We Open on Venus - Starship Troupers 2

by Christopher Stasheff

  “Six,” Chovy said, “manufactured right there in space, around the planet’s orbit, with each one a little farther away from Centauri—and slowly, ever so slowly, New Venus began to move away from its sun. Then they made more holes, and the planet moved farther out, and they made more holes …”

  “And finally it was all the way out where it is now,” Lacey said, trying to sound bored.

  Chovy nodded. “It took fifty years and a lot of earthquakes, but what the hey, nobody was living here; and a kilometer at a time, it moved out of its place, expanding its orbit, until it was a full AU away from Alpha Centauri. The climate cooled down—and the rains began.”

  “Of course!” Marty lifted his head, the slow grin spreading. “It was vapor—cool it down, and it condenses.”

  “You catch it quick, bawcock. Not that it stayed liquid, not at first. For a year or so, the droplets turned right back into vapor as soon as they hit the rock below—it was as hot as a stove top, after all. But awhile later, the drops began to stay liquid. That was when the Company brought in gangs of men to supervise the caterpillar-treaded robots that arranged the dikes and canals and dams and levees and sluice gates, to channel each rain into a different lowland— because it was fractional distillation, you see; the cooler it got, the lower grade the liquid. The dams channeled each grade of petroleum product into a different geological basin. A geologist kept track of the quality of the distillate, and told the crews when it was time to shift the barriers to form a new channel—so we wound up with the Ocean of Gasoline, the Great Kerosene Lake, the Gulf of Oil, and so on.”

  “How could they do all that without starting a fire and sending the whole planet up in one mammoth explosion?” Marty asked.

  Chovy shrugged. “Simple—the planet didn’t have any oxygen. After all, it didn’t have any plant life—too hot. And no liquid; everything was vapor. Kinda like the original Venus, that way. Okay, so solar radiation broke apart molecules in the stratosphere, and liberated a little bit of 02—and Oi, for that matter; but the next passing ship would ignite a flare that would use it up. No, it didn’t burn up more than a fraction of a percent—we’re talking about a whole atmosphere of petroleum vapor, here. When it had all rained out, the only gas left was a little free nitrogen. Then the company manufactured helium out in space and pumped it down here, to hold the volatiles down.”

  “So the geography is geology,” I inferred.

  Chovy nodded approval. “Good. I’ll remember that one. Yes, we wound up with a Bay of Benzene, and an Ocean of Gasoline separated by a huge dam from the Ocean of Diesel Fuel, and a mammoth tar pit—christened La Brea, for some reason.”

  “I might know why,” Larry said with hauteur.

  “Would you truly?” Chovy drawled.

  I figured an interruption was in order. “They also wound up with a permanent labor force?”

  “Oh, yes,” Chovy said softly. “Done looking at the unnatural wonder? I’ll show you where the labor force lives.”

  “I’d like that,” Susanne said, and that decided the matter. Just for form’s sake, though, I asked the others, “Seen enough here, folks?”

  “Of course,” Lacey said. “What else is there to see but that mammoth tube?”

  Chovy had already turned the car and was rolling back along the pier, so it didn’t really matter that the others mumbled agreement.

  Susanne gazed at the bleakness outside the window and murmured, “It’s hard to believe people choose to stay here.”

  “Hard enough,” Chovy said, his voice flat. ‘Too hard, because they don’t. There isn’t a one of ’em wouldn’t go back to Terra tomorrow, if he had the cash for the ticket.”

  “But I thought they paid you well!” Lacey said, startled.

  “Right—they did.” And Chovy went on to explain that the original crew was paid scandalously high wages to make them willing to give up the comforts of Terra for ten-hour days inside pressure suits, breathing canned oxygen— there wasn’t any free oxygen, of course, or the whole planet would have gone up in smoke with the first lightning stroke. There wasn’t any water, either; every drop had to be shipped in from the moon, which was fortunately mostly ice. So the Company had to provide air and water—but that was all right; it had to provide food and living quarters, too. Pretty nice living quarters, at least at first—and the food was good, by cafeteria standards. They had to do everything they could to persuade people to work under such unholy conditions—especially since the temperature was pretty hot at first, though it did cool down to something bearable. But after the rain had stopped falling, the Company offered them wages they couldn’t refuse, to stay on. About two-thirds of the men accepted, and the Company shipped the others home, then brought out a number of new hands, again at huge wages on five-year contracts …

  All women.

  And a few preachers.

  Then the Company saw to their work force’s mental health by providing recreational facilities—3DT theaters, and sports arenas, and bars, and gambling casinos.

  The miners started spending a quarter of their paychecks, between their own amusements and dating the new supply of women.

  Then the Company started charging for the food.

  It had originally supplied chow in mess halls, of course—but who wanted to eat institutionalized mess when they’d decided to stay a few more years? So gradually, the mess halls were phased out, and the restaurants and supermarkets phased in. That was when the miners found out how much food could cost, when it all had to be imported.

  Some of them decided marriage would be cheaper than dating, and settled down.

  “That’s where.” Chovy pointed through the windshield.

  Suddenly, there were houses ahead—small, square boxes, painted in soft pastels, seeming to defy the barren beige all about them.

  “This is where the workers live,” Chovy said.

  “But didn’t the Company provide housing?” Susanne asked.

  “Oh, you have read a history book, then!”

  Susanne blushed. “Same as you—in school.”

  “A bit higher school, I’ll wager, but no more fact in the textbooks than the Company wants. How much did they give us—a paragraph?”

  “Four,” Susanne admitted.

  Chovy nodded, steering smoothly past the quiet little houses lining the road. “Well, they told you the start of the story, but not its end. The Company provided housing, right enough, and still does—if you want a bunk in a barracks. Of course, that’s for beginners—after a couple of raises, they put you in an apartment with three other blokes. Which is all well and good if you get along with each other, and are young and single—but when our grandsires got married, it was another matter.”

  “Of course,” Susanne murmured.

  “There speaks an honest woman,” Chovy said with warmth. “And right, too—within the year, an apartment in the company’s barracks wasn’t good enough any more, so they took out loans and built their own minidomes—”

  “And they had mortgages,” Susanne said.

  ‘Too right. Then the kids came, and they found out that they couldn’t save anything’, what with the high cost of living. Sure, their paychecks were gargantuan, by Terran standards—but so were the prices; and workers who’d been willing to put up with Spartan living conditions for themselves, found that they wanted something better for their spouses and children—in fact, the best possible. Which meant—”

  “They weren’t visitors,” Susanne said.

  Chovy nodded. “They were immigrants.”

  “Or to put it another way,” Marty said, “they were stuck.”

  Lacey looked daggers at him, but Chovy nodded. “Don’t mind putting a fine point on it, do you, Jack? But you’re right, and if they were immigrants, they had to live by the law of the land.”

  “And who made the laws?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  “The Company, of course,” Chovy said, with the contempt the question deserved. “All this time, they’d bee
n working for the Company, and the Company had been making the rules. Even their leisure time had been spent in Company barracks, or Company recreation halls and bars—so the Company was the government.”

  As he explained it, the ones who accepted the fact that they weren’t going to see Terra again, or at least not until the kids were grown, started wanting to have some voice in local politics—and found they couldn’t. There wasn’t any town government—just a Company executive. And, of course, Company police. The only good thing about it was that there weren’t any tax collectors. How could there be, when the Company collected all the money and just paid wages and salaries? In fact, in some ways, it was a lot like socialism, where the government owned all the industry and distribution—except that this government was out to make a profit.

  They provided all the necessary social services, of course—hospitals, doctors, roads, transportation, schools, and all that. Of course, if you wanted the better hospital, or personal attention from the doctor, or marriage counseling, or better teachers, you had to go to the private-practice sector. There was the public school for the workers, and for lower- and middle-management, and a private school for the upper management. Same thing for the doctors—if you wanted a human instead of a robot, you had to pay.

  All in all, it was a real sweet system—if you were top management.

  “Couldn’t the union do something about it?” Larry asked.

  “Shhh!” Chovy glanced around melodramatically. “Mind your mouth, Jack! No dirty words here, please—I run a clean cab!”

  “Dirty words?” Larry flared, but Lacey put her hand on his and said, ‘This car isn’t really bugged, is it?”

  “Not that I know of, but I thought I’d make the point.”

  “Unions are illegal, of course,” Lacey inferred.

  Chovy nodded. “So is idle chitchat about unions—and speeches about unions are worse. But books about unions are the worst thing of all.”

  “Not to mention books about exploitation of labor,” I inferred, “or about class conflict?”

  Chovy was still nodding. “Or criminals, unless they are shown as being totally evil and always die gruesome deaths at the end. In fact, there isn’t much freedom of the press, or freedom of speech, at all. There is freedom of religion, but the preachers’ sermons are under the same censorship as any other speeches—and more than one preacher has wound up in jail because of it.”

  “These houses have domes over them,” Marty pointed out.

  Everyone looked. Sure enough, each house had a clear dome, like the glass over a serving dish—and it didn’t just cover the house, it covered a few hundred square meters of very green lawn.

  “This is where the senior workers live,” Chovy explained, “the skilled tradesmen and the foremen.”

  “But those first houses we saw?” Lacey was staring out the side with wide, almost horrified, eyes. “Aren’t they airtight?”

  “Oh, they keep the air in, right enough,” Chovy said. “All the houses had to, or the Company wouldn’t have had any workers left. Of course, they could let the house have a few leaks and put a dome over it, if they wanted a bit of a yard for the kid to play in. Not too big a dome, of course, because the Company allotted them just so much air per week. Sure, they could have extra—if they paid for it. Some of them did; it was a status symbol, having a bigger dome. Management had big domes indeed, and you could tell how high up the ladder a man was by the size of his geodesic—and the size of the house inside it, of course, but it was the ratio of lawn to house that was the real status symbol. The top kick, the managing director, only had a twenty-room house, nothing palatial—but his garden was a virtual park, and his dome was two hundred meters across.” A slow-moving vehicle turned the corner ahead of us and came trundling toward us. It was a tank truck, with a very thick hose coiled on a reel at the back.

  “An oil truck?” Marty stared. “Of course, I should have realized. What else would you heat your houses with?”

  “Geothermal,” Chovy said immediately, “when there’s any need for heat, which is only a few weeks out of the year. We don’t burn oil, Jack. We don’t burn anything.”

  “Not even if the fire’s locked up tight inside a furnace?”

  “What’s inside can come out,” Chovy said.

  Marty got that faraway look in his eye that meant he was working up a new joke. Before he could let it out, I said quickly, “So what is in the truck?”

  “Water,” Chovy said. “The nice man comes around and fills your tank once a month.”

  “What happens if you run out before the end of the month?” Lacey asked.

  “You stay dirty,” Chovy answered.

  The cab was awfully quiet for a minute. Then Susanne said, “What do you drink?”

  “Whatever you can,” Chovy said. “There’s always cola—if you have the cash.”

  “Speaking of cash,” I said, “what happens if you can’t pay for the tankful of water?”

  Chovy turned around and flashed me a grin. “Why, then, you owe the Company. No shame in that, Jack—everybody owes the Company. More and more, all the time.”

  We were quiet again. Then Marty quoted, “He who dies, pays all debts.”

  “Not here,” Chovy said. “When you die, your kids inherit whatever debts you didn’t manage to pay before you died.”

  “Can’t you borrow from somebody else besides the Company?” Larry asked.

  “Wrong.” Chovy shook his head. “Very wrong. This poor bloke already owes half his hide to the Company, and you want to take what he’s got that was going to pay for the other half? Very wrong, Jack. Nobody borrows here— except from the Company. You have to do that, or you wouldn’t have food to eat.”

  “Where do you shop?” I had a hollow feeling in my belly.

  “The Company store,” Chovy said. “They’re all Company stores.”

  “So,” Susanne said, “You’re born into debt …”

  “And you die in debt,” Chovy finished. “And you live in debt, or you don’t live at all. Welcome to life on New Venus.”

  Even Marty wasn’t up to giving a fanfare.

  Finally, to break the silence, I said, “You know, there’s something I don’t see here.”

  “There’s an awful lot I don’t see,” Lacey said angrily. “But what are you missing, Ramou?”

  “Posters,” I said. “Handbills. Billboards. Anything advertising the Star Co— the Star Repertory Theater, performing in its gala opening.”

  I glanced at their faces. They were all wide-eyed in horror.

  It was Marty who voiced it. “You don’t suppose nobody knows we’re coming, do you?”

  12

  “Do you suppose anyone knew we were coming?” I ventured.

  Barry’s face was grim—or at least his eyes were; his mouth and nose were hidden by his breathing mask. He had been seized by the same apprehension, but both of us had hesitated to voice it, as if the mere saying of it might have made it come true. Now, though, the fear was in the open, and we had to deal with it. “We must find Publius and discuss the issue,” he said, his voice coming flat and muffled through the breather.

  “How are we to find him?” I wondered.

  “Easily enough,” Barry said. “There can’t be all that many hotels in so rudimentary a town.”

  I looked around me at the bleakness and devastation of graded and rammed earth and low, beige and gray buildings, slightly relieved by garish shop signs. Oh, some of the stores had been cast in pastels, but time and ultraviolet had softened and leached the color till it was almost indistinguishable from the rest. We were looking at downtown Aphrodite, capital of New Venus—and a very negative tribute to the goddess of beauty it was. “In fact,” I murmured, “I can’t think there would be even one hotel. Who would wish to visit here if he did not have to?”

  “Ah, but we must consider those who must visit,” Barry said, smiling. “After all, Amalgamated Petroleum has many outlying offices; surely their executives must nee
d to attend conferences with the central management now and again.”

  “But why?” I said. “With visiphones …”

  “For the impact of personal confrontation.” Barry turned to me, the smile still in place. “Surely a man dedicated to live theater could understand that better than any. For personal confrontation, inspiration, and intimidation, and for the ceremonies of power.”

  “Also for security,” I amended, “if they don’t want some enthusiastic teenager eavesdropping electronically on their plans for dealing with labor.”

  Barry nodded. “No doubt. So I would be surprised if the Company did not have some accommodation for visiting executives—which is, I trust, willing to take the occasional tourist from Terra.”

  ‘Tourist?” I wrinkled my nose at the scent of gasoline fumes that managed to penetrate through my breathing mask—spray suspended in the helium, no doubt. “Who would want to visit this barren—”

  “Now, now, my good Horace,” Barry reminded me, “we are guests, of a sort.”

  I sighed. “I shall try to remember, Barry. Now, where is this hotel?”

  We had asked the cabbie to drop us in the center of town, so that we could wander about a bit and get the feel of the locale—get lost and find our way home, as it were. We had managed to become lost excellently, but we were doing rather poorly at finding our way home.

  “I haven’t the faintest,” he replied, “but I do see a phone.”

  I looked up and saw the screen fastened to the side of a tavern, with a sign above it that read, “If you can’t make it in on time, phone!” Pleasant chaps.

  Barry stepped up, fed in his credit card, and waited while a mellow synthesized voice advised him, “Processing.” Just in case he couldn’t hear, it flashed the words on the screen, too. Then they were suddenly replaced by a sign saying “Dial,” and the voice said, “Please dial your call,” in the event that Barry could not read.