Orbitsville Trilogy

by Bob Shaw

  "You look tired, Garry." Picciano appraised him candidly. "How long are you going to go on like this?"

  "As long as it takes. We've been through this before, haven't we?"

  "No! I have been through it—you won't even begin to think about the problem."

  "It's my problem. I'm responsible for Cona being the way she is."

  "That's a perfect example of what I'm talking about," Picciano said, not hiding his exasperation. "You have no responsibilities to Cona, because Cona no longer exists. Your wife is dead, Garry. Your only responsibility now is to yourself. There is always some uncertainty about the progress of erasure cases, but there's one thing I can tell you for sure—the stunted, half-personality which is going to develop in that human shell in the next room will have nothing, nothing to do with your former wife. You've got to accept that, for your own good."

  "For my own good." Dallen made the words sound like a phrase from a foreign language. "How long are we going to stand around here in the hall?"

  "I'll look at her now." Picciano opened the nearest door and went into the long living room, his heels clacking on the polished composition floor. In his early attempts to deal with Cona's incontinence Dallen had tried putting her in diapers, but she had disliked them intensely, and he had found their appearance grotesque and degrading. He had then settled for removing all carpets and cleaning up after her, a chore which had almost ceased to exist now that she was using the bathroom. She was lying on a blue pneumat, chin propped on her hands, engrossed in watching the swirl of colours and shapes above a nursery imager. Her legs were bent, bare feet circling aimlessly and sometimes colliding. In spite of the loose smock in which Dallen had dressed her she was noticeably plumper than she had been a month earlier.

  "Look who's come to see you," Dallen said, kneeling beside Cona and putting an arm around her shoulder. She glanced up at him, eyes bright with window reflections, and returned her attention to the glowing airborne patterns. Dallen took a tissue from his pocket and tried to dab a smear of chocolate from her chin, but she whimpered in irritation and twisted away from him.

  "We only got the imager yesterday," Dallen explained. "It's still a novelty."

  Picciano shook his head. "Do you know what you're doing, Garry? You're apologizing because the subject—I refuse to call her Cona, and so should you—didn't greet me with polite chitchat and a choice of coffee or sherry. This is what I've been…"

  "For God's sake, Roy!"

  "I'm only…" Picciano sighed and stared out of the window for a moment. "Did you get her to take all the fifth week medication and tracers?"

  "Yes. No problem."

  "In that case I'm going to carry out some tests and make notes." Picciano opened his flat plastic case and began to activate an instrument panel incorporated in the lid. "This is all routine stuff and I don't need any help," he added significantly.

  "Thanks." Dallen pressed his face against Cona's for a moment without getting any response, then stood up and left the room. A minute later he was out on the street, breathing deeply to cleanse his lungs of the smell of chocolate and urine which in his fancy pervaded the house at all times. He lived near the outer edge of the inhabited strip of Madison, an area which straggled northwards for about five kilometres from the city centre to accommodate a population of several thousand Metagov and local administration workers. For the most part the dwellings were large, stone-built and well screened by trees—evidence of the district's former affluence. The far-off drone of a lawnmower served only to emphasise the mid-week, mid-morning stillness, creating the impression he had strayed into one of the thousands upon thousands of deserted suburbs which migrating families had left to dreams and decay.

  Windows and doorways, never aglow, Dallen thought, recalling one of the most popular songs of the last two centuries. Everyone's gone to Big 0…

  Dismissing the mawkish lyric, he decided to walk into town and use the time to work on the problem of Derek Beaumont. The tragedy that had befallen Cona overshadowed everything else in his life, but he appreciated a certain irony in the fact that the one man he knew to bear responsibility also provided his only distraction. When not grieving over his wife or coping with the despairing drudgery she now represented, Dallen fantasised about being alone with the young terrorist, about making him name all the relevant names, about hunting and capturing and killing. Part of him, even in lurid visions, drew the line at cold-blooded execution, but another understood only too well that confrontations could be manipulated. It was a technique boys learned at school. Give the enemy a gentle push, encourage him to push back, respond with a harder shove, escalate the violence and keep doing it until suddenly all thoughts of guilt can be discarded and it's time to cut loose and go in hard. When it's merely a matter of temperature, Dallen knew, the blood can be very obliging. And the man or woman who pulled the trigger on Cona and Mikel was going to know the same thing … in the final passionate, exultant moment that person was going to know … and that person was going to he sorry … in the end…

  Walking south through slanting prisms of sunlight and green shade, Dallen heard his own footfalls change note as frustration hardened his muscles. Although his job occasioned him to think and act like a policeman, be held no official responsibility for local law enforcement. He was a Grade IV officer in the Deregistration Bureau, and as such his prime concern was with surveying tracts of land that had been declared empty and making sure they remained unoccupied for one full year, after which time Metagov was no longer legally accountable. Madison City itself, thanks to the artificial mix of its population, had virtually no crime, and the police department consisted of an executive and a handful of officers who were mainly concerned with regulating tourist accommodation. In spite of the overlap in their jobs, Dallen had always maintained an easy working relationship with Police Chief Lashbrook. Consequently he had been surprised to find himself not only denied access to the terrorist, but made distinctly unwelcome in the downtown police building.

  "It was a sickening thing, what happened to your wife and boy," Cole Lashbrook had said, eyeing him severely over pedant's spectacles. "I'm deeply sorry about it, but I've made every allowance I can. If you persist with your attempts to see Beaumont I'll be forced to take appropriate action against you."

  Dallen's fists clenched as his sense of outrage returned. "Against me!" he had almost shouted. "Are you crazy?"

  "No, but sometimes I think you are. Beaumont has made a formal complaint about what you did to him in back of that store, Garry. The dust hasn't settled over that business of the pursuit fatalities a couple of months back, and now there's this … And on top of it all you come round here and expect to be let loose on my prisoner!"

  "Your prisoner?" Dallen had refrained with difficulty from pointing out the police department's past willingness to allow onerous duties to be performed by his own force.

  "That's right. He was in possession of an explosive device and that makes it a criminal matter, and I intend to deliver Beaumont for trial in good health—a condition he may not be in if you get near him."

  "Exactly what does that make me?"

  "Garry, you're a man who has been known to go too far—even when you weren't personally involved in a case—and I'm not going to help you land yourself behind bars."

  Thanks a lot, Dallen repeated to himself, immune to the blandishments of the placid sunlit warmth through which he was walking. In the two centuries since the discovery of Optima Thule, to give Orbitsville its constitutional name, there had been a general and steady decrease in traditional crime. Most crimes had involved property in one way or another, and as the race had been absorbed by a land area equivalent to five billion Earths—enough to support every intelligent creature in the galaxy—the basic motivations had faded away. Keeping pace with that change, many vast and complicated legal structures had become as obsolete as barbed wire, and progressively fallen into disuse.

  Even on Earth, where there were historical complications, a community t
he size of Madison operated on a fairly informal basis as far as the law and its enforcement were concerned. In the days immediately following the blanking of his family Dallen had been certain that somehow he would obtain private interview with Beaumont. He had never allowed himself to consider the possibility of his being unable to force the prisoner to talk. He had fuelled himself night and day on the conviction that Beaumont would give him a name, the name, and that events thereafter would take a divinely ordained course. Now he was haunted by a suspicion that the young terrorist would be arraigned at the next session of the regional court and receive the routine sentence of—irony of ironies—deportation to Orbitsville. And once Beaumont reached Botany Bay, the popular name for the area surrounding the N5 portal, he would be beyond the reach of Dallen or any other private citizen. Economics and celestial mechanics had conspired to bring about that particular circumstance. A starship docking at an equatorial port simply went into orbit around Optima Thule's central sun, but only a few vessels—all owned by Metagov—were fitted with the complex grappling equipment which enabled them to cling like leeches to entrances in the northern and southern bands…

  "What's wrong with your car, old son?" The voice from only a few paces away startled Dallen. He turned his head and found that a gold Rollac convertible had slowed to a crawl beside him without his noticing. The top was down and at the wheel was the buoyantly plump figure of Rick Renard, a man who had started showing up recently at the city gymnasium used by Dallen. Renard had red curly hair and milky skin which was uniformly dusted with freckles. He also had an uncanny ability to needle Dallen and put him on the defensive with just about every remark he made.

  "Why should anything be wrong with my car?" Dallen said, deliberately giving the kind of response Renard was seeking, as if to be wary of his snares would be to pay the other man a compliment.

  Renard's slightly prominent teeth gleamed briefly. "Nobody walks in heat like this."

  "I do."

  "Trying to lose weight?"

  "Yeah—right now I'm trying to get rid of about a hundred kilos."

  "I'm not that heavy, old son," Renard said, eyes beaconing his satisfaction at having provoked an outright insult. "Look, Dallen, why don't you get in the car with me and ride downtown in comfort with me and use the time you save to enjoy a cold beer?"

  "Well, if you put it like that…" Suddenly disenchanted with the prospect of walking, Dallen pointed at the curb a short distance ahead, making the gesture an instruction as to where to halt the car. Renard overshot the mark by a calculated margin and scored back against Dallen by allowing the vehicle to roll forward before he was properly in, causing him to do some quick footwork as the door closed.

  "Aren't we having fun?" Renard's shoulders shook as he enjoyed a private triumph. "What do you think of the car?"

  "Nice," Dallen said carelessly, slumping into the receptive upholstery.

  "This lady is sixty years old, you know. Indestructible. Brought her all the way from the Big O. None of your modern Unimot crap for me."

  "You're a lucky man, Rick." Feeling the passenger seat adapt itself to his body, coaxing him into relaxation, Dallen was impressed by the car's sheer silent-gliding luxury. It came to him that its owner had to be wealthy. He vaguely recalled having heard that Renard was a botanist who had come to Earth on some kind of a field trip, which had suggested he was a Metagov employee, but salaried workers did not import their own cars across hundreds of light years.

  "Lucky?" Renard's narrow dental arch shone again. "The way I see it, the universe only gives me what I deserve."

  "Really? Do you accept donations from any other source?"

  Renard laughed delightedly. "As a matter of feet, my mother was a Lindstrom."

  "In that case, shouldn't the universe be getting hand-outs from you?" Dallen closed his eyes for a moment, glad to be distracted from his own affairs, and considered Renard's claim to be related to the legendary family which had once monopolised the space travel industry. For a brief period after the Big O's discovery its official designation had been Lindstromland, and the Scandinavian connotations of its present name hinted at the clan's continuing if muted influence. In their heyday the Lindstroms had amassed a fortune which, apparently, was beyond human capability to diminish; and if Renard was connected with them, no matter how tenuously, he was no ordinary botanist.

  The universe only gives me what I deserve. Dallen got a mental image of his wife—wandering aimlessly through shaded rooms, smock gathered to the waist, crooning to herself as she masturbated on the move—and the pressures within him grew intolerable. Cona deserved better…

  "I heard you're a botanist," he said quickly. "You collect flowers?"

  Renard shook his head. "Grass."

  "Ordinary grass?"

  "What's ordinary about grass?" Renard said, smiling in a way intended to let Dallen know that his education was incomplete. "So far we've found only thirty or so species on Orbitsville—an incredibly low number considering the areas involved and the fact that we have more than ten thousand species on Earth. The Department of Agriculture did some work on determining mixes of Earth seeds which are compatible with Orbitsville soil and the native species, but that was in the last century and it was a half-assed effort anyway. I'm doing the job properly. Soon I'll be going back with over a thousand seed varieties and maybe two thousand square metres of sample trays."

  "So you work for Metagov."

  "Don't be so naive, old son—all Metagov wants from Earth is a decree nisi." Renard turned the steering wheel with a languid hand, swinging the car into an avenue which ran due west. "I work for nobody but myself."

  "But…" Dallen grappled with unfamiliar concepts. "The transport costs must be…"

  "Astronomical? Yes, but it's not so bad when you have your own ship. For a while I considered chartering, then I realised it made more sense to reuse an old flickerwing from the graveyard and amortise the cost over three or four trips."

  "That's what I would have done," Dallen said, concealing his grudging awe for an individual who could so casually speak of owning the artificial microcosm that was a starship. "What have you got?"

  "A Type 96B. It was designed for bulk cargo work, so there aren't any diaphragm decks, which means it isn't all that suitable for my work. But I got round that by building really tall racks to hold the grass trays. Do you want a free trip to Orbitsville?"

  "No, not at … Why?"

  "I need people to tend the samples by hand—not worth installing automatic systems-—and I'm paying with free transportation. That way everybody benefits."

  "Perhaps I'll become an entrepreneur."

  "You're not cut out for it, old son—you've conditioned yourself to think small." Renard's smile conveyed affectionate contempt. "Otherwise you wouldn't be in the police."

  Tm not a policeman. I work for…" Dallen widened his eyes, belatedly aware of the car's change of direction. "Where the hell are we supposed to be going?"

  Renard chuckled, again pleasurably triumphant in what appeared to be a never-ending personal game. "This will only take a couple of minutes. I promised Silvia I'd drop by with a carton of glass she's been waiting for."

  "Silvia who?"

  "Silvia London. Oh, I don't suppose you've ever been to the Londons' place?"

  "Not since my polo stock got woodworm."

  "I like you, Dallen," Renard said appreciatively "You are a refreshingly genuine person."

  And you are a refreshingly genuine bag of puke, Dallen thought, wondering how he could have been stupid enough to give up part of his day to such criminal waste. His previous encounters with Renard in the gymnasium had been brief, but they should have been enough to let him recognise and beware of a stunted personality. Renard's life appeared to he a continuous power game, one in which he never tired of contriving all the advantages, one in which no opponent was too small and no battlefield too insignificant.

  The present situation, with Renard at the wheel of a car and therefo
re temporarily in control of his passenger's movements, was a microscopic annoyance, and yet the other man's obvious relish for what he was doing was turning it into something else. Furious with himself for being drawn in, Dallen nevertheless sat up straighter and began watching for an opportunity to quit the car. It would have to be done in a single effortless movement—otherwise Renard would score even more points—and for that the car would have to be practically at a standstill. Renard glanced sideways at Dallen and promptly accelerated, hastening the alternation of tree-shadow and sunlight over the curving gold hood.

  "You'll enjoy meeting Silvia," he said. "You've got to see her jugs."

  "Maybe I'm not interested in pottery."

  "Maybe that's not what I mean, old son."

  Dallen kept his gaze fixed on the pavement ahead. "I know what you meant, old son."

  "I do believe he's angry!" Renard craned his neck to look into Dallen's face. "I do believe I've succeeded in provoking the puritanical Mr. Dallen. Well, well!" Shaking his head in amusement, Renard turned the car into a wide driveway with scarcely any slackening of speed. The level of illumination dropped abruptly as walls of foliage closed in on each side.

  "These reactionary times we're living in must suit you very well." Renard spoke with quietly ruminative tones, surprising Dallen with the change of tack. "Personally, I'd have been happier thirty years ago, back in the Sixties. I suppose you've noticed the pattern in the last few centuries? The steady build-up of liberalism … peaking two-thirds of the way through … then the violent swing the other way to close out the century and start the next. Why do you think it happens? Why is it that Mary Poppins concepts like mortality and monogamy and family refuse to lie down and die?"

  I'm going to presume be doesn't know what happened to Cona and Mikel, Dallen told himself. When the car stops I'm going to walk way, and if he has enough sense to let me go that will be the end of it…

  The house which was coming into view on a low hill was not what Dallen had expected. All he knew about the Londons was that they were supposed to be wealthy and that they were a focal point for an unorthodox philosophical society—the sort of people whose chosen setting would abound in gabled roofs, leaded glass and all the overt signs of respectability and tradition. Instead, the London residence turned out to be a three-storey redbrick house—rather too small for its imposing location—around which had been tacked an untidy skirt of timber-framed extensions. Additions had been made to additions in an undisciplined manner which would not have been tolerated in the days when zoning regulations were taken seriously. A stack of greying lumber had been left near the entrance to the main building.