A World Between (27 page)

Boos, cheers, hisses, raucous laughter.

“And aside from shrieking their sexually twisted frustrated rage at the top of their lungs, what does Femocracy offer this planet but a splendid thesaurus of Machiavellian distortions and bald-faced lies? Femocracy operates entirely in the open on Pacifica? Then how did the Femo-cratic League of Pacifica spring into existence overnight? Spontaneous combustion, no doubt! Femocracy seeks only to engage in free intellectual discourse? Then what about what they’ve done to men on their own planets? Their
breeders,
as they call them—a handful of genetically downbred wretches kept in cages like animals and subject to unspeakable atrocities...

Falkenstein paused, as if calming his own outrage. “But why go on?” he said more quietly. “People who will deliberately downbreed half their own species into mindless stud animals will obviously do or say just about anything. If you can bring yourself to do
that,
what’s a little lying and subversion?”

He shrugged. “If this proposal passes, the lies they will then spew forth will escalate into purebred lunacy. No doubt we can expect to hear that Institute students have their brains scooped out and replaced with electronic circuitry. That we barbecue children and serve them up for breakfast. That we force initiates to roll in their own ordure, drink human blood, and swear allegiance to the devil. If you vote to subject yourselves to this pathology, we will abide by your decision. We will demonstrate the value of a Pacifican Institute of Transcendental Science to you with deeds, not empty words. And no amount of vicious, unfounded lies will sway us from our dedication to the scientific enlightenment of all humans everywhere. The profession of teacher is the noblest of all, and if vilification by ignorant primitives is the price we must pay to justify our claim to that calling, then so be it!”

The cheering for Falkenstein was much louder and so were the boos and catcalls. Brrrr! Carlotta thought. That was one brilliant, ugly speech, and the response to it was just as powerful both ways and almost as unwholesome. Anger was now the unifying theme in the Parliament chamber—anger evoked by Falkenstein against the Femocrats, and anger evoked by Falkenstein against himself. Black energy seemed to pulse off the visitors’ gallery, but she also sensed something else, a potential that might be seized...

She had originally planned to call the vote immediately after Falkenstein finished without any speech from her. But now her instincts told her otherwise, and she found herself glancing into Royce’s eyes for some subliminal confirmation. Seated in the first row of Delegate seats, Royce nodded back. Okay, bucko, she thought, here’s one for Pacifica! *

“Well now, we’ve just heard pur off-world friends call each other faschochauvinists, liars, subversives, and shrill, mindless Machiavellian monsters,” she said conversationally, without rising. “I forget who called what which.” The ugly mood broke at least for the moment into good-natured laughter.

* “But who really cares who called what which?” Carlotta said cavalierly. “They’ve been shouting the same crap in our ears for a long time now, and here we are, conducting democratic business as usual. Oh, some of us may have gotten caught up in one side or the other, but we’re all still
PacificanSy
aren’t we? Listen, think, vote, and abide by our democratically arrived-at decisions. That’s what electronic democracy is all about, and I don’t think I’m bragging unduly when I say that I believe that every Pacifican understands it....

Carlotta glanced from Falkenstein to Cynda Elizabeth and back to the audience. She shrugged. “But I don’t think these people have the faintest idea of what electronic democracy is all about. Both sides are convinced that they are in possession of the absolute truth and that therefore we should tell the other side to shut up before they pollute our impressionable adolescent minds with ideological garbage. The notion that we are undecided as a people on these issues and therefore should allow our time-tested democratic processes a decent interval in which to reach a democratic decision apparently seems terribly naive to these galactic sophisticates.”

Carlotta paused. The chamber was quiet now, but it was not a tense and ugly silence; it seemed to her that it was the receptive quiet of good sense and reason.

“But I wonder who is naive and who is sophisticated,” she said. “Those who seek to choke off continued debate? Or those who listen, evaluate, vote, and abide by democratic decisions democratically arrived at? True believers lusting after converts? Or the people who have done the most to make the Galactic Media Web the arena of free interplanetary discourse it is today? Everyone seems to want to enlighten we poor primitive Pacificans one way or the other. Shall
we
enlighten these poor benighted off-worlders and return the favor with a demonstration of the freest democratic system in the human galaxy in action? Shall we force them to participate in Pacifican democracy at work whether they like it or not?
Shall we vote?”

The applause was the loudest yet; heartfelt yet decorous, bright and cleansing. Soon it became a chanting of “Vote! Vote! Vote!” from the gallery as well as the Delegates. This isn’t the voice of a mob, Carlotta thought, this is the voice of a democratic Parliament and a democratic people. This isn’t for me, this is for
us.

Something caught in her throat. Pride and embarrassment mingled behind her burning eyes. This is what it’s all about, she thought. This is what makes it all worthwhile.

“Ayes for the resolution, nays against,” she said, in a quavering attempt at technocrat neutrality. When the wall screen behind her showed that the resolution had passed 98 to 5, the chamber was filled with loud yet dignified applause, as Delegates and spectators alike cheered their Chairman, their government, and themselves.

We haven’t yet forgotten how to be Pacificans, Carlotta thought as her vision blurred with tears. If I’m voted out of office tomorrow and never return, I’ll have this moment to remember, and it will have been enough.

11

R
OGER
F
ALKENSTEIN STOOD NEAR THE HELICOPTER AT THE
edge of the jungle clearing that passed for the Hollywood liner port, cool and relaxed in the murderous heat as the last batch of Institute recruits, sweating profusely and starting nervously at every crash and thump from the surrounding jungle, were loaded aboard. The ambient temperature was up around 120 degrees and the humidity hovered around its usual 100 percent, but the modified inertia-screen that enclosed his body kept his skin at a nice dry 70 degrees. If forcing us to locate the Institute in this jungle lunatic asylum was really meant as anything more sinister than a joke, it’s been a dismal failure, he thought. The more hostile the natural environment, the better our technology looks, and the security problem is certainly minimized out here two thousand kilometers from anything, surrounded by a godzilla-infested rain forest, where the sparse local population were far too obsessed with producing their endless godzilla epics to give much thought to anything more serious.

Falkenstein boarded the helicopter, nodded to the pilot, and the copter lifted clear of the jungle and headed northwest toward the Institute, about twenty kilometers of impenetrable jungle beyond the bizarre town of Hollywood. Almost at once, they were flying above the peculiar sprawling metropolis itself.

From the air, Hollywood seemed to be a huge city, a vast eclectic smorgasbord of every architectural style ever conceived by the mind of man. Here a few square blocks of Arabian Knights palaces, there the recreated skyscrapers of ancient New York. Medieval terrestrial castles and the glass towers of Heldhime. Downtown Gotham and the legendary Tivoli amusement gardens. The Luxor of the Pharaohs and the Rome of Julius Caesar.

In actuality, the few thousand whackers who inhabited the town lived in a cluster of environment domes at the eastern edge, and all else were flimsy half-scale mock-up shells of exotic buildings which existed in order to be periodically smashed to bits by rampaging godzillas for the benefit of the cameras and the delectation of the galactic audience. Indeed, just below, a fifty-meter green homed colossus and an even larger monstrosity with a huge mouth full of gnashing teeth were rolling about the streets of ancient Babylon, locked in mortal combat as hanging gardens and ziggurats crumbled from random kicks. Even inside the helicopter, the titanic bellowings and gruntings were quite harrowing to the Gothamite recruits.

But not to Falkenstein, who had long since developed a casual indifference to the crazed environment of Godzil-laland, though his first encounter with this unsettling reality had been something else again.

The shuttle from the
Heisenberg
had landed at the Hollywood liner port with the Institute construction party, and he and Maria had stepped outside into a choking, enervating blast of soggy heat. Immediately before them was a high green wall of trees, vines, and underbrush that gave off an overpowering stench of rank rotting fecundity. Things howled, bellowed, grunted, and crashed in the nearby jungle, sounds of menace almost too horrid to be credible.

“Great suns!” Maria said. “I don’t believe it!”

“Lindblad or whoever is responsible for this certainly has a mordant sense of humor,” Falkenstein said, wiping sweat out of his eyes with the back of his hand.

Suddenly a terrifying series of monstrous roars and bellows issued from the jungle before them, and a moment later something huge came crashing through the undergrowth toward them, erupting into the clearing in a green explosion of vegetation.

The thing was mottled green and brown and it stood forty meters high on tree-trunk legs which ended in huge clawed feet. It stood upright like a man, balanced on a huge tail tipped with three sharp two-meter spikes. The small-eyed head was mostly mouth; when it screamed its outrage at them, thick drool sprayed from triple rows of teeth, and a tornado of unbelievably fetid breath assailed Falkenstein’s nostrils even as he and Maria shrank back toward the shuttle.

Then another beast slithered toward them along the path broken through the jungle by the first. This creature was low-slung, shiny green, sinuous as a snake, and the tail-end of its seemingly endless body was nowhere in sight even after thirty meters of the thing became visible. It had huge yellow eyes, a grim-lipped mouth, and a scimitarlike horn growing from where its nose would have been. Black drops of venom dripped from its red forked tongue.

Bellowing, hissing, and screaming, the godzillas advanced into the clearing as the Falkensteins ran for the shuttle. Then all at once both of them abruptly froze still as statues. The low-slung godzilla sank to its belly. The bipedal monstrosity held a forelimb aloft in a grotesque parody of a military salute.

In the sudden silence, Falkenstein was aware of raucous human laughter. He took a careful second look at the immobilized godzillas. A long-haired man, naked save for black shorts, sat on the neck of the low-slung green creature, laughing uproariously. Perched in a saddle strapped to the neck of the saluting biped was a blond woman, also wearing only shorts, and also laughing her damn fool head off
.

“Welcome to Godzillaland!” the woman shouted “Welcome to Hollywood!”

The two whackers broke up again at their asinine prank, and only now, after the first flash of visceral terror had passed, did Falkenstein notice the small black control consoles at the bases of the godzillas* heads. Of course! he remembered. The del gado boxes. The people here implanted electrodes directly into the brains of these monstrosities. With their control consoles, they could maneuver these great creatures like so many protoplasmic robots.

That was how they made their godzilla epics, directing the monsters by remote control. It had never occured to Falkenstein that anyone would want to use this technique to turn these huge stinking things into
riding steeds,
nor could he have imagined a state of human dementia that would find such a foul joke as had just been inflicted on them
funny
.

But that was five weeks ago, Falkenstein thought as the helicopter passed over the northwest edge of Hollywood, where workers mounted on bipedal godzillas were recreating a simulacrum of classical Athens from the flinders of its most recent epic destruction. Now nothing that the whackers did was capable of surprising him or the Institute staff, and once they had understood that, they had lost their taste for humor at the expense of the Transcendental Scientists. There was now an unstated agreement between the Transcendental Scientists and the whackers to regard each other as different sorts of maniacs and leave it at that. None of the whackers displayed the slightest interest in the Institute. They weren’t even interested in the inertia-screens—they professed to enjoy the horrible jungle heat.

More dense jungle passed beneath the helicopter, and then all at once they were over the Institute. A perfect circle three-quarters of a kilometer in diameter had been burned free of jungle by an orbital laser from the
Heisenberg
. A huge silvery disc of a building had been erected in the middle of this cleared zone—the Institute proper, a standard temporary planetary structure identical to the one in the Cords except for scale. When the Pacifican Institute of Transcendental Science became a permanent institution, permanent structures would be built in a Pacifican architectural style at a more suitable location— ideally a small island in the Island Continent a discreet distance from Gotham.

A few small domes and discs surrounded the main building inside the clear zone. The periphery of the zone itself was surrounded by a single strand of cryowire strung on poles. This projected a powerful electrical field which effectively held off the wild godzillas that infested the jungle; not coincidentally, it also prevented anyone from leaving the compound except by air.

And now that the final batch of recruits has arrived, we can seal the place off from outside contact completely for the next five months, Falkenstein thought as the helicopter touched down in front of the main building. A hundred and eighty male Pacificans, fifty staff people, and twenty
Heisenberg
women masquerading as Pacifican students in a closed environment, very much like an experiment inside a sterile test tube, without even general access to net consoles to contaminate the process. A battle every step of the way, Falkenstein thought as he led the Pacificans across the bare earth toward the building, but at last we have it!