Under the wheel, p.1
Under The Wheel, page 1
Clayton found it unnerving—a whole world filled with Brothers and Sisters who looked exactly like each other. Dr. Rollan had cloned them all from the cells of a great genius of the last century.
“A simple formula, really,” Dr. Rollan said. “But fashioning the right personality mix and making it breed true in the conception tubes—that was no trifling matter.”
“I see,” Clayton said. “To get the right sort of worker for—”
“No no!” Dr. Rollan was agitated. “The point is that Earth societies contain a contradiction, a dialectical one, if you will. Earth, with its billions of citizens, preaches the virtue of tolerance, of passivity, of conformity. But who does it reward? The heads that poke up above the crowd! It is impossible to free them of their adulation of the special unless it becomes impossible to be special! So I constructed Brotherworld to prove that Uniformism will work. Here we can illustrate the central tenets of progressive thinking, begin the true evolution of socialist man.”
—From “As Big As the Ritz,”
Gregory Benford
GREGORY BENFORD*JOHN M.FORD
NANCY SPRINGER
BAEN BOOKS
UNDER THE WHEEL
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 1987 by Baen Publishing Enterprises
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
260 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10001
First printing, January 1987
ISBN: 0-671-65611-2
Cover art by Bob Eggleton
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by
SIMON & SCHUSTER
TRADE PUBLISHING CROUP
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, N.Y. 10020
Contents:-
AS BIG AS THE RITZ - Gregory Benford
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
FUGUE STATE - John M. Ford
CHANCE - Nancy Springer
AS BIG AS THE RITZ
Gregory Benford
Recently The Village Voice ran an expose on a New York City “utopian” colony not all of whose members found it to be the perfect circle they had hoped for.
The “Sullivanians,” devotees of the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis, evolved from a therapy institute experimenting with alternative lifestyles into a coercive, repressive “cult,” according to members who have left the group. Its leaders are strongly against the concept of the nuclear family, and have decreed that husbands and wives shall not live together within the group’s communal houses. Parents have been coerced into surrendering their babies to other group members, and members are encouraged to sleep (though not necessarily have sex) with a different person every night. Some members have not spoken to their parents in fifteen years.
A number of Sullivanians have fled, taking their children with them. Still, the group has about 250 members. To some, apparently, it is Utopia—merely a recent version of humanity’s grand experiment.
In his story about the asteroid colony Brother-world, Gregory Benford creates a utopia made possible by future technology. On Brotherworld, the men are all strong and the women good-looking—not surprisingly, as they’re cloned from a single genotype. Their world is the birthplace of Uniformism, a society in which being “special” or “different” is unheard of…
It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future— flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” 1922
Kings and fools
Make their own rules.
—Joan Abbe
1.
A lingering respect for the niceties of an Earthside education was the bane of the asteroid communities. Yearly it drained them of their brightest young men and women.
Thus the parents of Clayton Donner persistently pressured him to attend Harvard or Cambridge or Tokyo General, picking these names from a list as unfathomable as a menu in Swahili. Each locale was pictured in verdant 3D as a cultured pinnacle, a doorway to a different life.
Copyright © 1986 by Abbenford Associates
The asteroids had been colonized by those who respected no conventional wisdoms but instead made their own. Those ancestors, now in their vacuum-dried graves, would have wrinkled their noses at the odor of flatlander-envy that pervaded the discussions of Clayton’s destiny. The boy was quick, studious, clever. He would have made a fine metal-ceramics man, bio-integrater or syntho-miner. Instead, his parents relentlessly pressured him into an Earthside education extracted from books rather than from the gray tumbling worlds.
After his first year flatside Clayton was a convert to their cause. For a young man a career is a distant, fuzzy goal. Earth was concrete and fun. Gaudy. Effervescent. Deliciously lurid. He made friends, saw the sights, learned about sophisticated women and the chemical consolations of civilization. He even visited what was left of Africa, sampled the original abode where men had evolved, and came away with both a skin rash and a faint incredulity that anything worthwhile could have started there.
The east coast of the Americas was rather better, though clearly past its great days. The focus of Earthside economic life had shifted to the pan-Pacific nations over a century before. The snug, smug eastern streets were steeped in murky history and claustrophobic assumptions. Clayton stayed in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Boston, spending a week’s worth of his father’s profits in two days. The building was well preserved, eccentric by modem standards, and impressed him deeply with its timeless gilded swank. He tasted the now-rare lobster and savored the heady fragrances of orderly decline. A woman he met in the bar seemed to find his asteroid origins interesting, exotic, and within a few hours she was in his bed. It was a perfect setting to lose his virginity. He was only mildly disturbed when, the next morning, she firmly requested payment and even, when pressed, showed him the Greater Boston price sheet and luxury tax scale. He irritably paid up, resolving that the experience would not blemish his memory of the Ritz and its majesty.
He had ended up at UCLA, his ability and personality profile matched with the school’s needs and strengths by an elaborate trait-sifting program; the education of the young was too important to be left to their vagrant tastes.
Like virtually everyone’s, his life appeared dull from the outside, or at best made of elements from a soap opera, while from inside it had all the sweep and grandeur of War and Peace. Clayton went through the usual undergraduate crises. He learned to conceal his naive assumptions and be shocked at nothing. Fashion allowed one to be occasionally stunned, but only within severe limits. Dismay, however, was his for the asking; it implied a certain haughty despair. He tried the various exploits—sexual, social, hallucinogenic— appropriate to his age. Struggling, he ingested ideas from survey courses, earnest late-night bull sessions, Op-Ed pages and other fast-thought franchises. He imagined that he was crossing new frontiers, when in feet he was only crossing into Iowa; billions had been there before. He did not suspect that a decade later he would find these reaches a bit commonplace and not a little boring.
In his second year he met Sylvia. She was different from the other students—more intent, dedicated, severe. Her devotion to the cause of selfless politics was already well known at UCLA. He was mildly attracted to her, despite her habit of wearing loose-fitting, dowdy attire in dull browns and grays.
She was known as Sylvia Hammersmith at UCLA, but that meant little—at that time students often adopted the names of famous people as a gesture. As the young grew more and more alike, devices to distinguish themselves became ever more enticing. Sylvia’s taking the name of an explorer, fatally crushed on Venus the year before, seemed only a mild affectation.
When he discovered her true last name, however, his interest deepened. Clayton was still immature and, compared to any savvy Earthy, downright naive. Still, he sized up Sylvia quickly and judged his best approach. She wore a perpetual frown, assaying even casual remarks for their moral gold, so—intuiting rapidly—he decided to not mention his major subject of study. Instead, he talked endlessly of his minor area, Analytic Economic Morality.
He was, without thinking about it very much, solidly for Earthside’s social shibboleths of the era— strict equality of pay for all, abolishment of all inherited wealth right down to items of clothing and furniture, and numerous measures to alleviate any trace of economic envy. The university incorporated these ideas as best it could, but found difficulty staffing the scientific fields, since technical talent could easily find work elsewhere. Support for progressive ideas centered, naturally enough, among the professoriat devoted to such subjects as Greek pottery and interpersonal dynamics.
These notions met with Sylvia’s approval, and she opened up a bit. He learned of her laughing, pouting mouth, her glinting sea-blue eyes, her natural and unstudied grace.
He knew he was making progress with her, but he wa s amazed when she invited him to spend December at her father’s. Though this might be customary if she lived on Earth, or even in one of the crystalline orbital cities, she was Sylvia Towns-worth Rollan, and her father was founder of the most bizarre enterprise in the solar system: Brother-world. It orbited at a steep tilt to the ecliptic, about two astronomical units away from the sun. Getting there would have taken weeks by conventional transport.
Until this moment his interest in Sylvia had been entirely the pure, pointed lust of a young man. Mores of the era had swung back to a constraining reticence in matters sexual. Clayton was well socialized, and believed various unsupported assertions which had the effect of delaying marriage, postponing children and generally defusing the explosive power of adolescent sexuality. Sublimation is a subtle game, one the twenty-second century played well. His warmly remembered night in the Ritz now seemed to be a gauzy treat, unrelated to realities, like cotton candy eaten at a circus.
Ambition he had a-plenty. After Sylvia’s invitation he went immediately to his Major Tutor and asked advice. The gray-haired woman listened attentively, then said flatly that he must go, of course. There was no question. It could make his career.
Clayton was slightly shocked to find his own secret thoughts so freely voiced. He observed a quickening in the Major Tutor’s manner, a finedrawn anticipation of possible benefits to herself. Clayton studied the dart of three-level traffic outside her window and remarked that he was reluctant to mix his regard for Sylvia and his other interests, especially since she had such fixed views.
The Major Tutor pursed her lips, tapping a yellow fingernail on her amber desktop. She began a set-piece mini-lecture on devotion to the profession, on taking every opportunity in a field where such things came seldom these days, on understanding that in certain unique circumstances he could not allow niceties to dictate.
Clayton had heard it all before but believed it anyway. He could see the elements of personal advancement in this, but something deeper drove him and the Major Tutor as well: curiosity. Among those with the souls of true scientists, this was the ultimate addiction which could not be deflected. Both of them wanted to know. If minor deception was the price, so be it.
The Major Tutor observed that he would, of course, need special equipment. She could arrange that. But even more important was care, a sense of timing, even downright guile. Clayton understood.
His Major Tutor gave him confidential summaries of Brotherland’s construction, or rather, what little was known about it. The utopian colony was the outstanding enigma of the day. What’s more, Dr. Rollan had been acquiring advanced technology of an unsettling kind: plasma containment vessels, superstrong magnets, high-quality ceramics and alloys. Could he be building something even stranger than Brotherworld?
These questions the Major Tutor implied with raised eyebrows, and gave him an inventory of recent purchases by the colony. Clayton tucked the inventory away for study at the site.
The task was not without risk. Clayton was an adventurous type, though, determined to get his kicks in life, even if some of them were in the face. He left his Major Tutor firmly resolved.
He accepted Sylvia’s invitation, and changed his major subject to Undeclared, in case she should be of suspicious mind. Indeed, some of his friends did mention to him, as he was packing, that Sylvia had casually inquired into Clayton’s doings. They took it as a sign of female caution; courtship was a rite given much thought in this era, and the preliminaries were often the most rewarding aspect. They slapped him on the back, made a few obvious jokes, and gave unsolicited and rather explicit advice.
Clayton took the precaution of leaving behind any reading cylinder which could give away his interests. Instead, he took texts on social responsibility, even one which denounced the anarchist-cum-free capitalist asteroid communities from which he came. He halfway agreed with the book, anyway. The ’roid clans were rude, unsubtle, even loutish, compared with the fine manners and delicate social distinctions commonly found in California. The books had a point.
2.
They took a standard commercial fusion liner from Earth to Ceres, the conjunction being good. It made the trip under boost, at full grav, and arrived in five days. There they changed to a slingship. Its electromagnetic accelerating rings squashed them at three gravs for aching, tendon stretching moments, then abruptly set them free. They took a long arc across the solar system, out to the motes of asteroids. The ship moved like a darting wisp among the stately slow sway of worlds.
Their target was a lonely, rolling hunk of iron called Hellbent. The other people on the slingship were rough, silent types, ill-kempt and grimy, with no hope of ever getting far enough ahead to afford a true, full-water bath, or food not force-grown, or clothes of something finer than the fibrous weaves they wore.
At Hellbent men and women sucked a lean milk from bare, spongy rock. Economics had decreed Hellbent’s smelted products valuable for one booming generation, and had then snatched away its blessings, leaving only a shadowy clan who had too much invested to leave the place. The large docking cylinders and electromagnetic accelerators were leftovers of the glory days, kept up now as the staple of the economy. Clayton and Sylvia found the maze of sheet-metal corridors forbidding and chilly. The sheen of bare phosphors made them squint.
As they waited near the air lock for her father’s shuttle, Sylvia asked, “Did you see that skinny man on the slingship?”
“Uh, yes.”
“He was an astrophysicist, I’m sure of it.”
“Why?”
“The way he looked at us. He knows who I am.”
“Maybe he just thought you were good-looking.” She shrugged this off, impervious to compliments. “And his fingernails were clean.”
Clayton hid a grin. “A sure sign.”
He sighed, and felt an itchy sensation as he breathed in. Hellbent was so poor they ran their public rooms at zero humidity. In their hour-long wait the system could extract a gram or two of vapor from their breath and sweat, an involuntary tax of fluids.
Clayton’s home was never this badly off. He felt a twinge of guilt at thinking of his parents, laboring in the chilly grit of a rockworld not greatly different from this. He should visit them, but the cost was prohibitive. Sylvia had paid all the expenses this trip; he could never have afforded it. One of Clayton’s classmates had even suggested that as long as he was out this far, he might as well nip over and look in at home, too—all this said with an oblivious groundhog smile, never thinking that Clayton’s parents were on the other side of the solar system from here. To Earthsiders, like New Yorkers of the centuries before, everything beyond their neighborhood was a single, amorphous Elsewhere.
The shuttle arrived with a clanging thump. When the thrumming pumps had stilled, the two of them entered the bare, gloomy loading bay. A silvery body nestled there, sleek and chromed. From its nose a powerful beam of ruddy light turned and regarded them like a malignant eye out of the coagulated night. As they approached, Clayton saw it was a shapely fusion flitter, gleaming with polish. The slim craft was studded with portals that winked and sparkled as he passed, looking exactly like enormous green and yellow jewels. Its nose was asymmetric and spindly guidance rods studded its sides, deftly functional. It was a work of art.
Two men, dressed in Spartan simplicity, stood inside the welcoming ramp. Clayton saw instantly that they were Brothers, the famous product of Dr. Leon Rollan’s cloning experiment. And indeed, he could not tell one Brother from the other.
