Pallas (11 page)

A woman of quick, determined movements, she already had a hand on what was probably the kitchen door, but stopped at Emerson’s voice and turned to face him.
“Yes, boy?”

“I’m not a beggar, ma’am. I’m cold and hungry, and I appreciate your help, but I’m also used to hard work and willing to do my share for a
n
ything you give me.”

She nodded. “I figured as much, which is why I’m headed for the kitchen now. We’ll discuss the details once we get you fed, if it’s all the same to you. Come to think of it, I’m feeling a mite peckish, myself.
Must be the chilly weather.”
             
\

She began to turn. He held up a hand—and nearly lost his blanket.
“One more thing, ma’am.
I won’t bother you long. I have to get moving because I—”

“’Cause you refugeed outa that ant farm across the lake and you’re afraid they’ll be after you in the morning. What makes you think you’re the first? I appreciate your honesty, but anybody could tell a mile away what you are by the way you walk, slip-shuffling along like you’re ashamed you exist. It’s something I hadn’t thought to see again since leaving Mother Mud. Nobody out here walks that way, not with ind
e
pendence and one-tenth of
a gee
putting a spring in their step. Now
lemme get us something, will you, before one of us dies of starvation?” She pushed the door into the kitchen, went through, and let it swing b
e
hind her, leaving him to think about the swaggering hunters he’d seen earlier.

And wonder.

“’Sgood!”

Fifteen minutes later, Emerson was gobbling down his second helping of a thick, heavily peppered stew containing more protein—although he wasn’t aware of it just yet—than he’d ever been offered at a single sitting in his life. On the long, low table before him sat an aromatic loaf of home-baked bread and a stone crock of butter, neither of which would last much longer at the rate they were being consumed. Mrs. Singh had also brought a pot of hot, strong tea which she served in heavy, hand-thrown mugs, with honey almost as black as the tea.

“Glad to have another satisfied customer.” She wielded a tooth-edged knife.
“How about more bread?”

To his surprise, given what he’d been told about Outsiders, Mrs. Singh had accepted his diffident proposition and offered to trust him for food and lodging until he could arrange some form of employment more steady and remunerative than the odd jobs she nevertheless promised to find him around her own place.

“And don’t you worry none about them dragging you back to the ant farm,” she insisted. “That place is a fluke, one worm in an apple. Pallas was made for folks that wanted to be free, and they don’t take to anybody being sent back to jail.”

“Even a kid like me?”

“Even a kid, Emerson, especially one like you—going on thirty-five as you seem to be.”

He laughed,
then
became sober. “Please forgive me, Mrs. Singh, but if I’m going to be
an—
I mean if I’m going to live outside the Project m
y
self, I have to know how things work. Why would anybody be so g
e
nerous to a stranger?”

“You mean a wet, hungry, young stranger on the coldest night we’ve
had so far this year? Maybe I’ve been away from Earth too long. What else would a body do, boy?”

Having finished his stew and the last slice of bread he could manage, Emerson sipped his tea. “I don’t remember anything about Earth, but where I come
from,
the goons would beat him up, dust their hands off, and throw him outside the Rimfence.”

His new landlady shook her head.
“So much for political communa
l
ism and the milk of human kindness.”

Not altogether understanding what she meant, Emerson shrugged.

“Far as any alleged generosity part goes,” she added, “and aside from plain good manners on a frontier world where I might need the favor returned tomorrow, it’s pretty simple. In the first place, I can use another pair of hands around here at the best of times. And in the second, my other boarders are off into the weyers at the moment and it’s getting a bit lonely around here.”

Fascinated, he watched her take a small ceramic pipe from a box on an end table, stuff it with crumbly tobacco from the same box, and light it, puffing smoke. She was right: Outsiders could do whatever they wanted. In the Project, just getting caught with tobacco would cost you every other meal for a week.

“The wires?”

“Reminds me, I better tell you that you’re free to practice out behind the house anytime you want, long as you watch which way you point yourself and it ain’t after bedtime.”

He shook his head. He was tired. Somehow he’d assumed that Mrs. Singh had indoor plumbing. But what was that she’d said about
practice?
And why not after bedtime?

“Naturally,” she went on, not sensing his confusion, ‘whatever you contribute’ll be deducted from your rent.”

“Contribute?”

“That’s right. You help me cut my overhead, and I’ll cut yours.” She indicated the supper dishes with a nod of her pipe. “But no more of this here cottontail for a while, mind you. Everybody says they’re getting tired of it, and you can die—or go crazy anyway, from malnutrition—eating
too much rabbit.”

For the next several minutes, Emerson was preoccupied with trying to control his stomach, which threatened open rebellion. He wanted to tell Mrs. Singh that he hadn’t understood a single thing she’d just told him. On the other hand, he was equally horrified at the possibility that he did understand her, after all.

“But what can I be thinking about?” Apparently Mrs. Singh misi
n
terpreted the expression on his face. “You being fresh from that blasted ant farm across the lake and all, I plumb forgot that you probably don’t own a gun—or any kind of weapon at all, shocking as it may seem—to practice with, do you, boy?”

Gulping bile, Emerson looked down at his bowl, scraped nearly clean with the spoon that still lay accusingly beside it on the table. First it had been poor Bambi, murdered and mutilated by those gloating savages back on the road. And now it was cute and furry Thumper, here in this very stew he’d found so delicious.

Emerson had never eaten meat before.

What kind of surrealistic nightmare had he escaped to, anyway?

Nothing is wrong with American education that can be cured, or even changed, by tinkering with American education. Its problems, like so many others in that country, arise from a fundamental and long-standing conflict between American values and practices which, unresolved, will go on making things worse until the educational system collapses, dragging the rest of the culture down with it.

—Mirelle Stein,
The
Productive Class

M
rs. Singh turned out to be as good as her word.

Following their breakfast the next morning, a blessedly vegetarian affair featuring pancakes, hash-brown potatoes, and eggs (which were permitted by the dietary restraints he’d grown up under) fried with sliced mushrooms, she immediately found some work for Emerson to do, washing the previous evening’s dishes.

She wound up doing a fair number of them herself, standing beside him at the big double sink, since he’d never washed dishes this way b
e
fore and had to be shown how. He had seen indoor running water, in the Residence kitchen. Mrs. Singh’s was smaller but no less luxuriously appointed and felt friendlier somehow. Pots and pans were handled by a noisy, steam-filled machine under the countertop—something a mildly scandalized Emerson had never even heard of before and the Residence kitchen certainly didn’t have—but Mrs. Singh maintained that han
d
washing cups and plates and silverware constituted a form of meditation.

Emerson had his doubts, and not just about washing dishes. He’d have run screaming last night from what had momentarily seemed a house of horrors if he hadn’t been exhausted—and too honest not to acknowledge that he’d enjoyed the rabbit stew before learning what it was. Perhaps he’d even guessed. At any rate, he’d allowed himself to be led upstairs and shown a bedroom larger than the quarters his entire family shared at the Project. Crawling naked between clean sheets under a thick, quilted coverlet, he’d fallen asleep before he knew it.

After dishes were dried and stacked in the cupboards, Mrs. Singh showed him around her home, letting him know what chores she’d like to see done, if she didn’t get to them herself, as well as which facilities he was welcome to share and which he should regard as private. Windows needed washing and there were floors to be swept. She had a vacuum cleaner exactly like the one at the Residence and dust precipitators standing in a corner of each room, which the Residence didn’t have at all.

“These,” she explained, pointing at the surrounding walls, you can pull down and take to your room, long as your hands are clean and you bring ’em back when you’re through.”

Emerson was speechless. Books on the nineteenth-century British Empire weren’t the only items in Horatio Singh’s library. The house was full of books, walls lined to the ceiling with shelves, even the bat
h
rooms—which turned out to be inside, and more modern and comfortable than anything he’d known possible. There were books on every subject listed in the encyclopedia Mrs. Singh showed him how to use, and three more sets of encyclopedias. The second stage of his education had begun.

An authorized education at the Project consisted of one topic—selfless cooperation—with just enough reading, writing, and arithmetic thrown in to support the primary subject. Thanking her for her amazing generosity, Emerson explained to Mrs. Singh that his mother had taught him to read long before any school had gotten around to it. “What kind of schools,” he asked, “do they have here on the Outside?”

“No schools at all on Pallas”—she shook her head—“though som
e
one’s always threatening to start one up in Curringer.” They were in the parlor, sitting at the low table before the couch. The day was rainy and cold like the night before and she’d canceled her plans for outdoor work. Instead, Emerson was trying his first cup of coffee. “Even before I was born, the politicians back on Earth had managed to turn the whole planet into a jail, and most of us came here to get out of it. Who needs to start another jail here?”

The boy’s eyes were wide. “But how do children learn—”

She sighed. “How’d you learn to read? Teaching kids is what pa
r
ents—and nobody else—
are
for.”

“But what if they won’t—”

She held up a hand. “If they aren’t up to it, then it becomes the kid’s responsibility, either in childhood or later on. One of the best American presidents—Andrew Johnson, it was—didn’t learn to read till he was grown; his wife taught him. Horatio never finished high school: when he was fourteen he lied about his age and joined the teamsters—that was the jail he came to Pallas to get out of—but he read books every spare m
o
ment. I once watched him back a famous historian into a corner at a public lecture and make him admit he was wrong. Education never stops, boy, unless you want it to, and I suspect that’s just another way of deciding it’s time to lie down and die.”

“But—”

“Besides, those schools back on Earth were never anything but breeding grounds for petty criminals, tribal gatherings for passing on the commonly held ignorance, and indoctrination centers for political pro
p
aganda—useless when it came to teaching the most elementary skills. And they got worse and worse the more money that was thrown at ’em.”

“But, but—”

“You’re sounding like an outboard motor, Emerson. I taught my daughter Gretchen to read, and among the skills she learned along the way was how to
evaluate
what she reads. That’s the last thing schools want kids to be able to do, but it’s a matter of self-defense as important as knowing to focus on the front sight and squeeze rather than jerk the trigger. Turned out pretty well, I think, and now she’s educating herself, from the same books you see all around you.”

Emerson vaguely recalled mention of a child. How old was this Gretchen? Where was she now?

He astonished himself by asking.

“About your age.
She’s off in the weyers, like I said last night.”

“The wires?”

“That’s W-E-Y-E-R-S,” Mrs. Singh started to explain, when she was interrupted by a high, chirping noise that seemed to come from all dire
c
tions at once. “Coffee table!” she told the air in the room. Abruptly, the free-standing three-dimensional image of a strange-looking little man sprang into existence above the tabletop between the oversized mugs they’d been drinking from. The image couldn’t have been more than a quarter-meter tall, and it wasn’t in the least transparent. It wore a beard, a loose, color-splashed shirt, and a pistol hanging from under its shirttail. “Why, it’s Aloysius Brody! Good morning, Aloysius.”

“And a gloomy, miserable mornin’ it is.” The image glanced around. “I’m at loose ends an’ wonderin’ if
y’can stand
a bit of company. No particular reason, just feelin’ sociable.”

Mrs. Singh nodded. “I’ve got company already. This is Emerson Ngu, late of the Greeley Utopian Memorial Ant Farm.”

“A citizen exercisin’ his pedal franchise?”

“He has some questions I think you have better answers to. Still game for a kaffeeklatsch?”

“I’ll be right out. You might show him your family album.”

“Good idea. I’ll do it right away.” The image over the table vanished. Mrs. Singh rose, went to a bookshelf, and returned with a bulging ring-binder from which paper and transparent plastic protruded at the
edges. “You asked twice about the weyers. I just didn’t know the best way to answer. Aloysius is right, this may help—and give you a better idea of what the Outside is about than anything I could say. Horatio took these when he was on the terraforming crew.”

She opened the book. Despite what she’d said, the first item she showed Emerson was a handful of yellowed newspaper clippings and grainy halftone news photographs of massive space hardware and of an imposing man with bushy white hair and matching handlebar moustache. “S’pose the year 2007 seemed eventful enough already for anybody li
v
ing in Asia or North America,” she began, “but it had plenty of surprises for those on other continents, as well. That was the year William Wilde Curringer began launching his first commercial vehicles toward the a
s
teroids.”

From school lectures and endless assemblies Emerson knew the name of the infamous West American robber baron and expatriate plastics tri
l
lionaire who’d founded Two Lions Consortium, headquartered in the United Cantons of South Africa. Mrs. Singh turned brittle pages, gazing at headlines growing larger and more outraged as time went on.

“Curringer’s enterprises were always profitable as all get-out and this time he had the support of Japanese business interests. What I recall is that his manned and manless survey and freight-carrying machines all used cheap, simple rockets built from off-the-shelf components. You can’t tell from the photos, but the structure is seamless oil pipe with an extra heat treat. He even used windshield-wiper motors for fuel pumps, and later on made some innovative uses of solar sails.”

The first color photograph, still bright under a protective covering, was of the asteroid itself, taken through a spaceship window. Against a starry backdrop hung gray-brown, crater-scarred Pallas as it had appeared before an atmospheric envelope had masked its color and contours in shades of blue and white and green.

“Curringer’s idea was to start a permanent colony here under a unique corporate agreement.”

“The Hyperdemocratic Covenant?”
It was another thing Emerson had already heard about.

“That’s it, ‘One man,
one
veto.’ The immigrants’d be shareholders in the Curringer Trust, which, in turn, would be governed by a hyperd
e
mocratic principle thought up by Curringer’s old friend—and, the gossips had it, lover—Mirelle Stein the philosopher. I have a picture of her somewhere...”

What Emerson saw was another blurry newspaper photograph, one of a rather grim-faced, firm-jawed woman. Her dark hair was cut to pageboy length, with severe bangs across the forehead.

“In any case,” Mrs. Singh went on, “the Curringer Trust would own the atmospheric envelope, the largest artificial structure ever undertaken. Still is, far as I know. Curringer started with a bang—in ‘blatant contr
a
vention of international law,’ like it says in these here clippings. A few well-placed nukes—make that ‘clean atomic devices’—modified Pallas’s natural orbit and rotation. Horatio, rest his soul, helped plant more than one of those little bombs, himself.”

Pictures supported her claim: men in bulky, helmeted suits, one ste
n
ciled “SINGH, H.H.,” bending over mysterious canisters. One photo, enlarged until it took up a whole page, showed an unbearable light su
r
rounded by multicolored clouds streaming into space. This, too, was consistent with what he’d been told. Any application of atomic power, however peaceful or constructive, was always presented by the UN E&M counselors as an ultimate evil. Only Mrs. Singh seemed to think it was a good thing. And perhaps, he thought, it was. It appeared to have worked. Here they all were, and he’d never heard of any harm—two-headed b
a
bies was the example that popped into his mind—having come of it.

The next pictures, more of Horatio’s snapshots, were of the same men—or men wearing the same sort of space-suit—arranging huge sheets of plastic over the barren surface. In some ways it was like pictures the boy had seen of a circus tent about to be erected, except that this “canvas” was perfectly transparent.