Under the wheel, p.7
Under The Wheel, page 7
Clayton found her sudden tart anger endearing. All along he had wondered if she found Ernest’s sweaty—well—earnestness somehow attractive. To find that she could so quickly size up the situation, and automatically side with him, gave Clayton an unexpected jolt of pleasure. He smiled at her and gestured toward the immense gleaming stone.
“I believe the lady would like to take a walk upon the surface first, Ernest. We’ll suit up momentarily. Then I’m sure I’m quite capable of escorting her safely home, thank you.”
The sputtering exasperation that came from the speaker only deepened his joy.
11.
Clayton took a moment to himself on the veranda. It was pleasant to get outside, away from the hothouse festivities of the Hostel.
Dr. Rollan had declared a holiday. The Brothers and Sisters had set to with an endless round of dances, feats, athletic competitions, songfests and general revelry. Apparently they required no explanation of the holiday, no pretext, but simply gave themselves over to a mad round of heartwarming ritual good spirits. Clayton had never seen people with such capacity, and wondered how such a remarkable ability fit into the dry, acerbic Drovneb parameters. Breathing in the succulent air of ripe fields and sweet promise, he decided that narrow Drovneb had missed something vital.
“Are you going to accept?”
Sylvia’s sudden question, coming from behind, made him jump. He turned to find her glowing with energy, perspiring from a whirling folk dance that was just now ebbing away in the hall beyond.
“I…I came here to think it over.”
“You have to.”
“Well, I…it’s a big decision, Sylvia.”
Her mouth formed an incredulous O. “But you could live here forever.”
“But I couldn’t return to Earth, or even to the asteroids.”
“What does that matter? Earth can’t compare to this, can it?”
He gazed out across the verdant fields, the gentle curve of the Hoop rising up into the sky with a seemingly infinite promise of bountiful natural wealth. There was astrophysics to be done here, utopian visions, a self-contained universe. Even if it was founded, finally, on a deception. But even that false center was a giant jewel, a marvel unequalled anywhere.
“No, it can’t.”
“Father needs you.”
“Yes, he told me when he made the offer.” Clayton patted her hand uncomfortably.
Actually, Dr. Rollan had revealed more than Sylvia or anyone else in Brotherland knew. Dr. Rollan’s health was declining, an arteriosclerotic gumming combined with gradual, accumulating organ defects beyond the healing powers of man or machine. Rollan was the scientific sorcerer behind the Hoop, and was finding the task more difficult as the great ring spun on. Even minor excitements, such as Rollan’s confession to his daughter at the discovery of the diamond mountain, sapped his strength. He needed help.
“You know,” he said distantly, “if you hadn’t invited me, I wonder how he could have gotten anyone reliable out here.”
“You mean any volunteers would have been Earth agents?”
“Well, yes,” Clayton admitted uncomfortably.
“Just like you.”
“But I’m different, you know that.”
“Oh yes, as I know,” she said, an enigmatic smile playing on her lips.
Clayton’s arrival had seemed an omen to Dr. Rollan, a possible eleventh-hour salvation. Rollan had never trusted outsiders enough to think of bringing them into his gyrating experiment. But now he had to. Sylvia’s chance invitation had provided an unexpected opening.
“Is he resting?” he asked to deflect the conversation.
“I checked a short while ago. He’s looking better.”
“He knows I won’t leak information about the diamond.”
“Of course,” she said mildly. “We trust you.”
“Mere knowledge that so many potential diamonds could flood the market—that alone would drive the price to nearly zero.”
Sylvia smiled. “Your sacred market system. Too much wealth and it becomes worthless.”
Clayton shuffled uncomfortably, rubbed his hands together. There had been so many signs, clues, hints. The thick windows of his bedroom were diamond sheets. The robots he had seen at the edge of the Hoop were bringing a chunk of diamond to store among the ice fields of the Hoop’s backside. Ernest’s discomfort at discussing technical matters arose from the man’s lack of experience at keeping secrets from strangers.
Rollan had not been deeply disturbed by Clayton’s discovery. Perhaps the years of keeping the secret had built up a kind of pressure to share it with someone who could understand.
The old man did trust him. Earlier tonight the Handyman—face lined, hands visibly trembling, voice reedy and faltering—had offered to bring Clayton forward as his inheritor, the Fixit Man. To transfer the mantle of humble power.
Rollan’s dog came cautiously onto the veranda and sat a respectful meter from Clayton’s revered leg. Curiously, the dog acted this way only toward the Handyman and himself, as if all along the animal had sensed some similarity.
“I…I don’t know,” Clayton said. “I’d have to learn so much astrophysics, handle Brotherland, teach people like Ernest enough to help me out.”
“Father can teach,” she said laconically.
Clayton nodded. Dr. Rollan knew the quirky ways of the Brothers and Sisters, was sure that he could smooth the way for Clayton. They needed leadership, though of a gentle, self-effacing kind. For in their blissful, nostalgic world, the Brothers and Sisters were unprepared for the inevitable threats the Hoop faced.
One danger was obvious. The mass which was heated and thus lit the Brotherland skies was in turn swallowed by the hole. As the hole’s mass grew, its gravitational field clutched the Hoop harder, made it spin faster, stressed the steel webs that underlay the warm green fields. This would worsen. Only an astrophysicist could solve such a long-term problem.
The Handyman had peered at Clayton for a long time this evening, beseeching him wordlessly to shoulder the task. And now Sylvia did, too.
To maintain this idyllic simple communality demanded vast, intricate, gyrating technology, but even that was not enough. At the secret center was not a dark secret but instead a diamond, a luminous cliche of capital. Something in these contradictions appealed to Clayton’s heart.
He took her hand and walked inside, to the railing above the large dance floor. Below swirled the uplifted, perspiring, happy faces.
For the first time tonight, Clayton had begun to sense the strange social cohesion these people felt. They were the Handyman’s ever more demanding and uncontrollable hostages to fortune, joyful souls born into a serene world shaped by unseen hands. They spoke to each other constantly, comparing their minor mishaps, accidents, confusions, fretful collisions with reality’s unrelenting rub. The tireless torrent of pure, unashamed gossip shared out all misfortunes, tempered egoistic dread, purged anger of its uniqueness. There was a solace in such a thick net of mutually invaded privacies, sexual preferences confessed and exercised under an unblinking sun, angst exposed to the social glare like a skin disease shriveling away beneath searing ultraviolet. Like a heightened form of clubbiness, these people felt no oppression in their uniformity. They gained instead a reassurance that villages and tribes had granted their members down through millennia, the casual knowledge that no scrape or tragedy or disfiguring blemish was in fact new, that everything had happened before, or very nearly so, and could be shared, soothed. They were like a roistering army marching toward some battle they could not anticipate and so shrugged off, given strength to tramp forward by their own massed smell, their swelling songs.
Something in their innocent spinning dance endeared the Brothers and Sisters to him. Even dumb but useful Ernest, waving up at them, seemed like an old schoolmate. The fevered music, humid thick air, heady sweet aroma of wine—all blended into an illusion of ample community and endless uncomplicated joy. It was a dream he knew he could share, as the Fixit Man.
“They never seem to stop,” he said dreamily.
“Yes,” Sylvia said precisely. “Like sex, only too much is enough.”
The remark surprised him, like many of her sudden shifts, and he studied her for a long moment. She seemed coolly oblivious, and yet…
What an obliging accident it had been, that the fellow student she invited for a visit was an astrophysicist, even though he concealed it. Despite her thoroughness, her quiet investigation of him at UCLA had no revealed that deception. How providential, too, that Clayton had the right combination of curiosity and timing to discover the diamond, and force Dr. Rollan to think about a replacement. In the long run, if Clayton could not surmount the Hoop’s gathering problems, he had contacts among the freebooters of the asteroids. Their craft and their silence could be bought, without alerting Earthside. Clayton’s ’roid origins could be useful. And finally, how lucky for them both that romance had bloomed here, and that Clayton was a man she could share this marvelous mad pin wheeling world with.
His eyes narrowed at the thought, and she gave him a serene, full smile. He would always wonder exactly what it meant.
FUGUE STATE
John M. Ford
If you’re fond of a concrete, unchanging reality, don’t read this story. John M. Ford, who won the World Fantasy Award with his novel The Dragon Waiting, here creates a global police state that rules by revisionism. The Vogel apparatus has made it possible to control a man’s mind on the deepest level of all…and the world may never recover.
The rattle of the Russian gun seemed to go on long after the magazine was empty, and Forester’s arms ached from holding it against the recoil. He looked around the room; no one was moving.
Forester threw the AKD into the fireplace; logs shifted, sparks went up. He turned around, began walking away from the lodge, up the hill toward the treeline. Around him the snow went on smooth and white and forever.
Forester wondered if any of the people in the lodge had any notion of what he had done for them. He struggled himself to think of the word for it. An act. An act of…
An act of compassion.
That was it. It had been so difficult to remember. Forester stumbled in the snow, and fell forward. There was no more sensation than of felling into soft white light. Words tumbled through Forester’s mind as he tumbled through the light: pain, cold, weariness, death. But he had forgotten their context, and without context they were meaningless. Vogel had told him that, told them all that. Had any of the others understood?
Isolation was the last word. There wasn’t anything after that.
The Memory cops kicked in the door. Margrave was sitting in the middle of a book-lined room. The heat and sound sensors on the helicopter hi-drone outside said he was alone; gun muzzles swept the room, but there was nothing in sight but bookshelves and the kitchen. Closet doors were pulled open; there were clothes, more books, a duplicating machine.
“The copier is licensed,” Margrave said. “You’ll find that the seals are intact.”
The cops had on helmets and ribbed black armor jackets. Margrave wore a red-striped shirt and brown wool trousers. Forester carried a pistol, Danny Baker a riot gun. The two local-force backups had D-Three-issue Urban Short Carbines; the Division Four tech was too busy with her Vogel rig to use a gun. Margrave was making a cup of tea.
Margrave was long-bodied, conventionally handsome, with sandy hair and strikingly dark eyes behind small round eyeglasses. He jiggled the chain of the tea ball, making it jingle in the cup, and said mildly, “I suppose you have some sort of warrant?”
Forester pulled the laminated blue card out of his breast pocket, flipped it onto the table. “Glenn Margrave, National Identity Number 4036-8248-1390, your premises are being entered on suspicion that your actions pose a threat to the safety of the citizenry—”
“The public safety. Noble old phrase.”
“—of the World Federation of States. The bearer of these orders and his deputies are empowered to search and to pursue search, to seize and to confiscate property, persons, and data—”
“There are sixteen hundred twenty-four books in this room, give or take a few on loan. I hope you gentlemen can read very, very fast…but then, I forget. You’re not readers, are you.”
“—and to execute such other orders as the Federal authorities may prescribe.”
Margrave said, “Look, I’ve been through this four times, two of them in this very room. I’ll finish my tea, and we can go.”
“And to execute,” Forester said flatly, “such other orders as the Federal authorities may prescribe.” He reached into his pocket again, pulled out the red card and threw it down across the blue one. Margrave stared at the card. Forester said, “Okay, Rennert,” and the tech came in from the hallway, the steel briefcase in one hand cabled to the probe in the other.
Margrave looked hard at the Vogel apparatus. He knew what it was.
Forester said, “I now advise you, Glenn Margrave, that as Case VT-185441, the Federal Special Court has determined that you are to be given Vogel Conversion by a qualified operator at the time of your apprehension on the current charges. Because of the threat to the public safety, you are not to be permitted messages or other outside contact prior to the conversion procedure.”
Margrave’s face was very pale, but his body and voice were steady. “I don’t suppose you’ll name the charges against me?”
“You don’t know?” Danny Baker said.
Margrave looked at Baker. “You ask that as though you meant it, Officer. Yes, I know. But it once was usual for the prisoner to face the court, even if the court had already reached its verdict…No messages, eh. If I wrote a letter, you’d just burn it, wouldn’t you?” He started to lift the tea ball from the water.
Forester’s hand closed on his wrist. “Leave it there or I’ll break something.”
“It’s cold anyway.” He let go of the chain. Forester holstered his pistol and pulled Margrave out of the chair: he locked his right arm around Margrave’s throat, levered Margrave’s left arm up against his spine.
Margrave turned his head slightly, toward Danny Baker. “You’re black,” he said. “Don’t you find any outrage at this, at one person doing this to another?”
Baker said calmly, “Not when he’s the one man and you’re the other.”
The tech came closer, raising the probe. Margrave said loudly, “Is any one of you a Jew? Hispanic? Amerind? Are any of you anything other than police, that what’s happening here should mean something to you?”
“There was a woman named Lacy,” Baker said. “Other than police, she was someone’s wife, someone’s daughter.”
“Yes, yes,” Margrave said, “It is that basic humanity that I’m trying to reach—”
“Lacy’s job was registering duplicating and printing machinery.”
“Oh,” Margrave said quietly.
“Oh,” Forester said, and compressed Margrave’s chest. “Lacy never even carried a gun. Aren’t you going to tell us that the pen is mightier?” Margrave didn’t say anything.
The tech put the probe on the table and pressed a retina reader’s rubber cup to Margrave’s eye; Margrave shut his lids tight, but the tech just punched the inductor button and sprung them open again. “Okay, that’s a match,” the tech said, and picked up the probe again.
“If you are silent when the darkness takes those who protest against it,” Margrave said, “who will protest when the darkness comes for you?”
“The tapes of this will be wiped tomorrow morning,” Forester said in a tired voice, and pulled back. The tech shoved the probe against Margrave’s forehead. The secondary contacts reached out on jointed metal arms to embrace his skull. Margrave struggled then, finally, tried to bite Forester’s wrist above the glove, but too late; the probe’s inductor system had control of “his head and neck muscles and Forester had control of the rest.
Forester said, “Ready?”
“Another couple seconds. Grid’s bouncing like crazy. Okay, we’re in. No skin touching?”
“No skin. Do it. Danny—watch the door.”
“Never left it, partner.”
The tech said “Voltage,” flipped the safeties and triggered the Vogel circuits. The wired-glass contact tips glowed blue-white.
Margrave jumped, but not much.
“Five seconds to failsafe,” the tech said. “Mind the tears, they conduct…three, two, one, okay, from here on it’s permanent.”
Forester relaxed his grip, just slightly. Baker covered the hallway; it was quiet. The backups watched, curious; this was the first Vogelization they had ever seen live and close up.
The tech said, “Grid’s nearly flat…Okay, that’s it.” She punched a switch and the equipment went dead, the probe arms recoiling.
Margrave’s eyelids fluttered. His head rolled and his knees went slack. Forester kept holding him, on the off chance that the conversion hadn’t taken: Margrave hadn’t crapped his pants and most Vogels did that.
After a moment, Danny Baker said, “He’s done, partner. Let him down easy.”
Forester let go. Margrave swayed, but stayed on his feet. Vogel conversion didn’t reach down to the motor centers, but sometimes there was a temporary paralysis or blindness.
Margrave took a hesitant step. He looked around at the cops; his face was blank, his eyes wide. He shuffled to one of the bookshelves, ran his hands over the spines, made a gabbling noise. Drool ran down his chin. He got to the door, fumbled it open. One of the backups stuck his foot out in Margrave’s path.
“Don’t do that,” Baker said, not loud but sharp, and the cop pulled his foot back and stood up stick-straight.
Margrave paid no attention. He walked out into the hall, turned, and made his way toward the building exit, fingers scraping along the walls.
“They all got such a sense of purpose, you notice?” the tech said, folding up the Vogel rig. “Ever wonder where it is they think they’re going?”
