Pallas

by L. Neil Smith

  But there was worse news awaiting the early farmer.

  Stationary as a barnacle—or, more to the point, his own crops in the ground—the farmer was tied to the land and therefore easy prey for roving bandits who eventually recognized a good thing when they saw it, settled down, and organized themselves into the first governments, dedicated to “protecting” the farmer out of everything he owned. All that the first farmer’s wonderful store of surpluses guaranteed him, in the end, was that the individual who’d labored so arduously to produce them would be victimized forever afterward by those who hadn’t.

  This wasn’t Drake-Tealy’s idea of progress.

  Nor, contemplating the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project and its Chief Administrator, was it Emerson’s.

  Those early bandit-governments, like every government that followed, systematically encouraged agriculture, perpetuating the farmer’s misery and servitude.

  Equally, they discouraged hunting, usually reserving it as a recreational monopoly of the self-appointed ruling class. They had a practical reason for doing so: the hunter’s tools are deadly weapons, capable not only of feeding him and his family, but of defending his life, liberty, and property against predators and thieves—including tax collectors. Requiring more subtlety and dexterity than raw power, they can be wielded to good effect by women, or even children.

  Since a primitive people can rarely afford the investment of effort and time represented by two distinct sets of everyday tools, the farmer’s innocuous and clumsy implements, most of which had relied on male muscle until well into the nineteenth century, severely limited his ability to fight back, and at the same time cut his potential defensive forces in half, making him a victim all over again.

  Emerson put the book down and shook his head with sudden understanding. No wonder Mrs. Singh and Brody had been in such a hurry to see that he was armed. To them, it must have been as if he’d shown up on her doorstep not only wet and hungry, but naked—hadn’t they said something like that?—and helpless as a quadruple amputee, as well.

  Thus agriculturalism had systematically selected against individualism—and generated, incidentally, the first sharp divisions between classes and genders—in favor of the genetically characterless and mindlessly compliant. Well-established evolutionary trends which, according to Drake-Tealy, had pointed in the direction of greater and greater individuation for three billion years—and helped to separate humanity from the apes—were suddenly reversed.

  But there was more.

  Just as hunters had been more independent—and more independent-minded—than their agricultural successors, it was also likely that they’d been smarter.

  Smarter?

  How could that be? Had he missed something back there somewhere? If so, where? Emerson peered at the page in perplexed annoyance, then decided gamely to push on.

  Agricultural surpluses encourage overpopulation (all right, he could see that), while at the same time, any farming society’s natural desire for more agricultural labor has exactly the same effect. (Emerson nodded in agreement with a phenomenon he’d witnessed personally.) The inevitable result of both tendencies was teeming masses of undistinguished humanity, sooner or later enduring the nasty, brutish, and short existence expected by philosophers of the hunter-gatherer, where before, many fewer had led much higher-quality lives.

  Okay so far.

  The productive classes of most ancient civilizations had been exclusively vegetarian, living on a single, bland, staple crop. At the same time, their bone-bending, mind-killing labors supported taller, healthier, longer-lived aristocracies (another of Drake-Tealy’s surmises which was supported by paleopathology) identifiable by their continued consumption of animal protein.

  In both an evolutionary and an individual sense, the full development of a higher-order nervous system—which marks a basic physiological difference between human beings and lower beasts—depends on the ready availability of complex animal fats and certain vitamins not easily obtainable from vegetable sources, at least in a nonindustrial economy. Thus it came to be that the meat-starved underclasses labored at a permanent mental disadvantage with regard to their “betters,” a phenomenon that explained, in Drake-Tealy’s opinion, a great deal about human history in general and majoritarian politics in particular.

  In his final chapters, Drake-Tealy outlined a daring strategy he’d devised to correct mankind’s greatest mistake—among the solar system’s asteroids.

  The volume Emerson was reading had originally been published in the final decade of the twentieth century, before the terraformation of Pallas. He now turned back to a lengthy introduction he’d only skimmed before, written for this edition published several years later, when, with the financial support of billionaire William Wilde Curringer and the philosophical backing of novelist Mirelle Stein—under the governing influence of her own daring strategy, the Hyperdemocratic Covenant—the Pallatian Outsiders had returned to a hunting economy after ten millennia...but with a high-tech twist.

  ...as a result, Pallatians now divide their time between hunting hundreds of wild species first brought to the asteroid as frozen embryos and raised on private ranches in the absence of intensive farming (anywhere on Pallas but in the United Nations’ Greeley Utopian Memorial Project), and what they themselves term “civilization maintenance”—the usual variety of twenty-first-century tasks performed under a profit-driven system of divided labor and laissez-faire capitalism.

  Divided labor?

  What was that?

  Laissez-faire capitalism?

  He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  Emerson looked down at the crumbling remains of his sandwich, containing, among other things, thin, delicious slices of lightly roasted, heavily spiced meat, probably elk or venison if he remembered correctly what Mrs. Singh had told him before she left. He hadn’t consciously realized that he was eating animal flesh again—and enjoying it thoroughly. And the more answers he acquired to his questions, the more questions he seemed to have as a consequence.

  He understood—although he was no more certain what to make of it—that hunting was more than just something the Outsiders did for its own bloodthirsty, barbaric sake. Hunting was more than simply how they proved themselves as a people and as individuals. Hunting was even more than merely how they fed themselves.

  To them, hunting was an act consistent with their evolutionary history, with their nature as predators, and with Nature herself—a consistency which made it all that much easier to defy her, when they wished, in matters, such as crossing the dark reaches of space to build a home on an asteroid.

  To them, hunting represented independence and freedom—which Emerson realized intuitively are not the same thing, after all. He knew it was the former which created the latter. He didn’t realize, at the time, that it was this all-too-rare intuition—and the fact that they could see it manifested plainly in his character—which was the reason his new friends trusted him so easily.

  He did understand, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that hunting—along with everything hunting meant to the Pallatians—was their entire reason for being here.

  Of Iron Pigs and Pig Iron

  The only prayer I’ve ever felt the urge to utter is this: “Whatever gods may be, preserve us from the self-righteously useless, the militantly helpless, and the dogmatically uncertain.”

  —William Wilde Curringer, Unfinished Memoirs

  “Emerson Ngu, you’re on deck!”

  The amplified voice of the match director made him jump, although he’d been waiting nervously to hear it say these words for an hour. Flexing the anxiety-stiffened fingers of his right hand, he glanced down at the odd sight of the Grizzly Win Mag hanging in a holster off his right hip, unloaded, slide locked back. His left hand held a score card and a plastic box containing 45 softpoints, each nested in its own little hole in ten rows of five, one row having been left empty.

  Adjusting his ear protectors, uncomfortable and sweaty no matter what he did and
inclined to press the narrow earpieces of his yellow-tinted glasses into his temples, he strode to the line, a strip of concrete four or five feet wide exactly like a sidewalk, that stretched across the entire back of the range. He set his card on the concrete at his feet with the ammunition box to weigh it down.

  “Emerson, you’ll be taking your five practice shots at the swinger, now. Charlie Jackson, you’re on the first string of chickens, is that right? Lenda Jackson, you’re shooting pigs. Mark Friedrich, you’re on turkeys. Gretchen Singh, you’re doing the rams. Okay, shooters, load five rounds and make ready.”

  On the long lope out to the range with Gretchen, who’d gotten him into this, Emerson had emptied his four magazines of the seven hot-loaded rounds they carried and reloaded them with five match cartridges apiece. Now he drew the Grizzly, careful to direct its cavernous muzzle downrange, and inserted a magazine in the grip. Keeping his finger off the trigger, he depressed the slidestop with his left thumb and let the slide jump forward, feeding the first round to the chamber. Common wisdom and his own experience told him this would be the least accurate shot of the five—the so-called “semiauto effect”—and he was glad it would be at twenty-five yards. He flipped the safety up with the same thumb, took a long, deep breath, and waited for the next command.

  “Shooters, at your own pace, fire five rounds!”

  Emerson raised the Grizzly and sighted it at the swinger which, with the other chickens, was placed twenty-five yards from the line. Like the other chickens used in this game, it was a simple profile cut from a sheet of five-eighths steel. To Emerson it looked more like a duck. Unlike the other chickens, standing on their own little welded feet like toy soldiers, this hung from a frame on a length of motorcycle chain and didn’t need to be set up again after each successful shot. Trying to remember all the elements of marksmanship at once, he thumbed the safety off, focused on the brilliant front sight which he held under the foot of the chicken, took a deep breath and let it out, took half a breath and held it, and began squeezing the trigger. Sometimes it seemed like it took forever.

  His right index finger was better educated, after nearly a year of doing this, than the first time he’d fired the Grizzly. There was a now-familiar hesitation perceptible about halfway through the trigger-pull which he’d meant to have a gunsmith look at or do something about himself. After a while, he’d simply gotten used to it. It told him the big autopistol was just about to go off.

  There it was. The Grizzly Win Mag roared, even with the reduced loads he used for matches, and slammed into his palm as the muzzle lifted. The chicken didn’t move. His first shot of the day was a clear miss, an inch low and to the left.

  Emerson sighed. He always did badly with his five practice shots and was undismayed, though he could have used a spotter. Joe Tinkle and Noah Fulmor, fellow workers at the machine shop in Curringer who usually spotted for him (as Emerson did for them), were off in the weyers at the moment, hunting deer. They’d also missed work yesterday. Among Outsiders, hunting was considered a perfectly acceptable reason for skipping a day or leaving work early. The boss merely insisted that someone be available to cover for him when he was off hunting, himself.

  Somewhere behind his right shoulder came the metallic tinkle of an empty case. Emerson had learned not to worry where his ejected brass went, although it was expensive and reusable. Club members collected it in plastic buckets, between courses of fire, along with everyone else’s, as he’d collect the empties when it was his turn. It would be sorted out later, and since he was the only one who shot .45 Winchester Magnum, and it was twice the size of the ten-millimeter cases almost everybody else was using, getting his brass back would be easy.

  Emerson’s second shot took the chicken in the foot, as it should at this range, the Grizzly being sighted at seventy-five yards for the turkeys. As it swung a few times on its chain, he reminded himself that the trick was to take his time. This wasn’t a combat match where speed counted as much as accuracy. He was allowed a glacier-slow two minutes for his five shots, and the point was to lower the pistol between them, breathe, relax, and let the circulation come back into his arms.

  His third shot splashed lead on the matte-black surface of the chicken in the same place as his second. He’d learned that the Grizzly was capable of one-inch groups at this range if he was up to it. His fourth shot was a bit high, and his fifth—his arms were getting tired—sprayed dull silver in the dead center of the target. He lowered the massive Grizzly and breathed deeply.

  Once on the line, Emerson never heard the sound of other people’s gunfire or saw or felt their empty cases zinging at him through the air. His five shots had only taken him forty-five seconds. Not good. He’d have to spread them better and rest in between if he wanted to advance to Class double-A as he’d hoped to this morning.

  For Emerson, the last year had passed quickly and, he’d been surprised to discover, happily. Accustomed to backbreaking agricultural labor, here he’d worked at several jobs, all of which were cushy by comparison, beginning with chores around Mrs. Singh’s place. As she’d predicted, that had only lasted a few days. In a vehicle repair and refueling station, he’d learned more about mechanics. In a machine shop, he was still attempting to master lathe, mill, and drillpress. In a small foundry, on his own time, he was learning to make use of cheap fusion power and Pallas’s most abundant natural resource, metals of every description.

  Waiting, as all practice shooters did, until the competitors shot another five-shot string, Emerson finally received the command to make sure his pistol was unloaded, holster it, and move to the next position. On command, once the range was clear, he bounded forward to the six freestanding chickens Charlie Jackson had knocked down and set them up again. The difference between this game and matches like it shot in West America was that it was necessary, at Pallatian gravity, to fasten the silhouettes to their stands with meter lengths of slender steel cable sheathed in transparent plastic, so they’d fall where they’d been shot and wouldn’t be blasted yards away by the force of the projectile striking them.

  Walking back to the line, Emerson’s mind wandered to the past—welcome, since it gave him some relief from match nerves—and the distance he’d come, figuratively speaking, since his first day Outside. It hadn’t taken him long to discover that the qualities which had always gotten him into trouble at the Project got him promoted into better-paying jobs with more responsibility on the Outside. His specialty was mechanical improvisation—everything from straightening bent wheel rims to converting engines from one fuel to another—his quick mind generating more profitable solutions to problems than any 50 individuals could ever act on.

  During that time, he’d met Mrs. Singh’s other boarders, two of whom, the Jacksons, were shooting ahead of him this morning. They had turned out to be perfectly decent, ordinary people who, they were quick to assure him, hardly ever ate little Vietnamese-Cambodian Refugee boys for breakfast. Slowly at first, with more than a little help from each of them and from Mrs. Singh and her daughter—not to overlook R.L. Drake-Tealy—he’d started to sort things out.

  Life was pleasurable and surprisingly easy here on the Outside, without obstacles—like the taxation and regulation Mrs. Singh and Aloysius Brody, among others, loved to shudder over reminiscently, or the UN goons he knew—standing in the way of personal betterment or social progress. Not that there weren’t natural obstacles. The weather was as unpredictable here as anywhere, there were only twenty-four hours in a day and seven days in a week. But unlike most of the Earth’s populace—or the hardworking, hopeless inhabitants of the Project—Pallatians actually looked forward to getting up every morning. He came to realize they’d be a wealthy people, once their capital base was fully established.

  Already a few prefabricated mansions stood cheek-by-jowl with the first corrugated sheet-steel pioneer shacks in Curringer. Its one bustling street was fronted by a bank, a videochip rental, two general stores, three brothels, the plumbing and machinery shop where
he currently worked, four saloons (the Nimrod was one of them), five gunsmithing establishments, a combination doctor’s clinic and veterinary office, and a barbershop. An oil well pumped cheerfully away in its middle, around which noisy, bustling foot and vehicle traffic had to detour.

  At the same time, having given the matter much thought and unwilling to relish what he didn’t provide himself, he’d put his pistol to use while paying Brody a little every week. (It had turned out to be expensive, since Pallas had no weapons industry of its own; he’d been interested to learn this and filed it away for future reference.) He’d soon taught himself as much as he could with informal backyard shooting. To gain more proficiency, he’d allowed Gretchen to bully him into competing at the metallic silhouette matches held every week on the northern outskirts of town. Even so, he hadn’t begun making substantial contributions to Mrs. Singh’s larder, preferring to shoot rabbits, grouse, pheasant, squirrels, and other small game with reduced loads (reduced for the Grizzly, anyway) to risking a shot at his first big game before he felt he was ready.

  As for Gretchen, he remained as fascinated with her as he’d been the first day. She seemed to understand him, and the environment he’d come from, better than anyone else he’d met.

  “Bill Gonzales,” proclaimed the voice of the director. The boy glanced back to where—Al Theroux, his name was—stood at a card table behind the line with the record book under his hand and a bullhorn at his mouth. “You’re on deck: five shots at the swinger. Emerson Ngu, you’re on your first string of chickens. Charlie Jackson, you’re doing pigs. Lenda Jackson, you’re shooting turkeys. Mark Friedrich, you’re on rams. Okay, shooters, load five and make ready.”