Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 4: September 2013 (26 page)

The stainless “motif” was echoed in fixtures and countertops surrounding her, throwing the intolerable heat and a series of smeary reflections from their semipolished surfaces. If she’d leaned forward—and if the table before her hadn’t been covered with the preparations for dinner—she’d have seen the image of a tall, slender woman who appeared between five and ten years older than her thirty-four years. The strain marking her face was part of an overall tension which shaped her movements and affected everyone around her. She’d heard someone remark, not knowing she was listening—or maybe knowing perfectly well—that she lit up any room she walked into, but that her light was as discomfiting as that of an oxyacetylene welding torch. To a degree, she’d always been that way, she knew, even as a girl. And the years with Gibson hadn’t helped.

She was still reasonably attractive, she thought, for a mother of three who’d gone through everything she had. The most frustrating thing about her marriage was that not one of the women Gibson chased had ever been prettier than she was, or even a fraction as dynamic or intelligent. They were always younger—sometimes a great deal younger. She’d been quite young herself when they’d first met. And equally, they were—here her thinking hesitated as it invariably did, searching for a phrase she could somehow never remember the next time and had to search for all over again—well, they were less inhibited.

But in the first place, why hadn’t Gibson ever managed to take her away from herself and make
her
feel that way? She’d always believed he could have helped her if he’d ever cared enough to try. In some ways that had been the greatest betrayal of all. Or was he a prisoner, too, paralyzed like a seaside souvenir cast in a block of transparent plastic, which was the way she’d felt all her life?

And in the second place, there must be something more to life than sex.

There
had
to be.

Gwen Altman, wife of ex-Senator Gibson Altman, glanced at the servants to make sure neither was watching, then ducked her head and gave her face a quick swipe with the hem of her apron. Neither of the women appeared particularly uncomfortable. Perhaps the unbearable heat was something personal, a sign of premature menopause. Perhaps it was just that every day, no matter how bad the day before might have been, she felt more confused and increasingly unhappy.

She shook self-pity off for the moment—although the heat remained unbelievably oppressive—and returned to her inspection of the stainless tableware and place settings. Tonight’s dinner guest was very important—not in and of himself, she corrected herself hastily, what an absurd idea—but to her husband’s work here at the Project. And that, of course, made this guest important to her. Gwen was the great-granddaughter, granddaughter, daughter, niece, cousin, and sister to a long, distinguished line of congressmen, senators, and Supreme Court justices. She’d also been resigned since girlhood to practicing the virtues of a patient, pragmatic political spouse.

Thus she’d spent six endless three-hundred-sixty-five-day years—the solar year on Pallas was much longer—with her disgraced husband on this isolated frontier worldlet the Party had sent him to, helping him as best she could. Until recently (she wasn’t exactly certain when her feelings had begun to change), she’d been as stoic about it all as she’d always believed proper. Sometimes she’d been almost cheerful. She’d always believed—perhaps only because she wanted to—that they were simply waiting out here for Gibson’s earlier power and prestige to be restored to him once his public reputation was somehow rehabilitated.

But to Gwen’s utter amazement—and helpless revulsion—these past six years seemed to have made him content simply exercising what amounted to life-and-death authority over an unwashed, ignorant rabble of ten thousand Third World peasants.

The best evidence of that was that he no longer drank the way he did in office, nor did he beat her at irregular intervals as he had on Earth before the public ugliness which ruined his brilliant career. (The consummate politician at every turn, he’d made certain never to bruise her anywhere that would show on television or in newspaper or magazine photographs—for her part, she’d been horrified to discover that bearing beneath her clothing the marks he did make on her body was the closest she’d ever come to feeling like a woman.) But worst of all, he seemed to have forgotten all his earlier, grander, and, in her estimation, nobler aspirations which had somehow made it endurable for her.

Maybe even a little enjoyable.

One of the servants, Nansey, asked her a question about the salads which the girl should have been able to answer for herself. Oh well, Gwen sighed inwardly, that’s why she had to be out here in the kitchen. Alice, their housekeeper, would have been supervising ordinarily, but with important company coming, she was feeding the children an early dinner in their own suite. In Gwen’s opinion, Alice was the only one of these colonial women who had any brains at all.

Gwen wished that her opinion had been asked for in the matter of their exile in deep space, but it hadn’t been, neither by her father’s old cronies in the Democratic Union Party nor by her own husband. To her, the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project—and along with it, each and every godforsaken square centimeter of this miserable ball of rock they called Pallas—would never be anything but an empty wasteland. She remembered doubting, as a coed, the stories of Walter Prescott Webb about pioneer women living in sod shanties on the Great Plains of North America who were supposed to have died of nothing more than loneliness. She didn’t doubt them any more. She hated to contemplate living out the rest of her life—and most of all, trying to raise her children here.

As the casserole was taken from the microwave—an all-vegetarian entree consisting exclusively and conspicuously of produce grown here at the Project—filling the kitchen with even more heat and steam, Gwen unconsciously moved away, toward the open window.

The United Nations had seen fit to situate its experimental agricultural cooperative in a broad, shallow impact feature—in other words, she thought, a big hole in the ground—a little under a hundred miles in diameter, the Residence and attached workers’ compound occupying a low central prominence. Consequently, there was nothing to look at in any direction but a crater-pocked prairie ringed by mountains, their impossibly jagged ridges as yet unsoftened by the weather (a relatively new phenomenon itself on Pallas) or by the stands of forest growth everyone promised would someday put in an appearance.

She admitted to herself that the prairie everywhere she looked was dotted by a thousand deep blue, perfectly circular lakes. Well-managed cultivated fields were finally beginning to supplant the ragged, weed-choked “natural” meadows they’d found here when they arrived. And, thanks to patient gardeners requisitioned from the ranks of the colonists her husband watched over, equally well-tended flower beds bloomed all around the Residence itself in brilliant profusion.

All in all, she supposed, she and her husband and their children lived a life that would have been the envy of any British second son sent to the West Indies to make his fortune, or of any southern American plantation owner of two centuries ago. And what they did here was democratic, progressive, for the benefit of workers whom British and southern aristocrats would merely have exploited like cattle.

But the value of any of it was lost on her, calculated against—just to single out one terrible example—the absolutely shocking rate of suicide and spontaneous abortion occurring among the Project’s peasants and (according to what little they heard about the subject through authorized channels) the Pallatian colonists beyond the Rimfence whom everybody in the Project called “Outsiders.”

Of course a great many men and women—courageous or foolhardy, depending on who told it—had already perished simply in the tremendous undertaking of terraforming Pallas. It was a frequent topic of discussion at her husband’s table. Some had made lethal miscalculations in the deceptively low and surprisingly variable gravity of the asteroid. Others had suffered from the predictable but unavoidable hazards of the bitter cold and vacuum of space. Still others had succumbed, even as they might have back on Earth, to ordinary industrial accidents with high explosives and machinery. In the end, there had been over a thousand such victims, more than one for each kilometer of Pallas’s diameter, after whom the first landmarks on its surface had been named. And what had it accomplished?

She remembered the way, on Earth, that elected and appointed officials of various national governments and the UN—conscientious and courageous public servants whom William Wilde Curringer had arrogantly written off as “safety fascists”—began to rage impotently over the mounting death toll on Pallas, while at the same time, despite the most urgent warnings, construction workers from all over the planet had continued to sign up by the thousands to take the places of the fallen.

Little did she know—she’d have been about twenty-two at the time, she guessed, and still preoccupied with trying to make her marriage work—that it was her future home they were all talking about. Otherwise she might have paid better attention.

For the most part, it must have been the obscenely spectacular amounts of money Curringer had offered his workers, along with promised land grants on the asteroid, which attracted them despite the well-publicized dangers—just another example of the kind of exploitation Gibson was determined to stop here. But there were many among the survivors who claimed that they—no more or less than those who had died—were no different from millions of earthbound dam and bridge and tunnel builders who’d come and gone before them. They believed that the accomplishment—or even merely the attempt—was worthy of the risk.

Well, she thought—as she had done a thousand times before—if the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project succeeded, in the future, decisions like that would be made only by the people who were qualified to make them. The idea was a source of comfort to her, and she cherished it.

Gwen was an educated woman and knew that the stress of a new environment was taking its inevitable hideous toll. She understood the principle of natural selection, although like her husband, she was committed to seeing that it remained natural, rather than man-inflicted. But it was like having all these spectacular rainbow-colored sunrises and sunsets—which she felt were highly overrated anyway: what good were they when only one new baby out of every seven or eight conceived survived to enjoy them, as if it were still the Dark Ages?

Pressured—among others by a husband who seemed stimulated only by duty and was otherwise uninterested in her body—to provide a worthy example in what she privately referred to as the “Be Fruitful and Multiply Department,” Gwen herself had miscarried more than once. In the final analysis there was, she felt, a fundamental
wrongness
about Pallas which she couldn’t adjust to, no matter how she tried.

Lesser examples of that wrongness occupied the shelves and tabletops about her now. Except for rare, expensive imports, everything which would have been made of wood or plastic back home was fabricated here from metal or glass—the cheapest, most convenient materials on a mineral-rich world still poor in organics.

Overhead, the cloud-fleeced sky was blue enough, but of an alien shade. Two suns, the genuine primary—too far away and small—and one of its orbiting mirror-reflected counterfeits, were always visible in the daytime. The nights, thanks to those same orbital mirrors, seemed unnaturally brief, embellished by a natural moon which seemed the right size, but of the wrong color and pattern.

Trees, for the most part seeded by ultralight aircraft during the final stages of terraformation, were all exactly the same height, giving the landscape a contrived look which was appropriate but oppressively surreal, like living in a cartoon. It was estimated that in the low-mass regions of Pallas they might eventually grow to be a thousand yards tall.

Even worse, like the trees, the children who managed to be born alive and healthy were beginning to turn out gangly, attenuated, their growing bodies responding to a feeble pull of gravity which varied, depending on the location and its underlying geology, from just one-tenth of Earth normal to the merest twentieth.

And worst of all, Pallas was dull. Having long ago—and not without sufficient reason, thoroughly and humiliatingly laundered in public—lost interest in the intimate aspect of marriage herself, Gwen felt deprived of the cultural and social benefits to which any Washingtonian of wealth and status becomes accustomed. Her husband had argued that, through recordings and realtime transmissions to the Residence from the home planet, she was free to enjoy any drama, dance, or spectacle that anyone enjoyed on Earth. She’d replied that, while everything he said might be true, no one of any importance could
see
her enjoying them. And this telling if somewhat irrational point had long since settled the argument.

At least for her.

Tragedy and Hope

From 1917, Americans wondered why they aided Russia with food she could not grow herself. The truth was, those who had saddled them with a federal reserve and income tax did more than just keep Soviet Marxism going, they had created it. During the first half of the century, government grew
500 times faster than the population.
Could that have happened without an enemy to frighten voters and reluctant taxpayers?

—Mirelle Stein,
The Productive Class