Norman Spinrad

by A World Between

  But we didn’t, he thought, rising and raking the room with his gaze. That’s the past, and it can’t be changed. He noticed that the staff people were averting their eyes defensively, as if anticipating deserved recrimination. Recrimination might be deserved, but it was useless as well.

  Falkenstein grimaced. The staff would be useless at least until tomorrow, when they would have digested the sour meal of failure and be ready once more to face the future.

  Without a word to anyone, he left the lounge, walked down a series of empty brooding hallways, and stood in one of the viewing balconies overlooking the black Pacifican night. Beyond the electronic barrier, dark shapes thrashed and moved amid the deeper darkness of the jungle. Overhead, the stars were mere pinpoint abstractions, unreal and very far away. Somewhere up there the Heisenberg would be moving grandly across the impassive firmament, but now it was invisible, and Falkenstein could not remember ever feeling so isolated and alone. Only the ghost of Maria stood at his side, like the phantom presence of a freshly amputated limb, palpable only through the pain of its absence.

  Since that day when she had left his bed for the dormitory, even the time they did spend together had become an unreal dull torment, filled at first with arguments, and then with a forced and artificial normalcy that, under the circumstances, seemed like the most painful sort of madness.

  They were strangers to each other now—worse, the pain of that estrangement was made more poignant by the memory of what had been for so very long, and the conviction of each that the other was to blame widened the abyss with every passing hour.

  Falkenstein longed to be with Maria in this moment of total loneliness, but the Maria he longed for was the Maria that had been. The Maria that was would only exacerbate his loneliness with the triumphant vindication of her emotionalism over his logic. Were it rationally possible to hate an entire planet, Falkenstein thought, I would hate Pacifica with the passion of an outraged cuckold.

  He sighed, moved closer to the transparent wall of the viewing balcony, and collapsed into a chair. Such thoughts only divert my attention from the problem at hand, he told himself firmly. Hate, rage, emotion itself are hardly what’s called for now. I’m faced with a situation, and I must think it through logically.

  And things could be worse, he told himself, reaching for optimism. The Femocrats could be in control of the new Parliament. Instead, Carlotta Madigan is in effective control, and she’s at least committed to keeping the Institute open for the whole trial period. The new student body is installed, the Institute is functioning, and the crunch won’t come until the trial period is up, three-and-a-half months from now. The only operative question is the matter of a scenario for the interval between.

  What to do ... ? What can we learn from this current fiasco... ? He grimaced. Maria would say that this elec tion proved that the Pacificans have become so fed up with off-worlder meddling that they’ve been pushed into uniting against us and the Femocrats alike. No doubt she sees this as the triumph of some rude sort of social justice, some superior Pacifican democratic esthetic.

  But however wrong-headed that emotional value judgment may be, he reflected, the psychopolitical analysis is essentially correct. Maria understood that in a raw emotional way, and it would seem that Carlotta Madigan understood it with cold political precision.

  Therefore, Falkenstein realized with instant clarity, the thing to do now is precisely... nothing. No more media blitzes till the climactic vote on a permanent Institute is at hand. Let the Bucko Power movement go its own way. Maintain a low profile for the duration. While—if we’re lucky and they’re foolish—the Femocrats continue to polarize the women against the men, make themselves the main enemy of the Pacifican nationalism that’s been stirred up, alienate that middle 40 percent, perhaps enlarge it, and bum themselves out.

  Falkenstein rose to his feet buoyed by new energy— energy and a new kind of hope. Politically, such a scenario might be mere temporizing, a pragmatic admission that forces beyond his control now dominated the situation, but on a personal level...

  On a personal level, Maria would approve of this approach. She would see it as a vindication of her own feelings toward the people of this planet, as a personal compromise between them, as his loving attempt at a private rapprochement. It can bring us together again! he thought excitedly. The loss of this election can give me back my wife!

  With the anxious ardor of a courting adolescent, Falkenstein searched the Institute building for Maria. She wasn’t in the staff lounge, nor was she in the commissary or any of the viewing balconies, and her dormitory bed was empty. Some personal reticence, an unwillingness to display a private emotion publicly, his secret shame at the failure in his personal life, kept him from asking after her. So he searched the building in solitary silence, and only when he had satisfied himself that she wasn’t there did the thought occur to him that perhaps he had underestimated the love that still existed between them.

  Perhaps even now she was waiting in their private quarters to comfort him in what she would surely perceive as his hour of defeat. Of course! he thought. How stupid of me! Where else would your wife be when you needed her most? She’s waiting there for me while I’ve been running around here like a fool. Perhaps she’s even moved back in. Come to think of it, I do believe her clothing was missing from the dormitory.

  He dashed out of the building into the sweltering God-zillaland night, not even bothering to pause to erect his inertia-screen. By the time he had covered the fifty meters of open space to their private habitat, his breath was ragged and his clothes rank with sweat. But he barely noticed either the monstrous heat or its sudden absence as he entered their cool quarters.

  “Maria? Maria?” The living room was empty. The dining room was empty. The study was empty. “Maria ... ?”

  With a mounting sense of panic, Falkenstein entered the bedroom. Empty as well. Not a sign of her return.

  Then he noticed the red message light on the panel of the small net console. Woodenly, he punched the recall button, and collapsed, slump-shouldered, on the foot of the bed, as Maria’s face appeared on the utility screen—tense, drawn, quavering, but frozen into a mask of grim resolution.

  “Roger, by the time you see this, I’ll already be in a liner for Gotham. I can’t stand it here any more. I can’t stand what we’ve been doing, and I can’t stand being so close to you and yet so far away. I don’t know what I want to do; I only know I need time and space and alone-ness in which to think. As I record this, I’m watching the election results, and what’s happening has confirmed my female emotionalism with hard statistical data...

  Her voice became more shrill, and the line of her mouth hardened. “What we’ve done here is wrong, and now we’re paying for it. I don’t know what we can do about it, but I’m grateful to the people of Pacifica who seem quite able to preserve themselves. Failure seems to make the guilt I bear a little easier to take, but it’s not enough, and I don’t know what is..."

  Her voice began to tremble, her mouth quivered, and her eyes filled with tears.

  “I know this is cowardly of me, Roger. I should’ve faced you in person. But sad to say, I’m not sure you would have let me go had I placed that power in your hands. So... so... goodbye for now, I’ll call you from Gotham ... and try to believe that in some way I still love you ..

  The tape ran out and Falkenstein found himself sitting there staring dumbly at the dead screen. Fury, pain, loss seemed emotions too picayune with which to confront this unfathomable, unfaceable moment. They passed through him like transient electric shocks, leaving him drained of all emotion, leached of all possibility of thought, unable to even react His being was as dark and cold and lonely as the dead and empty reaches of the space between the stars.

  17

  SKIMMING OVER THE CALM WATERS OF THE BAY TOWARD Parliament on her floater in the bright blue morning, Carlotta Madigan wondered if the unreal tranquility which had descended on Pacifica these past two months was a genuine re
turn to harmony or just the lull before a greater storm.

  An exhausted ease had enveloped the planet since the Parliamentary election, at least compared to the frenzy of the previous months. Once more, the primary business of government had become the economy, and cleaning up the mess left by the Thule strikes seemed to have sucked up any excess political energy left over from this rather eerie cooling of the Pink and Blue War. The temporary raw materials shortage had necessitated the setting up of temporary quotas and allocations, along with a complex system of standby gov price-fixing for virtually all manufactured goods, and the sudden drop in disposable income caused by the temporary mass unemployment had to be cured by the prepayment of abnormally high citizen’s dividends.

  Ordinarily, an economic package of this complexity and scope would have meant a long, arduous debate in Parliament, but the whole thing had sailed through in four days with hardly a murmur, giving Carlotta a strangely unsettling sense of her own enhanced power over the new Parliament. Naively, one could put it down to a quiet orgy of patriotic cooperation, but more realistically it seemed that both the Femocrat and Bucko Power factions were walking on eggs, neither side daring to do anything that might provoke her into a coalition of convenience against the offending party.

  As a result, she had the virtual de facto power to rule by decree, and while this certainly made life easier, there was something quite unhealthy about it that made her perversely long for the more usual perpetual political tug-of-war.

  Truth be told, this quiet interregnum was not quite what Carlotta had expected. The Femocratic League and Pacificans for the Institute continued to organize, but the mass rallies and heavy media blitzes had faded away, as if both sides had realized that their attempts to polarize men and women against each other had reached the point of diminishing returns in the last election, had created a third force more dangerous to both than each was to the other. She had to admit that she found such political flexibility and subtlety on the part of the off-worlders both surprising and somewhat unnerving.

  For now the outcome was almost entirely in the hands of the handful of Pacifican scientists that Royce had secreted in the Institute. Unless the viability of a totally Pacifican Institute could be demonstrated by the end of the Madigan Plan period, polarization would swiftly become total as the 40 percent in between was forced to choose sides, and the electorate would be so evenly divided than an enforceable democratic decision might very well become impossible to make, and democratic government itself could collapse.

  Carlotta reached the lip of the main Parliament landing, floated onto the shore, and paused for a moment, looking back across the bay at the island heart of the city. The brilliant morning sun sparkled off the towers and domes; the faery traceries of the bridges bustled with pedestrian traffic; floaters and hydrofoils scrawled their white-water calligraphy on the blue waters; the city was a picture of commerce, tranquility, and reassuring normalcy.

  But behind that facade, what stratagems were being hatched, what plots were forming, what was really going on in the cafes and offices, the backrooms and the bedrooms? In quiet Ministry buildings, Royce and his spies were working on her secret plan for the confrontation soon to come. But what were the other sides doing behind the eerie truce? '

  “Well, where do we stand now, Hari?” Royce Lindblad asked somewhat nervously. “You know, we’ve only got a month to pull this off.”

  On Royce’s office comscreen, Harrison Winterfelt grimaced owlishly. “Gould be better, could be worse,” the Minister of Science said.

  “A statement that could be applied to* any given day’s weather or your love life,” Royce said testily. “I’m interested in specifics, Hari.”

  “Specifics is mostly what we’ve got,” Winterfelt said with a shrug. “Chemical formulas and cookbook techniques for their rejuvenation processes. Blueprints for their matter transformer. We know how they get from star to star so fast. An inertia-screen, we could build. The brain eptifiers are no trouble. But...”

  “But what?”

  “But basically what we’ve got is technology, not science,” Winterfelt said. “We can reproduce their gadgets and drugs, and we’ve got their theoretical approaches down, too. But the linkages are another story. We can synthesize brain eptifiers and rejuvenation biologicals, but how do the damn things work on cellular metabolism and the mind-matter interface? What’s the unified field theory behind the inertia-screen? And so forth. Our boys have some advanced basic theories and general approaches, and a lot of advanced technology on an industrial espionage level, but Transcendental Scientists they’re not. Institute graduates have six years of study behind them, and even the best conventional scientists can’t pick all that up in a few months.”

  Royce tried to understand what Winterfelt was saying, but the essence of it hovered just beyond his grasp. “But in practical terms, Hari, in terms of a media show that will win votes, can you give me enough to be really impressive?”

  “You mean to laymen? For sure! Pacifican-built matter transformers and inertia-screens. We could race a ship around the system in record time. We can rejuvenate some famous old jocko. We can show the people a fifty-year quantum jump in technology. We can knock ’em dead.” Royce sighed and relaxed back in his lounger. “That sounds great to me/’ he said. “Congratulations are in order. So what’s bothering you?”

  Winterfelt frowned. “Look, we can convince the voters that Pacificans can set up their own Institute of Transcendental Science,” he said, “but me, I’m not so sure. Cut off from the real thing, it’ll take decades for our scientists to understand the new theories and new technologies well enough to put them together in a way that will continue to generate more on a Transcendental Science level. In the meantime, Transcendental Science itself will progress at its own accelerated rate. Without some reed Institute graduates to guide us, it could take us a century or more to achieve-real equality with the Arkology boys.”

  “But we can do it? We won’t become a permanent backwater?”

  Winterfelt shrugged. “Probably not,” he said. “If we do go it alone, it’ll be a tremendous boost for Pacifican science. Not just the stuff we’ve pirated, but the knowledge that we can do it because we have some of it and there are people out there a century ahead of us who we can catch with an all-out effort. A lot of the best brains will go into science the way they go into media now. In a decade, we’ll be the number-two scientific power in the human galaxy.” He looked at Royce owlishly. “But number two, Royce,” he said, “not number one. Not for a century. That’s the trade-off—a delay of a century in scientific progress for getting rid of all these damn off-worlders.” “And which way would you vote, Hari?” Royce asked. Winterfelt smiled ruefully. “As a Pacifican, I’d say we can’t afford any more of the past few months. As a scientist, I’d say being at the leading edge of galactic science immediately is worth any risk.” He shrugged. “It’s a political decision, Royce,” said. “And as a politician, I’m glad that it’s yours and not mine!”

  “Thanks a lot, Hari!” Royce said. “But from where I sit the choice is obvious. There’s no way we can keep the Heisenberg people without being stuck with a permanent Femocrat mission, and there’s no way the buckos of this planet are going to sit still for that. Even if we could squeeze such a resolution through Parliament once, there’d be moves to repeal it every other week, and we’d end up changing Chairmen and Parliaments about as often as you change your underwear, with permanent Femocrat and Bucko Power parties forever, or until one side pulls off a successful coup. Thanks, but no thanks. What we’re stuck with may not be the best of all possible worlds, but it’s the only possible way for this one!”

  “Well, I wish you luck,” Winterfelt said.

  “Thanks,” Royce said dryly. “Within the month, this whole planet’s for sure going to need it.”

  Masking her uneasiness with an artificial confidence, Carlotta Madigan surveyed the Delegates, glanced at the near-empty spectators’ gallery, took a deep breath
, and announced: “The Chair now has a resolution to introduce.”

  I sure hope you’re right about this, babes! she thought, exchanging a quick glance with Royce, who now sat in the center of the ideologically rearranged Parliament. The Femocrats sat to her extreme right, the Bucko Power Delegates to her left, and the center block in the middle, and none of them, she thought, will be expecting this.

  The Madigan Plan still had eight days to run, this was supposed to be an ordinary session dealing with the economic situation, and everyone, even those who counted themselves her allies, would be caught totally flatfooted. Nobody was going to like it. Once more, she was going to deliberately provoke a vote of confidence she couldn’t win, and this time the resulting electronic vote of confidence would really be critical. Win or lose, there would have to be a new Parliamentary election afterward, because no one would be able to form a governing majority with this Parliament after the chaos this move was going to create.

  “It’s a setup,” Royce had insisted when he broached the idea to her two days ago. “Falkenstein and the Femocrats will be caught with their pants down. Parliament is sure to vote it down, and they’ll find themselves suddenly in the middle of an electronic vote of confidence a week before they expected it. Their reaction will be to attack you from both sides; we’ll just let them gibber and scream, then hit them with the bombshell on election eve, and you’ll win the vote of confidence in a landslide.”

  “Maybe,” Carlotta had said. “But if we’ve got the clincher, why not spring it before the Parliamentary vote and settle the whole thing without elections?”

  “Because we want new elections.”

  “We do?t9

  “Don’t we, Carlotta? Okay, we could expel Transcendental Science and Femocracy now with this ammunition with a cute little Parliamentary maneuver, without risking elections. But what would we have then? The same damn ideological power-blocks turning the next decade’s politics into an endless bout of recriminations. Getting rid of the off-worlders isn’t enough—we’ve got to get rid of their rotten legacy, too, and the only way we can do it is to shatter the Bucko Power and Femocratic blocks and elect a new Parliament that’s overwhelmingly non-Femocrat, non-Transcendental Science, and pro-Pacifica. And if that means risks, we’ve got to take them.”