Infinite Stars

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  Four other mass transit accidents in that same calendar year had each produced at least fifty-four casualties, but Bichet had been the worst.

  And no one had ever been held responsible for the “unforeseeable technical failures” which had led to all of them.

  Estelle had been four T-years old at the time, and in truth, Eloise was the only mother she’d ever known.

  But Gabrielle had been the daughter of university professors driven from their posts and hounded onto the BLS they’d despised for daring to speak out against ratifying the Constitution of 1795 PD. They’d made the mistake of believing the decades of steady rot actually might be reversed at the ballot box, and they’d fought passionately for the last remaining vestige of the old Republic. For which, the Legislaturalists had purged them from their positions and insured that they would never be employed again.

  Their fate had made their daughter wise, but Gabrielle had inherited their stubborn belief in the value of the individual, as well, and she’d inculcated it in her own older daughter. She’d also been careful to teach Eloise to conceal her own interest in such forbidden topics as the hardcopy on the sadly worn apartment’s rickety dinner table. Perhaps if she’d believed, understood, how bad things were truly going to become, she wouldn’t have encouraged such risky beliefs, but Eloise didn’t think so. Her mother had understood that the human spirit had to be nurtured just as surely as the human body, and as she’d told Eloise more than once, someone had to remember.

  There were times when Eloise remembered those conversations and condemned herself for not being more… proactive in the cause of remembering. But she wasn’t her mother, and by the time she’d been old enough to begin paying attention, the last frail edifices of the Republic of Michèle Péricard had toppled. And because they had, she couldn’t blame Estelle for her anxiety. That same anxiety was an omnipresent part of her, as well. Nor did Estelle need to remind her that they were all each other had, and what Eloise might have been prepared to risk for herself, she was not prepared to risk for Estelle.

  That was something she would never tell her sister. Never even hint to her. Estelle was her hostage to fortune, and Eloise would never—ever—let her suspect that it was fear for her which had prevented Eloise from doing what she might have done otherwise.

  “I think Mom would have liked you a lot, Stelle,” she said now. “I know I do.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Estelle said dryly, and Eloise chuckled again.

  “Hey, you’re my sister. Of course I love you! But liking someone can actually be harder than loving them, you know.”

  “Did I ever mention that you have some really weird perspectives on life?” Estelle asked.

  “From time to time,” Eloise admitted.

  “Good. I wouldn’t want you to think I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Oh, believe me! I don’t think anything of the sort.”

  Estelle laughed, then looked at the time display on the aged but still functional (more or less) smart wall and sighed.

  “I’d better be getting to bed,” she said. “I’m opening for Jorge in the morning.”

  “You are?” Eloise couldn’t keep an edge of concern out of her tone, and Estelle shrugged.

  “Vivienne screened in sick.”

  “‘Sick,’” Eloise repeated, and Estelle shrugged again. Both of them knew “sick” had nothing at all to do with germs or viruses in Vivienne’s case.

  “I know. I know!” Estelle said. “But we’re lucky to have her anyway. And when she’s not dusting or patching, she has a really sweet disposition. You know how much the customers like her when she’s straight.”

  “When she’s straight,” Eloise agreed. “Which seems to be getting less and less frequent.”

  “There’s not much we can do about that,” Estelle sighed, and Eloise nodded grimly.

  More and more of Estelle’s contemporaries were completely disengaging from anything even remotely smacking of personal responsibility. Eloise had a better notion than most Dolists of the precarious state of the People’s Republic’s finances, but the irony was that even Haven’s ramshackle industrial sector was incredibly productive by any pre-diaspora standard. The government was ever more strapped to support the BLS and associated programs by which the Legislaturalists had bought the Dolist Managers’ connivance in the institutionalization of their own power, yet it was persistently unable to find its citizens the sort of productive employment star nations like the Star Kingdom of Manticore had found for theirs. And a big part of the reason they couldn’t, in Eloise’s opinion, was because of the huge disincentive the BLS provided. Havenite manufactured goods might be shoddy, and they might be far less durable than comparable goods in other star nations, but they were certainly cheap. Cheap enough that the BLS allowed non-Legislaturalist Havenites to buy plenty of bread and circuses without ever working a day in their lives.

  So they didn’t.

  Eloise couldn’t really blame them, much though she wanted to. They were educated—programmed—to be drones, serving no real function other than to provide the reliable voting bloc that routinely shored up the Legislaturalists’ supposed legitimacy. That was how a façade democracy worked, and it wasn’t surprising that people who realized they contributed nothing more than that to their society weren’t exactly the most responsible people when it came to their own lives, either. The desire to contribute, if only to repay, was part of a healthy personality, and so was the desire to build a better life for oneself and one’s children. But too many people had realized—or decided—they were never going to rise out of the ranks of the Dolists, however hard they labored. So why should people who didn’t need to work, and who realized that trying to work was pointless, desire to work? Of course a lot of them took the easier path, collected their BLS, cast their votes obediently, binged on cheap entertainment, or drugs, or (increasingly) lives of petty crime and violence, and tried not to think about the other things they might have done with their lives.

  All too often, they succeeded in the not-thinking part.

  Eloise understood exactly how that worked. She’d seen it working around her for almost fifty T-years, and she knew her mother had been right to rail against it. People who lost the belief that what they did mattered—or had it taken away from them—tended to develop unhealthy personalities. And when enough of a society’s citizens had unhealthy personalities, it did, too. She’d seen ample proof of that around her, as well.

  There were still citizens of the People’s Republic who’d avoided that deadly cycle. In her darker moments, Eloise suspected their numbers were shrinking daily, but they were still there, and Jorge Blanchard—and Estelle—were cases in point.

  Even in Nouveau Paris, there were niches for people willing to work. The problem was that working was unlikely to change anything in their lives. Even Estelle and Blanchard knew that. The upper classes—indeed, even most of what passed for the middle-class—were the private preserve of the Legislaturalists, the Dolist Managers, and their families and cronies. The best anyone else could hope for was something like Blanchard’s diner, a friendly little place down near the Duquesne Tower tube station with real, live servers, good food, and clean silverware. Jorge was never going to become wealthy, but he could look back at his life and know he’d made a difference. That he’d accomplished something in a world which might have been specifically engineered to prevent people from doing anything of the sort.

  Eloise approved of Jorge Blanchard.

  But it looked like he was going to lose Vivienne Robillard. Estelle was right; when Vivienne was free of one recreational drug or another, she was exactly the sort of server someone like Jorge’s Diner needed. Unfortunately, she was sliding down the same blackhole which had claimed all too many of Estelle’s age-mates. More to the point, though…

  “Honey, I don’t like you opening the diner by yourself,” Eloise said now. “That’s a rough neighborhood.”

  “Rougher than The Terraces?” Estelle demanded, widening her eyes
. “Puh-leez, Eloise! Give me a break!”

  Eloise’s lips twitched ever so slightly, but she also shook her head.

  “Granted, The Terraces are no bed of roses. On the other hand, I don’t exactly encourage you to go traipsing around there by yourself, either.”

  “No, you don’t,” Estelle said rather pointedly. Eloise looked at her, and the younger Pritchart grimaced. “I know you think I’m still a baby, but I’m really not, you know. I’m all grown up, and sooner or later you’re going to have to trust me to start looking out for myself.”

  “You’re a regular octogenarian, you are!” Eloise retorted.

  “Well, I may be younger than you are, but I really have been paying attention. I’m not going to run around by myself someplace like The Terraces or the Eighth Floor.”

  “No, you damned well aren’t,” Eloise said firmly. “But”—she raised a forestalling hand before Estelle could react to her authoritative tone—“you’re right, you aren’t a child anymore. I still don’t want you walking around by yourself in the wrong neighborhood, but if pressed, I will concede you’ve demonstrated a modicum of situational awareness in the past. Still doesn’t make me any happier about your opening the diner by yourself, though.”

  “Richenda and Céline are headed down to the tubes tomorrow morning with me, and Jorge’s going to join us at Fifty. And I promise I won’t stir a single step home till you get there to ride the shafts with me.” Estelle sighed agan, theatrically. “There, satisfied?”

  “Satisfied,” Eloise conceded, although the truth was that she wasn’t entirely. Richenda and Céline were levelheaded girls, but they were within four or five years of Estelle’s age. She didn’t entirely trust their sensitivity to possible threats, but there was a certain safety in numbers, even in Nouveau Paris.

  “Then I’ll see you in the morning before I leave,” Estelle said, hugging her again and kissing her affectionately on the cheek before she headed off to her own bedroom.

  Eloise watched her go, then opened the sliding doors and stepped out onto the apartment balcony. That balcony—and their apartment’s exterior position and the view that came with it—had cost a lot of their joint BLS and quite a bit of sharp trading with the manager of this floor of Duquesne Tower. Eloise’s version of Jorge’s diner was the clientele she’d built up as a tutor. Her own mother had made sure she was actually educated, even if she’d had to do that by schooling her at home, rather than simply warehoused in one of the PRH’s so-called schools. Along the way, Gabrielle had impressed Eloise with her responsibility to “pay it forward” in turn, and there were parents even now, even in Nouveau Paris, determined to see that their children really learned something. People like Floor Manager Aristide Cardot, who hoped his son might find the Legislaturalist patronage that could lift him higher in his own life.

  A tutor’s pay wasn’t much more than Estelle earned working in the diner, but it was satisfying work, and it provided a handy cover for Eloise’s forays into the historical sections of the library and the InfoSys.

  You’re a fine one to talk about Estelle wandering around alone, she thought now, gazing out over the glorious light tapestry of nighttime Nouveau Paris.

  In the darkness, looking at the incredible strings of light that caparisoned the city’s mighty towers, watching the glittering fireflies of air cars and air lorries, or looking down, down, down into the mighty canyons to the lighted sidewalks, or looking even higher than the air cars, to where the running lights of cargo or personnel shuttles made their way from orbit to the spaceport, it was almost—almost—possible to believe that what that city once had been it might someday be again. But it wasn’t going to happen, she admitted sadly, and maybe that was the real reason she hadn’t tried harder to inculcate her own love of history into Estelle. Maybe it was better for her sister to never yearn for what had been true so long ago.

  It would be better if I didn’t, she told herself. Better if I didn’t understand everything we’ve lost, didn’t want it back so much. Maybe then I’d be more content, or something like that. And maybe I wouldn’t be so tempted.

  She sighed, bracing both hands on the railing, leaning on it as she looked out into the breezy darkness from her two-hundredth floor vantage point. Some of the other towers were far taller than Duquesne, and Estelle was right about the dangerous quadrants in their own building. Even so, there were moments like this when Eloise just needed to drink in the beauty, the sense—the illusion—of freedom and possibility in the breeze sweeping across the balcony.

  “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” The words first written over three thousand T-years ago ran through her mind. The words Michèle Péricard had lived by when she drafted the Constitution the Legislaturalists had ripped to shreds. “That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

  She didn’t begin to understand all the charges their drafters had leveled against their king. Details got lost in thirty-two centuries, and history as a discipline was… discouraged in the People’s Republic. For, she thought sourly, reasons which were self-evident. But she understood enough. She understood those words’ protest against sham government, against tyranny, and against what amounted to despotism that completely ignored “the consent of the governed.”

  Estelle was right, the biography of Péricard on her dinner table would have been proscribed if Internal Security or the Mental Hygiene Police had realized everything that was buried in it. In fact, the grand declaration from whence those words sprang had been proscribed; what passed for the authorities in the People’s Republic of Haven simply hadn’t worried about what the man who’d written Péricard’s definitive biography a century and a half before might have included in its appendices.

  A familiar shiver went through her as she looked out over that sea of lights, that ocean of lights, and those words went through her. In her own pantheon, no one stood higher than Péricard, the woman whose dream had created the Republic of Haven, the Athens of the Haven Quadrant. Whose dream had been murdered as surely as Hypatia of Alexandria.

  She wondered, sometimes, what would have happened if Estelle had never been born. She loved her sister more dearly than life itself, and the thought of a world without Estelle made her shy away like a frightened horse. Yet if Estelle hadn’t been born, if she weren’t Eloise’s “hostage to fortune,” what might she have done differently in her life?

  A part of her yearned for the answer to that question, although she knew it never could be answered, really. Yet there was that part of her, the part that remembered the fierce, proud conclusion of that ancient declaration.

  And for the support of this Declaration, they’d written, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

  That was what they’d pledged: everything they had. Everything they held most dear in all the world. And those words spoke to her even now. Spoke to that part of her that secretly admired the Citizens Rights Union. Too many of them were obviously terrorists for terrorism’s sake, but not all of them were. And at least they had the courage to stand and fight. That was what that secret part of her admired, even envied. Maybe some of them didn’t really understand what they were fighting for, and maybe some of them were fighting only for vengeance upon a system which had failed them, but at least they were fighting.

  And at least they have clarity, she thought. I suspect most of them have a pretty severe case of myopia, but what they do see, they see clearly enough to be willing to pay cash for it. And maybe if there were a few people in something like the CRU who weren’t myopic, a few people who remembered what they stood for, who could remind the rest of them…

  She drew a deep breath, and those words flowed through her one last time. Our
lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. Maybe the men who’d written them down would have understood the CRU—and remembered Péricard and her constitution—whatever the cost. Whoever the cost. And if they could have…

  She stepped on that dangerous thought firmly, drew a deep breath, then turned and went back inside and closed the doors behind her.

  * * *

  “You really should think about upgrading, Eloise,” Kevin Usher said. “You need more standoff capability.”

  “What I don’t need is any attention from InSec or the cops,” Eloise replied, standing back and wiping her forehead. Then she reached behind her head, holding the hair tie with her left hand while her right tugged on her sweat-damp ponytail to tighten the tie. “They don’t take too kindly to Dolists ‘packing heat,’ Kevin!”

  InSec, MHP, Urban Authority, and just about every single one of the People’s Republic police forces—of which there were no-one-really-knew how many, at the end of the day—took dim views of weapons in general, but they saved their special attention for firearms. Probably because firearms—even old-fashioned chemical-powered ones—posed a much greater threat to what passed for the champions of law and order in the PRH than a simple club or even a vibro blade.

  “I’m not talking about sticking a tribarrel in your hip pocket, for God’s sake,” Usher said in a disgusted tone. Then his expression softened as he waved both big, powerful hands at the workout room around them. “You’re good with your hands, Eloise, and you’re one of the few people I know who keep right on getting better. But the best rule of all for hand-to-hand is to keep the other bastard from ever getting his hands on you in the first place. One of the first things the Marines teach you is that the only time you use your hands is when you don’t have a gun or a knife and both feet are nailed to the floor.”

  Eloise chuckled, although she knew he was perfectly serious. And she trusted his judgment, too. She and Kevin had known one another for over five T-years, ever since he’d opened his dojo on Duquesne Tower’s Floor Hundred Ten. It was a ninety-floor commute for her, but it was located in the same quadrant on Hundred Ten as the Pritcharts’ apartment on Two Hundred, so it was only about a fifteen-minute walk from the nearest lift shaft trunk. And Kevin, an ex-Marine, had come highly recommended by one of her students’ older sister.