Island Worlds (4 page)

Murdo rose from his seat and stood beside Carstairs. "Thank you, Mr. Carstairs. Are there any questions or comments at this time?"

"Crap," said a voice from the back of the theater. Thor looked around and grinned. He knew that voice.

"Robert, how did you get in here?" McNaughton was raging beneath his unflappable exterior.

"I walked. You didn't really think you could keep me out, did you, Murdo? Who installed all your security gear?"

"National Fortressystems," Murdo said.

"And who owns thirty percent of National Fortressystems?" Bob asked.

"Hmm, I see what you mean. Well, since you insist, you might as well have your say."

"Yes, I'd be glad to hear what you have to say, Mr—Ciano, is it?" Carstairs seemed genuinely interested, not belligerent. Bob rose from his seat and walked down the aisle, lurching slightly. In one hand he held a huge brandy snifter.

As he passed Thor, Bob winked and whispered: "Just keep your mouth shut, kid."

He mounted the platform. "Mr. Carstairs, you've implied that the current deplorable state of the planet is the result of the expansion of humanity into space, much of that expansion pioneered by the direct ancestors of people in this very room."

"I don't blame our space efforts alone," Carstairs said. "I do say that it has been an important aggravation of other problems and a truly significant drain on our resources. Very limited resources, I might add."

"We'll let that stand. I'm here to tell you that, not only have our space colonies, settlements and exploratory expeditions not been a drain on this planet, they have repaid many times their initial investment. I say further that not only have those enterprises not contributed to the collapse of world order, they're all that have kept this planet from going straight to hell decades ago!" There was a lot of chatter from the audience.

"Robert," Murdo said, "why don't you sit down?"

"No, Mr. McNaughton," Carstairs said, "let him continue."

"Let's have a metaphor," Bob said. "I used to be a slick man with a metaphor, back in my teaching days." He put his brandy snifter on the podium, freeing his hands for gesticulation. "Our situation here on this planet is like that of a ship sinking, only it's sinking very slowly. As the food and water run low, the ship keeps getting low in the water." His hands made settling motions.

"Now, way off in the distance, but just visible, is an island. But, there's only one boat and getting to the island is a dangerous journey, with lots of rocks and tricky currents. However, a few brave souls man the boat and make it to the island. They report back that the island has water and you can grow food there, but it's going to take a lot of work. Go to it, say the people on the ship. A few of the bravest and most enterprising make trips out to the island. Sometimes the boat overturns and people are drowned, but there's always a few volunteers for each trip. Now there's no way that you can get everyone off the ship and to the island in that one little boat. But the fact is that most of those who could go don't want to. They prefer their luxury cabins. Even a sinking ship is more comfortable than an island, until the water comes in under the door.

"As the food and water stocks keep getting lower, the people on the boat keep demanding more from the island. They keep raising quotas on the people on the island even as the ship passengers are falling out and fighting among themselves. And that ship is sinking all the time."

One of the Third Worlders stood up in the audience. "Are you saying that the people of Earth are practicing imperialist exploitation against the space colonists?"

Bob thought for a moment. "Well, I wouldn't have put it that way, but I guess you're right."

"A very pretty metaphor, Mr. Ciano," said Carstairs, "but I've noticed that metaphors are seldom accurate."

"This one isn't really accurate," Bob admitted, "because unlike a real ship the one we're on is getting more crowded all the time and the people on it are starting to blame the folks on the island for the hole in the bottom of the goddamned hull!"

"Go home and sleep it off, Robert," Murdo said. "You're just embarrassing everybody. McNaughton Enterprises will be supporting the Earth First proposal."

"That's McNaughton-Ciano Enterprises, in case you've forgotton, Murdo. And if you think our company is going to support this hysterical garbage, then you and I are going head-to-head." He stormed down from the podium and crooked a finger at Thor as he passed. In the hubbub of the assembly breaking up, Thor left. He retrieved his cape and found Bob standing by his Harley.

"You see why I said you have to get offworld quick?" Bob asked. "Wait six months and you might not be able to go. Or if you do, it'll be as a hireling with more strings on you than a marionette." He waved his printout of the protocols. "Item One makes you a civil servant. Item Four makes you a broke civil servant."

"You're talking as if you expect that nonsense to pass!" Thor said.

"It'll pass, count on it."

"But, if I leave before I finish school and get my degree, I won't have any position waiting for me when I get there. The scientific stations aren't interested in anybody without an advanced degree."

"Then you may have to ship out as a laborer. There are worse things to do at your age. It really is a place where you can work your way up on guts and ability. I'd go right now if I could get a new ticker. But even if you can't go up with your degree, you might be able to protect some of your goods." He handed Thor a small card. "Look this guy up. He's an old friend of mine, name of Richard Swenson. He's a Norwegian, crazy as hell, but he can give you a way to protect some of your money. I'll talk to him tomorrow."

Thor put the card in his pocket, along with his emigration permit. "Thanks, Bob. If you think it's that urgent, I'll talk to him. Tell me something, if you think this thing is inevitable, why did you put on that scene back in there?"

Bob grinned. "Because now they have a villain. They can focus on me and maybe they'll leave you alone while you're making your arrangements. You're going to be under enough pressure, Thor. You're the future of the corporation and it's important to them to get your cooperation in this business. He straddled the bike and kicked it into life. It purred quietly, unlike the old hogs. Even with an I.C. engine license, noisy vehicles were strictly forbidden. Thor shook Bob's gauntleted hand. "See you, kid." Thor watched the taillight careening down the perilous mountain road. Bob was handling the curves with the ease and skill of a sober man one third his age.

Thor made diplomatic farewells. Karen didn't deign to show up to see the guests off. He had been planning to drive back to New Haven after spending a few days in Denver, but he had changed plans. He'd follow Bob's suggestion and spend a while getting a feel of the real world. It had not occurred to him that he had been living in an artificial environment until tonight. As soon as he was on the Interstate highway, he set the car's autopilot for Los Angeles. He cranked the seat back to horizontal and went to sleep.

TWO

He woke up on the outskirts of L.A. His eyes were gummy and he had a bad taste in his mouth. He was slightly hung over from the modest amount he had drunk at the party. He'd never had a strong tolerance for alcohol. He stopped at a charging station and found a restroom where he could wash his face and brush his teeth. The attendant behind his bulletproof barrier looked askance at his classic car and formal clothes. He pulled the razor out of the dashboard, then put it away. If he was going to be moving among the hoi polloi, an unshaven face might be good protective coloration.

There was a lot of L.A. to choose from. The Greater Los Angeles area stretched from Chula Vista to San Luis Obispo. Huge stretches of the megalopolis were Hispanic, and large areas were Ukrainian or Asiatic. In this immense, polyglot community was to be found everything that was happening in America.

He drove to Eagle Rock, an area that was still predominantly Old Establishment middle-class and found a motor inn that looked acceptable. In the lobby he punched the attention plate and the screen lit up. The clerk looked like a college girl working part-time out of her student apartment. "May I help you, sir?" She looked Hispanic and had a nice smile.

"I need a single room for a few days. Do your rooms have holo service and infonet screens?"

"Yes, sir, all our units are fully equipped. Please place your card in the slot and I'll key it for your room." Thor put his card in the slot and the girl's eyes widened when she read the credit rating.

"Is there a car rental nearby?" Thor asked.

"That information should be on the infonet, sir. All the nearby restaurants and entertainment centers will be listed, too. Just key in the name of your hotel: Omega Inns, Eagle Rock location number two."

"Thank you," Thor said. The girl's image winked out and the number of his unit appeared on the screen along with a disembodied voice for the visually impaired or the illiterate: "Your unit is five six six. Your unit is five six six. Enjoy your stay."

He parked the Porsche and took his bag up to the room. He chose some anonymous sports clothes from his small selection and found a nearby coffee shop for breakfast. Today he would institute his casual study of changes in holographic programming. He stopped in a convenience store and picked up several self-heating meals and appropriate beverages. This was going to call for a few inert days as a cushion veg, so he reminded himself to find a nearby dojo and make reservations for a daily workout.

With his bag of supplies in one arm, he stuck his card into the slot beside the door. The door slid open and he set the bag on a table. The room wasn't what he was used to these days, but it was at least as good as his first-year college digs had been. It was a small cubicle about five paces on a side, with a fungusbed large enough for two, a small table with two chairs, and a tiny bathroom. One wall was a picture window looking toward the old downtown section of L.A., where several small smoke plumes probably denoted modest riots. Best of all, another wall was covered by a holoscreen. He studied its controls and found a fairly complete listing of channels and services. It had a mask for retinal projection, but he disliked the gadgets. They gave him headaches and made it difficult to focus his eyes for an hour after he removed them.

He dragged a floor cushion before the screen, stuck his card in the screen slot, and keyed into the infonet He punched the keyboard for Media; Visual; History: –10 years; Daily program guide. An instant later the Greater Los Angeles guide for that date ten years previously began rolling slowly up the screen. He modified his request to the programming of the five major networks. He was instantly transported into a major nostalgia-wallow. There were all the programs he had grown up with. Many of them had been long-running series even at that date. At least one show in five had featured spacers in some way or other. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, space opera had become the premier format for action-adventure programming, and had stayed in that place for the next several decades. Only police and war series were even in competition.

There was
Pioneers
, set in the asteroid belt at the time of the earliest mining operations;
Tarkovskygrad
, about the terrible first years of Martian settlement;
L-5
, a semi-comedy in which the builders of the wholly artificial orbiting environments found themselves in a new, insane predicament every week. There was
Space Marine!
, which had been his favorite program while growing up, because Sam Taggart occasionally showed up as the senior commandant of the Corps. Makeup and computer enhancement had transformed the actor into a virtual duplicate of his grandfather.

Besides these historical and contemporary programs, there were many set in the fictional future of exploration. The science in those series had usually been so bad that even the fifteen-year-old Thor Taggart had winced, but they had abounded with energy, excitement and optimism. The series
Aliens
had featured a new first-contact story every week, many of them based on classic tales.

Documentaries about the progress of exploration and exploitation had been common as well, although they had never been nearly as popular as the pure entertainment programs. Thor keyed in a few minutes of each program to refresh his memory. He remembered many of the episodes. The dialogue and plotting were hopelessly simple-minded and naive to his adult sensibilities, but he could still feel a faint tingle of the excitement that had so stirred his adolescent imagination.

He spent the first half of the day going over the old shows, sometimes going back as far as forty years, long before he had been born. Always, a significant part of the programming had been space-oriented, expanding or shrinking as fads had made or dropped other genres. Virtually all of it had been sympathetic toward the adventure of space exploration. There was the occasional exception.
Space Pirates
, for instance, or the utterly bizarre
Star Tarts
, which had run for two seasons before the Islamic bloc had forced a worldwide crackdown on media porn. In all, it was much as he had remembered.

He opened one of the trays he had bought and poured water over it from the bathroom tap. The meal began to heat and reconstitute and he ate it with the plastic fork provided. He washed it down with genuine milk and felt fortified to face the next part. It was time to look in on contemporary programming.

After four excruciating hours he sat back in his cushion, appalled. His first selection had been titled
Asteroid
. It had sounded something like the old
Pioneers
. What he had watched instead had been the "family saga" of an incredibly rich and corrupt clan of psychopathic degenerates who mined gold (gold?!) from space rock, working slave-gangs of transported convicts. When they weren't chuckling over the death-agonies of the miners, they were usually indulging in a lot of kinky (off-screen) sex or crooked political wrangling, all of it amid surroundings of free-fall opulence fit to set any Earth slum-dweller frothing with rage and envy.

Then there had been
Space Cop
, an actioner about a team of handsome, incorruptible customs agents dedicated to keeping Earth free of goods smuggled in from space. In the space of a single hour they had dealt with a gang smuggling drugs made in secret, free-fall labs, another smuggling low-priced high-tech equipment, sure to put millions of Earthmen out of jobs, a third gang bringing back dangerous criminals exiled to Lunar colonies and a fourth bringing in a sinister political rabble-rouser. All four gangs were bloodily annihilated by the end of the hour. In this epic, "space scum" was one of the milder references to offworlders. Thor had a suspicion that, had media blue laws not been so strict, the references would have been considerably more graphic.

Frantically, he had switched around looking for something more hopeful. Every time he found any appearance by space settlers or explorers, they were invariably depicted as sociopaths, criminals, exploiters, sinister political schemers or, at best, deluded fools. How had he missed all this? The answer, of course, was that Bob was right: he had been hopelessly out of touch. He had spent too much of his life in colleges and with his rich friends and relatives. College establishments and the rich were always the last to accept change, or even notice it.

He needed to find out when this change had taken place. Had it been sudden or gradual? Had all networks changed at once or had one instituted it and the others followed? What was behind it? The sponsors? The Writer's Guild? It was a complex problem and he had no time to tackle it himself. All right, then, if he had spent too much time in the college network, at least he knew how to use it to get things done.

He keyed in the Greater L.A. University complex. When it appeared he keyed the Media Studies department and examined the sub-department headings. He selected Popular Holovision first and eliminated all the technical fields. He cross-referenced History of Programming and Media Propaganda. A list of courses and professors appeared. He eliminated them and keyed Independent Study Assistants For Hire. A long list of names appeared. All of them were grad students needing food, rent and beer money. His less fortunate friends in grad school had all worked the independent study network.

There were hundreds of names, but one attracted his notice instantly: Chih' Chin Fu. It used the old transliteration, before the adoption of Pinyin. The modern equivalent would probably be something like Jeijing Vung. It suggested a California family of more than a century s residence. There was no creature on Earth the equal of an old-time Californio for feeling out popular trends. It was imprinted on the nervous system.

He keyed the address code. The screen showed a blond young man with squarish features. "May I help you?" he asked in a heavy Ukrainian accent.

"I'm trying to find Chih' Chin Fu. I have a study to commission," Thor said.

"I'm Panas Chubar. Fu is my roommate. Just a moment." The screen panned to another part of the same room, where a thin young man sat amid a clutter of computer and infonet equipment. He wore a sleeveless coverall of silver fabric and his hair hung in a shoulder-length tangle. He looked sixteen but had to be older.

"Fu here," he said with a toothy smile.

"I'm Thor Taggart. I see in the U. infonet listing that you're qualified for independent study in trends and propaganda uses of holovision."

"Not only am I qualified," Fu said, "but I'm probably the best in the net."

"I'll give you a chance to prove it," Thor said. He outlined his problem. Throughout the recitation, the young grad student kept in continual motion. At first, Thor suspected some drug at work, but the boy moved very precisely, picking things up and putting them down, tapping out rhythms on the console before him, sipping periodically from a teacup. Thor decided that it was just an abundance of nervous energy. The kid spent too much of his time in front of a console.

"Let's see if I have it straight," Fu said. "You need to know the when, where, why, how and, most of all, who of the switchover from pro- to anti-spaceploitation in the pop holo medium?"

"That's it."

"Well, a study like that could take a while, and I have a heavy class load to cope with, plus a teaching assistantship."

"I don't have much time. How much would a rush job cost me?"

Fu scratched his bushy scalp. "Well, taking all the time and inconvenience into account, say, forty gee?"

Forty thousand dollars was a bit steep for a hungry grad student. Undoubtedly he could bargain the price down, but he didn't want to waste time and the money meant little to him, anyway. "Agreed. How soon can I have it? I'm only going to be in L.A. for a few days."

"Well, you're not too far from here. Will an hour from now do?"

"I said a rush job," Thor said, "but even the best in the net can't be that fast!"

"No, I got it right here." Fu rummaged through a file drawer and came up with a messy stack of printout sheets. "I did this a couple of months ago for a holoprop class. I was thinking of doing my thesis on it. You want me to transfer it to micro? That'll take a couple of hours, but I'll throw it in for free."

He had been neatly snookered. You had to admire that kind of gall. There was something in the way Fu moved—"Tomiki System?" he said on a hunch.

Fu gave him the toothy grin again. "Among others. You're
aikidoka
?"

"Among others," said Thor, smiling back, this time. "I'm looking for a good dojo. Could you recommend one?"

"I use the Honin Hall. It's about thirty minutes from where you are. I'll be heading over there this evening for a late workout You want to meet me there? It's jodo tonight, but you can probably find an instructor for some aikido."

"What time?"

"I go there at twenty-thirty. I'll flash you the address." He punched the location, then looked back up. "If you don't mind my asking, your name's Taggart, and your facial features resemble a certain gentleman of that name prominent in the early days of spaceploitation. Any connection?"

"If you're talking about Sam Taggart, I'm his grandson." This kid was quick.

"No kidding," said Fu, grinning. "And I only took you for forty gee! I'm going to be looking forward to meeting you in the flesh."

"Just bring the study. And yes, reduce it to micro. See you in a few hours." Fu broke the connection and Thor stretched. It was late afternoon and he'd accomplished a lot already. There was still a lot to get done today.

Leaving the Porsche in the subterranean parking garage of the hotel, he walked a few blocks to a rental agency and rented a battered electrical runabout. When he put in his deposit, his card got the raised-eyebrows treatment once again. That was another thing he had to change. His first stop was a bank, where he arranged for a more unobtrusive card, one which showed a modest credit balance. The teller showed no surprise at the request. Apparently, it was common for slumming rich types to adopt such protective coloration.

At a second-hand store he bought a workingman's outfit of trousers, tunic, vest and boots. He studied the array of cheap jewelry in the case at the purchase counter, but decided to pass it up. He knew vaguely that body decorations served as insignia of sorts, and he didn't want to send out the wrong signal through ignorance. He returned to the hotel to don his new apparel and by then it was time to make his way to the dojo.