Pallas

by L. Neil Smith

  With every nerve screaming at him not to, he bent down to lift one corner of the collapsed plastic tent. He’d never seen a dead human body before—at least he had no conscious memory of it—and he deeply dreaded having to see one now. It was possible that the bitter cold of the shadows had preserved these lumps of once-human flesh, if that was what they were. That would be bad enough. It was equally possible that the sunlight and heat had gotten to them through the cheap material, allowing them to slow-cook inside their sealed spacesuits.

  That would be infinitely worse.

  Emerson gulped again.

  In the end, it proved necessary to rip the plastic corner to get into it and, with Aloysius’s uncharacteristically quiet assistance, to spread it out over the adjacent rock. There, huddled face down in suits of about the same quality as the tent, were all that was left of the People’s Economic Democracy of Vesta.

  Emerson glanced up at Aloysius. The man’s face couldn’t be seen through his sun-darkened visor, but his theatrical shrug was visible even through the bulk of his suit. “Sure, an’ yer the glorious leader of this expedition, me boy. ’Twas all yer idea—an’ yer privilege t’turn over the first corpse.”

  “Thanks a billion, Aloysius.” Emerson grimaced, bent over against the resistance of his suit, put his hand on the shoulder of the nearest body, and rolled it over.

  To his relief, the tent had apparently retained its insulative properties and the body was frozen, having probably died of oxygen deprivation. He went to the next body and turned it over, and the next. Aloysius began to help, as well.

  Before they were through, he and Aloysius counted twenty-seven dead in all, of all races and both sexes, ranging in age from about eighteen to somewhere in the region of sixty.

  Junior was easily identifiable. He lay where he’d died, clutching an empty air cylinder to his chest.

  Emerson was glad to see him.

  And not a bit sorry he was dead.

  “My God,” Marshall exclaimed, still watching them from orbit. His voice coming suddenly that way startled Emerson. “It’s like Scott’s Antarctic expedition!”

  “My ass,” Aloysius retorted angrily. “It’s a hell of a lot more like Jonestown!”

  Emerson didn’t know what the two men were talking about, and he didn’t particularly care. What he could see most plainly was that, in a gesture completely typical of him, Gibson Altman Junior had thrown his life away on a venture which anyone else could have seen was obviously doomed from the outset.

  “‘Do every man equal justice,’” Aloysius quoted. “‘Let no innocent man suffer, let no guilty man escape,’ Wise words of a nineteenth century predecessor of mine, Isaac Charles Parker of Fort Smith, Arkansas, otherwise known as the ‘Hanging Judge’.”

  Equal justice, Emerson thought. The three of them had arrived at the lifeless rock which was Vesta, too late to do anything but bring back frozen bodies to their families.

  To the Senator.

  The Rabbit People

  A wise man once pointed out that the American eagle eats carrion, never picks on anything its own size, and will soon be extinct. That being so, perhaps Americans ought to select a symbol more in keeping with their current condition, like a milked cow, a sheared sheep, a plucked chicken, or a slaughtered steer.

  —William Wilde Curringer, Unfinished Memoirs

  Former Senator Gibson Altman took his first sip of coffee and sat back, bifocals temporarily folded. The elm tree he’d planted with his own two hands over Gibson Junior’s grave—had it really been ten years ago?—cast a pleasant shade on this end of the verandah, and the breeze coming off the fields was warm.

  As he had each morning for the last twenty-five years or so, since he’d first been appointed Chief Administrator of the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project, Altman was reading the overnight mail relayed electronically from Earth. He took another sip of coffee before he began again, yawned, and stretched.

  If you’re over a certain age, the thought ran through his mind, not for the first time, and you wake up in the morning and nothing hurts, then you’re probably dead.

  It was an excellent quotation, and he’d been tempted to use it publicly, perhaps as a humorous opening remark to one of his speeches (not about Social Security, of course), until his research staff discovered that it had first appeared in the writings of some twentieth-century right-wing crank, a retired Marine colonel who had apparently hated everything Altman’s predecessors stood for—public health and safety, social responsibility, ecological sanity, reverence for life and for the Earth in general—and had called them the “rabbit people.”

  In any event, the quotation didn’t seem to apply here, in the kindly gravity of Pallas. In fact, one of the items in this morning’s mail was another of the scientific reports he’d been receiving recently from the UN on the positive effects of advancing technology—and, in a footnote which was the reason he was included on the mailing list, of the asteroid’s undemanding gravity—on human longevity.

  He didn’t know if that was the reason he felt so good this morning, but he wouldn’t be suspicious of the feeling if he could avoid it. Perhaps it was because this was his birthday, although birthdays were usually far more likely to depress him. Thinking about Social Security, he was—he realized with a little start similar to the one his elm tree always gave him—sixty-five years old today.

  Most of the time lately, he conceded, he felt lousy. To begin with, he was alone in life and less prepared to deal with it than many other people he knew. He’d always been suspicious of those who preferred solitude. For most of his sixty-five years he’d never been able to stand being by himself for more than five minutes at a time.

  But here he was, ironically enough, far more profoundly alone than most of those who wanted to be. His wife, Gwendolyn—often he had to struggle for an instant to remember her name, and her face had been an indistinct blur in his memory for a long while—had left him years ago, taking two of their children with her. What had transformed her from a near-perfect political wife into a petulant, selfish, useless...individualist, he never knew. He’d never seen or heard from them again, or tried to.

  His elder son, who’d loyally remained with him, had gotten mixed up with that wild colonial girl. Then she’d been killed. And then he’d been killed. And neither calamity would have happened if it hadn’t been for Emerson Ngu, still disgustingly alive and well—and obscenely wealthy—after all these years. After all the trouble and heartache he’d inflicted on everyone around him. That seemed to be the way it always worked, didn’t it?

  Their baby daughter, Junior’s and—what had her name been, now, Ingrid, or Hilda, something like that?—who could never have been anything to her once-famous grandfather but a terrible living reminder of the tragedies and failures of his life, had been bundled off, back to the mother planet. He’d taken her up to the North Polar spaceport himself, put her on an Earthbound ship with the same two hands that had buried his son, to be raised by sister and her husband.

  How old would she be now?

  And what was her name?

  Even his faithful old foreman, Walter Ngu, was gone, savagely beaten to death by one of the youth gangs that roamed the Project these days, simply because he’d spoken sharply to one of them that morning in the fields. The poor little man had only been doing his duty. What could you do? Watch over people. Encourage them to take care of one another. Offer them every opportunity to live a safe, healthy, orderly, productive life. And they still turned out to be animals.

  Rabbit people, indeed. More like degenerate, treacherous, needle-toothed ferrets. Sometimes he looked out over the fields and hated each and every one of them. Sometimes he wanted to—he shook the thought off hastily, before it could consume him.

  He’d considered notifying Emerson, who’d been Walter’s eldest son, after all, but had finally decided against it. That traitorous, conniving ingrate either wouldn’t give a damn that his father had died, or else he’d find some way to twist thin
gs, to blame the whole affair on his old enemy, the Senator, just as he’d publicly blamed Junior for what had happened—entirely at the hands of a few drunken, irresponsible Education and Morale counselors—to that little colonial tramp. Altman couldn’t always remember his wife’s face, but he’d never forget Emerson’s when he’d brought Junior’s lifeless body back from Vesta. It had been frozen, expressionless. But inside, he’d known, the boy had been gloating.

  Ten years.

  And now the only one he had left was Alice, Emerson’s mother, ironically enough, who brought him a fresh cup of coffee as she always did at about this time, took the cold one away mostly unconsumed, went back into the Residence, and left him alone.

  Alone.

  He and Emerson Ngu now had more than enough reason to hate each other for the remainder of their normal life spans, and perhaps, if they were “lucky,” if this UN science report meant anything at all, they could manage to do it even longer than that.

  He felt a sudden chill.

  Why had he thought earlier that he was feeling so good?

  “Senator, are you ill?”

  Irritably, Altman shook his head. He wasn’t ill, merely preoccupied with what he was gradually realizing amounted to a severe attack of culture shock. Nevertheless, it took his attorney, shipped out here to the Asteroid Belt from Colombo especially for this occasion, several more attempts to get his full attention.

  The hearing was almost over. All that remained to be heard now was the disposition. Each side had exercised its opportunity to state its case over the past few hours, and Judge Aloysius Brody appeared ready to render his decision.

  How laboriously—and vainly, as it had turned out—had the Senator striven to get this matter taken out of that old buffoon’s hands, even to the extent of attempting to import an arbiter from Earth. Brody had no background in the law. Before setting himself up as a tavern keeper, he’d been a common laborer. Even now, he had no sense of the importance of his position as the only available jurist on Pallas (three others having refused to hear the case at all), and seemed to enjoy making things more difficult for anyone else who exercised authority.

  He didn’t even demand that everyone rise as he stumped back into the room—the same barroom he always used for these proceedings—on his cane and artificial leg.

  Beside him, Altman felt his UN-supplied lawyer tense as his professional involvement overrode his professionally assumed detachment. Perhaps he’d done an adequate job; he’d certainly spent enough time at it, taking ten minutes to every two the defense had seemed to require. The Senator had never been a trial lawyer himself and didn’t feel qualified to evaluate. The man couldn’t help it if he looked like a weasel, with that long, sharp nose and a case of five o’clock shadow that seemed to afflict him ten minutes after he shaved in the morning. But his suit—cheap and ill fitting as the fashion among his peers on Earth currently dictated—and his clumsiness in the low Pallatian gravity didn’t help matters.

  For his part, Altman wasn’t sure he cared any more how this farce played itself out. After all these years, after his long and faithful service, he’d hoped for more support than this from Colombo. And he could always try again, later on. In the meantime, like it or not, he had other, more visceral items to concern himself with. In the first place, he hadn’t been outside the Rimfence since Junior had been killed—had it really been seventeen years ago?—and the way things had changed had almost come as a mortal blow. The two hundred miles of rough gravel from Curringer to the Project (more accurately, between the town and the Ngu Departure plant five miles short of it) were now smoothly engineered and paved in some plastic substance which, excepting lubricants, now represented the only use a fusion-powered civilization seemed to have for petroleum products.

  Seventeen years.

  Nearly as shocking, the dilapidated rollabout—there had been no more gifts of vehicles or other major equipment from Earth—was pleasant to ride in and managed the trip, which once had taken more than half a day, in just under four hours. It helped that the machine had been retrofitted with a catalytic fusion reactor, but it meant, of course, that his drivers had been deceiving him for years about the need for an overnight layover. He was almost pleased enough over missing the arduous journey he’d expected to overlook it.

  Almost.

  Along the much-improved road lay one enormous, neatly developed homestead after another of a kind once limited to the town’s dusty outskirts, punctuated, at wider intervals than would have been the case on Earth, by clusters of shops, stores, and taverns. He saw nothing resembling a town hall, hospital, firehouse, post office, police station, or school. The Outsiders seemed more determined than ever to do without what every other member of the human race regarded as the minimal amenities of civilized existence. Not for the first time, Altman wondered how they survived, and cheerfully envisioned a series of unmanaged catastrophes for which any physical evidence seemed remarkably (and regrettably) lacking.

  Seventeen years.

  Almost before it had begun, it seemed, the ride was over. His intention to review the case a final time had been forgotten, along with his fellow passenger, the lawyer from Earth, until it was too late. The center of the Outsiders’ pioneering efforts on Pallas and that of his own had never strongly resembled one another. But even here, the basic nature of the contrasts between Curringer and the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project seemed to have changed dramatically.

  It was more than just the fact that the town had grown while the Project had not—and, in all frankness, seemed to be withering. He had once thought of it (and who had told him he had no poetry in his soul?) as the difference between corruptible metal and undying stone, specifically between sheet steel, easily derived from native ores, from which Curringer was mostly constructed, and concrete, also manufactured locally, which had gradually replaced the temporary plastic construction of the Project. Now it appeared, however, that hardwood was coming into vogue among the Outsiders as a building material, as trees sown decades ago all over the asteroid were beginning to be harvested.

  In some ways, this trend struck him as a curious regression, but whatever it actually represented, the Senator thought with a pang, Curringer, with its brightly painted facades and smoothly paved streets, appeared fresh and new, whereas his official Residence, along with the increasingly shabby buildings in the compound surrounding it, covered as they were with overlapping layers of spray-painted graffiti, were slowly starting to crumble back into the soil from which they’d come.

  The screeching of a chair leg across the floor brought him back to the present. “It seems t’me,” Brody began, startling no one in the room but Altman, “having given ’em due consideration, that the Senator’s long list of complaints an’ charges against the defendant here tend t’sort themselves into two general categories.”

  Altman glanced over at his adversary, hating the very sight of him. As with everything else on this occasion, he was startled to see, in the place of the nasty little Asiatic brat he always envisioned, a solidly built man in his mid-thirties, battered and prematurely gray from his experiences of life. Altman tended to think of it as the inevitable wear and tear of a profligately selfish existence. Ngu was a trifle scarred about the face, and still affecting the eye patch he’d begun wearing to divert public condemnation for his part in Junior’s death. (For that matter, he was always startled to see an old man’s face staring back from the mirror.)

  After the affair of Vesta, Ngu had returned to what his kind regarded as civilization. Whatever else it had achieved, his flight from justice, wandering in the wilderness, had served a typically evil purpose. From subsurface deposits he’d somehow discovered near the South Pole, he’d started an ice-mining company at a time when there had been a seemingly endless supply of water on Pallas and everyone, including his erstwhile partners, had thought him still a bit crazed by previous events. Within ten years, he’d extended a pipe network all over the rapidly developing and increasingly water-hungry ast
eroid.

  To the Senator’s helpless dismay, the slowly dying Project soon became dependent on the network’s services. Through a series of infuriating screen conversations and humiliating correspondence, he’d continued to insist that Ngu owed an obligation to his first home on Pallas; yet the younger man had consistently charged all the traffic would bear for whatever water he sold, which was why he, Altman, was here today, trying to set reasonable and humane limits on what Ngu claimed were his rights, in order to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number.

  “Lookin’ over the Senator’s briefs,” Brody continued, “no pun intended, it seems his initial basis fer complaint’s a bill of articles the defendant’s folks signed when they enrolled in the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project. From what we’re after bein’ told by his counsel, freighted up at enormous expense by the Senator’s rich and powerful friends in Sri Lanka and what’s left of the United States—an’ on that account t’be taken with grave import—certain parties in authority on Earth, if nowhere else, still honor those articles, no matter how ethically questionable or outmoded they appear to us, benighted as we be.”

  The makeshift magistrate paused in his maddening way to shuffle papers before he went on. With everything else that had changed over the years, Altman had been just as surprised to observe that Brody looked and sounded the same as ever. Perhaps there was something to the longevity reports he’d been receiving for the past decade—and perhaps it was not an unmixed blessing they foretold.

  “Later on, the good Senator attempts other forms of chicanery—which we’ll not hold against him, bein’ a lawyer himself after all an’ merely followin’ his own second nature—rooted in a UN doctrine declarin’ Pallas ‘the common property of all humanity’ despite the fact that no arbitrator here is likely t’recognize such a claim made by them or any other governmental organization. But we’ll be after givin’ him points fer gall, as well as consistency.”