by Allen Steele
Morse cleared his throat. “We’ve got a group registered at the hotel this weekend. The, uh … Church of Elvis.”
Hotchner shook her head and covered her eyes with her hand in dismay. Neil looked at the liaison for the Clarke County Corporation. “Church of Elvis? You mean, like an Elvis Presley fan club?” He gave a little shrug. “So what’s the problem? They should get along.”
“That’s not the question …” Hotchner began.
Jenny had a sneaking respect for Rebecca Hotchner, which came from the knowledge of both her real and subliminal roles in this meeting. Although Neil Schorr and Robert Morse were obstensibly the leaders of the colony, acting as the elected mayors of Big Sky and LaGrange respectively, it was Hotchner who performed as the representative for the consortium which held the purse strings of Clarke County: Skycorp, Uchu-Hiko, TexSpace, Galileo International, Trump, Lloyd’s, and the galaxy of lesser investors. Of the six-person Board of Selectmen, Schorr, Morse, and Hotchner represented the Executive Board … and Becky Hotchner was the only non-elected member.
Hotchner performed her duties quietly, remaining aloof, seldom pulling rank, always seeming to fade into the background at the town meeting. That was her public face. Yet in executive sessions like this, she was the unofficial arbitrator to whom everyone deferred, although Bob Morse officially wielded the gavel as the Board’s chairman. True to the unwritten code, when Morse cleared his throat again, it was with a subtle batting of her eyelashes that Hotchner granted the floor to him.
“The Church of Elvis,” Morse explained, “is not your typical fan club.” A well-groomed gentleman who probably slept in a three-piece business suit, he obviously felt uncomfortable dealing with the unpredictable and the unusual. “It’s a cult which believes that Elvis Presley was a divine emissary of God. They’ve only booked about seventy rooms, but in addition the Church has also leased Bird Stadium for a revival on Monday night.”
He paused and sighed. “It’s going to be televised on Earth. Live from here.” He tapped the tabletop with his index finger for emphasis. “Umm … I think the main program is that they’re going to bring Elvis back from the dead.”
Jenny’s eyes went wide open. “AAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!” she shrieked.
“Jenny!” Neil snapped, glaring at her.
“I know,” Morse said, shaking his head. “I had the same reaction when I found out.”
Everyone was laughing now except for Neil, who was forcing a vague smile so as not to be completely left out. “Oh, God!” Jenny gasped once she had recovered her poise. “Bob, how could you let these guys into LaGrange?”
The laughter quickly died away. Morse and Hotchner stopped smiling. Rebecca reached for the mug of coffee on the table in front of her. “That’s why I wished you hadn’t brought the subject up,” she murmured.
“But it does get to the heart of the matter, doesn’t it?” Neil said. “We’ve been discussing how to control the tourist population from impacting the High Grange Project. This business with the … um, Church of Elvis is typical of the problems the Ark is now facing.”
Bob Morse shifted in his seat. “That’s kind of a far reach, isn’t it, Neil?”
“If you’re not crazy about having an Elvis cult here, why were they allowed to come?” Schorr replied, gently stroking his long, wispy beard. “As LaGrange’s mayor you’ve got the authority to regulate tourism just as I have authority to regulate the Ark’s population. You delegated that authority to someone else, but it’s still your job. I repeat, if you don’t want an Elvis cult to hold a revival in Clarke County, then why let them come here?”
“If I had known what they were planning, I would have canceled it,” Morse explained, “but someone at the Convention Bureau approved the arrangements and signed the contract, so …”
“Don’t you have to approve everything yourself?” Neil blinked. “Don’t you have any guidelines?”
“It’s not quite as simple as …” Rebecca started.
Morse held up his hand. “My situation is not the same as yours, Neil. I can deny an individual or a group the permission to visit LaGrange only if I have reason to believe that they threaten the colony as a whole. That’s the law. I can’t turn down a bunch of Elvis kooks just because I don’t share their beliefs, no more than a town or a state back in the U.S. can stop a particular religion from being practiced or a group from taking up residency. Sure, these people are weird, but they’re essentially harmless, like most of the visitors we have here.”
“That’s not quite true, Bob,” Jenny spoke up. “That’s where we’ve been having our disagreement. Maybe you’re used to cleaning up after the tourists every day in LaGrange, but neither Big Sky nor the farm areas were intended to be an amusement park.”
“Nobody ever said that Big Sky was an amusement park,” Hotchner said, brushing back her iron-gray hair with her hands, “but most of the tourist action occurs in LaGrange and the Strip, except for the daily guided tours. The South tori are inaccessible without resident keycards, and the elevators will only take visitors to the Strip, the hospital, and lifeboat station or North Dock when a shuttle is boarding. So I don’t see how the impact is happening.”
“Let me show you then,” Neil said. “Computer. Neil Schorr logon, Timeshare Two.”
A disembodied AI voice came from nowhere in particular. Neil Schorr logged on Timeshare Two. How may I help you, Mr. Schorr?
“Please display cross section of the colony, with geographic detail of the habitat sphere,” Neil replied.
Affirmative. I’ll budget you twenty minutes for this activity.
A wide column of space between the ceiling and the top of the conference table coruscated into a holographic display of Clarke County. For an instant the colony appeared as an opaque, solid model. Then the outer surfaces disappeared and the colony became transparent. The torus sections now appeared as hollow glassine tubes, while the biosphere resembled a large fishbowl. Major geographic features within the biosphere were etched in lines of blue, gold, and magenta. The entire display slowly revolved on an imaginary axis of latitude.
“Outline Broadway in the biosphere, please,” Neil said. Broadway, the continuous roadway that linked Big Sky and LaGrange, became a silver band around the inside of the fishbowl. He pointed to the road. “I don’t have to remind you that Broadway is the only roadway which directly connects the East and West.…”
“Unless you count the river,” Jenny interrupted impulsively. Neil paused and everyone else looked at her. She swallowed and motioned to the map. “But, ah, I don’t think anyone from LaGrange is going to swim down to Big Sky.”
Rebecca hid her chuckle behind a cough into her hand. Robert stared at the map, and Neil glared at his wife for a moment before continuing. “The main problem is that tourists from LaGrange find it easy to rent a trike or take a short walk from the resort into Big Sky.”
“Wait a minute,” Morse said. “You can’t tell us that’s a problem, Neil. Clarke County has been marketed as a vacation destination, not just LaGrange. People pay money for the experience of living in the colony for a week. You can’t just rope off Big Sky and the ag section, put them off-limits.”
“Why not?”
“I see what you’re getting at, Neil, but it’s unworkable,” Hotchner said. “You’ve got to remember that it’s only a half-mile walk down Broadway from LaGrange to Big Sky. We encourage that. People can wander around the colony, to explore the place. You can’t confine them to LaGrange and the Strip. If they wanted just that, what’s to keep them from going to Vegas instead?”
“The fact of the matter is that the mission of Clarke County is to build and maintain a self-sufficient colony,” Neil insisted.
“That’s right,” Morse interjected. “And part of that self-sufficiency is maintaining a stable economy of our own. Tourism helps pay the freight. You know that.”
“But the agricultural program also pays the freight,” Schorr argued, “and it’s being disrupted by the tourist traffic. We’
re seeing the same recurring problems. Maybe you haven’t seen it, but we’ve got big trouble in the South hemisphere. Tourists are finding, to start with, that they can eat more cheaply in Big Sky than in LaGrange, so they come over. They head for the residential swimming area when the beach in LaGrange gets too crowded.…”
“Those hardly sound like major problems,” Hotchner said.
“They interrupt a daily pattern of …”
“You’re right,” Jenny broke in. “Those things are just a nuisance, like the vandalism we’ve experienced. The main difficulties are with tourists going into the farm areas. They’ve been stomping into the fields, and that destroys crops. Their kids get into the livestock areas and harass the animals. You’ve even got TV ads running which show children chasing goats, like it’s something you get with your TexSpace reservation. What’s the line they use … ‘Welcome back to Paradise’? Meanwhile, Mom and Dad are raiding the crops for ears of corn to smuggle back home in their luggage. A little souvenir of their trip to outer space …”
“That’s not …” Morse began.
“Yes it is,” Neil said, “and it’s getting worse all the time. A few weeks ago someone broke into the chicken coop during the night cycle. Next day we found five hens with their necks broken. Someone having fun. Each of those birds cost three hundred dollars to import, Bob.”
“Well, I agree that’s inexcusable,” Morse said, “but seventy-five percent of the farm program is being carried out in the South tori. The greenhouse sections are inaccessible to tourists without a guide.”
He held out his hands. “Neil, I am not trying to say that the Ark’s losses are acceptable, but you’ve got to remember that the farm areas in the biosphere are a showplace. Statistically speaking …” Morse shrugged. “Well, the losses there hardly endanger the interests of either the Ark or the Corporation.”
Neil shook his head. “You’re wrong there. The farming that’s done in South Section has the higher yield because it’s done through hydroponics, but as far as long-term goals are concerned, the biosphere’s farm zones are more valuable. Hydroponics is a mature technology. We’ve been using it in space for more than a half-century. There’s nothing really new there. What we’re doing in the sphere is experimental and it could ultimately affect the whole course of space colonization. We need to know how agriculture works in O’Neill-type colonies if more are ever going to be built.”
Morse sighed. “As if we haven’t enough trouble paying for the first one.”
“Not only orbital colonies, either,” Neil insisted. “What about the plan to terraform Mars? That may be way off on the horizon, but with the High Grange Project we’re collecting information on open-space farming which could be applied to the Green Mars program.”
“Yet, but …” Bob Morse began.
“Furthermore …” Neil drove on.
Sitting back in her chair, watching her husband and Morse tangle in verbal wrestling, Jenny realized in a moment of déjà vu that she had heard every word of this discussion before, among these same people in this same room.
Neil would make the point that the Ark was not only growing food for Clarke County, Descartes Station on the Moon, and Arsia Station on Mars, but also that one-tenth of the produce was being shipped back to Earth to feed the starving masses in the Third World. So each bean a tourist trampled meant somebody was going to go hungry. And then Morse would argue that since profits from Clarke County’s tourist industry alone were more than halfway to paying for the construction costs of the colony, the tourists were literally paying for Clarke County. Then Neil would counterattack with the claim that because the corporation had invited the New Ark to oversee the agricultural program, the Ark had the right to autonomous control over every factor that influenced the farms, including the tourists. Then Morse would dig in his heels and say, point-blank, that the Ark could move back to Massachusetts if it didn’t like the way things were being done around here.
Then Neil would either get mad and stalk out of the room—leaving nothing resolved—or he would back down and Morse would toss him a bone by saying that a compromise could be reached, that the tourists could be asked upon arrival to please not trespass within the farm areas. Of course, this was a promise which had been made before.…
Jenny found herself gazing across the table at Rebecca Hotchner, and realized that Rebecca was silently gazing straight back at her. While the two men yammered away at each other, the two women silently held their own discussion. Jenny didn’t believe in telepathy, but in that moment of clarity she could read the older woman’s mind, the thoughts that were going on behind those cool blue eyes.
These men only believe themselves to be in control, Rebecca told her wordlessly, but the fact of the matter, my dear Jenny, is that you and I are the powers-that-be, the decision-makers, the hidden matriarchy. Yet the difference between us is that my status is officially recognized, with a title that even appears on a letterhead, while you are simply Neil Schorr’s wife. In the final analysis, I’m in control. I represent the consortium and the consortium owns Clarke County, and there really isn’t such a thing as democracy here. For that reason, this discussion is pointless.
“I don’t have to point out to you, on an acre-for-acre basis …” Neil was saying.
“Nonetheless, the costs of this colony are being underwritten by …” Bob interrupted.
Rebecca continued to stare at Jenny. Nothing is going to change, her eyes said. This is a company town. We control the purse strings, and you would be wise not to forget that.
Hotchner’s head tilted back a little. So? Are you going to try to challenge that, dear?
“Maybe I will,” Jenny found herself saying aloud.
Hotchner blinked.
The two men, hearing Jenny’s words, suddenly turned their attention towards her. The silence was a moment pulled out of time. Absolute stasis.
“What did you say?” Neil asked.
Jenny took a deep breath. “This is getting us nowhere,” she said flatly. “It’s like …”
She shrugged. “Déjà vu. I’ve been in this meeting before. The Ark has its interests and the Corporation has theirs, and the two are not one and the same. We want to successfully establish a colony in space, and you guys want … I dunno, Spaceland, Las Vegas in orbit, Six Flags Over Earth. A quick buck, when it comes right down to it.”
“Jenny,” Morse said gently, “that’s not quite fair. We all want …”
“No, Bob,” she insisted angrily, “we don’t want the same thing, and you”—she found herself directly addressing Hotchner now—“don’t want a compromise.”
Hotchner closed her eyes. “That may well be,” she replied evenly. Then she reopened her eyes to stare straight back at Jenny. “But it’s the Clarke County Corporation which built the colony, and it’s the Clarke County Corporation which says who stays and who goes. Without a radical change in that structure, Jenny …”
She allowed herself a victorious little smile. “Maybe it’s the New Ark which goes.”
There was a sudden, bottomless silence in the board room.
“So that leaves us with only one alternative,” Jenny said.
“Jenny …” Neil started. There was a wrathful tone to his voice.
Jenny ignored him. “There’s no other choice,” she continued. “We’ll have to recommend at Sunday’s town meeting that Clarke County secede from the United States and make itself an independent, self-governing body.”
She stopped. Did I really just say that? The words had just … come out. As if they had a life of their own.
There was a disbelieving silence until Bob Morse stammered, “What … how … what are you saying?”
Jenny kept her eyes locked on Rebecca’s face. “This colony—this community—will not be bought-and-paid-for by a bunch of corporate greed-heads who want to turn us into a tourist trap. It doesn’t matter who paid for Clarke County. Legally, it’s a territory of the United States. Therefore, we can secede from the Union.”
She felt a pulse beating in her temples. She took another breath. “And we shall.”
Okay, so she had made her point. She had gotten their attention. Her instincts towards etiquette told her to shut up, or to say it was just a joke. Yet, at the same time, Jenny knew that she had just fired the shot heard round the Bernal sphere. There was no backing off from this one.
“We will make our own destiny,” she added, clearly enunciating every syllable.
Then, because the power was flowing in her veins so fast and hard that she felt as if her head were going to shoot straight off her neck, Jenny Schorr stood up and walked away from the table.
Neil reached out to touch her arm. Was this the action of a partner turning to congratulate his spouse’s courage? Or a husband trying to control his crazy wife? She didn’t know, and she didn’t care. She walked out of Neil’s grasp to the door, pulled it open, and strode out into the corridor.
Every nerve in her body was numb until she reached the end of the corridor. At the Red Line tram station Jenny pressed the touchplate to summon the tram. She was alone in the station. She half-expected Neil to be following her, but when she looked around, no one was there.
What she had done, she had done all by herself. It had started, and ended, in a closed executive session. No one else would ever know.
“The shortest revolution in history,” Jenny whispered to herself. She closed her eyes for a second and collapsed against a stanchion, trying to catch her breath. “Way to go, girl. That’s twice in one morning you’ve made an ass of yourself.”
Yet when she reopened her eyes, she saw something truly weird.
There was a video terminal mounted on the wall next to the slide-doors leading to the tramway tunnel. There were thousands like it all over Clarke County, electronic bulletin boards that routinely reminded inhabitants of schedules and public service announcements, continuously scrolling down the screen.
Now, however, the screen was displaying a computer-generated image of an Independence Day fireworks show: rockets lifting off from an imaginary horizon to explode in coronas of red, white, and blue.