“Ah, you two’ll make a fine couple for the ship. A useful one,” Perdue says. Not saying in which way. Private lives were not to be private on the Courier. It must already be in the précis, each computerized, psychographed, and even collaborated upon by its subject. It would be known to Perdue that their relationship, Veronica’s and his, has never been sexual. That Gilpin has no such relationships now would have been gone into, as far back as Madge. While candidate Oliphant’s style in that respect may be part of what Perdue’s girls admire her for.
“We’re not precisely a couple. As you must know.”
“Forgive me. Yes. We’ve had to study up beforehand,” Perdue says with distaste.
“It’s all in the public domain.” Loudly insisted upon at last, by the public itself. “You don’t forgive the process?”
“We abide by it. Dealing with the results as we can. Why do you ask, Gilpin? Balk, did you? When you had to go through the process your self?”
“Only out of humiliation. I’ve so little to hide.”
“I must say. How a man of your background could be so—”
“Foolish?”
“As to trust those data boys.”
“It was either them or the military.”
“Or us.” Perdue actually smiles.
“No one class can be allowed to choose the inhabitants of a new world that rigidly. That’s been my whole point. Besides, it never works.” He’d kept his eye on the family picture. The son’s hair is pale like the mother’s but wooled like the father’s. On a longer head, but with the same snub face. Wonder who that boy admires?
“What’s your alternative?”
He sighed; he sighs a lot in these offices. “Choose by lot.” Which of course they haven’t done. “From a representational pool of humanity, constantly added to. Tied first to the birth rate here, and only then to their capacity for Outer.” Actually he’d been improvising, as usual—adherence to principle being all he wants. In any policy to do with human beings, the means of execution were never ideal. His century has taught him it ought not to be. Let there always be a ragged, civilian, amateur eye.
“Mr. Gilpin, you may be very glad your ship’s crew was not chosen by lot.”
“Oh—with margins for operating personnel, of course.” That’s the loophole. They always see it.
“Everybody in a habitat in space ought to be operating personnel, for Christ’s sake. Just as on any spacecraft.”
“Until when? The millennium?”
Perdue’s a graceful man. “Here’s your promised list, Gilpin. Actually the data boys haven’t done so badly. Every economic and social factor represented.” He lifts a brow. Impossible, as they both know. “To an age curve.” That’s easier. “Over twenty-one. No children yet. But those belonging to present and future passengers on the qualified lists will be sent for later. And four of the younger women are pregnant. Two men in their eighties, three women. Low for the national percentile, but there it is. As has been so much discussed—death will inevitably be represented.” In time. Agreed. “As for your lame, your halt, your sick—” Perdue blew out his breath. “That’s impossible. We must not be burdened. But you do have—let’s see—a blind person. Blind since birth, graduate degree, very nimble—useful member. Also, a paraplegic. Did remarkably in vestibular training…Actually, in non-gravity no limbs can be rather good, you know. Or no use of them. Also, a few who wear hard-of-hearing devices. No sweat there. Plus one mildly retarded clerk, who’s worked excellently in the postal system.” He smiled again. Gilpin had refused to. “One mild emphysema, ditto one cardiovascular, et cetera, et cetera.” He hesitates. “No known carcinomas. Sorry, but we simply couldn’t. Because of the viral evidence, you really can’t expect…” He broke out still another smile. “But a very nice pair of female trusties from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Manics, both of them, on lithium dosage compatible with what we—” Might have to administer when aloft—to anybody? “Want to look it over, before you take it along?” He holds out the list. Take it away, he means, his wrist trembling with rage.
Trembling too, Gilpin bent over that first passenger list. A note appended to it reminded that each name had a case history not here attached, copies to be distributed to all when aboard. In addition, films on each person would be available for showing in the ship’s common room, later to be filed in the Island’s computer library, the file to be cumulative as the Island’s population grew.
“So there you’ll be,” Perdue said. “One hundred and eight average citizens, supposedly. Only nobody who passes our training can be average—you ever figure that?”
“We never campaigned for average citizens. Only for representative ones.” He’s spent years explaining the difference.
“Well, you’ve got them. All the right wrong people.”
“Wrong from NASA’s point of view.” Which by such a narrow margin he’s kept from being his country’s? Or hopes he has.
“From any point of view, they’re a disaster. Why start out with the flawed—valuable people or not—when you can so easily find the healthy equivalent? The functioning one?”
“Maybe we value their viewpoint. Humanly.” He loathes the language, but sees no way out of it. “And these people will function. Your crew saw to that.”
“At a cost of ten months. Why did you do it, Gilpin? I understand you’ve spent years. Healthy people are just as human as the sick ones.”
And the rich as human as the poor, and those in prison as much as those free, and the bad as much as the good. Or vice versa. He’d have had to admit thieves and charlatans and worse—all the human mix—if it had been up to him, but his own guilt is that he’s always known how far he can practicably go. “We want them both. Or rather, all.” He makes himself grin for the thousandth time. “In heaven—as it was on earth.” Except for the cemeteries—no room for those. All of them have signed a cremation release.
“It could be heaven in a way, you know.” That rainbow stare could gimp a scientist’s face as much as any evangelist’s. “In a way, organic life itself will be an intrusion.” This from a man who had started as a biologist. “Why not at least”—Perdue leans across his clean-swept desk—“I’ve a handicapped younger brother myself. Expect to miss him when I go. But—” He claps his knuckles together.
“You going with us?”
“On that first trip out? Uh-uh. I’ve opted for the second.”
“You expect a hitch?” Gilpin gets the freeze traitors deserve. For they’ve had their hitches. “Don’t see much of those displayed at Goddard.”
“Any hitch won’t be in the machinery.”
But in us rabble, he means. Perdue has hazel-green eyes which start out of that skin like electric lights during day, oblong nails and perfect cuffs, but spare as he is, his uniform appears too small for him. A man of contradictions, who has no sense of them? Or a sense so fine that he daren’t notice it.
Gilpin got up to go. “Well, I’m sure you’ll make it, Admiral.”
“I expect to—use my influence.”
“A lot of people will. Have.” He put the list in his briefcase. “We never figured on reforming humanity, you know. Only on including it.”
“For better or worse? Like in a marriage?”
“It is a sort of contract,” he says, surprised at the personal note. “Between the old Earth, and the new…” He would never get used to calling that thing “Earth.”
“Sentimentalists. Just like God, you people. He never would take the last step.” Perdue draws a finger across his throat. Above it, his brown face is more like Buddha’s than Gilpin’s will ever be like Christ’s. “Rested on the seventh day, He did. When a look at any back alley in Washington would tell Him he should’ve—revised.”
“Maybe the Islands’ll do that. Ultimately. Produce their own natural selection.”
“Natural—Huh.” Perdue matches his knuckles, silently. “That takes time. Eons of it. We only have space.”
At the base of the spine is whe
re the future thrill comes, Gilpin thinks to himself. Just above the coccyx, like the budding of a diviner tail. “Perhaps we’ll meet out there then. To continue this.” Gilpin’s glance crosses the desk picture. Perdue hadn’t been in uniform then. “That your son?”
“Mmm. Eighteen now.”
“Who does he admire?”
“You—” Perdue said.
“Gilpin! Gi-ilpin?” The cry comes from the beach behind him. “Is that you?”
Who else would it be, waiting for her company these five nights, secure in the knowledge that only on the last one would she come? He and she tend to meet that way, on the last night of professional involvements, or the beginnings of new ones. No friend of his life has ridden the years better, linked as they are by work topics and an unspoken tolerance of each other’s private lives, neither conducted in directions which ever meet. Yet after all this time her voice retains its Barbadian reserve; she’s an island person too. Until tonight, he’s never thought of it.
As she clambers toward him across the scrub, the long silver boots she wears catch the light like pistons. Those yard-long legs, skinny as a Giacometti figure’s, are her main African feature. Nefertiti’s, the lazy newspapers like to call the suave shape of her head. To him she has the snub face of a neat French child, blacked. In his own childhood attic there are files of an early humor magazine which ran cartoons whose pickaninny voices ballooned in white captions from blank dark. But night doesn’t make black faces harder to see; they make what light there is more apparent. Hers catches the moon’s web like obsidian. Tonight the white shawl top which is her trademark is only a sweater. But even in the jeans she wears to the office, exotic for this particular aviary is how she seems anywhere.
“Tom. Tom.”
“What’s wrong?” Has she the look she had the night they met years ago, strangers on a ratty antique plane whose seats were granted only by favor? A waif—but even then at her own request. And ready soon enough to be a queen.
“Those palm trees, just outside the motel. The ones wired for music. There was a man standing underneath one of them just now. A—passenger. But he’s not on the list.” She crosses her arms, gripping her shoulders, her eyes dilated.
He’s never seen her like this. “A passenger? You’re sure?”
She holds out a wrist. On it, the same mark as on his. The passengers are of divided sentiment on that mark.
“You’ve checked the list?”
“The motel’s. At the desk.” The words come numbly, slurred. But she doesn’t drink. “I was in my room. Working on—something of my own. A part I can never get right. I thought maybe here.” She shook her head. “So I went walking. God—that must be the biggest motel in the world; I saw almost no one.”
Yet they are all quartered there, under security they themselves assent to. A valuable cargo, two years in the making.
“Then a door opened and closed, down an aisle. He came out of it.”
“Some man you know?” His spirits sink. So many of them.
“I knew the shirt. Funny. Those sleeves always too short for him. Or shrunk.” She’d never said “always” about any one of them before. “And the shape of the head. From the back. So I stopped at the desk. He’s not on their list.” She shivers. “Those palm trees outside, they’re not for real. Did you know?”
“Yes.” Vinyl, each must be, all twenty-foot-high spread, and down to each bristly calyx, which bears a torch.
She’s staring past him at water, scrub, and sea, past even the celebrated shape of the module he’s leaning on, discarded here so far back in the space program, to sink into the hoped-for anonymity of rust. “Your briefcase. Look at it.”
Water is rocking it. Tide is coming in. While they watch, the undertow drains past the case, giving it the illusion of motion—a brief running-out to sea—then leaves it high and dry again.
“My past. I was going to let the sea take it.” So much impedimenta. Like the apartment he’d finally disposed of, his lawyer protesting such a giveaway—though already some citizens were getting reluctant to buy. On leasehold, the agreement was. With “ground rights.” For ninety years, unless the owner returned to Earth within a specified time. There would be more leases like that, more and more, coming on like that wave there, rising for its one moment of identity.
“Is the official list in it? Let me see.”
The briefcase wets his knees as he opens it. But his clothes too are to be left. “You should’ve had a copy. Everybody did.”
“I do have. I was saving it. To read on the—the plane.” She flashes him a rueful smile. Her life has been predetermined by planes; she’s one of the diamond successes faceted daily between those time-cutting wings.
He takes a small flashlight from the briefcase, holding it over the page for her. For years she’d worn her head shaved close; now it’s grown out again into its old coiled pattern of tiny braids dividing the scalp, like plowed fields photographed from a satellite. The ears are the smallest adult ones he’s ever seen, and perfect. He never kisses women anymore, nor men either, but those, bent over the list like a child’s, he could have touched. Nineteen years since they’d met—she’s now thirty-six. On the forefinger going down the list, the heavy carnelian ring which had been her father’s, then her stepmother’s, is gone. Given up. Though they never speak of her early history, he’s had intimations of it, as well as of the shape of her present habits, though never the details. Soon, if he wants he may have those as well. Like everyone else.
The finger going down the list is slow. Over a hundred passenger names, each with its small vita attached, introductory to the dossier to come. Once aboard and out of orbit, the full dossiers, drawn from both human and computerized interviews with the life subject and all that life’s contacts, will be available in various audiovisual formats, not neglecting plain print. So that at any unsuspected time your life might be unwinding in another human consciousness, or hers or his in yours, or you might consciously pursue a particular record on a basis less fragile than friendship or love. Optimally, everybody might, with everybody. Easier on an enclosed vehicle than on a planet-at-large, as Earth is now being referred to. Easiest of all where there will be just enough world, and time. On habitat.
“It will be the extraordinary documentary project of the age,” one editorial had said enthusiastically. “All subjects have cooperated as entirely as if on the private psychoanalytic couch.” Which also has been utilized. “A two-part dossier—on the one side its research routes in microfilm, on the other the unified document in readable type, multilingual and transferable to sign language or braille—is an awe-inspiring sight. Holding one in the palm is like holding a human consciousness.”
Palm holding is certainly stretching it. Those things weigh four pounds. He’d been reminded at once of Hermann Oberth’s lie detector. Openness is trust. Without further character delineation.
“I’d forgotten,” he wrote to Colorado, “that only island amateurs like me could dream of modestly doling out the crumbs of justice; my century returns them to us on the double—as boxed cake.”
He stares at Veronica Oliphant’s forefinger, painfully tracking down that list of names. Behind each of which now waits the four-pound box. His little idea of equal opportunity in the new New World may have boomeranged. Governments have to be founded on ideas—yet what government can be trusted to execute them? “Who could have dreamed we were all to become members of the members-of-one-another gang so quickly? Hope St. Paul will be pleased.”
The finger pauses.
“Find the name?” He averts his head, not to pry.
“No. Another man I knew once. Not too long ago.”
He knows her sexual style. Or suspects it.
“Fancy him being along. Mulenberg.” She seems amused.
The forefinger isn’t. At last it stops. The hand drops to her side.
“Not there? The other one?”
“No. But I saw him.”
One man, out of her many? He�
�s sure of it.
The battered gold locket she always wore—she isn’t wearing it. He turns out the flashlight.
“Turn it back on,” the voice beside him says.
When he does, she’s holding out the locket. “It’s what I was going to throw away.” The long arm goes up. She throws, not with a woman’s wristy toss, but like a basketball player. They watch a sparkle arc upward and silently down, too small for sound. They might have been watching through a telescope the fall of a spacecraft eons away. He thought of the gold oval, so recently on skin, twisting now in the salt wrack, a whole portion of meaning. For a second, the power of the sea is returned to him. Then he recalls where they are going, how far.
“Was there a face in it?” He’d always wondered.
“Not—so you could see.”
“You saw his face, though? The man under the tree?”
“Maybe I only thought I did. That’s what I’m afraid of. Because then it would mean that I still—” She spat her disgust into the sand.
“You?” One of the unique reporters of the world, the world said. “You saw. What you saw.”
Her body planes are always interchanging the way a good dancer’s do, hoarding their own secret central motion under the body’s legerdemain. “His every feature is the same. The same. Only—it’s a face that doesn’t startle you anymore.”
He’s known beauties, male and female both, who’ve aged that way. Just gone ordinary.
Her face never moves much. That’s what makes it such a lens catcher. “He didn’t know me. He didn’t—even know me.”
“That’s impossible.” No one could ever not know her, once seen. There are age marks. Yet, under forty still, it’s as if she’d had irremediable spiritual surgery at seventeen and done nothing since—except not ripen.
“We were right underneath one of those torches.”
Twenty-nine of them there are, one to each nonignitable totem-high palm, making a gigantic flaming avenue suitable to the scale in these parts, and to the intention. No expense has been spared so that this gateway to the cosmos, from which will go forth this first journey of the new aristocrats, might look as much as possible like a Chicago steakhouse. He could see her standing there, a movie girl no one could miss.
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