They were all laughing at that, both skeptical and amused at once.
“It’s bullshit, but what the hell,” Bench Press said. “Why not? Why not? Call it our world. Call it Nova Africa. Say no boss is gonna take it away from us this time.” He was laughing again, as if everything he had said was no more than a funny idea. Or else a hilarious truth, a truth so delicious that just saying it made you laugh out loud.
And so very late that night Frank went back to the Arab rovers, and he continued on with them, but it wasn’t the same. He had been yanked back into time, and now the long days in the prospector only made him itch. He watched TV; he made some calls. He had never resigned as Secretary; the office had been run in his absence by Assistant Secretary Slusinski, and he had done just enough by phone for them to cover for him, telling Washington that he was working, then that he was doing deep research, then that he was taking a working vacation, and that as one of the first hundred he needed to be out there wandering around. It wouldn’t have lasted much longer, but when Frank called Washington directly the President was pleased, and in Burroughs the exhausted-looking Slusinski looked happy indeed. In fact the whole Burroughs office sounded pleased that he planned to come back, which surprised Frank quite a bit. When he had left Burroughs, disgusted at the treaty and depressed about Maya, he had been, he thought, a bastard of a boss. But here they had covered for him for almost two years, and seemed happy to hear he was coming back. People were strange. The aura of the first hundred, no doubt. As if that mattered.
So Frank returned from his final prospecting trip and sat that evening in Zeyk’s rover, sipping his coffee, watching them talk, Zeyk and Al-Khan and Yussuf and the rest, and, wandering in and out of the room, Nazik and Aziza. People who had accepted him; people who in some sense understood him. By their code he had done the necessary things. He relaxed in the flow of Arabic, still and always awash with ambiguity: lily, river, forest, lark, jasmine, words that might refer to a waldo hand, a pipe, a kind of talus, robot parts; or perhaps just to lily, river, forest, lark, jasmine. A beautiful, beautiful language. The speech of the people who had taken him in, and let him rest. But he would have to leave.
They had arranged things so that if you spent half the year in Underhill you were assigned a permanent room of your own. Towns all over the planet were adopting similar systems, because people were moving around so much that no one felt at home anywhere, and this arrangement seemed to mitigate that. Certainly the first hundred, who were among the most mobile Martians of all, had started spending more time in Underhill than they had in the years before, and this was mostly a pleasure, to most of them. At any given time twenty or thirty would be around, and others came in and stayed for a while between jobs, and in the constant come and go they had a chance to carry on a more-or-less continuous conference on the state of things, with newcomers reporting what they had seen firsthand, and the rest arguing about what it meant.
Frank, however, did not spend the required twelve months a year in Underhill, and so he did not have a room there. He had moved the department’s head offices to Burroughs back in 2050, and before joining the Arabs in ’57 the only room he had kept was there in the offices.
Now it was ’59 and he was back, in a room one floor down from his old one. Dropping his bag on the floor and looking around at the room, he cursed aloud. To have to be in Burroughs in person – as if one’s physical presence made any difference these days! It was an absurd anachronism, but that’s the way people were. Another vestige of the savannah. They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.
Slusinski came in. Though his accent was pure New York, Frank had always called him Jeeves, because he looked like the actor in the BBC series. “We’re like dwarves in a waldo,” Frank said to him angrily. “One of those really big waldo excavators. We’re inside it and supposed to be moving a mountain, and instead of using the waldo capabilities we’re leaning out of a window and digging with teaspoons. And complimenting each other on the way we’re taking advantage of the height.”
“I see,” Jeeves said carefully.
But there was nothing to be done about it. He was back in Burroughs, hurrying around, four meetings an hour, conferences that told him what he already knew, which was that UNOMA was now using the treaty for toilet paper. They were approving accounting systems which guaranteed that mining would never show any profits to distribute to the general assembly members, even after the elevator was working. They were handing out “necessary personnel” status to thousands of emigrants. They were ignoring the various local groups, ignoring MarsFirst. Most of this was done in the name of the elevator itself, which provided an endless string of excuses, thirty-five thousand kilometers of excuses, a hundred and twenty billion dollars of excuses. Which was not all that expensive, actually, compared to the military budgets of the past century – less than a year of the global military budget of those days, in fact, and most of the elevator funds had been needed in the first years of finding the asteroid and getting it into proper orbit, and setting up the cable factory. After that the factory ate the asteroid and spat out the cable, and that was that; they only had to wait for it to grow long enough, and nudge it down into position. A bargain, a real bargain!
And also a great excuse for breaking the treaty whenever it seemed expedient. “God damn it,” Frank shouted at the end of a long day in the first week back. “Why has UNOMA caved like this?”
Jeeves and the rest of his staff took this as a rhetorical question and offered no theories. He had definitely been away too long; they were afraid of him now. He had to answer the question himself: “It’s greed I guess, they’re all getting paid off in one cosmeticized way or another.”
At dinner that night, in a little café, he ran into Janet Blyleven and Ursula Kohl and Vlad Taneev. As they ate they watched the news from Earth on a bar TV. Really it had gotten to be almost too much to watch. Canada and Norway were joining the plan to enforce population growth slowdown. No one would say population control, of course, it was a forbidden phrase in politics, but that’s what it was and it was turning into the tragedy of the commons all over again: if one country ignored the UN resolutions, then nearby countries were howling for fear of being overwhelmed – another monkey fear, but there it was. Meanwhile Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, Azania, the United States, Canada, and Switzerland had all proclaimed immigration illegal. While India was growing by eight percent a year. Famine would solve that, as it would in a lot of countries. The Four Horsemen were good at population control. Until then… the TV cut to an ad for a popular diet fat, which was indigestible and went right through the gut unchanged. “Eat all you want!”
Janet clicked off the TV. “Let’s change the subject.”
They sat around their table and stared at their plates. It turned out Vlad and Ursula had come from Acheron because there was an outbreak of resistant tuberculosis in Elysium. “The cordon sanitaire has fallen apart,” Ursula said. “Some of the emigrant viruses will surely mutate, or combine with one of our tailored systems.”
Earth again. It was impossible to avoid it. “Things are falling apart down there!” Janet said.
“It’s been coming for years,” Frank said harshly, his tongue loosened by the faces of his old friends. “Even before the treatment life expectancy in the rich countries was nearly double that in the poor. Think about that! But in the old days the poor were so poor they hardly knew what life expectancy was, the day itself was their whole concern. Now every corner shop has a TV and they can see what’s happening – that they’ve got AIDS while the rich have the treatment. It’s gone way beyond a difference in degree, I mean they die young and the rich live forever! So why should they hold back? They’ve got nothing to lose.”
“And everything to gain,” Vlad said. “They could live like us.”
They huddled over cups of coffee. The room was dim. The
