A Million Open Doors

by John Barnes

  Margaret sighed and shook her head. "My cousin Calvin— distant cousin, I only met him a couple of times and his parents were on bad terms with mine—lost his job ten days ago and shot himself with a hunting sluggun. It's not a sin, you know, to "realize that you aren't part of God's evolutionary plan for the universe, and removing yourself before you spread your unfitness is perfectly rational. I'm sure when Calvin pulled the trigger he was certain his eyes would open on heaven. And some of the protestors outside the Embassy were carrying Calvin's last vu, holding it up to the trakcar windows as we entered and left, within a day of that; he probably had the vu taken the day before he did it."

  "How can they—I mean..."

  "They just think of it as duty, Giraut. That's all. The way we're trained you can do practically anything as long as it's your duty to God."

  I nodded; the concept was as foreign to me as enseignamen was to her, and we had occasionally quarreled about both ideas, and I didn't want to further spoil the day by fighting. "I'm sorry we saw that."

  "I'm not," Paul said, coming forward to join us. "It reminds me of the kind of human waste that we've been causing in Caledony for ages. I know I pretend to be the apolitical businessman a lot, but the reality is that like anybody who's interested in getting people together with the things they need and want, I have an agenda. I want people to get what they want, and I want them ideally to get it from me, but most of all I want them to be free to want it and to make offers to get it. Those poor stupid fanatics have been sold on the idea that what they want is the ability to give themselves little priggish congratulations over having done the right thing. They'd rather be right than happy. More importantly, they'd rather that I be right than happy and they're not about to leave the choice up to me. I say, let 'em die, and I hope it's slow and it hurts."

  Margaret tensed; I thought she might have the argument with Paul that I had managed to avoid. And I had to admit that I felt nothing like Paul's passion on the subject; they seemed foolish to me, but not despicable.

  Margaret, however, said nothing, and Paul could tell he had given offense, and I think had not meant to upset Margaret, so after a long, awkward moment of standing there, he returned to the back where someone was starting to sing what I had assumed was an old Occitan hiking song, though I have since heard it in many places. "Valde retz, Valde ratz" means "the most real things are the most sincerely imagined," to give it in bland Terstad, and it is one of the first proverbs most Occitan children learn, so that it had seemed naturally to me that, hiking through waist-high scrub pine, and envisioning the oaks that would be planted a century after our deaths, tall and covered with moss, we would sing those words.

  After a long interval, Margaret said, "Sorry. Effects of upbringing."

  "We none of us escape them," I said. Rather than waiting to see what we would find in the open country beyond Nineveh and before the Pessimals, I had already been making it up and writing a song about it.

  Oddly, perhaps, after a day spent getting out through Nineveh Basin, the first four days were so uneventful that there was nothing much to remember of them. We fell into a rhythm of driving during Second Light and exploring our surroundings on foot during First Light. The major thing we discovered was something that could have been seen by satellite, probably had been, but no one bothered to record it. The huge visibility-orange chickens could feed on lichen, but they flourished on grain—and escaped strains of wheat and maize now covered the fields east of Nineveh. There were chickens in enormous numbers, everywhere; now and then when we would spook a flock of them, they would darken the sky with their wings.

  The stream banks seemed to be ideal locations for pear trees, which gave huge, succulent grainy pears that were sweeter than anything I'd ever tasted before—perhaps the wild trees were being strongly selected for freeze resistance. In a couple of days we had all given ourselves traveller's dysentery, necessitating stops whenever the two toilets in each cat could not deal with the six or eight people, but we managed to live through it, though I think Paul at least, if he'd been given a choice during the worst of the attacks, would rather have not.

  The two media people, who associated with the rest of us very little, cheerfully recorded everything, though Margaret' managed to prevent their taking shots of the row of men on one side of a cat and the row of women on the other during one pear crisis.

  In the evenings, there was so much driftwood in creek bottoms that it was very easy to put together the makings of a campfire, so we had one every Dark, two per day. Anna Terwilliger would recite her new poems; she'd gotten into just writing them in Reason, and for some strange reason the media people always made sure they got pictures of her speaking the poems around the fire, or in a grove of trees, or as she-walked along a streambank.

  I saw some of the pictures they were making, and they were sort of pretty, although Anna surely wasn't. It seemed to me that her poems were considerably improved by being in a language I didn't understand well, but since Margaret was a major enthusiast for them, I didn't say so.

  I asked Margaret to explain the appeal of the things, but it seemed to turn on Reason being used in a way that Reason never had been before, which was to say that I not only didn't understand the innovation, but that I didn't even understand what made it innovative.

  On the other hand, I understand perfectly why they liked to get Valerie playing and singing against the same backdrops. I heard through Paul that she had made so much from added sales of her recordings since beginning the trip that from her standpoint it was practically paid for already. She always gave Betsy a few minutes to talk politics to the media reporters, but they rarely ran any of that in the programming.

  For the rest of it, I slept more, got in some hiking time, did a little bit of very light ki hara do sparring at every stop with a couple of students who were beginning to develop some ability, and made quiet intense love with Margaret at every opportunity. I didn't drink at all, ate heartily, slept as I hadn't since I was a child, and generally felt so good at it didn't seem like anything could ever really be the matter.

  Meanwhile, Thorwald and Aimeric had no problem in calling us directly whenever they wanted to. Saltini's people were mounting more and larger protests against the Council of Humanity, and there were now almost a hundred hunger strikers in front of the Embassy; some of our people would no longer go to leaflet the Bazaar because they could not bear the sight of some friend or relative, gaunt with hunger, deliberately dying there.

  There had been four deaths so far, although all of them were technically exposure rather than starvation, and it was a rare day when the bright, sunny part of each Light in Utilitopia did not have parades carrying the photos of the martyrs. Betsy scored off them by pointing out that she had not chosen to be dead, and the quote actually got distributed. The next day when she picked up her electronic mail file it had over a thousand letters in it, most of them addressed to "Betsy the Whore, Irrational Woods Expedition" and the like. Valerie said she was angry about it, naturally, but delighted to have provoked such a response.

  "I don't know about it," I said to Margaret privately later, as we were sunning ourselves on a high boulder, taking a rare opportunity to be mostly naked. "I'm worried about what's going to happen when Betsy's in a kid's body and doesn't have the wherewithal to fight back; she's been a real heroine of a martyr—que enseingnamen!—we couldn't have asked for a better person, but I don't want anything like that to happen to her again."

  "You don't think the peeps would—"

  "Not so much them as the people who sent those letters. I would bet Saltini was pretty disgusted with his own cops over the murder and rape, but once you've set up as the all-knowing dictator you've got to protect your own. But the people who sent those letters calling her ... well, we know what they said—"

  Margaret nodded and stretched; I was distracted by the way her small, soft, pendulous breasts rolled on her chest. They might not be up to Occitan esthetic standards, or even Caledon ones—she ha
d been so embarrassed by the fine hair curling around her nipples that we had made love several times before I ever saw them uncovered—but I had grown very fond of them.

  She grinned at me. "Are we going to talk more depressing politics, or are you going to quit ogling me and get down to business?"

  After all, to turn down any kind of polite invitation is always a bit lacking in merce, and often outrightly ne gens, and no matter how many other Occitan customs I might violate, I would never be able to bear feeling myself to be discourteous. When we had finished, and spent the required time whispering and cuddling, we got dressed and climbed down to take our turn building the campfire for the oncoming Dark.

  By now, at every sunset, the sharp, high range of the Pessimals was nearer. They were tall—Nansen had only just been assembled from the solid core of its gas giant recently (by geological standards) and the tectonic plates were still only newly risen. The collision—actually, the outright overrunning of a small plate—that had produced this range had been savage, compared with the glancing blow on the other side that had formed the Optimals. Some of the higher peaks were in space for all practical purposes, and there were a couple of passes that Paul was planning future trips through that would require the cat to carry an air supply rather than rely on compressors. Moreover, between the clouds that blew in from the wet side of the Optimals, the evaporation from the inland seas, and the storms that blew in off the ocean on the other side, they received much more than their share of water, and that plus glaciers had chewed deep crevices and channels into them, so that the terrain there had to be as rugged as any human beings had ever encountered.

  At the next Light, we'd be leaving the warm interior of the continent, and there would be no more sunbathing or making love outdoors for a while. I was glad we'd taken the time.

  Gathering firewood was really more just a matter of cutting it; there was a wide bend in the river near camp, and a pile of driftwood from the mountain vines in the canyon up above had accumulated there. We cut a sizable batch of it into small pieces with the vibrating monomolecular saw, had the waiting robots pick up the load, and took it back to camp. One thing I would never introduce here was the Primitive Camping movement—I had used a real axe a few times, and the idea of spending hours of time and gallons of sweat to get what could be gotten in two minutes was absurd.

  That Dark, just after supper, when Margaret and I had just lit the fire but people hadn't yet gathered and there was still a little reddish glow behind the blue peaks of the Pessimals, the news came through that Saltini had declared being unemployed to be proof of unfitness and announced that anyone who didn't find work would be imprisoned.

  "Clever," Margaret said. "Now the hunger strikers can eat because prisoners always get meals. And at the same time he can reinforce Rational Christianity by locking up people who violate it."

  "There are two or three people at the Center who will be going to jail," I said, as we sat down and watched the fire get going. "Though I don't think any of them are vital to our work."

  "I wonder how they'll deal with Valerie?" Margaret said.

  "I hadn't known that she was unemployed. Have they—"

  "They already phoned me," Valerie said, taking a seat on a log next to us. "I go under house arrest as soon as I get back. Then I go to jail after they transfer Betsy to her new body, which will be about four more months." Her face went slack for a moment, and Betsy said with disgust, "They're putting me into the new body at the physical age of two instead of six, just so they can save six months off the process and put Valerie in jail that much sooner. I'll have to live with rotten fine motor control for years, and I can't believe how long it's going to be until I can have sex again—I suppose I could start looking for perverts." The slackness flashed across her face again. "Supposedly you won't feel the urge until the body goes through puberty." And again. "Did I mention they're also sending me through puberty again?"

  Both of us laughed at that, and it was hard to tell whether it was Valerie or Betsy grinning at us. "You'll miss each other," Margaret said.

  I still wasn't sure which one said, "Yes, we will."

  SIX

  There was no road through the pass, and the satellite surveys had only been able to tell us where it was flat, and not encumbered by the vines; there had never been any reason to remote-sense the kind of surfaces there. A couple of centuries of having the vines—some of them were thicker than a man's waist, and knotted into astonishing convolutions that reached to twice the height of the cats—had caused a great deal of gravel and loose rock to be retained on the gentler slopes, and it spattered outward, sank, slipped, and generally made difficult going for the cats. Often we took turns driving lead, switching off at every wide-enough stable spot, and the trip ceased to feel like a casual drive in the woods and much more like a real expedition. In two days we had covered about half as much ground as we had planned to cover in the first day, and we had already decided that coming back we would circle the continent southward along its beaches until we could get to a shallow, gentle river valley that would take us back into the interior.

  The beginning of that Light was like all the others so far; the peaks around us suddenly flared into sunlight, golden fire bouncing off the glaciers, blocks of ice and streams of water gleaming in the sun as they fell down from the heights. The cat smelled slightly too strongly of cooking and of human bodies, for it was bitter cold down in the shadows and no one wanted to venture out, let alone open the cat up for ventilation. After a quick breakfast of cereal and eggs—I still found the local gruel a bit disgusting, but appetite was living up to its reputation as a sauce—we were on our way, Anna's cat leading.

  We had tried to com the Center in Utilitopia but were unable to reach them; the message said the channel was unavailable, which could mean anything from the whole Center having been seized by the peeps to the much more probable problem that we weren't quite at the right angle for a synchronous satellite to focus its extra antenna on us, and because our communication wasn't considered urgent the com company wasn't going to reorient just to pick us up; hence any noise from our part of the world on our usual frequency was being answered by a burst of widecast to tell us that they wouldn't be talking to us.

  The canyon was so narrow that although some of the peaks ahead of us were in sunlight, if you looked straight up you could still see some of the brighter stars, including the great fiery eye of Arcturus, a scant six and a half light-years away in space, an instant by springer, and a lifetime in experience. I had a couple of rhymes and an image, and was looking for a motif that fit the image so that I could work up a song about seeing Antares from the Pessimals. For once there was little gravel or loose stone, and the ledge we were running along was well-sheltered from falling rock, so that all we had to watch out for were patches of ice and snow.

  My cat had just taken over second spot. We were only making about twenty kilometers per hour, but that was about as much as we'd attained since leaving flat ground, and the driving was fairly easy. I saw Anna slow down to make sure of her traction on a snow patch.

  Her cat vanished. In its place there was a great, gaping hole. A gap in the ledge, no longer bridged by its thin skin of ice and snow, yawned before us.

  I must have been shouting into the mike before they hit; in fact, Anna had had her mike open, and so all of us in the other cats heard the screams and a nauseating series of thumps and thuds, the long scrape as the cat slid down one wall of the crevice on its roof with everyone aboard shrieking, and finally hysterically sobbing. I snowplowed the treads to yank my cat to a swift halt fifty meters short of the edge, grabbed the hand-com from the dashboard, and burst out through the heatlock, leaving both doors open in my haste.

  The lead cat had probably started bouncing along the wall within ten meters of beginning its plunge, and had come to a stop on its back about sixty meters down after its long slide. One tread was all the way off the maglevs and lay across the rocks above; the other continued to spin lazi
ly, floating above the lifters, indicating that at least the main power system must be intact and that the Seneschal tubes were still making anti-protons to feed the generator.

  "Can anyone answer me? Come in lead cat. Come on, somebody pick up the fucking com, I can hear some of you..."

  The voice that answered was Valerie's; she and Paul had been in there, I remembered, along with the media people. "I'm scared."

  "Of course you are," I said, in the voice I'd learned ages ago in Search and Rescue Club back home, before springers. "What's going on down there? We'll get you some help just as soon as we can."

  She started to cry, long shrieking gasps that cut her off every time she tried to speak. That made me really afraid for the first time, perhaps just because now there was nothing to do until she could answer. "Valerie?" I said, keeping my voice level, deu sait how. "Valerie, speak to us? Come on, Valerie, we need to know what's going on."

  Margaret was beside me now, her mouth open wide in horror, just staring at the shattered cat below us. "Keep the others back," I told her. "We don't want panics or people charging in to do anything stupid."

  Give Margaret something to do and she was instantly functional again. She turned to go do as I'd asked.

  "Come in, Valerie. Please respond." I could tell more voices than hers were weeping or moaning. Why hadn't a transponder activated—where were the rescue birds and why were they not here already—

  Because we were on Nansen, and they had no rescuers, and no springer ambulances, and not only were we out here on our own, but there had been no channel that morning, and the equipment for our two secret channels was down there in that wrecked cat.

  The realization hit me like a hard kick in a relaxed gut. I drew a long breath; this was as bad as anything had ever been. Voice level, keep talking, get someone on the line, they had said in Search and Rescue Club a million years ago, and so I simply kept saying "Valerie? ... Anyone?"