Nemesis

by Alex Lamb

  Mark and the others awkwardly took their places on the hand-carved dining chairs.

  Food arrived. Plates and plates of it. Toast, prote-scramble with fresh herbs, sizzled strips of artfully printed makeon, coffee, fresh fruit. Even if the whole thing was a trap, Mark had lost the ability to resist. He’d never tasted anything so good. Since arriving on Carter he’d eaten nothing except some fragments of an emergency ration bar aboard the raft and a couple of mouthfuls of hideous-tasting water from the tunnels, which Venetia had insisted was safe.

  Massimo watched as they devoured the breakfast before them and asked no questions except ones pertaining to the meal.

  ‘Did you try the orange juice?’ he said. ‘You should. I have my own orange vines running downstairs. I make sure that one of them’s always in season.’

  Mark wondered whether most hostages got the same treatment. He suspected not.

  ‘Thank you for taking us in,’ he said carefully. ‘We’re all a little fried right now. We didn’t expect to be on Carter for more than a couple of hours – that was nearly a day ago.’

  Massimo winced. ‘I’m sorry. That sounds awful. And Carter, of all places. Not the greatest world to get stuck on.’

  ‘I’m also from Earth, by the way,’ said Mark, relaxing a little.

  ‘Really!’ said Massimo. ‘I did wonder. Well, you’re especially welcome here, in that case. I can’t help noticing you’re wearing a Fleet ship-suit, though. How come?’

  ‘I’m a roboteer,’ said Mark. ‘I fly starships. They asked me to captain this mission for them.’

  ‘My goodness!’ said Massimo. ‘That makes you a very rare bird, then. Your parents must be Transcendists. Good for them. We’re all Revivalists here, of course, but I won’t hold that against you.’ He winked. ‘And you ladies?’

  ‘Parents from Earth. Raised on New Angeles,’ said Zoe. She sounded reluctant to open up.

  ‘From Esalen originally,’ said Venetia. ‘I work all over the place these days. I worked here for a while.’

  ‘Poor you!’ said Massimo, laughing. He slapped the table. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to excuse my enthusiasm. It’s just I don’t often get the chance to host guests, unless it’s my cousins from the other side of the ocean. And frankly, I find them dull. As for you three, well, you’re practically celebrities if you fly with Yunus Chesterford. I watch all his feeds. You’ll have to tell me what he’s doing these days.’

  Mark and Zoe exchanged nervous glances.

  ‘It’s often lonely being the voice of authority in a place like this,’ said Massimo. ‘It’s a family responsibility, a duty I have to undertake. Thankfully only for a few years, then it’s back to Ganymede, thank God. So, do you want to explain how you got here? Give me the big picture.’

  Mark and Venetia started speaking at the same time and both stopped.

  ‘You talk this time,’ said Venetia. ‘You’ve got the most up-to-date information, in any case.’

  Mark did his best to fill Massimo in on the highlights of their experiences. Their host looked deeply disappointed when Mark gently informed him of Yunus’s death but didn’t interrupt. Mark finished by dwelling for several minutes on the nature of the threat following them, to make sure Massimo understood what they were dealing with.

  ‘If we can’t get word to New Panama, the machines will overrun this place,’ he explained. ‘Every sign of life will be scoured. And after that they’ll head for Earth.’

  Massimo listened with a grave expression. ‘My goodness. That is a truly extraordinary story, and a frightening one.’

  ‘And I can’t understate just how devious Sam is,’ Mark added. ‘He duped us all. With him helping the colonists, there’s no telling what they’ll try to do to get us back. I hate to say it, but your whole settlement should start taking precautions immediately.’

  ‘Then action must be swift,’ said Massimo. He clicked his fingers.

  One of the bald servants scurried over and bowed near Massimo’s ear. Massimo turned and spoke quietly. The servant nodded and hurried out.

  ‘It’s imperative that I verify your story before we take next steps, of course, but I just started that process. The idea of an attack on the sects via a proxy weapon comes as no surprise to me. I’d heard stories of experimental Freedom Camps vanishing. Nothing direct, of course. The existence of such projects would never be readily broadcast – the loss of face in the case of failure would be unacceptable. This development, though, takes the Frontier problem to a whole new level. But perhaps we should have expected it. It was only a matter of time before the balance of power finally tipped towards Revivalism. Of course the Old Colonies are reacting with panic. Violence was inevitable. Their stranglehold on the future is finally loosening.’

  Zoe shifted uncomfortably in her chair, setting down her fork with a clunk.

  ‘You disagree?’ said Massimo. ‘The Old Colonies have been losing political ground for the last twenty years. The Fleet is their puppet and now that puppet is so old and overstretched it can barely do its job. Which leads me to a question I’ve been waiting to ask someone for three years, ever since I was posted here. What do you think of all this?’ He gestured at the walls around him. ‘Not my house, but all of this – the Britehaven settlement. I know what the people up in the valley think – they hate us and everything we represent. That’s clear from the way they try to choke off our existence. But that’s because we claimed land they imagined they had all to themselves. An entire planet, just for a few tens of thousands of people. Crazy, wouldn’t you say? And so selfish. But this is beside the point. You aren’t bigots from the valley. You’re from more civilised worlds. So please be honest. What do you think of our settlement?’

  Zoe’s mouth remained shut. Mark checked Venetia with a glance and saw uncertainty there. He didn’t know what to say. Was this when the guns came back out? Massimo expected a reply.

  ‘Your house is nice,’ said Mark, hating his own vagueness.

  Massimo looked disappointed.

  ‘I think the seals and shielding outside could be better,’ Mark added. After Massimo’s own comments, this felt like a safe enough statement.

  ‘I completely agree!’ said Massimo, slapping the table. ‘What else?’

  ‘You use exosuits,’ said Mark. ‘That surprised me.’

  ‘Of course, to create work for the Following. Please, more of your reactions.’

  A chilly silence descended over the breakfast table as the delicate-boned servants cleared away their plates.

  ‘If you really want to know,’ said Venetia, ‘I think the religion game is a poor choice. Educational games are free and effective. If you want to give your Following something to think about, why not use them instead?’

  ‘Well said!’ Massimo clapped at her. ‘Thank you for your courage. I differ from you on the relative value of such things, of course, but these are exactly the sort of observations I was looking to solicit. I can see how you all want to be polite and I appreciate that – you’re in someone else’s home, after all. So let me tell you what I think you see when you look around here. Maybe that will loosen things up a bit.

  ‘For starters, my people are poor. That much is obvious, isn’t it? They’re penniless. The dome is terrible and the air is shit. It costs so much to ship these people here that there’s barely enough money left over to give them a decent life. Their food is shit, too. It’s habit-forming garbage. And their skin. Did you see it? Half of them have cancer. We restock our surgery every month and still keep running out of cure-kits. This is despite the fact that I’m always reminding them in sermon to wear sunscreen. We barely cling to the surface of this planet, my friends. Religion and distraction are the only things holding this society together. We live on what we can beg or steal from New Luxor, and that is pitiful.’

  Mark watched Zoe squirming in her chair. Finally she snapped. />
  ‘I don’t see how you can feel so proud about it,’ she said. ‘Your family and others like you are making billions of peace-coin every year. Billions. You could invest more in these people. Give them proper houses. You’ve dragged them across the galaxy to use them as property markers in a cynical land grab to squeeze political concessions out of IPSO. And meanwhile your families are rolling in money on private worlds, surrounded by drug-addled harem girls.’

  Mark held his breath. Venetia shut her eyes. Zoe had spoken with vitriol and said what they were all thinking. If Massimo wanted to kill them, it was going to happen now.

  He pointed at Zoe and grinned. ‘That’s right!’ he said. ‘There you have it!’ He looked delighted. ‘Well done, young lady. You’ve put your finger on it.’ He banged the table again several times. ‘Please understand – I have this conversation with myself every week. I always wonder how it looks from the other side of the table, but I can never sit down with those people and talk. It is so rewarding to be able to speak about it at last. And this is the point that I think people in the Old Colonies don’t see.’

  He leaned forward, his eyes gleaming. He didn’t look all that worried about an impending alien attack, Mark noticed. That disturbed him, but he wasn’t about to interrupt Massimo now.

  Massimo rested on his massive elbows and held two fingers close together.

  ‘In our society, there are two ideologies at war with each other. And this is what fascinates me – that people don’t even appear to notice. They inhabit their little bubbles of propaganda. One of those ideologies is religious feudalism, built from what is left of Truism and the Kingdom of Man. The other is robot-powered capitalism, imported from Galatea. It’s like the American north versus the south all over again. Except the difference this time is that instead of freeing the slaves, the Galatean solution is to kill them all. In the clean and tidy new capitalism, there are no factories to shove people into. Because of robotics, there is nothing for them to do but die. Hence the inevitability of this attack you describe. You Colonials seem to wonder at Earth’s distinction of rich and poor, but this is hypocrisy. The Old Colonies want the poor to disappear just the same way farm animals did after the Surplus Age.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Zoe, ‘the hope is that they’ll stop being poor.’

  Massimo threw up his hands. ‘But there will always be a poor! A system that doesn’t make good use of the poor is a system that destroys itself. Of all the differences between the sects, that is one thing we can all agree on – the one truth that Truism made clear. That there should be a separation of concerns in human society. This is what the twenty-first century proved. Global equality is a sick dream. It strips those with power of the responsibility that comes with wielding it. Think of what the superbanks did, and the Martians after them. A fixed Leading caste is what enables large, complex societies to stabilise, whether people want to admit it to themselves or not. This has always been true, throughout history.’

  Massimo gestured at himself. ‘You look at our sects and see squabbling. What we see is healthy competition between the Great Houses of Earth. You see poverty in the Following. We see responsible leadership finding a way to make the poor useful. In this generation they serve as property markers. In the next, they will serve some other, equally valid purpose.’

  ‘You’re deciding who gets to be rich and who gets to be poor,’ said Zoe, the anger in her eyes unchanged.

  ‘As societies have always done,’ said Massimo. ‘And the poor are helping us do it. The Following don’t want complicated answers. They want simple entertainment and simple moral standards they can understand. The people who want to force ambiguity onto them are always doing so for their own ends, just like the capitalists of old. So far as the Following are concerned, it’s the Galateans who are the problem. They haven’t lifted a finger to get people off Earth, whereas the sects help them at every turn.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Mark, whose discomfort had been growing steadily. ‘What about the Exodus projects? Or the lottery? Or all the other IPSO programmes?’

  ‘A bureaucratic nightmare,’ said Massimo. ‘Since when did desperate people have time to fill out forms or pass tests?’

  ‘The IPSO education programmes are free,’ Venetia pointed out.

  ‘So are ours,’ said Massimo. ‘You indoctrinate with science. We do so with religion. The difference being that religion is immediately relevant and rewarding. What hope does a peasant with a free science education have on Galatea? He is surrounded by geniuses whose parents paid for their brains to be twice the size of his.’

  Mark glanced at Zoe and saw the fury smouldering behind her eyes get brighter.

  ‘You give people the chance of a job at the cost of their culture,’ said Massimo. ‘We give people the guarantee of a job and elevate their culture. We take their oldest, most sacred beliefs and we cherish them.’ He leaned back from the table, apparently pleased with himself.

  Venetia folded the snow-coloured napkin in front of her into eighths.

  ‘You’ve been a very gracious host,’ she said. ‘I hope you won’t mind if I disagree.’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ said Massimo. ‘Go for it!’

  ‘You should know I’m no fan of Old Colony politics,’ she said, ‘and I was picked for this mission by the Free Movement faction in the senate. But some of the things you’re saying are just wrong. For starters, the bureaucratic nightmare around education that you refer to was engineered by Earth’s senators, themselves from sect families. You also appear to assume that financial exploitation is guaranteed by commerce, but that’s incorrect. It’s guaranteed only by monopolies of vested interests. The programmes the sects have embarked on aren’t creating a stable future for the poor. They’re creating human cattle, and that can only end in disaster.

  ‘I have studied and understand the cultural tools you use here. Most of them were discovered on Esalen, where I was born. Your Great Houses have simply combined those findings with data-science and used them for profit. You’ve taken a natural human need for spiritual direction and weaponised it. You’re right that some people will always be poorer than others, but nobody needs to be degraded. There’s only one excuse for oligarchy, and that’s greed.’

  Massimo threw his head back and laughed. He appeared to be loving every moment. Why shouldn’t he? Mark thought. Captive entertainment had been delivered right to his well-armed doorstep.

  ‘Go outside and ask!’ said Massimo. ‘Ask my Following if they feel degraded. They will tell you that they have been honoured by God! They will assure you that they are fulfilled here. Show me one immigrant up in the valley who can say that. You want to force your culture on people and make them feel small,’ he declared. ‘You want this so that you can satisfy your own comfortable notions of equality and justify your own wealth relative to theirs. We, at least, acknowledge that life’s answer for one person is not the same as it is for another.’

  A feeling of sick discomfort churned around in Mark’s chest. He felt no safer in Massimo’s house now than he had the moment he’d arrived, yet he couldn’t help but open his mouth.

  ‘I’d like to remind you that not everyone on Earth shares your opinions,’ he said.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Massimo. ‘Where did you live, my friend?’

  ‘New York,’ said Mark.

  Massimo roared with laughter and thumped the table. ‘That den of Transcendists? Did you ever go to Mexico City? Bangalore? Chongqing?’

  Mark shook his head.

  ‘I thought not. You missed some sights, my friend. You missed Earth, in fact.’

  He laughed long and hard. Mark felt both embarrassed and angry at once.

  Eventually their host wiped the tears from his eyes and got to his feet. A thin servant quickly cleared away his napkin.

  ‘My house has an annexe for when my cousins visit from the other settlements,’ said Massimo. ‘
You can stay there until we get this situation sorted out. It has its own air and water, which you’d prefer, I think, and the seals are good.’ He winked at Mark. ‘I’ll check on that story of yours.’ He gestured at the waif standing closest. ‘Five will show you to your rooms. Relax. Take a nap if you like. I’m sure you could use one.’

  With that, Massimo scratched his belly and strode from the room.

  ‘Would you like to follow me?’ said Five in a soft alto voice with eyes averted.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Venetia. ‘And I’m sorry for asking, but is this Ms Five or Mr Five I’m talking to?’

  Five smiled and glanced up for a moment in amusement. ‘We of the house relinquish gender when we take up service of the Lord. It is a great privilege. Five is my God-given name.’

  ‘I see,’ said Venetia. ‘No distractions, I suppose.’

  ‘Absolutely, madam,’ said Five, stroking the smart-collar and smiling cryptically. ‘Why would I want them?’

  ‘And did you volunteer for that,’ said Venetia, ‘or were you selected?’

  ‘Why, I volunteered, of course!’ said Five, looking astonished. ‘What kind of people do you take us for?’ The servant giggled and gestured down the hallway. ‘Please, this way.’

  As they followed Five to the annexe, Mark felt a kind of despair settling over him. He rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t really known what to expect from a Flag colony, but he’d never expected something so disappointing, or so intimately hideous.

  Zoe punched him gently in the side. ‘Hey, you,’ she said. ‘Snap out of it.’

  ‘This isn’t the Earth I know,’ said Mark sadly. ‘There are so many good people.’

  ‘Of course there are, you idiot,’ said Zoe. ‘Billions of them.’ She looked at him oddly, her head tilted to one side. ‘Your desperate need for your homeworld to be okay is kind of sweet, you know that?’ she said. ‘Very stupid, but sweet.’