Executive (31 page)

I should have paid closer attention to the warning, but I was in the office only briefly, about to return to my role as Garcia. “I don't believe there is anyone,” I said. “But if there is, I'll deal with it openly. The Tyrancy may not be popular right now, but we cannot afford to have any suggestion of scandal touch it.”

“As you wish, sir,” she agreed.

In due course the challenge was published, and thereafter Thorley named the member. It was my sister Faith.

Now I wished I had listened to Shelia! It had not occurred to me that the suspect would be a family member. Certainly I would have preferred to handle this quietly. But I was stuck with an open situation.

I talked to Spirit, as I also should have done before. “What's going on here?”

“It seems to be true,” she said. “A handsome and poised man has been courting her for influence. She meant well, but he was recommending corrupt cronies, and she has authorized their appointments. I don't believe she suspected, but she should have. She's blinded by love.”

Faith—once the most beautiful of young Hispanic women, then the plaything of pirates, finally a respected member of my cabinet. She had enormous support among the masses, for she had truly labored for the welfare of the poor and had accomplished many excellent reforms. But this was scandal, and now I had to act.

I summoned my sister. When she appeared at the White Bubble, I was struck by her elegance. In her mid-fifties, she was a handsome woman, and her dedication to her position enhanced the aura of class. It was hard to believe that she had gotten involved in this sordid thing.

“Is the charge true?” I asked, and knew that it was; her reaction betrayed her.

She spread her hands. “I love him, Hope.”

“He has interfered with the Tyrancy,” I said. “An example must be set.”

She gazed at me and turned away. That hurt me; I wish she had protested in some more obvious way.

We arrested the man and put him on public trial within days. We suspended Faith from her office. I hated this, but it had to be done.

There was no question of the man's guilt. The facts came out quite clearly. All of the suspect appointments were nulled, and the man was sent to labor in space.

And Faith was found in her Ami apartment, dead. She had taken a euthanasia pill.

Now the storm broke in earnest. For the condemnation of the man there was applause, but for the fate of Faith there was horror. Demonstrators marched and not only in Ami. WHY DID FAITH HUBRIS

DIE? the banners demanded.

The answer I remember best is the one made by Jose Garcia. In that guise I was known as an ardent supporter of the common man, so I was one of the ones the media sought for comment. “I believe she died because the Tyrant lost track of basic human nature,” I said, expressing the recriminations of the Tyrant far more accurately than they knew. “He has become insensitive to the feelings of others, including his closest family members. He failed to realize how seriously his sister would take the scandal and the destruction of the man she loved. He should have handled this matter privately, allowing her to retire and to join her lover in exile if she chose. Perhaps this is a reflection of his isolation from the passions and needs of the common folk. I'm sure he is extremely sorry now.”

“Now that the damage has been done?” a reporter asked, and I nodded affirmatively.

“Do you believe that the Tyrant is losing control and perhaps should be deposed?” another pressed.

Now, that was a leading question, well worth avoiding. But in my mood of grief and regret I stepped into it. “Sometimes I think so,” I agreed.

It was not long after that that the Resistance contacted Jose Garcia. “Do you believe that the Tyrancy should be ended?” an anonymous visitor asked.

I controlled my reaction. The Resistance had been bedeviling the Tyrancy increasingly. This was a nonviolent movement that spread ideas rather than physical mischief; it seemed to have no organization, which made it almost impossible to uproot. It supported the return of Jupiter to democracy without reversing all the reforms made by the Tyrancy. The problem with that notion was that every out-of-power movement espouses lofty ideals, but few retain those ideals when they achieve power. I was sure that it would not be safe to give over the reins until the reforms were complete. But it didn't necessarily appear that way to the common man. Thus the Resistance was dangerous, and we needed to be rid of it but had no handle on it.

I realized that Jose Garcia might represent that handle. If he joined the Resistance and worked his way into the confidence of its leaders, this could be the key to an important success.

But it disturbed me deeply to think that it had taken the death of my sister to open this particular avenue.

Certainly, if I could have traveled back in time and replayed that matter, I would have acted to protect Faith. I had indeed neglected her; I had hardly paid attention to her in the past two years. Now, too late, I thought about her constantly.

I think, in retrospect, that this was the true beginning of my madness. Something had snapped in me, and it could never quite be mended. Perhaps Faith's demise only foreshadowed my own. But this was not apparent at the time, and indeed my grief gradually diminished in intensity and faded into the background, so that I was not aware of the change that was occurring in me.

So I answered that I did have some question about the Tyrancy but did support many of its reforms, so was not ready to commit myself to any rash course. After all, I reminded my querant, I owed much to the Tyrancy; it had put me in charge of a major company and allowed me to reorganize it to my satisfaction.

That, it seemed, was the correct answer. The Resistance was not looking for rabid partisans but for thoughtful, concerned citizens who had sensible doubts about the Tyrancy. I certainly fitted that description at the moment.

Thus I became a revolutionary. But this was only the beginning and really did not intrude on my life.

Later that was to change, but only gradually, so that most of my life was unchanged.

My promise to balance the budget had seemed a mockery in the early years, as the deficits became greater than ever before. But as the company improved, became competitive, and then was the leader in Bubble technology, and other companies emulated our methods in order to become competitive with us , what had been a financial liability became a financial asset. Jupiter industry began contributing massively to the health of Jupiter society. Similarly the reduction in medical expenses helped, and the population control program, spreading to RedSpot and other Latin Jupiter nations so that their population pressure was easing in the same fashion ours was. Already the reduction in illegal immigration was measurable, and the related expenses were dropping proportionately. The Tyrancy might be condemned for the cutoff of procreation, but the job was being accomplished. And you know, as the economic situation improved, so did the attitude of the citizens. When the Tyrancy was two years old, I was being lasered in effigy in every major city; by the time it was five years old, I was being accepted as a necessary evil, and when it was eight years old, I was being hailed as an economic genius. Of course, by that time the antidote to the sterilizing agent in the food was being made available to just about anyone who asked for it, and babies were being born again, to families whose situations were secure. The hardships of the immediate past seemed to be forgotten. Contrary to popular belief, popular memory is short, and the conditions of the present color the public impression of both past and future.

I won't say that everything was wonderful, just that we had at last balanced the budget and were now retiring the planetary debt at a significant rate. Jupiter had again become the economic and social leader of the System. Buoyed by this, the people tended to overlook the remaining problems, such as the persistent illicit drug trade and the inability to fit every citizen in the job he most wanted. But we were working on these too.

Let me just give one example, the one that pleases me most, perhaps because it can be indirectly traced to my own management policy at Jupiter Bubble. I had set up task forces to explore new notions and develop them if that proved feasible. Some of these cost the company a good deal of money, because not every bright new notion makes sense, but that is only evident after it has been tried. Some merely wasted time. But some few did pan out, and these made up for all the rest.

One of our executives, Caspar Yonner, had transferred in from the Jupiter Fungus Company—known colloquially as Jupfun—and he had fungus on the brain. He had had a notion to develop a strain of fungus that would grow outside a bubble, directly in the atmosphere. Naturally that nonsense had not been tolerated there, but naturally we had considered it more carefully. It did sound scatterbrained, but the potential reward was so great that we decided to take the risk.

You see, much of our food is bacterial in nature. It is relatively inefficient to grow grains and vegetables, and colossally inefficient to grow animals for slaughter. But the right kind of fungoid cultures, yeasts, or bacteria can generate an enormous amount of protein in a very short time, to just about any specification.

From the vats emerged imitation animal flesh of many flavors, nutritious and inexpensive, and this was shaped into steaks or bacon or chicken legs to supplement the plant-derived food. Thus the fungus industry was one of the vital ones, which was why the Tyrancy had nationalized one of the inefficient fungus companies. It had floundered under our tutelage in the usual fashion, losing its best personnel. We had hired Yonner because his credits were good.

Culturing bacteria was a tricky business, because the cultures propagated extremely rapidly and mutated often. The solar radiation seemed to be mostly responsible. If a single cell were mutated, remained viable, and bred true to its modification, in a single day we could have a thousand tons of pseudo-vanilla pudding that looked and smelled like rotten eggs, and tasted worse. In such event, about the only thing to be done was to flush out the bubble to kill off the mutated strain, repressure, flood it with saprophytic agents to digest the refuse, and start over. Yonner had been this route several times and had noticed that sometimes the mutated culture returned in the same form in the replacement batch. Either a similar mutation had occurred, which was highly unlikely, or somehow one or more spores had survived the depressurization.

Actually the terminology is deceptive. Originally the farm bubbles were all in space, orbiting beyond the Jupiter atmosphere, so that opening a lock meant depressurization. But in this case the bubble had been in-atmosphere, just below the residential level, where the pressure was about six bars and the temperature slightly higher than Earth-norm. So despite the term, it was actually pressurization that occurred, as the hostile gas of Jupiter squeezed in to stifle the living organisms. Then, when it was pumped back out, it flushed out the dead material with it. Except that it seemed that not all of it was quite dead.

Yonner had reasoned that if some spores could survive depressurization, they might be selected to grow and replicate in it. That could lead to atmospheric farming, dispensing with the need for agricultural bubbles. Perhaps a current of fungus could be developed that could be harvested. That could lead to a virtually infinite supply—solving much of the food problem of the planet.

Of course, there were cautions. We didn't want to pollute the Jupiter atmosphere. It was uncertain whether fungus could propagate in the atmosphere, or whether such a strain would be edible, or whether such a harvest was feasible. So we let Yonner study it. For three years he and his team researched and experimented and struggled, trying strain after strain in special capsules of Jupiter atmosphere at different pressures. The expense mounted. But this was Jupiter Bubble; we knew the atmosphere could be harvested for inorganic material, so we were more tolerant of a notion about organic material than his original company was.

And suddenly he had it. He found a strain that would flourish at the conditions extant in the cloud layer just above the inhabited zone. Water, pressure, temperature—the lab tests proved that it was feasible, and it was an edible variety. Its tolerance was limited; it could not survive beyond that fairly narrow range, so could not spread out of control. It looked very good.

Now, in an ordinary government it would have required decades of bureaucratic consideration before such an experiment was permitted. But I studied the data, consulted with the experts available to the Tyrancy, and concluded that the potential benefit outweighed the potential risk. So when Yonner put in his petition for approval, it was granted immediately by the supposedly distant Tyrant.

It worked. The strain of fungus propagated phenomenally well, suffusing the swirling clouds, and in a matter of months the first harvest was possible. It didn't amount to much, for as yet the spores were spread very thinly, but it proved it could be done. Within a year there were commercially viable harvests, and thereafter it became something very like a cornucopia: seemingly unlimited protein from the clouds.

We had solved the problem of food for the hungry masses of the System.

I think this would be about as nice a note on my place in history as any. True, I was a tyrant; true, I authorized the demise of many old folk, facilitated the suicide of those of any age, and prevented the birth of many babies. But true, also, that the system I set up, and the specific company I reorganized, may have done more good for humanity than any other. If this doesn't justify me, then I don't know what does.

But meanwhile the Tyrant was not exactly idle. We had had continuing trouble with the importation of illicit drugs, despite the clinics. There were some that were simply too dangerous to tolerate, so were not provided by our clinics, and these were becoming big business. Unable to persuade a certain Latin government to take serious steps against the producers and exporters of the most serious of these drugs, we took firmer action: we invaded.