As “touch all the bases,” that line has passed into the familiar quotation books.
Ben and I are in the history books, too—in the footnotes along with the hundreds of other people who made first landings. If you count the starships, that list would run into the thousands.
Ben isn’t happy buried in the footnotes, and he and I don’t speak anymore. He’s mad at me. He never discovered life on Neptune, and nobody, it is clear, is ever likely to. On the other hand, I’m the author of one of history’s minor taglines. He finds that galling.
It isn’t a great distinction to bear, I’ll admit, but there have been dark nights in my life when I’ve lain awake and wondered whether or not I would leave any ripples behind me. That line is enough of a ripple to bring me through to morning.
7
Now I’m Watching Roger
NOW I’M watching Roger. Roger is hanging facedown in his ropes overhead and looking at me. He isn’t saying anything and I’m not speaking.
I wish I had the time to spare in relaxation that he does, but I’m kept constantly busy. There are a million things here to do. If I had Roger’s free time, I’d know how to put it to good use. I wouldn’t idle.
I wonder about Roger’s experiments. The only time he ever seems to work on them is during our regular telecast to Earth. I asked him about his experiments once, but he didn’t take notice. He jumped up into his ropes. He’s very well practiced at it now. If I had more time, perhaps I could make flying leaps to the top of the dome, too.
Roger is too silent. He never speaks up when Jack does something to annoy me, and this encourages Jack to take more advantage. Roger will never settle anything, and I’ve saved him from Jack I don’t know how many times. But how do you ask a man to back you? He either sees the need or he doesn’t. It isn’t proper to ask, so I don’t.
On the other hand, if he’s going to play the silent game, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t play it, too. The only time I’ll speak is when I stir from my silent work to drag Jack off his back. But I don’t expect he will notice.
To taunt me Jack takes off his black hat during our telecasts. He’s charming and plausible. If you believe him, we would be happy to stay another eight months on the moon. I’m not sure I could juggle things that long, though I’ll grant that Jack might.
When it is my turn, I nod and wave to Earth. I tell them we’re keeping busy. Roger works away at his experiments in the background. He waves to the camera but he doesn’t say anything.
When the telecast is over, Jack puts his black hat back on again. He spent an entire evening making it out of paper and coloring it black with ink. I didn’t watch because I was busy working. Jack knows the black hat annoys me, but I’m not saying anything or taking any notice.
He may be plausible in public, but Roger and I know him better. He only eats the good parts of things and leaves the rest. I imagine he was indulged. And he’s a glutton. I pointed it out when he left the rind from the Christmas fruitcake and his antics lasted for a month. He started by leaving crusts and bits of cracker on my plate and grew even more blatant when I refused to take any notice. At the end he was gobbling with both hands and flinging food about.
I do have an audio of several episodes but it isn’t easy to tell what is happening.
I have a number of recordings of Jack. None of Roger except for background.
In one recording I say, “Jack, you haven’t been sterilizing.” It is a point I am particular about.
“It’s true, Clarence ‘Clancy’ Ballou, I haven’t been. I’ve decided to give it up. I’ll take my chances with the moon. Let the moon take its chances with me. I wouldn’t mind giving it a dose of something.”
“That’s against policy,” I say.
“Screw policy, Clarence. Maybe you’re too nice for this work. There’s the universe, as regular as a clock. Then there’s us, life, an out-of-place accident. We’re anarchy, disorder. No matter how tough the universe makes the rules, life will survive and spread. The moon is only the first step. Someday we’ll spread to the stars and take over everything. We’ll rip the guts out of the universe. We’ll stripmine the stars. Life will prevail. It’s our destiny to crap up the works.”
“You make us sound evil. That’s what the regulations are for, to ensure that we don’t contaminate other worlds.”
“You don’t understand, Clarence. We are evil. And it’s up to us to make the most of it.”
“But I’m good. I’ve always been good.”
“Learn better.”
It was after that that he made his black paper hat. It’s supposed to be a reminder to me, but it isn’t really necessary. I know which of us is which.
Jack is outside. I’ve been counting our sacks of garbage. I believe that two are missing. I fear the worst.
Was it sterilized? Not if he didn’t sterilize it.
I fear the worst.
Just before the telecast I say to Jack, “What about the garbage?”
“What garbage?”
“I know about the garbage. Unless you stop burying it outside, I’m going to have to tell them back home.”
He takes off his black hat. He combs his hair and practices his smile.
“I’ve been counting,” I say.
On the telecast I’m cautious. I say that some garbage is missing.
They ask Jack about it. Jack is in charge of accounting for the garbage. He says that it is all there.
I call on Roger. Roger smiles and waves from the background for the camera.
Jack smiles and tells the audience about garbage accounting procedures. He is very plausible. He thanks me for raising the question.
After the telecast he says, “I have a higher loyalty.” And he puts his black hat back on.
What can I do?
Another sack of garbage is missing.
I don’t know what to do.
Roger just fell off the bench. Since I enforced safety regulations and made him stop sleeping in his ropes, he has taken to biting his fingernails and falling off the bench.
I’ve been thinking about Jack. I’ve been thinking about the moon infected with life. I’ve been thinking about people like Jack overcrawling the universe.
Jack is larger than I am.
I’ve just made myself a white hat.
Another sack of garbage is missing. Sometimes I think Jack is not completely sane.
I have taken charge of garbage accounting. I think I’ll rest easier now that it is in my hands.
In future I think that the answer must lie in unbreachable refuse containers. And a tight check system to see that everything gets deposited. But even these cannot be enough if the irresponsible aren’t weeded out beforehand. The power of life must rest in hands that respect it. I’m not sure how that can be ensured, but I will think about it until the rotation changes.
This new job means one more intrusion on my time, but it’s necessary. Those who can do are condemned to do to the limit of their strength.
I explained on the telecast to Earth tonight as best I could. I told them the problem and how I solved it. I’m sure I didn’t tell it well—Jack was always the raconteur—but they seemed to understand. Roger looked up from his work long enough to nod and wave to the people back home.
I think things are under control.
Things are much smoother now. The change in Roger has been amazing. He is more active now. He works with greater concentration. He listens to my advice and nods. He has even been outside the dome for the first time in months.
That is the good side. On the negative side he has taken to his ropes again. I haven’t the time or the heart to speak to him about it.
I’m very busy.
I just counted and counted again to be sure. One of Jack’s fourteen sacks is missing; I believe a foot. I don’t know how it could have happened. The right foot, I think. We must get unbreachable refuse containers.
Now I’m watching Roger. Roger is hanging in his ropes and watching me.
&n
bsp; 8
Arpad
I DON’T expect to live past sixty. Not on my life-style. Somebody will see me killed, I’ll attract lightning, or I’ll shock and thrill the world by dropping dead some Sunday. In the meantime, my style has advantages.
Sixty is early middle age by Ship standards and careful Shippies pace their lives accordingly. I don’t. I play go for broke. I shatter the common clown by enjoying everything he’s afraid would kill him by sixty, and I blind him with my speed. I act while he thinks about acting. I invent problems on the moment and dazzle my way out of them, and he merely invents problems.
I relish the thought of dying at sixty. I want to find out what I’m able to do with plastics, do it, do it big, and get out. I don’t want to hang on. Shakespeare and Napoleon, who did their own separate work in plastics, both died on the eve of fifty-three as bare young men. But they had tested their limits. I don’t yet aspire to die at fifty-three, let alone at thirty-three. Right now I’ll settle for sixty years to find my limits.
I haven’t found them yet. Understand that.
I was brought up a Shippie against my will and only gradually grew to enjoy it. My father was a disinherited Shippie, Expelled, or the closest thing to it, for marrying down. He lived at the tepid tempo of a Shippie to the day of his death.
I was born on the planet of New Albion. On the basis of my father’s stories of my fine heritage and the strength of my imagination I fancied myself a cut above my friends, but I had the same dirt between my toes.
My father died at the premature age of eighty-four. Some of his cronies in the old Universal Heirs of Man gang took their remorse out on me. I was rescued, saved from myself, saved from my mother—and what an operation that was—and restored to Mother Bertha, their Ship, to be made a first-class heir of Earth and Man, as was my due. They held their noses, told me of my luck, and abandoned me to a dormitory to make the most of my new opportunities.
Twice I was prevented from escaping. The third time I changed my mind and returned.
I decided I would show them that I could beat them on their own terms. At the age of fourteen in the Ships they turn you out on a colony planet—some hellhole like New Albion—to survive on your own resources. If you do survive, you are an adult citizen.
Well, that’s my own home jungle. I figured that if I could cope with New Albion—and I was doing all right there—and survive Ship civilization, I could pass Trial snickering. After that I could walk away—either pick myself a colony planet to my taste or act badly enough, after my fashion, to get ejected like my father before me.
By the time I did pass Trial, and I sailed, I had changed my mind. I no longer ached to leave. I’d been looking around the Ship, and it was clear that there were many more opportunities than anybody in sight was taking advantage of. I couldn’t walk away from that.
The Ships were launched just over two hundred years ago to carry survival colonies away from an overpopulated and depleted Earth on the hysterical edge of self-destruction. Seven Ships founded some one hundred colonies. And now, all these many years later, the only movement between the stars is the seven Great Ships on eternal motherly rounds to disapprove of their children. They are good mothers.
There are only 28,000 people in Mother Bertha. The Ship is a small world full of fat, slow, lazy, democratic gods. Sheep. Clowns. The democracy is in direct relation to the fatness, the slowness, and the laziness. But a colony planet, even the best and biggest of them, is only one world. A Ship gives access to a hundred worlds.
Or a hundred plus seven.
There’s a certain joy that comes in thinking about the possibility of affecting a hundred and seven worlds. That’s a lot of plastic to shape, however you like best to mold plastic.
My father died at eighty-four, still trying to decide what he wanted to be when he grew up. Admittedly I haven’t yet made my final decision, but I’ve got it narrowed down—stun, dazzle, damn the consequences, and die at sixty leaving plastic shape behind me for people to wonder about for a hundred or a thousand years. The more unused opportunities I see around me the higher goes my estimate of how long I can keep my name in conversation. Whatever may have become of Earth, people still do talk of Shakespeare and Napoleon, and will.
Not that I seek admission to their company yet. I’ve just been trying my experiments for the last little while, each one a bit more expansive than the last. If I hold my pace, at sixty I will have explored my limits.
Each of the Great Ships follows its own separate schedule, and one Ship will meet another two or three times in a year. The people who matter exchange information. The people who don’t matter don’t pay much attention. I’m constantly amazed by the amount of attention a Shippie can sink into quad sports. Seizing that attention is one of the opportunities that nobody is taking advantage of. But I have never claimed that it is easy. You must strike them a thunderblow between the eyes.
When I was twenty, Mother Bertha—that is, the home of my fathers, Moskalenka—met Sara Peabody at a time when I was primed to start a new experiment. I made petition to change Ships.
I was met by a young girl recently enough a Citizen still to talk of it. She was an attractive young chub, a pretty bit of plastic, a blonde in a yellow striped jersey like a butterflower. Her name was Susan Smallwood and she had been sent to guide me.
After introducing herself, she said, “Are you sure you want to transfer here? Really?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Are you in the Sons of Prometheus or anything like that?” she asked.
“No.” I have a lingering prejudice against people of that sort, but I didn’t express it. I was satisfied to say no.
“Then you shouldn’t have much trouble. My mother’s Mobility Officer. You’ll have to talk to her.”
I needed a guide. The innards of a Ship are a scramble. It took me fully two years to learn my way around Mother Bertha. If I wanted to touch Shippies in that particular way—and I’m thinking about doing it—I’d write about deep, hollow, safe earthwarrens. Mother badgers tight in their dens. It would be a safe set of symbols to play with.
Susan Smallwood took me through runs and tunnels to my appointment. She was curious about me and showed it. “Why do you want to transfer?” she said.
“Oh, there’s opportunity here,” I said.
“I don’t see much.”
She had met me in Sarah Peabody’s scout bay. We had stood dominated by the line of scoutships—Sarah’s links to other Ships and other worlds. It isn’t much of a jump to call them opportunities. Ship people think in bland and figureless prose. They see only scoutships and the absence of scoutships.
Butterflower was a nice girl, the sort I wanted to take notice of me before I stopped caring. Now what I wanted was someone to speak in tongues with.
“I’m going to be chela for Heriberto Pabon. That’s an opportunity.”
“Oh, but he’s dirty,” she said.
“My teachers said that he was. But he is supposed to be brilliant.”
“I wouldn’t change Ships to serve somebody like Heriberto Pabon,” she said.
“There are too many Margolins in Mother Bertha. That’s reason to change ships.”
“Where?”
“Moskalenka.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s kind of good. We have families like that here. But not many Margolins.”
“That sounds like opportunity,” I said.
“I guess.”
Mrs. Smallwood, Sarah Peabody’s Mobility Officer, was a harder and less attractive version of her daughter. People like her are ripe for molding because they are so certain that they cannot be molded.
Though Butterflower was a Citizen, her mother presumed, ordered, and dismissed. There was strain between them. When Susan left, her mother made some remark about wishing her daughter would show more initiative, just as though she hadn’t been grinding her heel into every bud of initiative the girl had poked up. I tucked that away to think about.
When I have tempo in chess and the force of attack is with me, I take little notice of my opponent’s game. I just play like a tide. But when I’m moving initial pawns and the rhythm of the game has yet to be established my way, I keep track.
Mrs. Smallwood assumed her cap of office, fixing it into place to demonstrate the new and official woman I had to deal with. She sat down and straightened papers.
She said, “We must be quick to decide about this. I don’t know how you run your Ship, but this one is going to be on its way in five hours. We have a schedule.”
Ships do have schedules, keep them, and live by them. Mother Bertha and Sarah Peabody have the times and places of their meetings scheduled for twenty years.
“Oh, I understand,” I said.
I understood that being quick to decide would mean doing things at her pace and in my best imitation of her style. I was patient—which I can be when I must, having had practice enough—I did things in her pace and style, and I watched her.
“You wish to study with Heriberto Pabon?”
“Yes, ma’am. He was recommended to me by my teachers. And he agreed to accept me.”
“Do you know anything about him?”
“Not really, ma’am. Not at first hand. We haven’t met.”
“That seems irresponsible, young man,” she said. She sorted paragraphs in front of her. “Heriberto Pabon may have found a safe hole for himself, he may consider himself above ordinary rules and standards, but should you care to ask anyone, you would be told that he is a fast and unsocial man.”
I didn’t smile at the description.
“I have your approvals here. What could they have been thinking of?”
I said, “I believe my advisers think me too narrow, too concerned with public work, and not concerned enough with other areas of my development.”
“But you have doubts about this?”
I spread my hands. “I’m in the hands of my teachers.”
“I suppose that must be respected,” she said. “But we don’t encourage immigration, Mr. Margolin. And it would be three years before you could be returned to Moskalenka. We don’t prevent anyone from leaving us, but frankly we do make some selection about whom we allow to join us. We have the lowest population of any of the Ships and, we like to think, the most select. But don’t think of us as exclusive. Still, let me ask you one thing. Are you a member of the Sons of Prometheus or any other reconciliationist group?”
Farewell to Yesterday's Tomorrow Page 10