Executive

by Piers Anthony

  We were, of course, accustomed to the city-bubbles. This one was different. The naturalistic environment extended in a full sphere around us, like a giant map: plain, jungle, desert, and lake, all there in living color. The sun-beacon projected the concentrated light to half the sphere, leaving the other half in deep shadow, simulating day and night. It rotated slowly so that a complete circle was made in twenty-four hours. This was mostly for the benefit of the living plants; the elephant could choose its place and time, obtaining the light or the darkness whenever desired.

  We became part of a party of about twenty-five sightseers, mostly children. The canned tour announcement came on: “This is the Elephant Dome. It was constructed in 2586 and has been in continuous service since. Its ecology is completely self-contained except for the elephant and its diet; the insects, field mice, snakes, and assorted birds reproduce themselves and maintain their populations in equilibrium without interference by man. We do monitor the air, but this is minimal; it regenerates naturally. If mankind were to disappear tomorrow, this community would continue indefinitely.”

  “Not likely,” I muttered. “The necessary concentration of the sunlight, twenty-seven-fold, has to be done by gee-lens, and that technology has to be maintained by man.”

  “Oh, Daddy, don’t talk back to the recording,” Hopie said impatiently. She nudged Amber. “Isn’t he funny? He argues with canned announcements!” Amber grinned dutifully. She was a great deal more expressive than she had been when she arrived; one year of our influence had been good for her.

  “Elephants are the largest of all contemporary land animals,” the voice continued. “More than six hundred varieties have existed in the past, but only two survive naturally. The one in this bubble is a genetically crafted Mammut americanum, or American mastodon. We can call her Mammy, of course.” The announcer paused to allow suitable chuckles of appreciation. Naturally Mammut became Mammy. “She stands seven feet tall at the shoulder and would weigh six thousand pounds if subjected to normal-gee. However, she is fifty-two years old and in indifferent health, so we have scaled down the gee to eighty percent.”

  “That’s not very big,” Hopie said. “I read where African males weigh twelve thousand pounds and are over ten feet tall.”

  “Don’t talk back to the recording,” I admonished her.

  “I’m not!” she protested. “I’m just making a clarification.”

  “So good to know the distinction.”

  “Fifty-two,” Amber said. “Your age.”

  “Thank you so much for reminding me,” I said, frowning, and I knew she was smiling. “But I’m not quite as fat as the elephant.”

  The recording continued with information about elephants in general and Mammy in particular: how large her brain was; how padded her feet; how versatile her trunk. “There are forty thousand muscles and tendons in her trunk; it is an extremely precise appendage. Her ears are large and have many blood vessels; she flaps them to make a breeze and cool her blood.”

  “I want to get in close and get some pictures,” Hopie said.

  “Let’s hear the spiel through first,” I said. “Then there’ll be the tour through the habitat.”

  “Mammy consumes fifty thousand pounds of hay every year,” the spiel continued, “in addition to thousands of gallons of mixed grains, about six thousand pounds of dried alfalfa, and thousands of potatoes, cabbages, apples, and loaves of bread. She drinks about eight thousand gallons of water.”

  I considered those figures. The cost was phenomenal! We could feed a lot of people with fifty thousand pounds of grain. The water use wasn’t so bad because it was recycled, but the food— well, surely they recycled that indirectly, via the manure, but still I had to consider whether it was worth it.

  “... relatively inefficient,” the voice continued. “Mammy actually eats twice the food that would be required by an animal of her mass with superior digestion.”

  It looked bad for Mammy.

  Then we proceeded to the tour of the grounds. Our party descended to the rim. The canned lecture followed us, explaining that the elephant was very careful where she went and would not cross a ditch more than five feet across and five feet deep. Thus we could walk in perfect safety along the marked path that was protected by naturalistic ditches and barriers. The elephant could swim well enough, with all of her body submerged except the tip of her trunk, but concealed vertical mesh under the lake region prevented her access to the marked trail in that direction.

  We filed along it. “Oh, there she is!” Hopie exclaimed, pointing. “Coming toward us.”

  “You don’t want to wait here,” a more experienced visitor said. “Watering time in five minutes.”

  We moved on, not wanting to get wetted down in the simulated rainstorm coming up. We skirted the shore of a pleasant little lake.

  I heard a little hiss. I looked—and there was a smoking spot on the turf at my foot.

  My military experience gave instant recognition. That was a laser score!

  “Girls, get out of here!” I said, and dived into the lake. Lasers are deadly but not through water. I was under attack, but my guards would manifest almost immediately to cover the situation. All I had to do was stay out of range long enough to let them function.

  There was a splash beside me, and a thrashing. Someone else had jumped or fallen in. In a moment I saw that it was Amber. Did she know how to swim?

  It was evident that she did not. I stroked to her and caught hold. “Relax!” I shouted at her head. “I’ve got you!”

  She heard me and stopped thrashing. I hauled her to the most convenient shore, which happened to be in the elephant’s domain. We staggered out, my arm around her waist. I had to trust that my would-be assassin had been routed by my bodyguards and would not fire again. Still, I hauled Amber under a thick bush, to get us both out of sight.

  It could have been only a minute, perhaps less, that we were there before the guards found us. But it seemed like a small eternity. Because I had made a remarkable discovery.

  Amber, completely soaked, had her hair and dress plastered to her body. But she was not a mess; she was beautiful. Suddenly I saw the features of Helse on her. Not precisely but approximately. Amber was about fifteen years old, just a little younger than Helse had been. She was Hispanic, as Helse had been. She was very much like a younger version of Helse.

  I gazed at her silently. I saw now that she had developed in two years. Of course, it had been happening all along, but I had not been noticing.

  Not only that.

  Her development paralleled that of my anonymous helmet lover. So did her appearance, now. And her manner, as she gasped and clung to me, frightened.

  I focused my talent on her, reading her, and in a moment I had no doubt. This girl was that woman.

  The guards appeared and brought us back to the marked path and out of the zoo. I hardly noticed. My mind was in a whirl.

  Amber had not realized that I had caught on. That was the way I wanted it, because I had some complex thinking to do.

  Things were falling into place: these mysteriously appearing chips; Shelia’s attitude; the anonymous woman’s inexperience— now they all fit. Amber, lonely, liking me, unable to express it directly because she couldn’t talk in English and knowing she shouldn’t talk about this in Spanish.

  But the helmet woman had talked in English! How could that be?

  It could indeed be, I concluded. Amber could not speak English, but she did know the language. In a feelie a person’s imagination governed. If she imagined she could speak there, then she could—and so she had. And she had gotten what she wanted.

  What she wanted? I pondered the past year of helmet love, and knew that I had wanted it too. Had I realized the identity of the woman, I would never have done it; but now I did realize, and though I was shocked, I knew I still wanted that woman. Fifteen years old. Fourteen when it started. Below the age of consent. Yet the age of consent had been all but abolished by the Tyrancy; any two peo
ple could do what they wanted together, provided both understood and acceded.

  But the fact remained that she was younger than my daughter. That bothered me.

  What was I to do? I wrestled with it, then went to Shelia. “I have caught on,” I informed her grimly.

  She made no pretense at ignorance. “Then you know why she wouldn’t tell you.”

  “Yes. I would have cut it off at the outset, before—”

  “Before you loved her,” she agreed.

  I nodded. “But you—why did you collude in this?”

  “She needed you—and you needed her.”

  “But she’s a child!” I protested.

  “Not any more.”

  I thought again of our year’s affair. No, not anymore! “What do I do now?”

  “Why, you love her, Hope.”

  “But she’s younger than Hopie!”

  “So?”

  “Don’t you see—she—how can I—?”

  “Helse was sixteen,” she reminded me.

  “Helse was a woman!”

  She nodded agreement.

  And, of course, my definitions were skewed. I had been fifteen when I knew Helse. She had seemed adult then. Now I looked back on that age, and it seemed to be that of a child. It was not so.

  “Don’t you see the complications?” I argued. “She came as my—my ward. Like another daughter. How can I—?”

  “We shall keep your secret, Hope.”

  “Coral, Ebony—they know?”

  “They know. It was Coral who first recognized Helse, as it were. That was why Chairman Khukov gave her to you.”

  Obvious—in retrospect. Khukov shared my talent and perhaps my tastes. He had recognized the physical potential in the girl and seen what she would become. The fact that she was a variant idiot savant was incidental. “You demon!” I muttered.

  “You would have done the same for him,” Shelia said. “In fact, you gave him his position.”

  “Let me think,” I said. “She doesn’t know I know, and I don’t know how to tell her or what to do after I do.”

  Shelia handed me the chip. “Tell her here.”

  Maybe so. I didn’t feel free to talk to the child Amber, but I could do so with the anonymous woman. I took the chip.

  I donned the helmet and played through our latest scene. It happened to be of violent sex. I had hit her, and she had hit me, and then we had clutched each other and done it standing up. In the scene our blows had been painless; we were playing at violence, just for the variety of it, knowing that we would never have done it in real life.

  Playing at violence. Playing—as children did.

  No wonder! She was a child! And I in my second childhood.

  After the act we stood together, just holding each other. Children?

  “Amber,” I said, not sure how the helmet woman would react to this.

  “You found out,” she said.

  “I found out,” I said, half appalled that she should have had this programmed, anticipating my realization.

  I moved back in the feelie to a prior congress and repeated the word.

  She responded similarly. I went back to our very first act together—and she responded to the name.

  From the outset she had been ready, just waiting for me.

  For a year she had waited.

  A child?

  I returned to the most recent scene. “I finally realized,” I said. “But what are we to do now?”

  “Whatever you will,” she said simply.

  “No!” I protested. “You are the one at risk here. You must decide. You must come and tell me what you want—in life.”

  “Hope, I cannot speak this language in life.”

  “And I cannot touch you like this in life,” I retorted. “But now that I know, I cannot continue this way, through the helmet. Come to me, tell me in Spanish if you must, but tell me. To love you—or to leave you alone.”

  She was silent. We had progressed beyond her preparation. I removed the helmet and took the chip and gave it to Shelia.

  “I think I shall not monitor these any more,” Shelia said.

  “As you wish,” I said curtly, and proceeded to my other business.

  • • •

  Megan was now speaking out in public, not exactly criticizing the new policies of the Tyrancy but making constructive suggestions.

  She wanted attention paid to slum clearance, conservation, women’s rights, and planetary aid. She had traveled to Latin Jupiter and bought a bright and beautiful scarf there, which she wore proudly. “The people are talented and good,” she said. “But many are oppressed by their governments. We of wealthy North Jupiter cannot be satisfied while hunger and misery remain elsewhere. We must help in whatever ways we can but especially through education. The poor people cannot wait for gradual reform; in their frustration they will turn violently against their governments. The Tyrant should go for himself to see the situation to the south; then perhaps he would better appreciate the need.”

  Megan refused to participate directly in my government, but I valued her input in whatever manner it came. “Set up a Latin tour,” I told Shelia.

  • • •

  The ship lifted above the great rushing band of clouds that was the base for the United States of North Jupiter and slid south around the planet. I watched with my usual goggle-eyed tourist’s fascination. I had been over twenty years on Jupiter, but still its atmospheric dynamics awed me. You can, as the old saying goes, take the man out of space, but you can’t take the space out of the man. I had been raised on a surface that was solid, with no atmosphere beyond the dome; later I had spent fifteen years in space, mostly aboard ships. Atmosphere remained a strange thing to me, in my unconscious mind. The way it thickened and swirled as if possessed of its own volition, its cloud patterns never quite repeating themselves in detail despite their consistency on the planetary scale.

  We crossed into the mighty maelstrom that was RedSpot. I saw the endless swirls and eddies that rimmed it, stormlets paying homage to the Lord of Storms, and for a while I flirted with the trance state. To my eye the vortex seemed to accelerate, to make its grand counterclockwise rotation in seconds, so that I could appreciate the whole of it. It became a monstrous mouth that consumed the smaller swirls, one after the other, or at least sucked away much of their power. That was, of course, how it nourished itself: it was the System’s hungriest vampire.

  I felt a hand on mine and emerged from my reverie. It was Amber, beside me, for, of course, I had her along, as I normally did when contacting the officials of other nations. It had become accepted as one of the idiosyncrasies of the Tyrant, this constant presence of his ward, the mute girl; in fact, it was now expected. It seemed to lend an air of validity to the encounters, in the minds of the officials.

  So she was with me physically. And emotionally, via the helmet. But the two were not yet merged, for she had not come to me in the manner I required, to tell me that she wanted me to love her in life as I had in the helmet—or not. I had to have that independent statement from her before I could act. My memory of Reba’s lesson remained clear, and I did not want to impose a relationship of this nature on a virtual child who was in most other respects subject to my will. This much would be Amber’s choice— and if she did not tell me yes, then I would leave her alone, and all would be as it had always been, overtly. I had to have this much assurance of the fairness of my position. This much.

  Now we descended into the vortex of RedSpot, and the great swirl of it took us in, perhaps an analog of our emotional situation. The clarity of it was lost with proximity, and soon it was as if we were in a normal atmospheric current. That was the way of human objectivity, I realized: from up close, the daily routine seemed ordinary even if from afar it clearly was not. We could appreciate reality on the physical plane, on occasion, by rising above it, but how could we ever do so on the emotional plane?

  We docked at RedSpot City, the capital of this nation. Externally it was a cluster
of giant bubbles, much like any other complex. Internally, I knew, it had its own identity. But I was not properly prepared for the reality.

  The halls of the upper class were spacious and elegant. Parks, gardens, and fountains abounded, and there were many statues. We toured the Plaza of the Constitution and saw the majestic cathedral there, whose spires reached up toward the center of the bubble. Amber was plainly awestruck, and I was mightily impressed myself. Then we were received at the National Palace, and the phenomenal Castle, traditional home of the president of RedSpot. We admired the University Library, its enormous facade reflecting ancient Aztec and Toltec art.

  “But what about the residential areas?” I inquired.

  There was a certain confusion while they tried to persuade me that such regions were not really of interest to me. Ah, but they were, I insisted innocently. I reminded them that I was Hispanic myself and had come from a Hispanic planet; they were my people and I wanted to see them personally. What I did not remind them of was that it was evident that much of the aid rendered in prior years to this and other Latin Jupiter nations had been wasted. So I needed a closer look at their real nature, to justify the intransigence I had in mind—and they preferred to deny that justification without stating why.

  They could not deny me, though misgiving was manifest on every RedSpot face. Soon Amber and I were treated to an impromptu ride through one of the neighboring sections. They tried to confine it to the favored gee-norm level, but I asked to see the upper reaches, where the poor folk resided. Because courtesy required that I be humored, and because my lone say-so could cause another massive North Jupiter loan to be approved for RedSpot, they obeyed. We went directly to the top.

  Gee was noticeably diminished here, for this was nearer to the center of the mighty city-bubble, with correspondingly smaller centrifugal force. That was why it was not a favored level; prolonged residence here would weaken the body, making activity on the full-gee levels difficult. It had been to avoid a similar fate that my family had emigrated from Callisto, the better part of forty years before. We had been threatened with residence in the half-gee coffee bean plantation, and we could never have won free of that, once committed. This level of RedSpot was not that extreme, but still it was not healthy.