A Million Open Doors

by John Barnes

  "How high up are we?" Bieris said. "Or were we—I mean, how high is the top of the pass?"

  "About seven km," Aimeric said. "But the temperature and pressure gradient is much less steep than on Wilson—you can breathe up here, easily, without carrying oxygen, and though it's cold it's not all that much worse higher up than it is lower down."

  By now we had driven down to where we could see the way the road tumbled down in a series of steep switchbacks to the valley below.

  As we descended, we left behind the heavy retaining vines and saw more long grass. "That's wheat!" Bieris exclaimed suddenly.

  "Yap. Practically every engineered plant in Caledony, even the cover crops, is edible or good for something. Part of making it all maximize happiness," Bruce said. He threw us around another tight bend, and we lurched down the brightly sunlit road, a roostertail of dust springing up after us. Now that I could see, and had ridden with Bruce for almost three hours, I was beginning to enjoy the way the cat zoomed along the mountain road. "This whole part of the planet is one big farm. One reason we don't trade much with St. Michael is that over there, to make life more rugged, they engineered weeds. We're crazy here, but not that crazy."

  As we came down into the hills that ran along the eastern side of the Optimals, I saw that all the trees had been machine-planted in long straight rows, so that what had looked like forest from far away looked more like an orchard planned by an obsessive gardener close up.

  "I bet all these trees are seedless," I said.

  "Yap," Aimeric said. "That way trees grow only where they're planted, and with very little genetic drift, machines can pick them on a regular schedule."

  When we slowed to a stop at Brace's house, at first glance it looked like just another bare concrete cube— "Hey, you've got windows!"

  "Yap. Took me three stanyears of complaining to a psyware program that I had claustrophobia before they decided it was rational for me to want them. But you're all in luck—by a slightly elastic reading of the building permit, I had all my guest houses windowed as well."

  When we climbed out of the cat, it was actually pleasantly warm, perhaps twenty degrees, and we just carried our parkas. The bright amber sun, now rolling down toward the mountains west of us, made our Occitan clothes look oddly garish and outlandish; Brace's simple coverall, kneeboots, and shirt had more color and texture than I'd have thought possible.

  "Let's all get inside and get a little food and sleep," he said. "I imagine you're tired, and we're coming up on Second Dark, when most people sleep, so you can get on the local schedule. Supposedly your baggage won't be along for a Light or two, but I've got spare rooms I use for field hands at harvest, so I made up three of those—uh, unless you'd rather use two." He sounded so embarrassed that I thought it was kind of heartless of Aimeric to wink at me.

  "You're very kind," I said, "que merce!"

  That seemed to embarrass Bruce even further, and he turned away from me and toward Aimeric, just in time to catch Aimeric reaching into his pocket. "Aw," he said, "now that we're away from the city and the cops your IOU is good enough for me."

  I turned away for a moment to look around me. The land I stood in looked more like a vu to me than like anywhere real. Automatically, I reached for Raimbaut's mind to show him this, and—almost as automatically—I was shredded at the heart by the realization that he was no longer there. It had been the same, over and over, for the past four days, since they had taken him off of me; somehow, though, as I looked at the odd colors and the harsh, scoured mountains, the great open fields and straight-rowed orchards, I knew this would be the last such seizure of memory.

  As I looked at my strange surroundings, I wondered what Raimbaut might have thought of all of it, and to my surprise that made me feel differently, as if the loop of these past few days had suddenly broken; I had known, even before I wore his psypyx, everything he thought about everything one might find in the Quartier des Jovents. But confronted with this ... I had no idea what he might have felt, thought, or exclaimed.

  My thoughts turned again to Garsenda, and I realized that it was much the same for her—as well as I had known her back in the Quartier, I could not now imagine what she would make of this. The same held for Marcabru, and Yseut, and all my other friends. Indeed, I had no idea what Aimeric felt as he saw his homeworld for the first time in many years, after so long believing it lost to him forever, or what Bieris might be thinking.

  And Bruce, of course, was beyond comprehension.

  I had lived all my life in the certainty that what passed through my mind would pass through the minds of any of my fellows, were he standing where I was. And it had been true. My wearing of Raimbaut's psypyx had only confirmed what I already knew to be true, that everyone I knew was what I was.

  If somehow a springer door back to my own apartment were to open in front of me right then, it would make no difference; I could not return at all to what I had been—to the only thing I knew how to be. My mind whirled through the last two days, trying to find the moment when I had crossed over to this new life—

  "Hey, Giraut!" Aimeric said. I turned to see him standing in the heatlock of Brace's house. The others had vanished. "We didn't even notice you hadn't followed us in. You'll freeze solid out here in a couple of hours—why don't you come in?"

  I shook my head, once, to clear it. "I was just thinking."

  Aimeric came Out of the house, closing the outer heatlock door, and approached me as slowly and carefully as if he thought I might suddenly blow up. "I was afraid you might be," he said. "Did it just hit you that you can't go home?"

  "You could say that." He was now standing directly in front of me, and realizing why he had come to me, I said, "Did you ever feel that way?"

  "Often, my first few weeks; off and on since." He sighed. "I wish we'd had a few more hours to talk you out of this. Well, at least it's not quite so permanent—you will be going home in a stanyear or two."

  "I'll be going back" I corrected him, automatically, as I picked up my lute case and followed him into his old friend's house. He turned and looked at me, perhaps trying to think of something to say, but finally said nothing.

  The heatlock door closed behind us, the inner door opened, and we went inside. It wasn't until I was almost asleep, in one of Brace's guest rooms, that I realized I had no idea of how I felt either.

  PART TWO

  MISSION TO A

  COLD WORLD

  ONE

  The sun was up, making the kitchen cheerful and bright. Bieris and I were sitting across from each other, exchanging eyerolls, while we listened to two people catch up on events that had happened long before we were born. Every so often she would shrug, or I would.

  True, I was not feeling bad physically. For the first time in two standays I wasn't hung over, I had had some sleep, and I wasn't being rushed from one place to another. But it was beginning to sink in that I would be on this unpleasant icy rock inhabited by two unpleasant icy cultures for at least two stanyears.

  Meanwhile Aimeric and Bruce went on and on about who was dead, who had married whom, who had what job, while Bieris and I waited. At least the food was good, if you didn't mind Anglo-Saxon cuisine. (Fried meats, bland boiled starches, and thick, fatty, salty sauces, mostly, if you haven't tried it. Usually I disliked the stuff, but Bruce had kept the salt and grease under control and been liberal with the spices, and the coffee was dark and properly bitter.) And since there would be no companho around to harass me about Garsenda, I could just shrug the faithless little slut off and enjoy life— the only problem being whether anyone could enjoy life in Caledony.

  Finally, I found a hole in the conversation to ask. "Uh, Bruce—I'm sure you folks have the same technology we do—so ... what does a farmer do?"

  Bruce sighed. "You'd be amazed how many extinct occupations we have here. A cousin of mine is a blacksmith, his wife is a computer programmer, and their son delivers milk. I do what everyone else does here in Caledony, except teachers and pe
ople with other jobs that require a living person. I com a central number to find out which robot I replace today. A while before I get there, the robot switches off and I do its job for four hours. And I bet Aimeric hasn't told you that everybody—resident aliens included—has to do that."

  "But I thought we were working for Aimeric," Bieris protested.

  "The Council of Humanity recognizes that as work," Aimeric said, "but the Caledon government issues the local money, and that's the only thing you can spend here. And the only way you can get that is to put in your four hours a day as a replacement robot."

  "Yap," Bruce said. "Hell, they wanted to make the Ambassador work. The same damned stiffnecks we were fighting way back then, Aimeric, are in power now, and they've not budged a bit. Technically, the Council of Humanity is loaning you to the Caledon government, and since nobody ever gets paid for working for the government, you've got to put in your Market Prayer time, same as anyone."

  "Market Prayer?" Bieris asked.

  "The work you do replacing a robot." Aimeric sighed and poured another cup of coffee. He looked over his shoulder at Bruce. "There's someone I haven't asked about—"

  "Yap. He's Chair of the Council of Rationalizers, now."

  Bruce didn't say who "he" was. I looked at Bieris; she shrugged.

  Finally Aimeric said, "Bruce, what happened?"

  Bruce leaned back against the counter and scratched at a callus on one hand. "I'd been afraid you would ask that. Can't we just say interest just faded away?"

  "You don't believe that."

  "Nop. I don't. But I sure can't fault any of you for having gone to Wilson." Bruce looked up at him, his mouth drawn and thin. "My God, I tried so hard to go myself. But it sure tore the guts out of the movement when you all left."

  "We had seven thousand members in the Liberal Association. What difference did twenty or thirty of us leaving make?"

  "Almost everyone sent had some major role in the leadership of the Liberal Association—besides Charlie there were five other regional chairs in that crew."

  "Anyone intelligent was in the Liberal Association in those days!" Aimeric drummed his fingers on the table and stared at the wall.

  Bruce said, softly, "Think of it the way the PPP would see it. Here's a chance to get rid of sixty or seventy heretics and troublemakers, in exchange for being able to fill some needed slots at the university without running the risk of having to allow Caledons to read forbidden texts as part of their training. I don't say that any of you was wrong to go, Aimeric. I'm just saying we lost more than any of us realized at the time when you and the others left, and I think the peeps set it up to happen that way."

  Aimeric didn't say anything for a few long breaths. Rather, he just stared out the window at nothing. Finally, a little half-smile formed, and he said, "Look at us. Dead ringers for our fathers, except that we don't apologize to Jesus for being irrational."

  Bruce laughed, and began "On my honor as a Wild Boy"— and Aimeric joined him, their voices rising into mad crescendo—"I swear I will not apologize for enjoying myself, pass up a chance to get laid, or be like my old man."

  "Charlie wrote that when we were thirteen," Aimeric explained to us. "He was the best of us."

  "He was," Bruce agreed. He turned to his com to get our work assignments. "We're in luck," he said, "at least for today, it's picking apples."

  For a long time, as we strolled up the road toward the orchards, the only sounds were the paltry breeze brushing the leaves and the crunch of our boots on the gravel. Amazingly, after the howling blizzard the previous day in Utilitopia, three hours away by road, it was actually a little warm.

  The destruction of the land here appalled me. In Nou Occitan only those things that absolutely could not be done well hydroponically, like grapes for wine, were grown in the open, leaving the rest for wilderness, park, or city. Here, instead of open spaces or forests—or whatever there would be, given proper terraforming and species design to produce wildlife and landscapes—there were only ugly square fields, broken by stone walls, fencerows, and trees along a river, an obviously artificial landscape, made uglier by a lack of design or planning. It looked like ancient flat photos of Vermont or Normandy.

  "Who exactly are we working for, Bruce? You?" Bieris asked.

  Bruce took a field coffee-maker out of his pocket and said, "I don't know if anyone wants any more coffee, but let me show you something."

  We stopped by the side of the road to sit with our backs to a huge, stone-warmed boulder. Bruce unfolded the cup, set the little cylinder of the maker on top of it, and pointed to the digital display there. As he pressed start there was a hiss— the machine extracting water from the air—then, after a long second, coffee gurgled into the cup.

  The digital readout flashed:

  COFF BEANS .0082

  WATER .00005

  ELEC PWR .00002

  COFF MKR RENT .000001

  CUP RENT 2E-8

  PRAISE GOD

  GIVE THANKS

  THINK RATIONALLY

  BE FREE

  "There's a readout like that on everything here," Aimeric explained. "Whatever you get here, you're renting from someone, and you pay every time you use it."

  "Right down to the fly on your trousers," Bruce said. "But you can't save money by pissing yourself—they just get it back in damage charges on underwear."

  "Well, who are you buying from?" Bieris asked. Bruce hit a number combination on the coffee maker, and the digital readout flashed:

  PREV PAYMTS THIS SYSTEM:

  LIBERTY COFFEE CORP

  JUSTICE OF GOD BEVERAGES

  CALEDONY WATER LICENSED

  MONOPOLY

  JESUS-MALTHUS TEA AND COFFEE LTD.

  CALEDONY POWER LICENSED

  MONOPOLY

  ROGERS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCE

  LEASING

  MARY CARTER AND CHILDREN

  KITCHENWARE RENTALS

  PRAISE GOD

  GIVE THANKS

  THINK RATIONALLY

  BE FREE

  "Okay, I see, but who owns all those companies and corporations? They must have stockholders and things!" Bieris seemed to take all this as a personal affront.

  "We're the owners," Aimeric explained. "But all the stock earnings go into health and life insurance to prevent our being a burden on society. Then when we die whatever's left from our premiums goes to the government, which uses it to buy stock for new workers coming into the system..."

  "So everything here is rented, leased, or sublet?" I asked, feeling like an idiot for asking once more, but passionately hoping to get a different answer this time.

  "Yap. The stuff in our baggage is probably the largest aggregation of really private property ever to enter Caledony. All part of doctrine—it's the only way the market can make sure everybody always works, because work is what God wants from us."

  There was a long silence. It wasn't so much that I was afraid of working—at least I don't think so. I had always stayed in shape, between hiking, dancing, and dueling, but there was something about the idea of my replacing a machine that made me want to bash in the face of anyone who suggested it.

  "Why does God want that?" Bieris blurted out.

  Bruce laughed like it hurt him. "I can tell you what I would have said if you'd asked me while I was a preacher. He loves us. Work is how He teaches us to reason and become thinking beings, because in a moral society the morally correct choice always gets the largest rewards."

  We didn't talk much on the rest of the walk, as we turned off the road and followed a little trail into the orchard to where four human-form robots stood still, like naked mannequins, the sun playing over their beige-pink coverings, their faceless, hairless, single-eyed heads pointed straight forward.

  Bruce jumped, swung up into a gnarly old tree for a moment, and came back down with four bright-yellow apples. "Stop, thief," he said, handing one to each of us and waving off our attempts to fish out coins. "It would be polite of you to pay me,
you're getting the custom right, but Aimeric and I can both tell you from our childhood that they don't really taste perfect unless they're stolen."

  Aimeric nodded solemnly. "Absolutely true."

  The apple was cool and very crisp, full of sweet thick juice that gushed down into my beard. "Oops," Bruce said, "should have warned you—to be freeze-resistant they have to be kind of sticky."

  I ended up pulling my spare handkerchief out of my sleeve to use as a napkin; all of us were a mess.

  I was forced to cheer up despite myself. On such a fine day, picking apples wasn't bad work at all. The sky was an astonishing shade of deep blue that I had never seen before, and colors were so vivid in Mufrid's amber light that it all looked like the paintings of a genius child who had mastered line drawing but still painted only in bold primary colors. The brighter light made the distant mountains leap out in startling complexity and detail, the high falls on the valley rim shining like white-hot silver.

  Up in the trees, the crisp sweet scent of apples was overpowering, and at Bruce's urging every so often we'd pause to devour an unusually ripe or fine one. My skin was sticky with juice, my arms ached with the unaccustomed stretching, and my nose was beginning to run a little, for as the sun sank it rapidly got cold and damp. My throat felt a bit raw, and I had not been so tired in ages, but when the alarm bells on the robots rang to tell us they would soon come back to life I was a little sorry it was over.

  On the way back, Bruce said, "You're welcome to stay with me as long as you like, of course, but I assume that as soon as your belongings arrive you'll want to move into the guest houses. They're on our way back—would you like to take a look?"

  What Bruce had for us were three little bleached-white concrete cottages in a grove of apricot trees out of the wind. Each stood empty and freshly scrubbed, awaiting the robots with our furniture and belongings. They looked like temporary utility buildings back home.