The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma

by Brian Herbert

  “Sorry, ma’am, I have a real busy schedule today.” He smelled expensive incense, a subtle fragrance that was much more sophisticated than the common variety.

  She arched her eyebrows in displeasure. “Our cleaning bot has been down for more than three days, causing us all sorts of discomforts. We have allergies to dust, you know.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, ma’am, but we’ll have the little guy up and working in short order.”

  “Either that or I want a new one.”

  As the stylish woman led him through a corridor and then into a comfortable living room, Ridell looked around in envy at all the things her family had. The apartment was at least twice as big as his own, with expensive gem-beads hanging in the doorways that made a gentle tinkling sound as they passed through them. The living room was filled with leisure technology, and one wall featured images of drum circle percussionists, playing repeated patterns. The furniture was all post-revolution and high-end, with ornately stitched patriotic slogans on the tan cushions of the couch, fancy dispersion lamps that used hardly any energy, and a long decorator table on one wall, containing a very realistic-looking model of a Janus Machine, complete with crew.

  “Over there,” she said, pointing to the non-functioning household robot in one corner. A metal mound with soft bumpers around the perimeter, the unit had a golden sensor array encircling its body and a standard panel box on top, with a remote-control unit in a slot. The machine’s undercarriage was low to the floor.

  “Does your robot have a name?” he asked, kneeling and looking inside the panel box. He removed his backpack, brought out a test bundle, and connected it to the circuitry.

  “A name? Whatever do you mean?”

  “Some families name their robots, sort of an affectionate thing to do.” Ridell watched the small screen on the test bundle as the device ran through its program, looking for the problem. While waiting for the results, he checked the unit’s remote transmitter.

  “It’s just a machine,” she said. “Name a robot?” She paused, and seemed to soften a little. “I suppose I have heard of people doing that, but it makes no sense to me. I just want what the machine does for me, the product of its work; I don’t want to imagine it’s a family member, a little friend, or anything like that.”

  “I see.”

  The woman was a bit haughty, knowing that she occupied a social station well above his own mid-green status. But she seemed to be making an effort to be pleasant. As he worked, she mentioned that she was also having trouble with her food preparation machine, and asked if he could fix it, too.

  Even though he could probably repair that unit, it was not in his job description, and there were strict union rules against performing tasks that were the domain of other union shops. He didn’t explain all of that to her, though, and just said, “Sorry, I only know how to service cleaning bots. You’ll need to turn in another work request.”

  “Oh, very well.”

  The test bundle reported a problem with the servo-motor synchronization, causing the bot to shut down to prevent damage. He made adjustments inside the panel, then flipped the unit over and checked the undercarriage wheels, sensors, and suction devices. Then, removing the remote-control unit from its slot, he dispatched the robot to clean the room. Whirring smoothly, it ran over the carpets and synthetic wood floors, then up the wide legs of a table and, perching on top, it used extension arms and blowers to dust carefully around a replica Ming vase and an electronic image in a picture frame.

  The framed image was locked in place, and caught Ridell’s eye. It showed a pretty young redhead standing with a green-robed Chairman Rahma, suggesting that this family had high connections.

  Noticing the direction of his gaze, Mrs. Longet said proudly, “My daughter Dori is a close adviser to our beloved Chairman Rahma. That picture was taken earlier this year.”

  “At the Montana Valley Game Reserve?” he asked.

  “Of course. That is his home and headquarters, and Dori works for him there.”

  “Well, what a coincidence! My daughter Jade is with our beloved Chairman at the game reserve, too—recently joined him.” Then, feeling a sudden camaraderie with the woman, he extended a hand to her and added, “It’s nice to meet another parent.”

  Dori’s mother froze up, looked askance at the hand as if it were dirty, and did not shake. “Mr. Ridell, you get whatever Chairman Rahma says you get, so don’t try to curry favor with me! Just complete your work here and be on your way.”

  Red-faced, he completed the task of checking the robot, while wishing he knew how to program the machine to strangle this arrogant, condescending woman. In a matter of minutes he was out the door and into the hallway, his thoughts punctuated by the sound of the door closing securely behind him, and the clicking of the security locks.

  He hurried away, hoping he never had to see her again.

  * * *

  JOSS’S TRAIN GOT under way again, and accelerated to a high rate of speed.

  A short while later, it came to another stop, and this time Joss could see why without being told. The relocation train had turned onto a sidetrack, but many of its boxcars at the rear were still on the main track, blocking it. To the right of the long train, he saw a huge containment camp, a fenced area where people were kept until reservation space could be found for them.

  Doors on most of the green rail cars opened, and people streamed out of them, carrying their meager possessions. There were adults with children, and children carrying their little brothers or sisters. Joss recoiled in surprise and revulsion at the conditions he saw in the camp where they were being herded—a sprawl of improvised shacks and tents, with open sewage ditches running between them and children playing in the squalor. Couldn’t the GSA government provide better facilities for its citizens? He’d never seen anything like this, hadn’t imagined it could possibly be this bad.

  “Kind of makes that dinner turn over in your stomach, doesn’t it?” Sabe McCarthy said.

  Joss felt like saying something too, but just stared out the window, disgusted and transfixed. He heard shouting that sounded like it was coming from inside his own train, from one of the forward cars. Just then the doors thumped open at the front of his car and a man in ragged clothing ran through, chased by two black-uniformed soldiers. One of the anarchists drew and fired, dropping the man in the aisle by Joss. The man wasn’t dead and didn’t appear to bleed, so they must have used a stunner on him. He looked groggy as they dragged him away and out of the coach. Joss saw a growing number of Revolutionary Guardsmen outside along the track, all wearing shiny black helmets with green tree emblems, and gleaming black jackboots.

  “It’s a wild, rough country out here,” Bim Hendrix said.

  Now several more boxcars at the rear of the relocation train opened up, and Joss saw people pour and tumble out, shackled adults in prison garb. A few resisted and shouted protests, but to no avail. The others looked numb and stumbled along, doing as they were told. All were herded by the anarchists onto a barren, raised clearing.

  A squadron of anarchists appeared, marching in formation from the front of the relocation train. They carried Splitter rifles.

  “Uh-oh,” Sabe McCarthy said. “I’ve seen this before.” He slapped his cards down on the table, rose to his feet. His face went ashen. “I’m going to my cabin.”

  Joss didn’t move, felt so paralyzed that he was unable to even toss his hand of cards on the table. He suspected what was going to happen next, but had only heard rumors about it before. So it was true! He hated to think of it.

  The prisoners stood on a surface that looked like it had been split previously, leaving a hardened gray amalgam that had not been greenformed, an apparent killing field of bodily remains. In the background, he heard the government announcer describe nonchalantly how roving bands of scofflaws were pursued and rounded up in the wilds, and how most of them could “never be rehabilitated.”

  A shudder ran down Joss’s back. They were going to be
recycled.

  Outside, the anarchist squad pointed their Splitter guns at the prisoners and fired little bursts of black death. For a lingering moment the hapless prisoners were outlined in black like a macabre art piece. Then they disintegrated and crumbled into a horrific, gooey conglomeration on the ground.

  Sickened, Joss looked away, into the face of Kupi across the table.

  She did not appear to be pleased by what they’d just seen, yet she nodded toward the killing field and said, “Some things are unavoidable for the greater good.”

  Joss nodded, but inwardly he could not agree. Later he would think back on this moment many times, and would identify it as one of the turning points in his life.

  11

  It was so easy to discover bad things about large corporations, and so difficult to find anything good. As just one example of their transgressions, the major corporations provided only a tiny percentage of the employment in the United States, but were plundering a much higher percentage of human and planetary resources. The bottom line was, they contributed the minimum and took the maximum.

  —Chairman Rahma Popal, Commentaries

  CHAIRMAN RAHMA STOOD at the balcony railing outside his third-floor office, feeling the warmth of afternoon sunlight on his gray-bearded face. The greensward stretched into the distance, with its wetlands and grazing pastures for buffalo, elk, and other animals—a pastoral view that was edged by evergreen forests extending from the valley up to the mountains. Several hundred meters to the left, he saw the net- and fabric-covered aviaries and the adjacent clearplex-and-alloy greenhouses, a network of connected structures that were filled with endangered species of birds and plants.

  In the other direction stood the Shrine of Martyrs, a black marble mausoleum where ten of Rahma’s fallen comrades from the revolution were entombed. Their electronic images adorned the interior walls, and there were reliquaries for each hero containing some of their personal things—a piece of uniform fabric, a ring, a watch, a pair of eyeglasses, a little book of haiku, a lock of hair, and the like. Rahma used the shrine as a private sanctuary, where he could visit with his dead comrades and honor them. There were hundreds of facsimiles of the shrine around the GSA (all built to scale), for the use of the public.

  He had just finished a sparse vegan lunch and midday tryst with Jade Ridell, a young redhead he had invited to become one of the women living in his personal compound. She was pretty and had a cheerful personality, as well as considerable intelligence, though he didn’t think she could ever be a threat to his favorite for the past two years, Dori Longet, or to Valerie Tatanka, the doctor at the clinic who was also his lover.

  At his desk inside, he’d just read several reports, one on the Quebec attack that took place two days ago. Half a dozen Army warplanes had been destroyed there by a small rebel group, one that didn’t seem to have any Corporate financing. The saboteurs had been questioned and summarily executed.

  Another report concerned the much more troubling Bostoner attack that took place four days ago. A pair of enemy combatants who survived had been interrogated. One had refused to answer questions and had died during the grilling process; the other had received a serious head wound in the battle, and had lapsed into a coma. Yesterday, however, the man began slipping in and out of consciousness, mumbling incomplete sentences with unintelligible words, such as “voleer,” and references to something that sounded like “VT digging technology,” which Rahma’s investigators and engineers suspected had something to do with the craft burrowing underground.

  Thus far, no one understood how the mysterious burrowing machine worked, because it had been detonated by a self-destruct mechanism. There had been evidence of a place where the machine emerged from the ground, but further investigation of the site had revealed nothing more. Had it been hidden there and dug its way out for the sneak attack, like a desert fighter hiding in sand and leaping out to strike? That sounded like the most plausible explanation, but if the attackers had buried the sizable machine there, how had they eluded detection from satellites? Weather patterns were being analyzed in detail now, to see if there had been extended periods in which visibility from orbital space might have been impaired. With no more answers yet, Chairman Rahma tried to think of something else.

  As he gazed out on the broad expanse of greenery and the snowcapped mountains, he could almost envision an entire planet like his cherished game reserve, much the way it had been millions of years ago. How marvelous that would be! In his mind’s eye he imagined vast forestlands as well as mountains, rivers, lakes, and seas, all undamaged by mankind in his self-seeking, relentless drive to hold domain over every aspect of Earth and its resources.

  In his boyhood Rahma had imagined becoming a dedicated environmentalist one day, working to preserve nature habitats for future generations of humankind to enjoy. By the time he reached his teens he came to realize, however, that his goals were too small and that his focus on humanity was wrong, that his thoughts were being filtered by a worldview that had proven harmful to the Earth. He became politically active, after deciding that he had to think on a much larger scale, and that he wanted to reverse the historical course of ecological ruination by man, in whatever way he could. In the process he developed a more mature worldview, in which people mattered only to the extent that they could protect and enhance nature. He often reminded himself that his own life no longer mattered, except to advance the restoration of the planet.

  His involvement with the street revolution and the Berkeley Eight revolutionary council had been momentous in his life, enabling him to disseminate his ideas to a wide audience. The subsequent work he had performed as Chairman of the Green States of America had been a stepping-stone in a larger plan in which he hoped to expand greenification to other regions around the world. But entrenched Corporate and other political interests held foreign lands in such vise grips that he had grown to think that it might be impossible to ever expand beyond the Americas, and that he would have his hands full maintaining what he had accomplished here. Every day he received reports of guerrilla tactics being employed against GSA interests—hit-and-run attacks that often did not result in the perpetrators being killed, caught, or even identified.

  He regretted the human deaths that resulted from forcing more than a billion people to relocate, but the tens of millions who died were either weak or resisted. Their ongoing deaths were not his fault, and he felt very little personal guilt over them.

  This planet comes first, he thought.

  Going back inside his office, the Chairman saw a red light flashing on his bamboo desk, in a code that indicated he had a visitor waiting for him. He voice-activated the door to his outer office, and it slid open with almost no sound. The trusted hubot Artie stood in the open doorway, looking in with the eyes of the Chairman’s dead friend Glanno Artindale. “You have a visitor,” the hybrid said, in a throaty voice that approximated that of Glanno.

  “I have no appointments scheduled this afternoon.”

  “We thought you would want to see this one, Eminence. It is Director Ondex and one of his subordinates.”

  “Ondex again? What does he want this time?”

  “He would not tell me, only said it was a matter that he could discuss only with you.”

  Rahma Popal’s shoulders sagged. “Very well. Send the bastard in.”

  Moments later, the tall, patrician man marched in, followed by a female assistant in a white gown and two Greenpol officers carrying their helmets. The assistant had a large volume under one arm.

  The Chairman exchanged signs of the sacred tree with Ondex, then sat at his desk. The visitors remained standing.

  “You have not yet submitted your identification package for the genetic database,” Ondex said.

  Rahma smiled. “A joke? A bit of amusement? Why are you really here?”

  The Director of Science scowled. “No joke, Eminence. It is required.”

  “Don’t be absurd! I do not need to submit an identification package!
I am the Chairman of the Green States of America!”

  Ondex snapped his fingers, and the assistant handed the thick volume to him. Rahma noticed that it was a federal law book.

  Opening it to a marked page, Ondex read, “‘For the good of the GSA, every citizen must comply with identification procedures.’”

  “You SciOs don’t run the ID database,” Rahma said. “Greenpol does, and need I remind you? I control the police.” He nodded to the officers, but they were looking at the floor, not at him.

  Ondex smiled. “But under the GSA Charter, every branch of government—including mine—has access to the police database.”

  “You’re going over the line now, you nitpicking SOB. You tend to your duties, and I’ll tend to mine.”

  “Since you helped draft the law, you should understand it better than anyone. Aren’t you a citizen of the GSA?”

  “Of course, but—”

  “Then you must submit cell samples to the DNA bank, along with details of other identifying features of your body. This should have been done years ago.”

  The Chairman shook his head, but more out of dismay than anything else. The genetic database had been his own idea, so that his Greenpol forensic pathologists could study the brains and cellular material of eco-criminals and other miscreants, to come up with medical treatments that would prevent the living from repeating their crimes—drugs, brain wipes, genetic reprogramming. But his researchers were having trouble coming up with useful patterns or treatments, and Rahma had been considering abandoning the program.

  “All right,” he said, in exasperation. “If the bureaucracy must be fed, let’s get it over with.”

  Ondex closed the volume, and snapped his fingers crisply.

  The Greenpol officers stepped past the Director of Science and stood on either side of Rahma Popal. One took cell scrapings from the skin on his arm and neck, along with fingerprints, and snippets of gray hair from the back of his head. The other officer performed retina scans and caliper readings of Rahma’s ears and nose and took a series of photographs of his face from several angles. Then both of them performed thermal imaging of his brain, using scanners that cast varying colors of light on different portions of his cranium. After that, they ran another scanner over his clothing, picking up all the details of his body.