Royce shrugged. “That’s for the Ministry of Labor, not me.”
“Not this” Munroe said. “Maybe I’d better play it back for you from the beginning. Gov channel okay? No differences in any of the coverages.”
“Okay,” Royce said. “But what’s this all about?”
“Effing FemocratsI" Munroe grunted. “Look!”
On the newsscreen, a panoramic shot of a big pit mine under a medium-sized permaglaze dome. Outside the dome, the whirling whiteness of a full-bore Thule blizzard. Inside the dome, the great shovelers and conveyors stand idle and abandoned like frozen godzillas of steel. Lines of female pickets wearing the workclothes of Thule techs cordon off the machinery and the lip of the mining pit.
Picket signs read “Ban Faschochauvinist Fausts Now!” “Close the Institute!” and “Femocratic League of Pacifica.”
Announcer’s voiceover: “A general strike called today by an ad hoc committee of female workers in Valhalla has effectively paralyzed most mining and industrial activity in Thule.”
A series of shots: female pickets outside another pit mine, a deep-mining complex, half a dozen factories under Thule environment domes. In two of the shots, a few male workers appear to be counterpicketing, unorganized, without signs.
Announcer’s voiceover: “Male workers appear to be avoiding confrontations and are not attempting to cross the picket lines. No incidents of violence have been reported. Susan Willaway, spokesman for the striking female workers, explained the purpose of the strike at a rally held in Valhalla three hours ago...
A medium shot on a sandy-haired woman addressing a large female crowd from a makeshift podium.
Susan Willaway: “.. . no woman will go to her job here in Thule until the faschochauvinist Institute of Transcendental Science is closed and the Heisenberg is sent back to wherever it came from! Let’s see how Bucko Power can keep the mining and industrial heartland of Pacifica producing with half a work force! Thule sisters, unite against the Institute! Work is power! No work while the Institute remains open!”
A panoramic shot on the wildly cheering crowd of women, without local audio.
Announcer’s voiceover: “The Ministry of Labor estimates that the strike has the support of at least seventy-five percent of the female Thule work force...
Royce’s auxiliary comscreen came alive. It was Carlotta. “Have you—”
“Yeah, yeah, just a minute...” Royce said. He turned off the news channel audio. “Unplug from this circuit, Bill,” he told Munroe. “And thanks.” He turned his full attention back to Carlotta.
“Well, that changes things, doesn’t it, Royce?” she said, her agitation undertoned with a certain smug satisfaction, or so he thought.
“Does it?” Royce said dubiously.
“Good lord, Royce, all our heavy industry and most of our mining operations are in Thule!” Carlotta said. “A few days of this, and the whole planetary economy will start to shut down. Everything else aside, we’ve got to close the Institute now or we’ll have mass unemployment and a crunching depression.”
“Give in to a bunch of Femocrat-fomented strikers?” Royce said angrily. “You should get in touch with Cynda Elizabeth and demand that they call this thing off or else!” “Or else what!”
“Or else we’ll kick their asses off the planet forthwith!” Carlotta grimaced. “That would only egg the strikers on. We’ve got to give in now, and I have the authority to do it on my own if I have to. I’ll declare a state of—”
“It’d solve nothing, Carlotta, wait and see,” Royce said, Roger Falkenstein’s face appeared on the main comscreen. Oh-oh, he thought, it looks like we won’t have to wait very long! “Falkenstein’s calling me,” he told Carlotta, “and he does not look happy.”
“Well, that’s something anyway,” Carlotta said sardonically. “Patch me in, monitoring only.”
“Right,” Royce said. He cleared a monitoring channel from his net console to Carlotta’s, so that she was plugged into Falkenstein’s call but he wasn’t plugged into her. Carlotta’s tensely pensive face remained on his auxiliary comscreen as he plugged in Falkenstein’s audio.
“What’s the meaning of this strike in Thule, Royce?” Falkenstein said angrily. “I thought we had reached an agreement.”
“We have, Roger, and it still stands.”
“Well, what are you going to do about this situation?” Falkenstein demanded. “Our Arkmind projects that your economy will begin to falter within a week if this situation continues, and there’ll be mass unemployment within two. At which point, the economic pressure to close the Institute will become overwhelming, and—”
“There’s nothing I can do,” Royce said. “The right to strike is protected by the Constitution.” Although, he mused, a strike for a non-work-related political goal might skirt perilously close to insurrection... might pay to check it out with the Ministry of Justice...
“Is it?” Falkenstein said slowly. “You mean you have no legal means of bringing this strike to an end?”
“Looks that way to me, Roger,” Royce said, knowing what the inevitable response would be, and half-welcoming it. There could be only one viable political counterweight to this Femocrat strike, and Falkenstein was certainly smart enough to perceive the obvious. It would escalate the situation further, but it would certainly remove knuckling under to the Femocrats as a real alternative.
“Well then, Royce, I trust you understand how... how the buckos of Thule are likely to react to this vicious tactic...
“I have some vague idea,” Royce said sardonically.
“Not that I myself or any of my people would interfere in your domestic politics, of course...
“Oh, of course not, Roger. No more than the Femocrats would. No more than they already have.”
“And under the present circumstances, no less,” Falkenstein said. “After all, I cannot in all conscience attempt to restrain our independent Pacifican supporters from <...aking congruent action. That in itself could be construed as interfering in local politics, couldn’t it?” “For sure,” Royce grunted.
“None of this need affect our agreement, though,” Falkenstein said. “You understand my position?”
“All too well, Roger, all too well.”
“I’m very sorry it’s come to this...
“So am I,” Royce said, unplugging from the circuit.... I think.
“You two boys seem to understand each other very well,” Carlotta said, frowning. “Would you mind letting me in on the inner meaning of your cryptic conversation?” “Isn’t it obvious?” Royce said. “Now the male workers will ‘spontaneously’ counterstrike for retention of the Institute and expulsion of the Femocrats.”
“Oh, fuck,” Carlotta groaned. “Of course.”
“That’s what I meant when I said that knuckling under to the female strikers would solve nothing,” Royce said. “In a few hours, we’ll have the female and male workers on strike together for mutually exclusive goals. Give in to one side, and you just guarantee that the other strike will continue.”
“Great grunting godzillas, what do we do now?” Carlotta said. She looked at Royce pensively, uncertainly. “It is ‘we’ on this one, isn’t it, Royce? We are together on this?”
“On the need to stop both strikes without giving in to either side?” Royce asked carefully. —,
“On the need to stop both strikes quickly, whatever it takes,” Carlotta said. She sighed. “I suppose under the circumstances, it amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, babes,” Royce said. “Keeping the economy from being chewed to bits has to be number one. I’m with you on that, boss-lady.”
Carlotta smiled at him, pantomimed a kiss. Royce laughed and blew a kiss back. Awful as this situation is, it does have its personal compensations, he thought. At least we’re synced together again in the face of adversity. But what adversity!
“Well, any brilliant ideas, bucko?” Carlotta asked grimly.
Royce shrugged. “You could call Cynda El
izabeth and tell her there’s going to be a counterstrike,” he suggested. “Tell her that I can get Falkenstein to call off his if she’ll end hers.”
“Fat chance,” Carlotta said. “Cynda Elizabeth must have known there’d be a counterstrike before this started. I have a feeling that both Transcendental Science and the Femocrats will not be unhappy to have this situation continue to some awful showdown. Shit...he fingered her mouth reflectively.
“There is one possibility,” she said. “We have no legal means of ending these strikes, but if we could get away with construing them as civil insurrections...”
“You’ve been reading my mind again, babes,” Royce said.
Carlotta smiled at him. “Feels pretty good, doesn’t it?” she said. “As good as anything can feel under these circumstances.”
Royce laughed. Despite the gravity of the crisis, he felt an enormous release of tension. For now, at least, the stress was coming from without, not within. Now they were really working in sync again, at least for the moment, for whatever it might be worth politically.
“You get onto Cynda Elizabeth, I’ll check with the Ministry of Justice,” he said.
“Right babes,” Carlotta said. “Good to have you aboard again.”
“Likewise,” Royce said. “Now all we have to do is figure out some way to keep the boat from sinking.”
A tracking shot on Roger Falkenstein and a squat, darkhaired man in a pseudo-military black tunic as the camera follows them down a long hall in the Institute.
Falkenstein: “....n keeping with our policy of noninterference, we take no position for or against the men striking in Thule...
Man in black: “You won’t even take a position on the Femocrat strike?”
Falkenstein: “That’s different, Mike. The female strike is openly backed by the Femocratic League of Pacifica, an obvious Femocrat front, and they’ve declared open warfare on us. Their strike may be legal, but it is certainly directed against the Institute, and therefore we have no compunction against calling for its swift termination by any means necessary.”
Man in black: “But you still won’t officially support the strike organized by Pacificans for the Institute?”
Falkenstein (somewhat impishly): “That would be illegal, Mike. Of course, we totally support your goals. But we believe that the buckos of Pacifica are men enough to determine their own destiny without our advice or endorsement. However ... we do think it appropriate to show the people of Pacifica what this planet stands to lose if the Femocratic League of Pacifica succeeds in using economic blackmail to drive us from this planet...
Cut to an exterior shot just outside the Institute building. Six male Pacificans are operating a control console connected to a mesh of thin wire fifty meters in diameter on thin wooden poles over a large heap of earth.
Falkenstein’s voiceover: “A form of matter-transformer used in instantaneous construction. Matrix patterns of various constructs are stored in a computer memory. The desired construct is chosen and the transformer assembles it electronically out of an equivalent mass of raw matter...
A silvery field of force envelops the area under the mesh. When it clears a moment later, a replica of the Institute building, forty meters in diameter, has appeared, seemingly from nowhere.
Falkenstein’s voiceover:...uilding... or a hover...
The field of force appears again, and when it clears this time, the model building has been replaced by a sleek blue hovercraft.
Falkenstein’s voiceover:...r even a piece of heroic statuary...
The force field transforms the hovercraft into a piece of monumental sculpture: four Pacifican buckos in realistic full color looking upward as a stylized Transcendental Scientist hewn in black obsidian raises an open palm toward a hologram of the galactic starstream which floats magically overhead.
Falkenstein’s voiceover: “I rather like that, don’t you? I think we’ll keep it.” ,
Cut to an interior shot in a small infirmary. An old man lies in a bed surrounded by life-support machinery. Three Pacificans in white smocks hover over him, reading his life-signs, administering injections.
Falkenstein’s voiceover: “Here Pacifican students are learning the many complex techniques involved in rejuvenation. The result might justly be called an indefinite lifespan and perpetual youthful vigor. However, for all Pacificans to benefit from these techniques, we will not only have to train people in all the necessary sciences, but we will have to train teachers in all these areas in a permanent Institute, so that your planet can eventually develop the corps of thousands of Transcendental Scientists that will be needed.”
Cut to a small darkened room where a Pacifican student lies on a couch under the watchful eye of a Transcendental Scientist. An electrode band around his brow is wired to a small console. In the middle of the room is a small-scale and quite fuzzy holoprojection of a Gotham street scene: ethereal buildings, vague crowds, tiny dots that might be hovercrart or hydrofoils skimming over the nearby shimmering waters.
Falkenstein’s voiceover: “This is frontier technology, even for us. The subject’s brain is synced into a computer which operates a holoprojector, thereby transforming thoughts into visible images. The technology is not quite perfected, and the training necessary to operate the device successfully is quite arduous. But the possibilities are staggering—new forms of psychotherapy, new artforms and media technologies, ultimately perhaps an electronically augmented form of direct mind-to-mind communication.”
Cut back to the tracking shot on Falkenstein and the man in black as they walk down the seemingly endless corridor, past a long series of open doorways through which a myriad arcane activities are briefly visible.
Falkenstein: “One of the charges against us is that we’re creating a scientific elite, and to that I must plead emphatically guilty. What, after all, is an elite but an ever-growing community of enlightened, idealistic, and dedicated men leading their people onward toward infinity?”
Cut to an exterior shot of the statue grouping outside— the stylized Transcendental Scientist leading the Pacifican buckos onward to the stars—from a low angle, emphasizing the upward thrust of the piece’s lines.
Falkenstein’s voiceover: “As we now pass this torch of knowledge to Pacifican Institute graduates, so will those graduates become an elite passing the torch on to their entire people. This is the great upward sweeping spiral of human evolution—upward and onward, time without end, worlds without limit. If this be Faustian faschochauvinism, let us make the most of it!”
Bara Dorothy smiled across her desk at Cynda Elizabeth. The little breeder-loving fool drummed her fingers nervously on the desktop, apparently still unable to grasp how perfectly the strategy was working. But then she had been against calling the strike in the first place, Bara thought. She seemed to have lost her clear sense of the true purpose of the mission long ago.
“I still don’t see why you’re so pleased,” Cynda whined. “The strike strategy has been a dismal failure. The Institute is still open, Falkenstein has countered with a male strike, and now the government can't close down the Institute without a direct confrontation with the breeders.”
Bara Dorothy shook her head impatiently. “What is the purpose of this mission?” she asked, as if quizzing a dull little girl.
Cynda Elizabeth stared at her blankly.
“Not to close the Institute,” Bara Dorothy continued, “but to unite the sisters of Pacifica in Femocratic consciousness so that they will seize power and establish a Femocratic government on this planet! Great Mother, Cynda, have you forgotten that?”
Cynda opened her mouth, then nibbled her lower lip as if she had been about to say something, and then thought better of it “Therefore,” Bara said, “the present situation is ideal. The strikes have drawn the line between sisters and breeders with utter clarity. Everything that Falkenstein does now to mobilize this loathsome Bucko Power movement behind him will also mobilize the Sisterhood behind us. As the strikes begin to wre
ck the Pacifican economy, even that traitor to her sex, Carlotta Madigan, will no longer be able to equivocate. There will be a victor and a vanquished—and soon.”
“But how can you be so sure that the breeders won’t win?” Cynda said. “They’re half the population, and they’re in a position of rough equality.”
“Democratic politics!” Bara snorted. “You’ve become infected with the local ideology, Cynda! You think this issue will be decided by votes?”
“But that’s the way they do things here...” Cynda said fatuously.
“That’s the way they did things here!” Bara replied triumphantly. “But the fate of this planet will now be decided by power, and power here, as everywhere, is in the hands of Sisterhood! The breeders of this planet may now unite against us, but they’re still macho breeders, which means that the Pacifican sisters are their sex objects. Whereas fully conscious sisters have no sexual need for breeders. So when the final confrontation comes, the breeders’ own contemptible piercers will force them into capitulation.”
“But... but most Pacifican women are heterosexual,” Cynda said. “They want men as much as men want them.” For the moment, you little fool, for the moment, Bara thought. “Unfortunately, that’s quite true,” she said. “Therefore, it’s time to raise Pacifican Sisterhood to full consciousness, to erase their atavistic craving for the local breeders. Then they will be truly united in total Femocracy; then they will fully come into their own rightful power and make that power felt—decisively! Mary Maria is already preparing material for the media campaign.”
Cynda Elizabeth frowned. A sickly look came into her eyes. The filthy little breeder-lover! “What’s the matter now, Cynda?” Bara Dorothy said slyly, twisting the knife a little deeper, daring the little pervert to reveal her true atavistic feelings. “Do you feel sorry for the stinking macho swine? Do you lack the will to fight through to final victory? Are you a secret breeder-lover at heart?” Emotions flashed across Cynda Elizabeth’s face: a flush of anger, a tremor of fear, a white-skinned effort at control. You’re such a transparent little fool, Bara thought “If ... if those are official charges, bring them officially,” Cynda stammered. “Otherwise... otherwise keep your innuendos to yourself!”
Norman Spinrad Page 26