Far Thoughts and Pale Gods

by Greg Bear

  “Sandoval BM lost half a million Triple dollars. Fortunately, we were able to convert the farms to tailored pharmaceuticals. That was before your marriage to William … Although typical of your early adventures. You’ve matured considerably, as I’m sure you’ll both agree. Still, Rho has never been caught up in a freefall scuffle. She has always had Sandoval BM firmly behind her. To her credit, she’s never brought in the kind of trouble that could reflect badly on the BM. Until now, and I can’t pin the blame on her for this, except to say she’s not terribly prescient.”

  “You blame her for any aspect of this?” I asked, still defensive before Thomas’s gaze.

  “No,” he said after a long pause. “I blame you. You, my dear lad, are a focused dilettante, very good in your area, which is the Ice Pit, but not widely experienced. You don’t have Rho’s ambition, and neither have you shown signs of her innovative spark … You’ve never even taken advantage of your Earth sabbatical. Micko, if I may be familiar, you’ve managed the Ice Pit well enough, certainly nothing for us to complain about, but you’ve had little experience in the bigger arena of the Triple, and you’ve grown soft sitting out there. You didn’t check out Rho’s scheme.”

  I straightened in my chair. “It had BM charter—”

  “You should still have checked it out. You should have smelled something coming. There may be no such thing as prescience, but honed instincts are crucial in our game, Micko. You’ve cultivated fine literature—terrestrial literature—fine music, and a little history in the copious time you’ve had between your bursts of economic activity. You’ve become something of a lady’s man in the barn dances. Fine; you’re of an age where such things are natural. But now it’s time that you put on some muscle. I’d like you to handle this matter as my accessory. You’ll go to the council meetings—one is scheduled in a couple of days—and you’ll study up on the chinks in our system’s armor.”

  I settled back, suddenly more than just uneasy, and not about my impending debut in larger BM politics. “You think we’re approaching a singularity?”

  Thomas nodded. “Whatever your failings, Micko, you are sharp. That’s exactly right. A time when all the rules could fail, and all our past oversights come back to haunt us. It’s a good possibility. Care to lecture me for a minute?”

  I shrugged. “Sir, I—”

  “Stretch your wings, lad. You’re not ignorant, else you wouldn’t have made that last remark. What singularity faces the BMs now?”

  “I can’t really say, sir. I don’t know which weakness you’re referring to, specifically, but—”

  “Go on.” Thomas smiled like a genial tiger.

  “We’ve outgrown the lunar constitution. Two million people in fifty-four BMs, that’s ten times as many as lived on the Moon when the constitution was written. And actually, it was never written by an individual. It was cobbled together by a committee intent on not stretching or voiding individual BM charters. I think that you think Task-Felder isn’t above forcing a constitutional crisis.”

  “Yes?”

  “If they are planning something like that, now’s the time to do it. I’ve been studying the Triple’s performance for the past few years. Lunar BMs have gotten increasingly conservative, sir. Compared with Mars, we’ve been …” I was on a nervous high; I waved my hands, and smiled placation, hoping not to overwhelm or offend.

  “Yes?”

  “Well, a little like you accuse me of being, sir. Self-contented, taking advantage of the lull. But the Triple is going through a major shake-up now, Earth’s economy is suffering its expected forty-year cyclic decline, and the lunar BMs are vulnerable. If we stop cooperating, the Moon could be put into a financial crisis worse than the Split. So everybody’s being very cautious, very … conservative. The old rough-and-tumble has given way to don’t-prick-the-seal.”

  “Good,” Thomas said.

  “I haven’t been a worm, sir,” I said with a pained expression.

  “Glad to hear it. And if Task-Felder convinces a significant number of BMs that we’re rocking the boat in a way that could lower the lunar rating in the Triple?”

  “It could be bad. But why would they do that?” I asked, still puzzled.

  Rho picked up my question. “Tom, how could a few hundred heads bring this on? What’s Task-Felder got against us?”

  “Nothing at all, dear daughter,” Thomas said. BM elders often referred to family youngsters as if they were their own children. “That’s what worries me most of all.”

  Rho returned to the Ice Pit to supervise completion of the chamber for the heads; I stayed behind to prepare for the council meeting. Thomas put me up in Sandoval guest quarters reserved for family, spare but comfortable. I felt depressed, angry with myself for being so vulnerable.

  I hated disappointing Thomas Sandoval-Rice.

  And I took no satisfaction in the thought that perhaps he had stung me to get my blood moving, to spur me to action.

  I wanted to avoid any circumstance where he would need to sting me again.

  Thomas woke me from an erratic snooze of one hour, post twelve hours of study. My head felt like a dented air canister. “Tune to general net lunar news,” he said. “Scroll back the past five minutes.”

  I did as he told me and watched the LitVid image.

  News of the quarter-hour. Synopsis: Earth questions jurisdiction of Moon in Sandoval BM buy-out of StarTime Preservation Society Contract and transfer of corpsicles.

  Expansion 1: The United States Congressional Office of Triple Relations has issued an advisory alliance alert to the Lunar Council of Binding Multiples that the Sandoval BM purchase of preservation contracts of four hundred and ten frozen heads of deceased twenty-first century individuals may be invalid, under a late twentieth century law regarding retention of archaeological artifacts within cultural and national boundaries. StarTime Preservation Society, a deceased-estate financed partnership group now dissolved on Earth, has already transferred “members, chattels, and responsibilities” to Sandoval BM. Sandoval Chief Syndic Thomas Sandoval-Rice states that the heads are legally under control of his binding multiple, subject to …

  The report continued in that vein for eight thousand words of text and four minutes of recorded interviews. It concluded with a kicker, an interview with Puerto Rican Senator Pauline Grandville: “If the Moon can simply ignore the feelings and desires of its terrestrial forebears, then that could call into question the entire matrix of Earth-Moon relations.”

  I transferred to Thomas’s line. “That’s amazing,” I said.

  “Not at all,” Thomas said. “I’ve run a search of the Earth-Moon LitVids and terrestrial press. It’s in your hopper now.”

  “I’ve been reading all night, sir—”

  Thomas glared at me. “I wouldn’t have expected any less. We don’t have much time.”

  “Sir, I’d be able to pinpoint my research if you’d let me know your strategy.”

  “I don’t have one yet, Micko. And neither should you. These are just the opening rounds. Never fire your guns before you’ve chosen a target.”

  “Did you know about this earlier? That California would tell Puerto Rico to do something like this?”

  “I had a hint, nothing more. But my sources are quiet now. No more tattling from Earth, I’m afraid. We’re on our own.”

  I wanted to ask him why the sources were quiet, but I sensed I’d used up my ration of questions.

  Never in my life had I faced a problem with interplanetary implications. I finished a full eighteen hours of research, hardly more enlightened than when I had started, though I was full of facts: facts about Task-Felder, facts about the council president and her aide, yet more facts about Logology.

  I was depressed and angry. I sat head in hands for fully an hour, wondering why the world was picking on me. At least I had a partial answer to Thomas’s criticisms—short of actual precognition, I didn’t think anybody could have intuited such an outcome to Rho’s venture.

  I lifte
d my head to answer a private line call, routed to the guest quarters.

  “I have a live call direct from Port Yin for Mister Mickey Sandoval.”

  “That’s me,” I said.

  The secretary connected and the face of Fiona Task-Felder, president of the council, clicked into vid. “Mr. Sandoval, may I speak to you for a few minutes?”

  I was stunned. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t expecting … a call. Not here.”

  “I like to work direct, especially when my underlings screw up, as I trust Janis did.”

  “Uh …”

  “Do you have a few minutes?”

  “Please, Madame President … I’d much rather hold this conversation with our chief syndic tied in …”

  “I’d rather not, Mr. Sandoval. Just a few questions, and maybe we can patch all this up.”

  Fiona Task-Felder could hardly have looked more different from her aide. She was gray-haired, in her late sixties, with a muscular build that showed hours of careful exercise. She wore stretch casuals beneath her short council collar and seal. She looked vigorous and friendly and motherly, and was a handsome woman, but in a natural way, quite the reverse of Granger’s studied, artificial hardness.

  I should have known better, but I said, “All right. I’ll try to answer as best I can …”

  “Why does your sister want these heads?” the president asked.

  “We’ve already explained that.”

  “Not to anyone’s satisfaction but your own, perhaps. I’ve learned that your grandparents—pardon me, your great-grandparents—are among them. Is that your sole reason?”

  “I don’t think now’s the time to discuss this, not without my sister, and certainly not without our director.”

  “I’m trying hard to understand, Mr. Sandoval. I think we should meet casually, without noise from aides and syndics, and straighten this out quickly, before somebody else screws it up out of all proportion. Is that possible?”

  “I think Rho could explain—”

  “Fine, then, bring her.”

  “I’m sorry, but—”

  She gave me a motherly expression of irritation, as if with a wayward son—or an irritating lover. “I’m giving you a rare opportunity. In the old lunar spirit of one-on-one, and cut the politics. I think we can work it out. If we work fast.”

  I felt way out of my depth. I was being asked to step outside of formal procedures … To make a decision immediately. I knew the only way to play that game was to ignore her unexpressed rules.

  “All right,” I said.

  “I have an appointment available on the third at ten hundred. Is that acceptable?”

  That was three days away. I calculated quickly; I’d be back in the Ice Pit station by then, and that meant I’d have to hire a special shuttle flight. “I’ll be there,” I said.

  “I’m looking forward to it,” Fiona Task-Felder said, and left me alone in the guest room to think out my options.

  I did not break the rules of her game. I did not talk to Thomas Sandoval-Rice. Nor did I tell Rho what I was doing. Before leaving Port Yin for a return trip to the Ice Pit, I secretly booked a non-scheduled round-trip shuttle, spending a great deal of Sandoval money on one passenger; thankfully, because of my position at the station, I did not have to give details.

  I doubted that Thomas or Rho would look for me during the time I was gone; six hours going, a few hours there, and six back. I could leave custom messages for whoever might call, including Rho or Thomas or—much less likely—William.

  To this day I experience a sick twist in my stomach when I ask myself why I did not follow through with my original thought, and tell Thomas about the president’s call. I think perhaps it was youthful ego, wounded by Thomas’s dressing-down; ego plus a strange gratification that the council president was going to see me personally, to put aside a block of her time to speak to someone not even an assistant syndic. Me. To speak to me.

  I knew I was not doing what I should be doing, but like a mouse entranced by a snake, I ignored them all—a tendency of behavior I have since learned I was not unique in possessing. A tendency common in some lunar citizens.

  We habitually cry out, “Cut the politics.” But the challenge and intrigue of politics seduces us every time.

  I honestly thought I could beat out Fiona Task-Felder.

  As our arbeiters executed the Nernst design, the repository for the heads resembled a flattened doughnut lying on its side: a wide, circular passageway with heads stored in seven tiers of cubicles around the outer perimeter. It would lie neatly in the bottom cup of the void, seven meters below the laboratory, out of range of whatever peculiar fluctuations might occur in the force disorder pumps during William’s tests, and easily connected to the refrigerators. Lunar rock would insulate the outer torus; pipes and other fittings could be neatly dropped from the refrigerators above. A small elevator from the side of the bridge opposite the Cavity would give access.

  It was a neat design, as we expected from Nernst BM. Our arbeiters performed flawlessly, although they were ten years out of date. Not once did anyone mention problems with the Council. I started to feel cocky; my plan of conferring with Thomas about the visit with the president faded in and out with my mood. I could handle her; the threat was minimal. If I was sufficiently cagey, I could drop right in, leap right out, no harm, although perhaps no benefit, either.

  The day after I finished oversight and inspection on the chamber, and received a Nernst designer’s inspection report, and after the last of Rho’s heads had been installed in their cubicles, I stamped my approval for final payment to Nernst, called in the Cailetet consultants to look over the facilities, packed my travel bag, and was off.

  There is a gray sameness to a lunar ocean’s surface that induces a state of hypnosis, a mix of fascination at the lifeless expanse, never quite encompassed by memory, and incredible boredom. Crater walls, rilled terrain, the painted flats of ancient vents. Parts of the moon are beautiful in a rugged way, even to a citizen.

  Life on the Moon is a process of turning inward, toward interior living spaces, an interior you. Lunar citizens are exceptional at introspection and decoration and indoor arts and crafts. Some of the finest craftsmen and artists in the solar system reside on the Moon; their work commands high prices throughout the Triple.

  Two hours into the journey, I fell asleep and dreamed again of Egypt, endless dry deserts beyond the thin greenbelts of the Nile, deserts populated by mummies leading trains of camels. Camels carrying trays of ice, making sounds like force disorder pumps …

  I awoke quickly and cursed William for that story, for its peculiar fascination. What was so strange about space sucking heat from trays of water? That was the principle behind our own heat exchangers on the surface above the Ice Pit. Still, I could not conceive of a sky on Earth as black as the Moon’s, as all forgiving, all absorbing.

  The shuttle made a smooth landing minutes later at Port Yin, and I disembarked, part of me still believing I would go to Thomas’s office first, an hour before my appointment.

  I did not. I spent that hour shopping for a birthday present for a girl in Copernicus Station. A girl I was not particularly courting at the time; something to pass an hour. My mind was blank.

  The offices of the council president were located in the council annex to Port Yin’s western domicile district; in the suburbs, as it were, and away from the center of BM activity, as befitted a political institution. The offices were numerous but not sumptuous; the syndics of many small BMs could have displayed more opulence.

  I walked and took the skids, using the time to prepare myself. I was not stupid enough to believe there was no danger; I even felt with one part of my mind that what I was doing was more likely to turn out badly than otherwise. But I skidded along toward the council president’s offices regardless, and in my defense I must say that my self-assurance still overcame my doubts. On the average, I felt more confident than ill-at-ease.

  It was after all just politics. My ent
ire upbringing had ingrained in me the essential triviality of lunar politics. Council officers were merely secretaries to a bunch of congenial family businesses, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of rules of cooperation that probably would have been followed anyway, out of simple courtesy and for the sake of mutual benefit.

  Most of our ancestors had been engineers and miners exported from the Earth; conservative and independent, suspicious of any authority, strongly convinced that large groups of people could live in comparative peace and prosperity without layers of government and bureaucracy.

  My ancestors worked to squash the natural growth of such layers: “Cut the politics” was their constant cry, followed by shaking heads and raised eyes. Political organization was evil, representative government an imposition. Why have a representative when you could interact personally? Keep it small, direct, and uncomplicated, they believed, and freedom would necessarily follow.

  They couldn’t keep it small. The moon had already grown to such a point that layers of government and representation were necessary. But as with sexual attitudes in some Earth cultures, necessity was no guarantee of responsibility and planning.

  From the beginning, our prime families and founders—including­, I must say, Emilia and Robert—had screwed up the lunar constitution, if the patched-up collations of hearsay and station charters could even be called such.

  When complex organization did come, it was haphazard, unenthusiastically organic, undisciplined. When the Split broke our economic supply lines with Earth, and when the first binding multiples came, the Moon was a reservoir of naively amenable suckers, but blessedly lucky—at first. The binding multiples weren’t political organizations—they were business families, extensions of individuals, the Lunars said. Lunar citizens saw nothing wrong with family structures or even syndicates; they saw nothing wrong with the complex structures of the binding multiples, because somehow they did not qualify as government.

  When the binding multiples had to set up offices to work with each other, and share legal codes written and unwritten to prevent friction, that was not government; it was pragmatism. And when the binding multiples formed a council, why, that was nothing more sinister than business folks getting together to talk and achieve individual consensus. (That oxymoron—individual consensus—was actually common then.) The Council of Binding Multiples was nothing more than a committee organized to reduce frictions between the business syndicates—at first. It was decorative and weak.