Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 4: September 2013 (25 page)

At last, a broad band of purest scarlet arose from the dying of the day, its free ends racing around the silhouetted borders of the world until they met, annihilating one another, and vanishing into the velvety blackness of the night.

Gibson Altman—still “Senator” by courtesy despite everything that had happened in the past six years—shook his head. He always expected to hear explosions of some kind, but the spectacle was silent, produced by the plastic envelope they’d wrapped around this little world, an unforeseen effect of the specific polymer employed, the stresses it was subject to, and its distance from the sun. No one was entirely certain why it happened. There were other things to do, so many other objects of scientific research that were more important.

Things that were everyday matters of life and death.

Altman stood alone on the verandah of his official residence, hands in his pants pockets, eyes adjusting to the light of Pallas B, the tiny moon. With a feeling that was almost satisfaction, he gazed out over the freshly plowed and planted ground (not “earth”) surrounding the building, realizing again that he was literally master of all he surveyed. In the dark, and at this distance, he couldn’t see the Rimfence that marked the border of his fiefdom, nor, many kilometers further off across Lake Selous, the lights of Curringer, which in all respects represented the opposite of everything he hoped to accomplish here.

What he could see was what he’d accomplished so far:
order
. A fair beginning at it, anyway. Stretching almost eighty kilometers away in every direction, filling the vast meteoric bowl that constituted the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project, lay hectare after hectare of lovingly prepared soil, its precisely harrowed contour lines accentuated by the rising moon and slanting shadows.

Closer in, set apart by neat concrete walkways too narrow to be called streets (nor would any motor vehicle ever be permitted to defile them), tidy ranks of prefabricated living facilities shone in the moonlight. Here, the Project’s ordinary colonists were learning to pursue a life that was simple, healthy, and well planned. It was the Senator’s job to do that planning here on Pallas, second largest of the solar system’s “Big Five” asteroids—always within strict guidelines, of course, set down by master planners back on Earth.

The moon was bright tonight, presenting its broadest face to the faraway sun. It was irregular in shape, too small to pull itself into a spheroid by its own gravity. Unlike the world it circled—and three-quarters of the asteroids in the Belt which were composed of carbonaceous chondrite—Pallas B was gray-white granite. Behind him, if he’d cared to turn, he might have seen his own reflection in the Residence’s window glass. They were the only glass windows in the Project. The rest of its populace made do simply, with the translucent plastic their quarters had been constructed from. That was fitting and proper, he thought. Nobody else needed to look out from indoors to see what others were doing.

They only had to go outside and do it.

Had he cared to turn, he’d have seen the handsome face, somewhat younger in appearance than its forty-one years, of a former senator from Connecticut once regarded as the unopposed contender for the Democratic Union Party’s Presidential nomination. Following the violent scandal which had dashed that aspiration—in a United States increasingly governed by neo-Puritanism and wracked by what the media were calling “The Great Depression II”—he’d been hastily removed from the spotlight. Some wag had observed that he might have gotten away with any one of the three acts he’d unknowingly performed for the benefit of a hidden video recorder, maybe even two, but that all three in the space of one night had simply been asking for catastrophe, if only in the form of a serious back injury.

Afterward, in the rooms (smoke-filled, of course) behind the proverbially closed doors, his angry, disappointed party leadership had offered him what amounted to a lifelong sinecure or—depending on who did the describing—exile in deep space. Like it or not, they told him, he was about to become the first interplanetary remittance man, officially Chief Administrator of an agricultural cooperative being established by the United Nations on the asteroid Pallas.

Hard as it was to believe, he had to concentrate to remember her name. Everything else about her was still fresh and clear in his mind—her eyes, her smile, the precise color, size, and shape of her—he cut the thought off savagely. It wasn’t enough that she’d been impossibly beautiful, flatteringly willing. Almost instinctively, it had seemed, she’d given him everything he’d ever wanted, things he’d never known he’d wanted, things that were technically illegal in more than a dozen states. Things he’d have hesitated to ask of a prostitute.

Things that sometimes left permanent marks.

It wasn’t enough that she’d been black. Voters on the wine-and-cheese side of the spectrum, the Volvo side of the spectrum—his own side of the spectrum—were always very careful to conceal their prejudices, but they were real nonetheless (otherwise, what political profit would there have been in appealing to them with three-quarters of a century’s worth of condescending social programs?) and ran much deeper than the mere crude, open bigotry of the right. It was only later that he’d learned—because the press had informed him and the rest of the world in ten-centimeter headlines—that she’d been sixteen years old.

And she’d often brought her younger sister along.

Before six years of guilt and anger overwhelmed him as they’d done so often before, a feeling that was almost satisfaction came to his rescue. Out in the silvery moonlight, the first of his cultivation teams appeared in the distance, shuffling back from the fields they’d tended all day. And they were right on time, according to his grandfather’s antique gold pocket watch which he consulted, as he always did at this time, from this very spot on the verandah. Return too soon and they’d lose valuable daylight and person-hours, an inefficiency that, repeated too often, might someday add up to disaster for the still-struggling colony. Return too late and the fleeting moon would set, leaving the night too dark for weary feet to find the narrow pathways laid between the furrows.

Even in this failing light he could see that the colonists’ simple pullovers and loose trousers weren’t quite as splendidly creased and spotless as they’d been this morning, lined up for assembly. That would soon be remedied. Accompanied as they always were by their Education and Morale counselors whose pale blue paramilitary outfits were nearly as wrinkled and dirty as their own, they would discard their work-soiled clothing in the Project laundry, step through the communal showers, be issued fresh white denims for tomorrow, and be led to their assigned seats in the Project kitchen for a simple, balanced, and nutritious meal. All three facilities were already in full swing—being put to use by clerical, maintenance, and other service personnel—in anticipation of the mass return from the fields. Some might have thought the mingled odors of laundry, showers, and kitchen disagreeable. For the Senator they had the smell of good things being done rationally, without a murmur of disturbance from anything or anyone.

The E&M staff were an International Peace Corps detachment on indefinite loan by the United Nations to serve as the Senator’s hands and arms on Pallas. The shock batons swinging at their belts—once known as “cattle prods” before animal rights activists demanded otherwise—might be used on an occasional boisterous colonist (they could be such children, after all), but the presence of such weapons, he’d long since persuaded himself, was more for their protection from any Outsiders who might break in through the Rimfence. His colonists might be children. They weren’t barbarians. They worked hard and obeyed, building a future for themselves and, he hoped, for all mankind, in which there would be no more Outsiders to disturb the peace.

In the midst of the compound, where the colonists could appreciate it as they ate, stood an heroic-scale bronze of Horace Greeley, after whom the colony was named, the nineteenth-century founder of the New York
Tribune
, a decent, inexpensive paper meant to uplift the laboring class. Greeley had hired some powerful journalistic talent in his day but his editorials had
made
the paper, supporting a protective tariff—an issue so hot it had sparked the Civil War—advocating governmental and cultural reform, and dabbling in experimental socialism.

The
Tribune
had been popular on the American frontier, many of its readers having acted on its famous editor’s even more famous advice, “Go West, young man, go West!” Nor was this the first time Greeley’s name had been tied to a project like this. The “Cooperative Union Colony” had named a town for him in 1870, a few dozen kilometers north of Denver. Mr. Greeley, however, had ignored his own advice, stayed East, and unsuccessfully run for President in 1872.

Altman suspected the name “Greeley Utopian Memorial Project” had been chosen by a Colombo bureaucrat who wasn’t a native English speaker. With the new century, due to increasing hostility from rich Western countries, the UN had been forced to relocate to Sri Lanka. In any case, no American would have chosen the acronym GUMP.

In its way, the statue of Greeley was fully as incongruous. It had been commissioned on Earth and freighted here at an obscene cost, money that might have been better spent. The sculptor had either been a romantic fool or historically illiterate. Greeley, who’d also died in 1872, wore a spacesuit, holding the bulky mirror-visored helmet under one arm. None of the colonists had worn a spacesuit during their two-year voyage to Pallas, nor even seen a crewman doing so.

For some reason, the thought of his own seemingly endless voyage (two full weeks aboard one of the new fusion-powered constant-boost spacecraft) brought the Senator full-circle. He’d seen the aurora borealis once, on a Strategic Defense junket to Greenland. He realized now that it was a pale thing compared to a Pallatian sunset which was visible all over the asteroid. What was more, the same outrageous spectacle occurred each morning when the sun came up.

Unpredicted as it had been, the colorful display apparently harmed no one. Nor did it indicate any structural failure of the atmospheric envelope. It was
pretty
, he guessed. But with the notorious exception of various young women, he’d never cared much for pretty things as such. His publicly devoted, conspicuously long-suffering wife privately maintained that he had no poetry in his soul. For his part, he’d never claimed to have a soul, let alone one containing poetry.

The sunset was impressive. Some might call it garish. He felt that was appropriate somehow. It almost constituted the signature of the individual responsible for it. He, too, had been described as colorful, unpredictable, impressive, even garish. No one, however, had ever thought to describe the man as pretty.

What the Senator did appreciate, what the sunset mainly meant to him, was that an overbearing robber-capitalist and his pack of arrogant world-making engineers had proven imperfect, failing utterly to anticipate a phenomenon this…blatant. What else, in the name of suffering, bleeding humanity, had they failed to anticipate?

Pallas was half a billion kilometers from the sun, a quarter billion from Earth at closest passage. It was dark out here, he understood, and bitterly cold. Deep space was a living thing: hungry, vicious, determinedly clawing at a molecule-thin fabric which was their one and only protection against its ravages. And the frail lives of thousands upon thousands of helpless human beings lay in precisely the same hands whose owner had failed to predict this gaudy sunset.

Greedy hands.

Worst of all, the hands of an individual who would never have to live with the results of his failures, whatever they might be. Someone who would never take the same risks as those he’d schemed for all of his long, wasted life to exploit.

Dirty hands.

A dead man’s hands.

The hands of William Wilde Curringer.

Whither Thou Goest

Keep your overall goal in mind above all. Those who swerve to avoid a few cuts and bruises defeat themselves. Understand from the very minute the fight begins that you’re going to take damage. Accept it. You’ll suffer far worse from the idiots and cowards on your own side.

—William Wilde Curringer,
Unfinished Memoirs

It was hot in the Residence kitchen.

True, the room was air-conditioned, and every appliance within its walls was powered by the Project’s catalytic fusion reactor which, with thousands of others scattered across Pallas—small-scale, decentralized, and designed to produce oxygen and water as a by-product—supplemented a pair of huge mylar mirrors in orbit as a source of energy, and helped replenish the asteroid’s atmosphere.

The kitchen was the largest room in the building, but it wasn’t the sort of homey, hospitable refuge she’d grown up expecting to find at the heart of even the most formal executive residence. The ceiling overhead was very high, supported by stainless steel I-beams with rows of circles cut from them—which had lowered their weight for transport through space—that lent the ambience of an industrial plant and at the same time looked spindly, having been engineered for the low gravity of the asteroid, so that in the back of her mind she kept expecting them to come down on her head at any moment. The roof itself was some sort of translucent fiberglass, and the light it allowed into the room felt clinical to her, although she’d felt that way about skylights back on Earth, as well.