Should the existence of helium-3 on Mercury be made public, the status quo could collapse in the blink of an eye. Small-fry pirates would descend from all over the system. It would be chaos.
“Don’t worry,” Elfrida said to the children. “My lips are zipped.”
“Are we there yet?” Lena whined.
“Nope,” Jake said. “Why don’t you two log out for a while, let your assistants take over? It’s silly for us all to be here.”
After running for a couple more hours, they reached the top of one of Mercury’s lobate scarps: vertical precipices heaved up by the primordial process of cooling and shrinking. This one was named the Rowling Scarp. In the blackness 2km below, blue flames flared, their tops snapping off and dancing independently.
~Try infrared, Elfrida’s MI assistant advised.
~Wow!
The suit’s infrared vision revealed a mobile mine that made the UNVRP operation look like a hobby kit. Machines the size of spaceships trudged along the foot of the scarp, sucking up blast debris and feeding it into a vacuum smelter—the source of the unearthly flames.
“We’ve got a smelter, too,” Boris said. “But it’s not as big as that.”
“What’s that over there? It looks like a factory.”
“It is one. It makes refrigerators.”
“No,” Lena said. “Toasters.”
“It makes everything,” Jake said.
Elfrida’s assistant informed her that this was a white goods fab operated by Danggood Universal, one of the smaller players on Mercury. In an era when 3D printers could fabricate human organs, never mind consumer durables, high material prices on Earth meant that it was still cheaper to print these things (refrigerators and toasters, not human organs) on Mercury, attach solar sails to them, and send them winging back to Earth. Red tape and changing mores had killed manufacturing on humanity’s home planet. Heavy industry was now seen as disgusting, raising the cost of regulatory compliance to the point that it made more sense to operate on Mercury.
“They shoot the stuff into orbit from here,” Jake said. “We might see a launch if we hang around long enough.”
“Y’know, on Earth,” Elfrida said, “people sometimes wonder why stuff they ordered takes so long to arrive. Now I know. It’s because someone miscalculated the launch trajectory from Mercury.”
“Really?”
“I’m just kidding. They do final assembly on Earth. You can order whatever and it arrives the same day.”
“Really?” the children repeated, longingly. Elfrida felt bad for making them envious.
It was time to go to work. Jake took a length of slithery fabric out of his cargo net. Each holding one corner, they unfolded it over the edge of the scarp. They splarted down the top corners. Boris and Lena then leaned over the edge to shoot more splart at the bottom corners, sticking the banner to the rock.
They shone their phavatars’ headlamps down at their handiwork.
The banner read: VOTE FOR ABDULLAH HASSELBLATTER! MOAR ART.
“I hope this works,” Elfrida said.
“It’ll work,” Jake said.
“I’m just wondering if this is really the best way to use our resources.”
“Why, what would you have done, ma’am?”
“Oh, probably slapped together a sim and used profile-crawling software to offer it to likely voters.”
“You’re so old-school!” Lena jeered. “You have to get physical with these people. It’s the only way to make them notice you.”
“I just wonder if anyone’s going to see these,” Elfrida pondered, as they jogged along the scarp to hang another banner ahead of the Danggood Universal operation.
“It doesn’t matter if anyone sees them,” Jake said. “I mean, of course they will. Their sats can see us right now. But the point is that we went to all this trouble, so they know how much we care.”
By the time they finished splarting up their banners, satellite images had already flashed around the solar system. The images, at first transient morsels of social media fodder, gained millions of views when they were joined by images of a fight between Elfrida’s crew and another gang of phavatars who were splarting up their own banners on the same scarp. Despite Elfrida’s reservations about the tactic, it had already been copied by Dr. Hasselblatter’s rivals for the directorship.
xiii.
At that very moment, in Danggood Universal’s all-terrain mobile white goods fab, the company’s regional CEO, Kip Rensselaer, was looking out the kitchen window. The window was actually a viewport screen, and the panorama upon it would have been invisible to the naked eye. Danggood Universal operated further ahead of the terminator than UNVRP did, proceeding in darkness around its band of territory between 65° and 72° N. In this simulated view, the banners stood out like wounds on the cliff.
“Flattering,” Rensselaer said. “Do they know this operation has a human staff of four point five?”
“I don’t think you’re the intended audience,” said his visitor. “It’s the NEO colonists they’re targeting.”
“Oh. Thanks for destroying my momentary illusions of importance.”
“Sorry.” There was a pause. “Point five?”
“What? Oh. My mineralogist’s seven-year-old daughter.”
“I hope you’ll allow her to make up her own mind about who to vote for,” Dr. Ulysses Seth said, archly.
“She’s already joined the Hasselblatter fan club,” said Rensselaer. “They get capes and wizard hats to stick on their internet profiles.”
Visibly depressed, he opened the drinks cabinet and poured himself a bourbon.
Dr. Ulysses Seth watched him thoughtfully. The two men were old acquaintances. They had both spent their lives on Mercury, which bound them together in a small and exclusive brotherhood. This planet grew on you. Unlike an asteroid, Mercury had gravity, in every sense. Dr. Seth had come to cherish its sere, radiation-scalded expanses. For that reason (and others), he’d travelled here in person, rather than arranging a teleconference. His personal Flyingsaucer was parked on the stem of the cargo launcher that undulated behind the fab like a Slinky.
As they sat without speaking, a shooting star lit up the viewport screen. A container had just launched, packed with 100,000 air-conditioners.
“So who are you voting for?” Dr. Seth said.
“Not you,” Rensselaer said.
“And I came all this way to press your withered flesh and promise you sweeties.”
“A wasted guilt trip,” Rensselaer said. Dr. Seth grimaced at the pun. “We’re voting for Pyls O. Mani. When a man takes the trouble to change his name to a homonym for mucho moolah, you can be reasonably confident that his soul contains … well, no depths whatsoever. That’s what we’re scared of, you see. The depths of people’s souls. This planet turns people into poets. Strivers. Utopians. They cease to see the rocks for the horizon. Just look at Doug.”
“He’s still backing Patel.”
“He hopes to win the affection of the NEO colonists, who collectively owe him 1.1 billion spiders. But they are joining the Hasselblatter circus in droves.”
“What about me?”
“What about you, Seth? You’ve been buzzing in our ears for decades about founding a Republic of Mercury. I’ve told you, we’ve all told you over and over again, that kind of thing went out with fossil fuels. Even if we were prepared to rebel—yes, I say rebel—our independence would last precisely as long as it took the news to reach Earth. Star Force keeps a couple of ships in orbit around Mercury at all times. What’s up there right now? The Crash Test Dummy and the Dead Weather. Either of them could wipe out all our assets in less time than it has taken me to drink this bourbon. You could not hold a coalition of regional plutocrats and horny-handed plebs together in the face of such overwhelming odds.”
“George Washington did.”
“That’s the sort of thing I expect to hear from Doug, not you. Also, you’re not George Washington.”
“Nor ever li
ke to be. I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
“When a man starts to quote Eliot,” Rensselaer said, “it’s time to open another bottle.” He did so.
Dr. Seth hobbled restlessly around the kitchen. It was circular, banded in part by the viewport screen, with fish tanks running the rest of the way around. A short hop, for the fish, from tank to chopping board. Rensselaer and his staff killed the fish that they ate themselves, rather than getting a bot to do it. Space-dwellers, if they were psychologically healthy, came eventually to relish dirt, grime, fish scales, even blood. It was a natural human reaction to confinement in tunnels and radiation-shielded boxes. Sociologists saw this craving for pastoral squalor as a sign that a colony was reaching its psychological limits. They did not believe that humans could live in space any longer than three generations. But Dr. Seth believed differently. While he acknowledged that the UNVRP R&D division had gone off the rails, he saw this as something to celebrate.
Under the most unnatural conditions, human nature asserted itself.
He interpreted Rensselaer’s despair as a tribute to this same miracle.
Rensselaer was aware that humanity was collapsing into a defensive crouch, oppressed by the seemingly undefeatable PLAN.
And he believed they couldn’t do anything about it.
But Dr. Seth did.
He halted in front of the viewport screen. “I suppose you saw the news yesterday?”
“Yes. Earth’s PORMSnet intercepted another meteorite. Quite a large one. The explosion was visible in daylight from South America.”
“Isn’t it odd? In past centuries, destructive meteor strikes were rare enough to go down in history. Now, they come at the rate of several a week.”
“Oh, stop being so arch,” Rensselaer said. “You and I know perfectly well that those meteors do not wander into Earth-crossing orbits by chance. They are kinetic kill vehicles launched from Mars. Earth’s defense establishment lives in terror of the day when the PLAN throws something really big at us … something we could not blow up, or divert in time … something like 4 Vesta.”
“We foiled that scheme. If that was their scheme.”
“Yet the so-called Heidegger program lives on in 4 Vesta’s abandoned infrastructure. I can’t understand why we haven’t fragged it,” Rensselaer said.
“I can. It must be studied, its weak points found. Some think that the meteors aimed at Earth aren’t intended as kill vehicles pure and simple, but that they carry something similar to the Heidegger program, which a successful impact would unleash on Earth. Or perhaps it’s something worse. Biological terror. We have never let one get close enough to examine it properly.”
“I’ll drink to that. Are you sure you don’t want anything?”
“Perhaps a coffee.”
“Yours?”
“I’d certainly rather it to that instant swill they provide you with.”
This was the other reason for Dr. Seth’s in-person visit to Danggood Universal: he had brought Rensselaer five pounds of coffee beans. The smuggling fraternity in the test hab dealt in many things, but the greatest source of their profits was coffee, the example par excellence of a foodstuff that couldn’t be faked up from nutriblocks. Dr. Seth himself connived at this trade.
A maidbot appeared and operated the coffee grinder. A marvellous aroma filled the kitchen.
“The PLAN intends to destroy humanity,” Rensselaer said. “That is not news. Cheers.”
Dr. Seth accepted a demitasse of freshly brewed Idaho coffee and inhaled its steam in delight. “It may not be news, but it is debatable. It has been pointed out that if the PLAN means to destroy us, it’s not trying very hard, given the tactical edge its stealth technology offers, and the vast resources of Mars. I believe that their activities add up to a coherent strategy. They don’t want to destroy us physically. They want to destroy what makes us human.”
“That’s what I meant. I agree with you, Seth. So do van Gaal and Bankasuprapa.” Rensselaer named two of their confreres, the regional managers for Centiless and GESiemens. “From this distance, we have a clear view of the changes they are forcing on Earth. Slowly but surely they are molding us. By targeting purebloods, they intend to make us turn on our own. We responded laudably in the beginning, by denying the differences among us …”
“But the cracks are starting to show,” Seth finished. “Witness UNVRP’s decision to remove our pureblooded staff from Mercury. All in the name of safety.” He spat the last word with contempt.
“That wasn’t your decision?”
“Pope’s. To be fair, the man had not a notion of retreating in the face of the PLAN. He was the greatest pragmatist I have ever known. It would be cheaper to automate the Phase Five ramp? Let’s do it! His gaze was fixed on Venus, and beyond that, the stars. But the idea of evacuating our people got taken up at the highest levels. The personhood faction seized on it as a stalking horse for their own cause. Safety first! It is in danger of becoming UN-wide policy.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I am. And meanwhile, Mercury still lacks a PORMSnet of its own, which would remove the argument for evicting my people.”
“One could be forgiven for thinking you were in this for the colonization of Mercury, not Venus,” Rensselaer said with amusement.
“I have come to believe that both are equally possible and desirable. Yes, I admit it, I’ve been talking to Doug. He’s a crypto-nationalist—”
“In addition to his other, ahem, issues—”
“But he’s also a paraterraforming expert. And, Kip, sometimes it takes a foilhat to point out the obvious.”
“The PLAN has never attacked Mercury,” Rensselaer said, pointing out the obvious in his turn. A timer rang. He rose and sprinkled food into a fish tank. Slender silver branzino crowded to the surface.
“There’s always a first time. We need a PORMSnet to defend the planet. And beyond that, Kip …”
“Uh oh. I see a Doug-ish gleam in your eye.”
“This idea is entirely my own. Kip, if we were a sovereign state—just listen—we could turn over a portion of our capacity to weapons production. A fleet of ships piloted by MIs, officered by a small corps of humans. We would hurl them at Mars in numbers sufficient to overwhelm the PLAN’s planetary defenses. The—”
“Been tried,” Rensselaer said, moving on to the next fish tank.
“Not on the scale I envision. We could achieve so much here, with Mercury’s resources.”
“Have you been tested for dementia recently, Ulysses?”
“It’s one hundred percent doable! But it will take a planet. Earth is complacent, shortsighted. They won’t even admit that we’re at war. Someone has to lead the pushback. Kip, it has to be us. There is no one else. We must at least try!”
“No.”
Rensselaer removed the dust cover from a third tank. A toy boat lay sunk at the bottom. Presumably it belonged to the mineralogist’s daughter, the only child in this facility. Rensselaer rolled back his sleeve and tenderly fished it out.
“Please,” Dr. Seth said.
“Go bother someone else, Ulysses. Never was a man so misnamed. All he wanted to do was go home.”
“So do I,” Dr. Seth said. “But the home I left isn’t there anymore. Nowadays, the police paintball you for speeding. Orbital gun platforms blow up black tech labs without regard for casualties. The media amplifies scare stories to keep Earth’s people in a state of fear. Conflict abroad begets repression at home, ad hoc, ad infinitum. We have to set a new example of courage, faith, and hope.”
“You’re worse than Doug,” Rensselaer said. “He only wants to reboot the United States of America.”
A new flash of color appeared at the edge of the viewport screen. The Danggood Universal fab’s slow westward journey had brought it level with another banner. VOTE FOR HASSELBLATTER! MOAR ART. This one had a picture of a robot bison on it.
“You do know,” said Renss
elaer, “that Dr. Hasselblatter is President Hsiao’s man. She parachuted him into this campaign to stop some lunatic—like you—from walking off with the directorship.”
“You aren’t going to tell me the President came up with those robot bison.”
“No, that seems to have been Hasselblatter’s own idea. I don’t think anyone expected his campaign to take off like this. The President must be delighted.”
“Look at that,” Dr. Seth cried.
A little farther along hung another banner. This one was splarted crooked, so that a ripple in the cheaply printed fabric warped its message. Yet it could be still be read.
VOTE FOR ANGELICA LIN. GET JUSTICE.
Rensselaer laughed until he cried. “They’re all at it. Monkey see, monkey do. We are what we are, Ulysses.”
“I feel rather sorry for her,” Dr. Seth sighed. “She must have planned to run on Charlie Pope’s record. Then she found out that everyone loathed him. Now she’s having to come up with some actual principles.”
“Justice isn’t a bad start.”
Kip Rensselaer, BS, MA, Ph.D., regional CEO of Danggood Universal, Inc., surveyed the limp vegetables and pouches of condiments laid out on the kitchen counter.
“I think it may be my turn to cook supper,” he said. “Ulysses, will you be staying?”
“No,” Dr. Seth said. He’d spent too long here already. As Rensselaer had warned him up front, it had been a wasted trip. And at his age, time was a precious commodity.
From the privacy of his Flyingsaucer, he sent an encrypted email.
“The election is as good as lost. Our allies are weak reeds. You are our only hope.”
xiv.
Elfrida logged out. The children lay twitching on couches around her.
She’d promised them she would take care of the competition.
She took off her headset and gloves, and stood up, rotating her stiff shoulders.
Hotel Mercury’s telepresence center had started life as a tourist attraction, 100 years ago. Posters showed the creepy, sub-humanoid phavatars the idle rich had once used to stroll over the surface of Mercury. Elfrida walked between rows of modern couches jammed into this turn-of-the-century womb. Her hair felt sticky with the oil from other people’s heads. Her heart felt like someone was stabbing it with manicured fingernails.
The Mercury Rebellion Page 11
