Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 4: September 2013 (27 page)

As it was intended to be, stepping into the official residence of the Chief Administrator was like stepping a quarter of a billion kilometers, all the way back to Earth.

“Dinner’s ready, Senator, and Mr. Brody is at the gate.”

As she always did at this time, Alice Ngu had come to fetch him in from the verandah. Short, plump, and brown, wearing a plain dress which failed as a servant’s uniform only because nobody else here wore one like it, she was second- or third-generation Cambodian or Vietnamese—Altman could never remember which—and delivered her English with that lilt Orientals seemed to retain no matter how many of their ancestors had lived and died in America. Her husband and children had been among those he’d watched returning from the fields.

As usual, he’d already started in and met her in the family’s private living room. “Thank you, Alice, I’ll talk to the gate. Please tell Mrs. Altman I’ll be there shortly.”

As she left, closing the double doors behind her, it struck him all over again how Gwen had made a point of maintaining things as if they were still living on Earth. Given certain constraints, the place combined the ambience of the executive mansion she’d grown up in with the self-conscious rusticity of the high-tech hideaway where she’d spent most of her vacations. Altman had to concentrate sometimes, remember to slide his feet along as he did outdoors, avoid lifting them too far from the carpet in a pull of gravity only a tenth as powerful as that of Earth, in order to keep from dashing his brains out on the ceiling beams.

The room appeared pine-paneled. There wasn’t a tree on Pallas that could have provided the boards—not that anybody was willing to cut, anyway. The cost of importing the rolls of photoprinted plastic had exceeded what many a family had spent simply getting here, but the paneling—and the chairs and sofas upholstered in dark colors, the yellow incandescent light of the fabric-shaded bulbs in end-table lamps—lent a welcome warmth to this room, and to others Gwen had decorated, which seemed lacking anywhere else on the little planet.

He reached an intercom set into the wall beside the doors and touched a key. Its tiny liquid-crystal screen, until now merely displaying the time, date, and temperature, dissolved into a wide-angle view inside the gatehouse, where an International Peace Corpsman waited to hear from him.

“Altman here.”

“Sir! Subject identifies himself as Brody, Aloysius, no middle initial, no real ID.”

Before Altman could focus on the well-scrubbed face beneath a baseball cap of sky blue (Earth’s sky—Pallas’s was tinged with a reddish purple Gwen often complained of), a vast hand engulfed the picture, wrenching it about until it settled on a seamier face he recognized. Annoyance colored the young Corpsman’s voice, just as reddish purple colored the sky. It was a common reaction which the Senator understood perfectly but couldn’t train his people out of. Outsiders made a point of
never
carrying documents, and under the Stein Covenant—the agreement they’d all signed before immigrating to Pallas—they couldn’t be required to.

Brody grinned into the camera. “A good evenin’ to ye, Senator darlin’, an’ will y’kindly be lettin’ me in?” Altman was sure the accent was a phony. Not only did it seem to come and go with the weather and the time of day, but his intelligence sources had told him that Brody had been born in an industrial suburb of Boston.

“Sorry for the wait, Mr. Brody. The corporal will have someone escort you to the Residence.”

Altman rang off, savoring the room about him for a final minute. Thanks to Gwen, nothing but the gravity reminded him of the world he stood on. The drapes had been drawn before dark and—a welcome difference from Earth—a fire burned in the hearth. At home, with the dwindling resources and draconian pollution laws of eastern North America, it would have been a hologram. Here there was certainly no scarcity of agricultural waste, nor of hydraulic rams and labor to shape it into “logs,” and between the chimney precipitators and a selectively permeable atmospheric envelope, no pollution.

Meanwhile, without a crackle or a grain of “snow,” the latest digitalized disinformation from LiteLink in Atlanta, admittedly delayed by never less than fourteen minutes, splashed across a large high-definition room screen as it might have done in any home on Earth, without an audience at the moment to appreciate the technical—if not the journalistic—accomplishment it represented.

On the other walls, Gwen had hung framed prints, young girls in sunlight-dappled gardens, quaint bridges arching over their own reflections in quiet, lily-patterned water. On the piano—small, but representing yet another conspicuous expense—stood a picture of her parents. Never mind that it was an old campaign photo taken just before the Big One murdered them and twenty million other Californians. The truth, which he’d never spoken in his wife’s company, was that dear old Dad Hathaway’s political posterior—or at least his reputation with posterity—had been rescued by the earthquake everybody had been expecting for decades.

Shaking his head at the remembrance, he dismissed it and made his way to the formal entrance, where Alice was answering the door. “Good evening, sir, may I take your—”

At first glance, there seemed nothing to take. From the way Brody leaned on his cane, he wasn’t about to part with that. A head shorter than Altman, he wasn’t large but somehow gave a contrary impression. Behind antique rimless glasses, his eyes glittered with good-natured mischief—some cosmic joke he was willing to share with anyone who asked—the lines radiating from their corners making him look like a Coca-Cola Santa Claus. He could have been described as broad. His clothes, and the sweeping gestures that formed a part of his vocabulary, accentuated it.

At least he looked clean. Like all Outsiders, he was dressed and groomed abominably, tonight in faded denim trousers, leather sandals, and an off-white smock dyed in primitive splashes of color. His beard and hair were gray-shot, the latter shoulder-length and parted painstakingly in the middle, held behind his prominent ears with a thong. Altman’s sources stated that the man was sixty-two years old and had come to Pallas earlier than most immigrants as a laser operator with the original terraforming crew. Having lost his right leg in a construction accident, he’d apparently decided to stay where the gravity was kinder.

From under the obnoxious shirt, strapped to his left thigh, hung a big, heavy-looking pistol which the Senator wished he’d had the Corpsman confiscate at the gate. Unfortunately, that would have breached the so-called governing document cooked up by pop-philosopher Mirelle Stein and foisted on the locals by Curringer simply because it had been his billions—along with those of a Japanese consortium he’d had under his thumb—which had financed the entire terraformation.

More to the point, Outsiders could be very touchy about what they’d been led to believe were their rights, and the Project badly needed new markets for what it grew. Much as the proliferation of personal arms on Pallas infuriated Altman—he’d been the Senate’s foremost advocate of stripping America clean of that particular evil—he was reluctant to offend any potential customer, especially the widely respected landlord of the Nimrod Saloon & Gambling Emporium, which formed whatever social focus the ramshackle town across the lake laid claim to.

Brody gave Alice a searching look. Winking broadly at Altman, standing a couple of meters behind her, he handed her his cane, unfastened the tie-down above his knee, reached up under his shirt and pulled the rig off, pistol and all, handed it to her, and reclaimed his cane. Arm sagging more under the emotional than the physical mass of the belt, weapon, and spare ammunition, she handled the ensemble as if it were a poisonous snake, but accepted it without comment and hung it on a knob of a coatrack near the door.

Altman led the man to what served as a dining room—there wasn’t time for the customary drink and small talk in the parlor Gwen kept for such occasions—where they both sat, only to find themselves on their feet again when she entered from the kitchen.

“Justice Aloysius Brody,” the Senator began, “my wife, Gwendolyn Hathaway Altman.”

Gwen, who’d been supervising the cooking, removed her small apron, wiped her hands, and extended one to match the paw Brody offered. Altman thought he was going to lean down and kiss it.

“Charmed t’be sure, Mrs. Altman, an’ at yer service.”

“Please be seated,” she answered, “
Justice
Brody?”

Gwen had been a thin, pretty, tightly wound platinum blond of seventeen, nine years younger than himself, when he’d first become enchanted with her at an Inauguration ball in 2012. At the time, he hadn’t known that she was the elder daughter of the most powerful individual in his own political party. He was still pleased to recall that his ardor hadn’t heated noticeably when he’d found out who she was. It had pleased him somewhat less, after their wedding in 2013—during a period when premarital intimacy was less common than it had been generations earlier—to discover that she brought her innate nervousness to bed with her.

She had been the picture-perfect political wife. Sixteen years had given her fine lines at the corners of her eyes (nothing like the mesh decorating Brody’s), put a little flesh on her, and added some premature silver to the platinum.

All the patience he could muster had failed to warm the personal side of their life together. In the end, to her visible relief, he’d sought satisfaction elsewhere. They hadn’t slept in the same room since their first child, Gibson Junior, had been conceived; a rare exception had allowed the delighted tabloids to show her, eight months into a second pregnancy, at the height of the scandal which had destroyed him. True to her upbringing—for Gwen life imitated the art of the possible—she blamed him less for extramarital adventuring than for getting caught at it. She monitored her blood chemistry and made appointments with him by the calendar, a monthly chore he relished less and less.

“I thank y’very kindly, ma’am.” Cane between his knees, Brody folded his hands atop the crook as she refilled his wineglass. “’Tis an honorary title, dear lady.”

The kitchen door swung aside, temporarily stopping conversation. Once the cook and her helpers, colonists like Alice, had served them and departed, Gwen raised her eyebrows prettily. “You’re not really a judge, then, Mr. Brody?”

Altman watched with amusement and sympathy—for Brody. Gwen had lusty instincts for a few things, power being highest on the list. Had she been convinced that Brody was a nobody—were she to become convinced even now—she’d drop out of the conversation and let her husband carry on. He’d seen the same thing happen thousands of times and was convinced she was unaware she did it.

The man grinned, turning up the Santa effect. “I’m after adjudicatin’ the occasional dispute. Mostly I’m no more than the humble innkeeper y’see before ye—thank y’kindly, I will have another. Y’wouldn’t be related t’Dad Hathaway, now?”

“I’m his daughter.” She smiled, her eyes downcast modestly on her plate. Her own enthusiasm tonight for the wine they made themselves here was unusual. Ordinarily she’d let her first glass sit through a meal, hardly condescending to touch it.

Alden “Dad” Hathaway had been the last Democratic governor of California. He’d wanted to be the first President from the newly formed Democratic Union Party, but fate—at 9.5 on the Richter Scale—had intervened. The party, large and diverse as it was, solidly rooted in American political tradition, had so far failed to put a candidate in the White House. There were reasons for that—Altman himself was presently foremost among them—but there were other reasons, as well.

Reluctantly on the couple’s part, they talked about it over dinner. The Outsider seemed more interested in discussing events on Earth, which he hadn’t seen for years, than business. In a buyer’s market he felt free to antagonize them with his peculiar ideas, whereas they—Gwen was aware of the Project’s desperate need for customers—couldn’t afford to antagonize him by telling him how peculiar his ideas were.

In the ancient Chinese sense, the opening years of the twenty-first century had proven “interesting.” Sweeping changes—welcome and long overdue, in Brody’s opinion—had imposed themselves on an increasingly confused and confusing world.

Most notable was a shift in the century-old balance of political and military power. Prodigious, domestically unpopular amounts of American aid had failed to keep the Soviet Empire from crumbling after decades of wildly swinging temperament, liberal reforms alternating with brutal strictures often tightened overnight. Those subsidies, along with a last hysterical flurry of foreign military adventures, had only helped cripple that once-great Western nation’s own economy and had eventually destroyed both the Democratic and Republican parties.

“Not t’mention their old management, so proud of their bipartisan aid programs,” Brody declared, “at least as far as runnin’ under the old labels was concerned.”

At about the same time, reacting as it had over two millennia to outside influence, split by linguistic and cultural differences little appreciated in the West, China had divided itself into a dozen conflicting principalities, some independent, some controlled by other governments, and some—it was impossible to tell.

“The Chinese picture still seems to change every day,” Altman informed his guest.

“But it’s fair t’say that socialism as a force in human history seems finally t’have run its course.”

Altman watched Gwen, who’d studied Marxist economics at Berkeley, the one university in the world still offering it, until conversation moved to safer ground. In mostly English-speaking Europe, borders meant less each year. Mirroring America’s economic problems, Europe had eliminated trade barriers on that continent, along with internal economic regulation.