New America (9 page)

He let her go and stood up. “I can’t, Eva. Not yet.”

She stared as if in horror.

“The whole community depends on, well, on me,” he said wretchedly. “The negotiations. We’ve discussed them often enough, you and I.”

“But—” She shifted the gurgling baby, in order to hold out one arm in beseeching. “Can’t that wait for a while? It’s waited plenty long already.”

“That’s part of the point. Everything I’ve been working for is coming to a head. I dare not hesitate. The time’s as good as it’ll ever be. I
feel
that. I can’t let … my man … cool off; he’ll back away from the commitment he’s close to making. I’ve gotten to know him, believe me. In politics, you either grab the chance when it comes, or—”

“Politics!”

He consoled her for the short span he was able. At least, she accepted his farewell kiss and his promise to come back soon, bearing his triumph and their people’s for a gift. He did not tell her that the triumph was not guaranteed. Doubtless she understood that. Her brain and will had been half of his throughout the years. In this hour she was worn down, she needed him, and he had never done anything harder than to leave her alone, crying, while he went to do his damned duty.

Or try to. Nothing is certain, on a world never meant for man.

Consider that world, its manifold strangeness, and the fact that no help could possibly come from an Earth which a handful of freedom-lovers had left behind them. Consider, especially, a gravity one-fourth again as great as that under which our species, and its ancestors back to the first half-alive mote, evolved.

Hardy folk adapted to the weight. Children who grew up under it became still better fitted. But the bearing of those children had not been easy. It would never be easy for most women, until natural selection had created an entire new race.

Worse, that gravity held down immensely more atmosphere than did Earth’s. Because this was more compressed, men could breathe comfortably near the tops of the loftiest mountains. As they descended, however, the gas concentration rose sharply, until it became too much for most of them. Carbon dioxide acidosis, nitrogen narcosis, the slower but equally deadly effects of excess oxygen: these made the average adult sick, and killed him if he was exposed overly long. Babies died sooner.

Now the human species is infinitely varied. One man’s meat can quite literally be another man’s poison. Such variability requires a gene pool big enough to contain it. The original colonists of Rustum were too few—had too few different chromosomes between them—to assure long-range survival in an alien environment. But they could take with them the sperm and ova of donors, preserved in the same fashion as were those of animals. These could be united and brought to full fetal development in exogenetic “tanks,” on whatever schedule circumstances might allow. Thus man on Rustum had a million future parents.

And: as far as practicable, the donors back on Earth had been chosen with a view to air-pressure tolerance.

Some of the original settlers could stand the conditions at intermediate altitudes; some could actually thrive. But exogenes like Daniel Coffin and Eva Spain could live well throughout the entire range, from ocean to alp. To them and their descendants, and whoever else happened to be born equally lucky, the whole planet stood open.

The human species is infinitely varied. A type on the far end of a distribution curve will not always breed true. There will be throwbacks to the median —perfectly normal, healthy children, perfectly well suited to live on Earth. Certain among them will be so vulnerable to unearthliness that they die already in the womb.

Because of that possibility, every woman who could manage it spent the latter halves of her pregnancies on High America. In earlier years, Coffin had often been able to visit Eva there. During this final wait she had seen little of him, in spite of all the time he spent on the plateau.

Thomas de Smet was a fairly young man; the accidental death of his father had early put him in charge of the Smithy. He ran it well, producing most of the heavy machinery on Rustum, and planned to diversify. Thus far, businesses were small, family affairs. They were, that is, with respect to number of employees. Since machines had started to beget machines, the volume of production—given the resources of an entire unravaged world—was becoming impressive. Manpower was the worst bottleneck, and the settlers were doing their lusty best to deal with that.

Coffin had known de Smet since their youth, albeit slightly. On Rustum, everybody of the least importance knew everybody else of the same. When the first glimmerings of his scheme carne to him, Coffin decided that this was the man to zero in on. He had spent as much of the past year as he could, cultivating his friendship.

The worst of it is,
Coffin thought,
I like the fellow. I like him a lot, and feel like a hound for what I hope to do.

“Hi, Tom,” he said. “Sorry I’m late.”

“Who cares?” de Smet replied. “This is my day off.”

“Not quite.”

“Dan, you don’t mean to propagandize me again, do you? I thought we were going fishing.”

“First I want to show you something. It’ll interest you.”

De Smet, a lanky towhead, studied Coffin for a second. Nothing in the lowlander’s squint-eyed smile, relaxed stance, and easy drawl suggested a serious intent. However, that was Coffin’s way at the poker table. “As you wish. Shall we flit?”

They entered the aircar. Since Coffin would be guide on the first stage of the outing, de Smet waved him to the pilot’s seat. The vehicle quivered and murmured up from the lot behind the Smithy. Anchor became a collection of dollhouses, where the Swift and Smoky rivers ran together to form the Emperor and all three gleamed like drawn swords. The countryside spread brown in plow-land and stubblefields, amber in late-ripening crops, fading green in Terrestrial grasses and clovers, blue-green in their native equivalents, multihued in timberlots and woods, one vast subtle chessboard. Dirt roads meandered between widely spaced farmsteads. Far to the north, where the tableland dropped off, a white sea of cloud deck shone above the low country. Eastward reared the Hercules; southward, the yet mightier Centaur Mountains came into sight above the horizon; westward, cultivation presently gave way to wilderness.

Coffin aimed in that last direction, set the autopilot, leaned back, drew forth a pipe and tobacco pouch. He hadn’t commanded a high speed of the machine. Equinox was barely past; daylight prevailed for better than thirty hours.

“How’s Eva?” de Smet asked.

“Herself healthy.” Coffin was silent for a heartbeat. “As we feared, we can’t take the kid home.”

De Smet winced. “That’s hard.” His fingers stole forth to touch his companion’s arm. “I’m awfully damn sorry.”

Coffin grew busy charging his pipe. “We’ve seen it happen to neighbors of ours. Eva feels bad, but she’s tough. We’ll get us another exogene baby who can live with us.” They had long since added to their brood the one that law required every family to adopt. “I reminded her of how she, and I for that matter, how we’re as fond of Betty as of those we made ourselves. Which is true.”

“Naturally. Uh, have you made any arrangements for … yours?”

“Not yet. We couldn’t, before we got the verdict.” Coffin hesitated. “Don’t be afraid to say no, I realize this is none of my business and we do have ample opportunities. But what might you and Jane think about taking our Charlie in?”

“Huh? Why, mmm—”

“You haven’t taken your exogene yet. Well, we’ll be adopting a second. The rules allow a family to do that on another’s behalf, you know. Eva and I would be mighty glad to have you raise Charlie. Then you’d be free to order an exogene later on, or not, whichever you chose.”

“This is rather sudden, Dan.” De Smet sat awhile in thought. “I’ll have to discuss it with Jane, of course. Frankly, though, to me it looks like a very attractive proposition. Instead of getting some doubtless nice kid, but one whose parentage is a total blank, we’d get one that we’re certain comes of high-grade stock.” After a moment: “And, hmm, it’d create a tie between two influential houses, in highlands and lowlands.”

Coffin chuckled. “In effect,” he said, “we’d swap babies. You’d have to adopt a tank-orphan— except that now Eva
must
take a second. So you gain freedom of choice, we gain a proper home for Charlie, both families gain, as you say, a kind of alliance … and, well, the babies gain, too. Mind you, this is my own notion. I’ll have to talk it over with Eva also. I’m sure she’ll agree if Jane does.”

He kindled his pipe. De Smet, though a non-smoker, didn’t object. Among numerous achievements on his plantation, Coffin had, with the help of a consulting agronomist, developed tobacco that could grow in Rustumite soil without becoming utterly vile.

He puffed for a bit before he added, “It’s what you’ve kept insisting, Tom, as we argued. A fair exchange is no robbery.”

De Smet had first quoted that proverb of economists to Coffin on the first occasion that the two men seriously discussed business. This was several lunations after they began to be well acquainted. They amused themselves by calculating precisely how many, since only a short while before, the lunation—the time it took for both moons to return to the same position in the sky— had been defined officially, if not quite truthfully, as five Rustumite days.

Coffin had returned from one of his frequent expeditions into the highland wilds, returned to Anchor and Eva. The de Smets invited him to dinner. Later the men sat far into the night, talking.

That meant less on Rustum than it did on Earth. Here, folk were regularly active through part of each long darkness. Nevertheless, most of the town was abed when Coffin asked: “
Why
won’t you? I tell you, and I’d expect you and your experts to check me out beforehand, I tell you, it’ll pay. The Smithy will turn a profit.”

De Smet was slow to respond. They sat side by side in companionable wise, whisky and soda to hand, pipe in the fist of the guest, out on a balcony. The air was warm; somewhere a fiddlebug stridu-lated, and rivers boomed and clucked; the windows of Anchor were lightless, and it had no street lamps, but it glowed coppery-silver beneath a sky full of stars, in which the moons were aloft, gibbous Raksh and tiny hurtling Shorab.

“I hate to sound like a Scrooge,” de Smet said at length. “You leave me no choice, though. The profit’s too small.”

“Really? The resources we’ve got—” De Smet drew breath. “Let me make a speech at you, Dan. I sympathize with you lowlanders, especially your own Moondance community, which is the largest. You want industries, too, besides agriculture and timber and suchlike nature-dependent enterprises. Currently, the machines that make machines are all here, because that’s where colonization started and High America is where the great majority of people still live. You want me to bring down a lot of expensive apparatus and technical personnel, and build you facilities that’ll belong to you, not me.”

“True. True. Except we’re not asking for any handouts. We have money from the sale of what we produce—”

De Smet raised a palm. “Please. Let me continue. I’m going to get a little abstract, if you don’t mind.

“Money is nothing but a symbol. It gives the owner a certain call on the labor and property of others. One can play many different games with money, until at last one loses sight of what the stuff
is
and ends by wrecking its value. Luckily, that’s no danger on Rustum, yet. First, we’re too few to maintain elaborate fiscal schemes. Second, we have a free-market economy with a strictly gold-standard currency.

“Why do we have that? First, because the founders of the colony wanted to be free, free as individuals; and the right to buy, sell, or trade as one chooses is an important part of this. Second, they’d read their history. They knew what funny money leads to, always, as inevitably as fire will burn if you stick your bare hand in it. Therefore the Covenant ties the currency to gold, whose supply grows too slowly to outrun the growth of real wealth. This causes most transactions to be in cash. One can borrow, of course, if one can find a willing lender; but the lender had better have that claim-on-wealth in his personal pocket.

“As a result, now that the hard early days are behind us, now that production is expanding faster than the money supply, the price of nearly everything is falling.”

“I know that,” Coffin protested. “What I got for my wheat last year barely paid the cost of raising it.”

De Smet nodded. “That was bound to happen. Fertile soil, new varieties of grain suited to local conditions—how easily we get surpluses that drive prices down! Meanwhile machinery and human labor are in shorter supply, with more call on them. Hence their price gets bid up; or, to be exact, it doesn’t fall in proportion to the price of natural products.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“You aren’t starving, are you? One advantage of tight money is that it discourages speculation, especially by an individual. He can’t have a mortgage foreclosed on his land because he was never able to get a mortgage on it in the first place, valuable though it is.” In haste: “I don’t mean to insult your intelligence, Dan. This is the same elementary economics you and I both learned in school. I’m simply recapitulating. I want to spell out that I have better reasons than greed for saying no to you.”

“Well, but look, Tom, I’m better off than most of my friends down there, and I often feel the pinch.”

“What you mean is, you’d like to do certain things, and can’t do them without High American help. You might wish for an up-to-date flour mill, for instance, instead of a waterwheel or windmill— or instead of selling your wheat here and buying back part of it, as bread, at a considerable markup. Yes, surely. The fact is, however, I regret it very much, but the fact is you will simply have to do without until there’s enough machinery available to bring its rental or purchase price down. Meanwhile, you can be self-sufficient. And nobody is pointing a gun at your head forcing you to overproduce.”

De Smet filled his lungs afresh before he continued: “You see, if we gave you a subsidy, the cost of that would have to be met either through taxation or inflation. No matter which way, it’d amount to taking earnings from the highlander for the benefit of the lowlander, who gives nothing in return. Price controls would have the same effect. In fact, any kind of official intervention would distort the economy. Instead of meeting our difficulties head-on and solving them once and for all, we’d hide them behind a screen of paper, where they’d grow worse and breed new troubles to boot.