Pallas

by L. Neil Smith

  Mrs. Singh’s house, although it looked like wooden homes Emerson had seen in books, was constructed of local stone, carefully chosen, arranged, and worked so that even the natural striations of the rock were made to resemble woodgrain.

  Henrietta Singh, as Emerson first knew her, gave an equally deceptive impression, that of a dried-out, garrulous woman of middle age and uncertain ancestry, hardly taller than himself, who for some reason felt the necessity to apologize, as she introduced herself, that Mr. Singh—Horatio, as she referred to him—was unavailable to greet guests. He was buried in the backyard, the widow explained, having died of something called caisson disease, at the age of forty-four.

  “Planted him myself, with these hands,” she told the boy, showing him a faded black-and-white photograph of a dark-visaged, hook-nosed man with a huge, curly dark beard. “Poor dear passed away without seeing his only child born, though he allowed as how he welcomed death when it finally came, crippled up like he was, something terrible. Never complained none of what’d happened to him, though. Always maintained that it was well worth it to get a new world started.”

  Emerson nodded, too cold and tired to pay very close attention. They sat in a room more like those in the Chief Administrator’s official residence than the peasants’ quarters his family had occupied, the woman on a long couch, he on a matching chair she’d draped with a big lavender towel before handing him another towel exactly like it to dry himself with. They were the first towels Emerson had ever seen that were some shade other than the grayish-white the Project laundry produced. At first he hadn’t recognized them for what they were.

  Emerson initially found himself repulsed by the woman’s outgoing nature and friendly lack of reserve, so different from anything he’d known growing up in the Project, and therefore, somehow, threatening to him. Then it occurred to him that if he listened carefully enough, he might learn something about this alien environment into which he’d launched himself so blindly. Or at least some alien environment somewhere—from the hundreds of books and other memorabilia scattered about her cluttered front parlor, he gathered that the late Horatio Singh had been an amateur historian, interested in the nineteenth-century British Empire.

  “Back when it was possible to find a testicle in England,” Mrs. Singh confirmed, peering at him closely, as if to see whether he was offended by the expression. She’d lit a fire in a tiny grate set in a nearby wall, and leaned over now to stoke it with the long-handled metal tool he’d earlier taken—more or less correctly—for a weapon. “Least that’s how Horatio put it, rest his soul. He had a way of talking, that man. Never said much, just looked at his books and listened to other people talking. When he did speak up, it was to a point.”

  Emerson nodded again, his mind dull with fatigue. All he knew about the British Empire—and it was knowledge acquired in the last ten minutes—was that it had existed.

  “Here, now,” Mrs. Singh told him, “you’re shivering!” She took another big swatch of colorful fabric from where it lay on the back of the couch and rose to lay it over his shoulders. “Pull this blanket around you and wiggle outa those wet clothes while I go see about something to warm you up inside. Won’t be a minute.”

  He obeyed. “M-Mrs. Singh?”

  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 anything 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 independence 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 behind 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 myself, I have to know how things work. Why would anybody be so generous 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 communalism 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.”

&n
bsp; “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 misinterpreted 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?

  Off in the Weyers

  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

  Mrs. 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 before 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 handwashing 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 bathrooms—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 someone’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 parents—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 moment. 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 propaganda—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 directions 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. Sin
gh 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 living 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 asteroids.”

  From school lectures and endless assemblies Emerson knew the name of the infamous West American robber baron and expatriate plastics trillionaire 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.”