A World Between

by Norman Spinrad

  Carter Berman, the current Minister of Industries, a gray-haired man in his seventies who had shuffled in and out of that office more often than probably even he cared to remember, was on the comscreen now, in something of a defensive dither, trying to persuade her to establish a Pacifican Skyliner Corporation to bring down the fares on the routes between Gotham and the Cords, and Carlotta was getting that familiar sphinxlike look which should have told him that it was a lost cause.

  “…as things stand now, there are only two lines operating between Gotham and the Cords, and the competition is virtually nil, Carlotta…”

  As he spoke, Carlotta punched up the traffic figures on her access screen. “So is the traffic,” she said. “The two lines operating now are averaging only 61 percent of capacity.”

  “But check the fare structures.”

  Carlotta punched up the figures. TransColumbia was charging 180 valuns for coach and 230VN for first class. Zipline was charging 167VN and 240VN. “So?” she said testily. “There’s absolutely no evidence of price-fixing.”

  “Look at the charge per passenger-kilometer and compare it to routes of similar length.”

  When Carlotta punched up the figures, she saw that the charge per kilometer was nearly 30 percent higher than Gotham-Valhalla or Valhalla-Lombard and even 17 percent higher than Gotham-Godzillaland. But on the other hand, the profit margins didn’t really seem excessive.

  “Look at the figures yourself, Carter,” she said. “The profits aren’t out of line.”

  “They’re 25 percent above what they should be. A government corporation could cut the fares 20 percent and still show a respectable profit.”

  “At the same capacity figure?”

  “Of course,” Berman said, squinting quizzically.

  “Well hell, Carter, what makes you think we could run that line at 61 percent?” Carlotta snapped. “Demand’s inelastic. Compete with TransColumbia and Zipline, and all the liners will be running less than half-full, and the govcorp will run at a loss along with the freecorps. Then they’ll drop their routes and we’ll be stuck with them.”

  “Have you modeled that or are you just winging?” Berman asked, beetling his brows in annoyance.

  “Winging it,” Carlotta said. “And so are you, right? You don’t have a computer projection on that, do you?”

  “No,” Berman admitted.

  “Well, when you come up with one, plug me in again,” Carlotta said, unplugging herself from the circuit. She sighed. For all his Technocrat pretensions, Berman was an Interventionist at heart. If he had things his way, there’d be a new govcorp every time someone’s profit margin went half a point above 10 percent. For her part, Carlotta preferred to leave the free market alone until something got really flagrant.

  The Constitution gave the government monopolies in energy production and mining, which was more than enough to let the government run at a profit, pay a decent dividend on citizen’s stock, and keep the total economy on an even keel by manipulating energy and metals prices. Within those parameters, the free market could pretty well run by itself.

  The govcorp business had started only a century ago, when the freight-booster companies had been caught fixing prices. Profit margins of 40 percent had been excessive by anyone’s standards, but regulating the free market went against everyone’s grain. Instead, Parliament had set up a government freight-booster corporation to drive down prices by competing in the free market. It worked so well that the gov was able to dispose of its stock in the corporation within five years at a nice capital gain for the citizenry.

  But what had begun as an emergency program inevitably became institutionalized. Now there was pressure to set up a competing govcorp every time the profit margin in an industry exceeded about 10 percent and pressure to sell it out to free-market interests the moment the profit margins dropped below that arbitrary figure, whether it made sense in current stock exchange terms or not.

  As far as Carlotta was concerned, it was a visionless, rigid way to run a planetary economy, and she had been willing to lose the Chairmanship over just such issues several times. Not without a vote of confidence you don’t, Carter! she decided. She smiled her Mona Lisa smile. And we both know the votes aren’t there, she thought, calling up a status report on agricultural prices and production.

  Now here’s an area where the free market doesn’t work at all without constant finagling, she thought. The five million Columbian farmsteaders could grow enough food to feed quadruple the planetary population if they had any incentive to do so. But most of them could grow all their own food and take care of their other economic needs out of their citizen’s dividends. As a result, the free market in foodstuffs would heterodyne wildly without continual government intervention. Shortages when overproduction dropped prices so low that the farmsteaders stopped producing surpluses for the money economy, followed by sudden rises in prices, followed by more overproduction, another price drop, another shortage, ad nauseum. An agricultural govcorp would have made the most sense, but the Mainlanders had too much political clout for any such proposal to get through Parliament. So the Ministry of Agriculture was forced to buy and sell commodities in huge amounts in order to keep prices relatively stable.

  According to the current figures, wheat production was down, and soybeans were going into a glut situation. Carlotta plugged in to Cynthia Ramirez, the Minister of Agriculture.

  “Buy a hundred million bushels of wheat futures at 12VN,” she ordered. “Sell soybean stocks at 6 until the price drops to 9.”

  “We’re going to have to release wheat soon at 9,” Cynthia pointed out. “And we bought those soybeans at 8. We’ll take a beating all the way around.”

  Carlotta shrugged. It was virtually impossible to run the Ministry of Agriculture at anything but a loss. “Do it,” she said. “We can always boost the price of iron to make up the loss.”

  If that’s not too inflationary, she thought as she unplugged. The job of Chairman was essentially a juggling act. The gov as a whole had to run at a healthy profit or the voters would swiftly boot out the administration that reduced their citizens’ dividends. But the gov also had to keep the total economy and the currency in balance, which often meant doing things that were totally counterproductive in profit-and-loss terms. The Chairman had to walk this fine line continuously while juggling the entire economy, which was why any Chairmanship that lasted a full fiscal year was cause for smug self-congratulation.

  Carlotta had already been in office for two quarters this time around, but her smugness about it was tempered by the knowledge that Royce was at least half-responsible. There had never been a Minister of Media better than Royce, and never a team like the two of them in the top two offices…

  Idly thinking of Royce out there in the Davy Jones, Carlotta programmed a general weather review from the planetary observation system. The obscreen split vertically. On the left, temperature, humidity, and barometric readings; on the right, realtime images from standard observation cameras scattered around the planet.

  A heavy windless rain fell on the western slopes of the central Sierra Cordillera mountains, soaking down through the laden branches of the towering trees and turning the loamy forest floor to chocolate-colored muck sprinkled with brilliantly colored fungi…

  Rain always reminded Carlotta of that party at her Gotham tower apartment where she had first met Royce. It had been pouring that night, great driving sheets obscuring the lights of the city below and drumming against the windows. It was supposed to be one of those political gatherings put on by a rising hopeful—a great stew of power with just a flavoring of sex. And then she saw him, barechested in the then-current bucko fashion, skin-tight white pants, high black boots, a short red cloak flung casually over his bare shoulders, long brown hair, and that silly, endearing droopy mustache—a transparent attempt to look older that only made him seem even younger, even more desirable. For a moment, politics suddenly seemed so unimportant—

  A merciless sun fried
the perpetually cloudless sky over the Wastes. Heat waves shimmering above the dun-gray sands caused the far-off slate-colored mountains to waver like a mirage of themselves…

  —They had spoken only once during the party, and that only briefly. Carlotta had been holding court with a small group of older Delegates, impressing them with her grasp of the issues, whatever they had been at the time, with her momentum, her easy disdain of their temporarily higher status. She turned to get a drink, and saw him, leaning up against a wall, pelvis arched forward, looking at her.

  “Like what you see, do you?” she said with as much imperiousness as she could muster.

  “You’re a winner,” he said. “I’m at your mercy, lady. You can have me if you want me.” He laughed—boyishly, ironically. “You might even persuade me to vote for you.”

  “You certainly consider yourself a hot little bucko, don’t you?” Carlotta said.

  Royce laughed, arching himself languorously toward her. “Don’t you?” he said, looking into her eyes.

  Carlotta moved closer, piqued by his classic bucko narcissism, leavened as it was with a saving self-irony. “I might be interested if your bark’s not better than your bite.”

  “Oh, I never bite,” Royce said. “Do you?”

  Carlotta laughed and flicked a finger at the V of his pants. “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she said, snapping her teeth together—

  A sprinkling of snow drifted down from the leaden skies over Thule, lightly powdering the eternal glare ice of the frozen antarctic continent. Only the far-off domes of Valhalla fractured the endless flat white monotony of the polar cap like carefully placed dots of contrasting pigment on some minimalist abstract painting…

  —Two moments at a party like hundreds of others. A good-looking woman turning thirty and climbing up the power curve had endless young buckos offering themselves up to her, some just for the night’s pleasure, but just as many angling to make orbit around a rising star, and Carlotta had supposed that this was just another handsome and available young body in the crowd. She had thought little of it, and had gone back to politicking, perhaps with a slightly enhanced sense of her own personal charisma, certainly not thinking of that young bucko as anything more than a tasty possibility for some idle evening—

  A strange howling windstorm roared through the dense verdant jungle of Godzillaland, rainless, whipping showers of brightly colored blossoms through the tangled undergrowth. Flitbats bounced from tree limb to tree limb in skittish panic, and something huge crunched through the jungle near the edge of the obscreen…

  —Carlotta had been tired but exhilarated by the time the last of her guests left; fatigued, talked-out, but emotionally buoyed by how well it had gone, filled with a sense of impending triumph at the thought of what now seemed like her certain election to Parliament when the present administration fell.

  Absorbed in political calculations, she walked into the bedroom—and there he was. Stretched out naked on the carefully turned-down bed with a glass of wine in his hand and his red cloak draped with minutely calculated carelessness over his loins, the quintessence of bucko insouciance.

  He sipped his wine and stared at her over the rim of the glass. “Are you through conquering the world for tonight, Carlotta Madigan?” he said.

  Carlotta choked back a laugh. It was too much, it was like some silly porn opera, and yet…And yet, when he crooked his finger at her imperiously, she went to him. When he kissed her, her lips opened to his, and whatever she had been thinking about was forgotten.

  It was the perfect bucko performance, so physically perfect as to seem almost soulless, a porn opera for sure. Afterwards, he propped himself up on one elbow and regarded her with classic insolent smugness.

  “Who are you?” Carlotta said softly, playing her own part as the script would have it.

  “Royce Lindblad,” he said huskily.

  “And what manner of creature are you, O mysterious and masterful stranger?”

  “Well, truth be told, I’m an assistant producer for the Web,” he said sharply, abruptly changing verbal tone. “Porn operas for export.” And he broke up into gales of laughter.

  “You fucking son of a bitch!” Carlotta managed to shout before she started laughing with him—

  White clouds scudded across a clear blue sky over the eastern end of the Island Continent. Far off toward the horizon a single bright blue sail billowed between two forested islands…

  Sitting in her lounger, Carlotta smiled almost girlishly. They had spent the rest of that night not making love but talking media and politics, and almost from that moment that had been half of their relationship, she the master, Royce her helpmate.

  But she couldn’t look at a sail moving across the open sea without thinking of Royce out there in his boat, that young bucko still. And she couldn’t think of Royce sailing without remembering that first night, for that was the young and ever-ageless part of him that only she and the sea knew, her silly young bucko in the sweetness of the night—

  Suddenly all her net console screens went blank and then began strobing in blinding scarlet while the speakers battered her ears with a shrill electronic hooting. A priority security override! What the—

  Leaning forward nervously, Carlotta punched the “accept” button, wondering what in hell could have happened.

  The strobing of the screens and the alert siren abruptly ceased. The agitated face of a youngish woman appeared on the private govchannel screen.

  “Well?” Carlotta snapped. “Who the eff are you? What’s going on?”

  “Laura Sunshine, Ministry of Media, Web Monitoring Bureau,” the young woman said in a tightly controlled voice. “We’re getting a tachyon transmission from inside the solar system.”

  “What?” Carlotta grunted, her mind suddenly racing along in high gear. It made no sense. Modulated beams of faster-than-light tachyons were used strictly for interstellar communication—they were the medium of the Galactic Media Web. Tachyon transmission was much too expensive to use for shorter-range communication; besides, Pacifica was the only habitable planet in this solar system.

  Therefore, it had to be a starship from outside, and that was truly a historic event The instantaneous tachyon transmissions of the Web held the human worlds together, but physical travel was restricted to sub-light speeds, and the nearest inhabited solar system was a decade arid a half away.

  Furthermore, why would a starship wait until it was inside the Pacifican solar system to announce its impending arrival? Most starships carried would-be immigrants, and the standard procedure was to announce intentions from the home planet before the ship left, so that a welcome could be bought with rare items of interstellar trade—Earthside life-form embryos and seeds, unique biologicals, secret technologies—coveted by the world at journey’s end. These things were negotiated before-hand, unless—Oh, no!

  “Is this transmission in clear or in code?” Carlotta asked brusquely.

  “In clear,” Laura Sunshine said. “And you’re not going to like it.”

  “No shit?” Carlotta muttered sardonically to herself. Then, aloud: “Plug me in, and for God’s sake, scramble this circuit.”

  The govscreen went blank for a few moments and then a new face appeared on it: an older man with long, neat, steel-colored hair, an angular face with hard brown eyes, and a great beak of a nose. He was wearing an all-too-familiar midnight-blue tunic with a high stiff collar edged in silver.

  “I am Dr. Roger Falkenstein of the Transcendental Science Arkology Heisenberg.” the man said in a cool, measured voice. “We are entering your solar system and will make orbit around Pacifica in twenty days. Our mission is peaceful and will greatly benefit your people. We intend to establish an Institute of Transcendental Science on Pacifica. As Managing Director of the Heisenberg, I request permission to land on your planet and open negotiations with your government.”

  The screen went blank for a moment and then Falkenstein reappeared. “I am Dr. Roger Falkenst
ein of the Transcendental Science Arkology Heisenberg…” The damned thing was a continuous tape-loop.

  Angrily, Carlotta unplugged it and plugged in Laura Sunshine. “That’s the whole thing?” she asked.

  “That’s it, they’re transmitting it continuously,” Laura Sunshine said. She grimaced nervously. “The Pink and Blue War?”

  “Looks like it, doesn’t it?” Carlotta said grimly. “Hold this circuit and plug into planetary observation. I’ll see if we can get a visual.”

  She plugged in the planetary observation system and got a dark-haired young man on the obscreen. “This is the Chairman,” she said. “Scramble this circuit. Scramble another circuit to Laura Sunshine, Ministry of Media, Web Monitoring Bureau.”

  “Huh?” The young man gaped at her quizzically.

  “Just do it,” Carlotta snapped. “And remember, this is priority security, not a blatt to anyone.” When the circuits were safely scrambled, she said: “We’re getting tachyon transmission from a ship inside the system.” She didn’t bother to allow the ob-tech a moment to digest that. “Laura will give you the coordinates. I want you to lock a long-range orbiting scope on the beam and give me a visual at max magnification, and keep all relevant circuits scrambled.”

  A few moments later, a hazy object swam across the obscreen: a silvery cylinder against a black backdrop of space and hard pinpoint stars. A thin blue fusion-flame spouted from the near end of the thing, nearly transparent, but unwavering and perfectly conical. The ship was surrounded by a rainbow aura, as if its image were imperfectly electronically superimposed on the starfield, or as if it were surrounded by some unknown kind of energy field.

  “Can you give me some kind of speed estimates?” Carlotta asked.

  “It’s moving at about a tenth the speed of light now,” the voice of the ob-tech said uncertainly. “But…but it’s decelerating at about ten gravities…that’s…no one inside could survive…it’s impossible…”