Pallas (8 page)

“What I don’t understand is what the Libertarians gain from acting as de facto representatives for the West.” On the screen before him, Altman watched his old friend squirm uncomfortably. “Times are changing too much, Gibbie. I’m getting too old.”

Altman smiled sadly. It wasn’t Dodd’s age, but the age he’d lived in most of his life. He was a survivor of an era of “broker parties,” political entities representing no idea or collection of ideas (although they might pretend otherwise when tactics called for it), but which simply accrued power for its own sake.

In a sense, the Republicans and Democrats had been professional athletic teams, striving mightily to defeat each other for the money, the spectacle, for victory itself, but for nothing else. They might even e
x
change members, who would be expected to play as hard for their new team as they had for their old.

Straddling the transition between two eras, Altman could understand and sympathize with Dodd, but following the worldwide economic co
l
lapse, more had changed than the names of two outdated political parties. Altman knew the Libertarians as ideologues who claimed to value pri
n
ciple above all else, including short-term political gain. In his view, they’d remained consistent enough over the years to contaminate the other parties, which now represented ideologies of their own.

In time, the “Sagebrush States,” also known as the “Jackelope R
e
public”—those west of the ninetieth meridian, popularly called the “Webb Line” after historian Walter Prescott Webb—had no longer b
o
thered sending delegates to Congress. Even worse, the myriad mandates of Washington were increasingly ignored as water, gas, electricity, trash hauling, postal, telephone, and other vital services to government buil
d
ings became mysteriously unreliable overnight. Thousands of outraged federal bureaucrats, tax collectors, and law enforcement officials found themselves harassed, disarmed, arrested,
even
jailed.

Afterward, they invariably received apologies from local authorities for the “terrible mistake.”

Others, falling into less temperate hands, simply disappeared, never to be heard from again.

With its brightest Presidential hope attuned to the Age of Ideology and foremost among the advocates of harsher policies toward the West, the Union Democratic Party was willing to reimpose Washington’s authority by military means. In light of the location of most of America’s missile silos, obsolete fission plants, and radioactive dumps, however, this was seen as provocative by others. The Presidency and both houses of Co
n
gress belonged to a coalition of Conservatives (who’d followed Dem
o
cratic example by changing the name of their party) and Libertarians (who’d established themselves as a permanent feature of American pol
i
tics following the disaster they’d warned was coming for thirty years).

What Brody had said of international politics was true as far as it went. Although the people of Earth neither fully understood nor entirely trusted the circumstances which had brought it about, the Cold War had ended. Sometimes, however, it seemed as if everyone was waiting around nervously to see what would replace it. Preoccupied with what they perceived as dangerous worldwide instability, and in the continuing a
b
sence of any sort of open declaration by the states west of the Webb Line, the ruling coalition, at least for the moment—which had so far lasted more than a decade—refrained from acting against the West.

Meanwhile, in what people and the media everywhere were now calling “West America”—and in “East America,” as well—a series of everyday economic and social realignments with the Canadian provinces, which had long suffered many of the same regional divisions manifested to the south, had, for all practical purposes, rotated the international border ninety degrees.

But Dodd was going on.
“One more thing.
I understand that little bitch Martie Mough is headed out your way and plans to drop by the Project for
an interview. She came along a little after your time, Gibbie, so you may not know much about her. The story I get from my media people is that she used to pay lip service to Lyle Latheman over at LiteLink, where she started in the secretarial pool, then switched to GIGO last year for a cool fifty million NADs. Watch her, Gibbie my boy. She’ll flap those ey
e
lashes at you and waggle her cute little ass, then fuck you the first chance she gets.
And not in a nice way.”

Altman chuckled, but wondered what the penalty was for not su
c
cumbing to the charms of Martie Mough.

“That’s all for now, Mr. Chief Administrator. I know you’re doing God’s work out there, and doing it damned well. Let me hear from you soon. I’ll be looking forward to it.”

The screen blanked.

Altman sighed wearily, thought about the unfinished work still lying on his desk in the next room, then sighed again and began composing a reply to his old friend back on Earth.

“Elwood!”

Dodd hated being called by his first name.

Individuals obtained recognition of their freedom by fighting and bargaining, or—failing in this—they could run away. This running away was possible because they had somewhere to go.

—Walter Prescott Webb,
The
Great Frontier

L
ooking out the window and seeing dust on the horizon made Gwen think of the historian Walter Prescott Webb again, and of the women of the Great Plains who knew in the morning, because the prairie was so flat, that they’d have guests to feed before sundown.

Finally satisfied, more or less, with the state of what was unfortunately and undeniably a rather well-worn carpet, she pulled the vacuum hose from its outlet in the wall, rolled it up, and tucked it behind some boxes on a top shelf of the closet.

She was nervous about meeting Sarah Murdoch.

It wasn’t just because the aging actress had once been the brightest star of Hollywood and Broadway. Gwen admired her for many more things than that. It was true she’d started in the chorus line and gone from there to musicals and comedies to become the most celebrated singer, dancer, and comedienne in show business. But Sarah Murdoch hadn’t been co
n
tent merely to remain pretty—although it was wonderful what plastic surgeons could do these days to stave off old age—she’d kept in physical shape, as well. At fifty, she’d been pictured on the cover of a national magazine kicking an exceptionally well-turned leg higher than her head, rehearsing for a revival of one of her most successful shows.

Gwen shut the closet door—with considerable difficulty, as it stood open most of the time—glanced out at the horizon again, then turned her attention to the toys and stuffed animals she’d tossed onto the unmade bed to get them out from underfoot. The toy population had long since outgrown the toy box. She’d anticipated that and brought a large carton from the kitchen, filling it and hiding it in the knee-well behind the ruffled pink skirt of the vanity.

Being pretty had never been enough for Sarah Murdoch. In younger days, she and her actor-producer-director brother had stood bravely on the side of every humanitarian issue that the world around them seemed to be turning away from—higher taxes, nature preservation, aid to di
s
tressed and developing countries alike, democratic limitations on scie
n
tific research, gun control, nationalized industry, animal welfare, state health and housing programs—and for some reason it had never seemed to hurt their enormous, well-deserved popularity.

Now what to do with all these overly cute pelicans, tigers, leopards, and so forth? For a child without grandparents—her own mother and father were dead and Gibson’s parents had all but disowned him during the scandal—this one did surprisingly well, thanks to a number of childless maternal uncles and aunts anxious to make up for the fact of their exile as well as the lack of grandparents. Most—the solid Union Democrats—sent soft, cartoonlike replicas of endangered species, the profits from which went to conserving the originals. There was even an
appealing, padded bristlecone pine tree around here somewhere.

Sarah Murdoch was pretty solid herself, now that Gwen considered it. In the wake of the collapse and reorganization of the major American political parties, she’d had the sense to abandon the foolish consistency of long-outmoded liberal values and publicly oppose the repeal of porn
o
graphy and drug laws, as well as fighting a noble but similarly losing battle against the Curringer Trust’s pet resolution in the UN proclaiming a so-called human right to vote with one’s feet—in other words, to abandon your homeland simply because you think you’ll be better off somewhere else, selfishly depriving your native country of badly needed intelligence and talent which weren’t truly yours to begin with, anyway.

Shaking her head, Gwen tried hiding the stuffed animals atop the c
a
nopy of the four-poster. Its ruffles, and those of the bedclothes, matched those of the vanity, but the fabric was faded and threadbare from too many washings. And the animals were all too apparent, unfortunately, from the perspective of someone lying on the bed. It looked like a bushel of potatoes was about to fall onto one’s
face
.

Sarah Murdoch had lent her name to the most controversial ideas. Wages for housework, which had fizzled during the last century, she’d raised from the dead almost single-handedly. Later, she’d written best-sellers on near-death experiences, telepathy, astrology, spiritualism, prehistoric astronauts, clairvoyance, telekinesis, the
I Ching
, the Tarot, reflexology, and nonsecular faith healing.

In between, she’d been to London as a guest of the last Marxist state on Earth, to Aspen (where she maintained legal residence) as a duly elected delegate to the Union Democratic Party’s first national conve
n
tion, to the Hague to demand that Interpol spray the world’s tobacco fields with paraquat, and to Colombo to badger the General Assembly into funding the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project. And she’d soon be here at the Project itself to entertain the colonists and see for herself what they’d accomplished with what she’d helped them obtain.

Unable to avoid another anxious glance out the window, Gwen found she was humming a song from the classic video
The Music Man,
the one about “The Wells Fargo Wagon.” The traveling dustcloud had grown
closer all day, heralding the arrival of the star and her performing co
m
pany—too many and with too much baggage to fly down from the North Pole in those ridiculous, tiny, ultralight aircraft the Outsiders used.

Gibson had tried getting them a cargo helicopter from Colombo, but had failed. They’d settled on a huge-wheeled rollabout intended for a UN Lunar settlement that had never quite worked out—the Swiss-South African investors who had bought that colony out were building hig
h
ways for private automobiles, of all things! The machine had been di
s
assembled on Earth, shuttled bit by bit onto one of the big Curringer Liners, shipped to Pallas, and reassembled at the North Pole.

Once it returned Miss Murdoch and her entourage to the spaceport, someone would drive it back to the Project, where it would double their present fleet of such vehicles, used for heavy farm chores and hauling produce to the market in Curringer. It represented a generous gift, esp
e
cially since Miss Murdoch had insisted on buying it from the contractor herself and paying the freight. Too lightly built for work in the gravity of Earth, it had been sitting at a factory in Prague gathering dust and taking up space, about to be broken up for parts.

None of that made Gwen feel nervous now as she personally straig
h
tened, cleaned, and dusted the Residence’s only guest room, hoping Miss Murdoch would be willing to spend a night in it, although at any other time in her life it would have been enough. Actually, it was her daughter’s bedroom, and as much as she dreaded putting little Vanessa in with Gibson Junior these days, if only for a few hours—even the servants and staff had learned to avoid him—it was necessary. Nor was it the fact that all of her own clothing was years out of date. Surely Miss Murdoch would understand and overlook something like that.

What made her nervous was the personal reason she wanted Miss Murdoch in this room, especially during those first few precious minutes after she’d led the woman here, alone, without Gibson around, and was theoretically making sure that she was comfortable. What made her nervous was the favor she meant to ask of a person she didn’t know and had only admired anonymously for most of her life.

Of the three overland journeys the Lunar rollabout would be making
before its conversion to more mundane purposes, the trip down from the North Pole, the trip back, and the final trip to the Project, Gwen was concerned about the middle one.

She wanted to go along.

Her bag was packed only with what she and her three surviving children would require during the two-week voyage that would take her back to the home her parents had left her in Arlington.

Making as little fuss about it as she could manage given the conditions she was operating under, because like it or not she would always be the perfect political spouse, she was ready—had been ready for a long time—to leave Pallas, the Project, and a husband who had neither needed nor wanted her for years.

Emerson didn’t know how he’d gotten roped into this ceremony, but it was messing up his plans.

Cleared through the security gate in the Rimfence, the rollabout from the North Pole had covered the seventy-eight-kilometer distance to the Residence and compound in forty minutes on what was said to be the only paved road on Pallas. After the rough, lumbering journey here cross-country, it must have seemed like flying.

Anybody might have thought it was Santa Claus’s sleigh, the way it had been decorated and the way people were acting. All the servants and their families were on display in bright, fresh uniforms, democratically shoulder to shoulder with the Chief Administrator, his thin, pale, nervous wife, and their three children: evil-eyed Gibson Junior (who appeared to be keeping himself uncharacteristically close beside his father), gentle little Vanessa, and the two-year-old—Emerson could never remember its name or gender—squirming in its mother’s arms.

Emerson felt like squirming, too. Standing on the verandah with his own mother and several brothers and sisters—his father assigned the humble task of helping make up the crowd scene below—he gave the machine a critical eye to take his mind off the embarrassment he felt for himself, his family, and his fellow peasants.

It was almost identical to the hauler that already served the colony, a
great plastic-lidded aluminum trough five meters wide and thirty long, hanging from—more than resting on—two dozen huge fin-treaded tires twice as tall as he was.
Grossly overbuilt for conditions on Pallas, which exerted only about half of Luna’s pull, both had come cheaply to the Project through UN sources.
The canopy of the Project’s vehicle had long since been removed to increase its cargo capacity, the curved, magn
e
sium-strutted sheets of plastic having been set on a foundation of met
e
oric stone to function as a greenhouse which would probably be expanded now, once this machine was turned over to the Chief Administrator.

Where life support machinery—oxygen, cooling, and heating equi
p
ment for the harsh
Lunar
environment—had once hung between the tires, the racks were now filled with boxes, bales, and trunks. Those same racks, on the machine the colony already used, were an important element in Emerson’s plans for tonight.

Standing at attention, their shock batons swinging from their belts, five hundred United Nations Education and Morale counselors—one for every twenty of the Project’s unarmed and compliant laborers—formed a kind of human corridor along both edges of the brand-new semicircular driveway in front of the Residence. Their pale blue one-piece uniforms couldn’t compete with the blazing splendor of the visiting machine or the circuslike spectacle of its arrival.

To begin with, all thirty meters of its hull had been enameled in the pink equivalent of international safety orange. That much of any color was painful enough to look at, but the words
sarah murdoch’s inte
r
planetary tour of stars
were emblazoned over it in a similar flu
o
rescent blue that made the letters shift and dance in one’s tear-filled field of vision. Over that were many layers of transparent finish embedded with both metallic and pearlescent spangles, and strings of hundreds of tiny colored lights winking on and off at random.