting over the crenellations of a nearby castle. They were in a field, and it was raining. They didn’t have an umbrella. They ran, out of breath, and when they took shelter under a copse of trees, they found a dead hawk, lying on the ground. They took a picture.

What they were experiencing was a boredom. They masked it with the veneer of an active lifestyle, but underneath it was stronger than ever, a vibrant lethargy. And, if they thought about it, it seemed like they could trace it back to the fall of Karma. Boredom was an unfamiliar concept to Hardin, so he made sure that she would expand on what it meant to her and how it manifested in her life. Lucretia seemed to hesitate to remember, but Hardin pushed ever so slightly and they followed the thought in time, they went to a place five years before.

It came as a shock, to hear that Karma had been destroyed. Karma had every appearance of something eternal—for as long as anyone had lived, Karma had made all the rules, all of the important decisions, had made everything. And its existence was so abstract—how could a being that was in a sense immaterial ever die? But it had, and all because of a faction of dissatisfied people that were put to death after a long investigation into their activities.

And what took Karma’s place was Darcy. A charming man, but one that was aging rapidly. And, instead of doing Good Works, everyone was supposed to grow plants. Because it was closer to nature, it was therapeutic, because of all of that.

What she quickly realized was that she hated plants. They grew so painfully slow, they were always dying or shriveling for no apparent reason that she could think of. She watered them when she was supposed to, she put the growing lamp exactly where she was told, but the plants always wasted away before they gave back anything in return for her efforts. It seemed obscene to her that a form of life could be so incapable of providing for itself. But then she remembered that the same thing applied to her.

It was a way of life that couldn’t replace the one she had lost with Karma—she had liked doing Good Works, she had liked the occasional smiles she would cause on people’s faces. Every day was an adventure, where she would walk through her ancient town, seeking a new situation that she could morally benefit with the opening of a door, or by sacrificing comfort. When she reflected on those days they seemed empty, but at least they weren’t a vacuum. Those days were full of an air that couldn’t be seen, but at least it could be lived in. She could breathe. In the vacuum of the following five years she could only hold her breath for so long, she could only tolerate life being meaningless for so long. Every day that it felt like she accomplished nothing, had done nothing, ate away at the small reserve of her soul.

So she ran away. Not so very far, just to Heidelberg. But the change was significant. There was still the necessity of growing plants, but grafted on top of that, like a much prettier face, was the makeshift construction of a New Karma.

Hardin was in familiar territory, standing back in the expansive mess hall of New Karma Building A. He had to push again—with Lucretia’s voice, he asked, “Why was it so hard to leave Bamberg if there was nothing for you there?” And his immediate response was a wave of raw sentiment, of late nights and early mornings, of conversations over the phone and dark bars where the music played loudly and everyone seemed so lovely. There were times, moments, thoughts, both before and after Karma’s death, but in a way they were removed from time, so that they were in a dimension of their own, in no way related to her boredom, or her unreflective complacency that came before—they were purely the love of a place. The place from which she came.

Abruptly they were dragged into the present, and there was nothing that Hardin could do to prevent it. She was looking out the window again, at the gaining starlight, and she was thinking about Hardin. Hardin found it disagreeable to be listening to thoughts about himself, especially after what she went on to refer to her thoughts as—she said she loved him. She was using it as some kind of coping mechanism, to momentarily forget about the looming Mars, but it was still an unfortunate circumstance for Hardin. And when she became momentarily aware that her thoughts were all available to Hardin, and she felt awkward about them herself, it became that much more unbearable for Hardin.

Thinking that he was on to something, that perhaps he knew a way out, he tried to reassert his guidance in her mind. He conjured in the back of her mind the essence of loneliness, or at least his best interpretation of it. And then, once again in her own internal voice, he asked why it was there. He asked where it came from—he knew very well that he had put it there, but he also knew that her mind would attempt to take credit for its origin, and to explain it somehow. And as simply as that, he followed her mind’s attempt back through time.

It took them to many bedrooms, to casual acquaintances that ended in disproportionate intimacy. It was another emotional experience that Hardin learned something unexpected from—he had never expected to find such a strong disconnect between two very contiguous judgments of a person, from a complete disinterest at one moment to an almost insatiable lust, and then back to a disinterest. Only, that second time, the feeling was tainted with apathy.

“You’re doing it again,” Hardin said as her with her voice. “You’re feeling a disproportionate interest in this Hardin person, and it will only end in the same apathy that it always does. It’s best to never even start the process.”

And the real Lucretia responded, she said, “What if it’s different this time? Why wouldn’t I take the chance? It certainly seems different than all of the other times, this time.”

And then Hardin had to suffer through vivid reenactments of all the other times that Lucretia had thought she was in love, and as she went through each she pointed out the one factor that made that time different, that made it somehow inferior than the present. And the main lesson at the end, it would seem, was what she finally said when she had went through all of those bitter memories. She said, “I’ve learned from all of that.”

To get away for a while, Hardin decided to invade someone else’s mind. To spend some time in a place he wasn’t loved, where he felt much more comfortable. A few rows ahead, already asleep.

Mars 12

An Idyll

There was a
reason for every lie that Rex Darcy told his biographer. Darcy’s parents had died in the Folgers Revolt, but not as protesters. They had nothing to do with the protest, they just happened to walk by at the wrong time. And they were Evaporated with the rest of the people—with a heavy hand, the police had just put the whole crowd put to death, without ever attempting to sort out who was at fault and who was just an innocent bystander. Because it was easier that way.

Of all the transgressions committed against Darcy in his life, that was one of the ones that bothered him the least. Despite what he had told the biographer, there was nothing special about his parents—they were nonentities, and only figured into his life insofar as they had donated their genetic material to him, along with a few years to get him through childhood. They left him no lasting impression, no great lessons, nothing that made their memory invaluable to him.

But to tell that truth, that his parents had done nothing, and furthermore meant nothing to Darcy, was not the sort of message he wished to send to the people who would be reading about his life. Even though parental disenchantment was a widespread sentiment, it was still considered inhuman, much like a dislike for children—Darcy didn’t like children either, although his exposure to them was fairly low. But if the biographer ever brought them up, he would have to say he loved them, even though he had no intention of ever having one. He wouldn’t bring it up himself.

His slight fabrication that his parents had been directly involved in the revolt, and died for their beliefs rather than for walking in the wrong place, also served another purpose for Darcy—it showed that he had a reason to have ambivalent feelings toward Karma, and toward the old system. If his parents were just randomly killed, then it was the wantonness of the police officers’ violence that had killed them. If they had in fact been the target of Karma’s ordered deaths, then the responsibility of their death was Karma’s alone, even if it was done by means of the police officers he had sent.

And then the ‘miracle’ he had seen, with a police officer saved by a common civilian from a man crazed by thoughts of revenge—he hadn’t been there. He’d read about it in the paper the next day. And even though it had emotionally impressed him, it wouldn’t seem to everyone like a defining moment in his life if it was just something he had read. So he put himself at the front row—he was one of the witnesses, in the trial. Already he had sent to one of his contacts in the police department, requesting that his name be silently slipped into the portfolio for the case, in preparation for a time when people might research the validity of all his claims. To say that the incident had caused him to give up his belief in the power of science was the most outright of his lies—it convinced him that nothing else would save him. If people could be condemned for doing what was unanimously considered the right thing, then morality was not a game that Darcy wanted to play. The unequivocal truths of science began to appeal to him that much stronger, after reading that article. But the science that was taught in schools was a neutered science, since Karma had removed all of the useful truths from it so that no threat could ever be made to his dominance. To the most elite of engineers, electricity was explained as if it were magic—a switch was flipped and electricity happened. Magnets were rotated in a circle, and electricity happened. Darcy had to go through quite a few banned books before he discovered Maxwell’s laws—the most fundamental of truths, erased from scientific memory so that they couldn’t be used against Karma. It was enough to convince Darcy that he would learn much more on his own. Once again, that was a truth he could never share. Instead, he tied his conversion to a miracle.

And of course he couldn’t mention that he was in the Karma Tower minutes before it exploded. Helping excavate people from the rubble was a much better alternative.

By creating all of those dramatic events, Darcy wanted to introduce his apparent ambivalence toward Karma slowly, through the course of his biography. He wanted the reasons for him to defect from Karma’s tenets to be enumerated one by one, and yet for years after it seemed like he should have broken, and become the one to protest most vehemently, he had remained the champion of the old system, and performed Good Works like no one before. It demonstrated a loyalty, a stoicism, that people would be able to relate to and respect. But at the same time, when he replaced Karma’s system of beliefs with his own in the future, they would understand why he would think that improvements should be made. It was a delicate balance, staying in the public’s good favor. Only a small portion of them would think that he was a saint until the day he died. The other, much larger portion would sell him out the moment that he showed any sign of human weakness. And to decry the sins of the recent, favorable past was always a weakness.

There were plenty of people for him to be sold to. His political rivals sprouted like weeds, moments after Karma had died. He had been quicker than all of the rest, since he knew what was coming, but they had been far more numerous. He won the vote that he himself proposed, but only barely. The men who had come in second, third, and fourth were all very much present in the recently established political scene of Earth. Martin Ficken especially commanded a huge following, and laughingly evaded Darcy’s assassination attempts like they were some kind of bad joke. The others were just as resilient—for five years they had all been constantly campaigning. Their most recent points of discussion were that Darcy should accept a term limit of eight years, like the abandoned precedent of centuries before, and also that he should resign immediately, since he had abandoned Earth.

Darcy wasn’t worried about the first accusation—he could dance around the issue, postpone, and publicly discuss the merits and demerits of a term limit until he was seventy. The second accusation scared him much more, for the simple fact that it was true.

When he had made his bid for supreme leadership, and even before, when he had devoted years of his life preparing a series of events that would elevate him to that position, he had always thought that Earth and its people would be his ultimate concern. That he would always look out for their best interest, and appeal to everyone, because he was a genuine representative of so many of them—a person from the lower class. But then he had moved to Mars, and it was hard to look back. Mars was just so beautiful.

He became distracted with its beauty. His mansion, surrounded by the largest farm ever planted, was the embodiment of a pastoral idyll that had never existed. Instead of setting aside time for dealing with Earth’s concerns, much less travelling there, he devoted more and more time to researching long-lost farming techniques, and genetic modifications that would make the earthling plants better adapted to the Martian environment. His excuse was that it was still fundamentally a concern for the people of Earth—the more food he could produce, the more they could eat. But it was the only concern he was addressing out of thousands more, and if he was being honest, he didn’t care about the people on Earth anymore. He just wanted his time on Mars. Peaceful, serene Mars. The air was so fresh, and the soil so verdant.

If he let his political image slip any further, Mars would be taken away from him. So he focused on earthly concerns long enough to temporarily neuter his political rivals. A biography would make him seem more present on Earth, more personable, even as he continued to neglect it.

So on their fourth evening together, Darcy and his biographer, he tried to emphasize his modesty again. He’d been letting that aspect of his image go for some time, after declaring himself king and building his castle. So while they discussed his work on Mars, which involved the pleasant and favorable subject of food, Darcy made sure to widely spread the credit for the success of the system.

“You wouldn’t have believed, just five short years ago, that such an elaborate system of commerce could exist between worlds. Centuries ago, when maritime travel was first perfected, it changed history. Sugar was grown in the Indies, and traded for rum in New England; the rum was traded for slaves in Africa; and then the slaves were brought back to the Indies, to get more sugar with—all for massive profit. As historians, we have to condemn the trafficking of humans, but if that can be put aside—the ambition is astounding. And now here we are, in the grand scheme of things just a short time later, sending food from Mars to Earth, trading it for intelligent, well-educated people, who come here and think of brilliant new ideas, which are traded for more food—a much more
moral
triangular trade. And how much more impressive! How much more ambitious! And the profit is measured entirely by quality of life, as it should be.

“The people I have the pleasure to work with here, I couldn’t ask for better people. They’re the ones that made it all possible. All I had to say was, ‘I’d like to feed the people on Earth, somehow. But I don’t know the first thing I should do to go about that.’ And the very next day we have an economy that extends across the solar system, which couldn’t be any more efficient. All I had to say was, ‘Can’t we grow hardier plants?’ And a month later we’re already harvesting the first crop of a Martian-specific strain of corn, genetically modified to perfectly correspond to the conditions here.

“I think what I’d like to emphasize most is that this is all still a work in progress, which is an astounding statement if you think of all the things that have already been accomplished here. We’re slowly working our way up Maslow’s hierarchy—we’re taking care of food and shelter, right now. As soon as we can, we’ll start implementing programs that focus on the safety of the two worlds, like reestablishing the police system that fell apart after Karma died. And then, finally, maybe everyone can really start living like a human again.”

His biographer took notes slower and slower every evening. Darcy took a long pause, while the man moved his pen with lassitude. As a matter of principle, Darcy had insisted that the writer spend the mandatory two hours in the fields per day, but his constitution didn’t seem to be keeping that pace well. He had developed a sickly pallor, and a slight cough. He was exactly the kind of person that Darcy thought the worlds could use less of—but as long as he wrote well, his purposes would be served.

“Do you have any questions?” Darcy asked, after a while. He looked at his grandfather clock, which was slowly wasting time.

“Yeah, do you have any water I could drink?”