Imperial Earth

  "And what will he do about it?" Malcolm asked softly.

  It was a good question, and for a moment both Makenzies brooded over the deepening rivalry between their family and the Helmers. In some ways, it was commonplace enough; both Armand and his son, Karl, were Terran-born, and had brought with them across a billion kilometers that maddening aura of superiority that was so often the hallmark of the mother world. Some immigrants eventually managed to eradicate it, thought the process was difficult. Malcolm Makenzie had succeeded only after three planets and a hundred years, but the Helmers had never even tried. And although Karl had been only five years old when he left Earth, he seemed to have spent the subsequent thirty trying to become more Terran than the Terrans. Nor could it have been a coincidence that all his wives had been from Earth.

  Yet this had been a matter of amusement, rather than annoyance, until only a dozen years ago. As boys, Duncan and Karl had been inseparable, and there had been no cause for conflict between the families until Armand's swift rise through the technological hierarchy of Titan had brought him into a position of power. Now the Controller did not bother to conceal his belief that three generations of Makenzies were enough. Whether or not he had actually coined the “What's good for the Makenzies...” phrase, he certainly quoted it with relish.

  To do Armand justice, his ambitions seemed more concentrated on his only son than on himself. That alone would have been sufficient to put some strains on the friendship between Karl and Duncan, but it would probably have survived paternal pressures from either direction. What had caused the final rift was still something of a mystery, and was associated with a psychological breakdown that Karl had experienced fifteen years ago.

  He had emerged from it with all his abilities intact, but with a marked change of personality. After graduating with honors at the University of Titan, he had become involved in a whole range of research activities, from measurements of galactic radio waves to studies of the magnetic fields around Saturn. All this work had some practical relevance, and Karl had also played a valuable role in the establishment and maintenance of the communications network upon which Titanian life depended. It would be true to say, however, that his interests were theoretical rather than practical, and he sometimes tried to exploit this whenever the old "Two Cultures" debate raised its hoary head.

  Despite a couple of centuries of invective from both sides, no one really believed that Scientists, with a capital S, were more cultured (whatever that meant) than Engineers. The purity of theoretical knowledge was a philosophical aberration which would have been laughed out of court by those Greek thinkers who had had it foisted on them more than a thousand years earlier. The fact that the greatest sculptor on Earth had begun his career as a bridge designer, and the best violinist on Mars was still doing original work in the theory of numbers, proved exactly nothing one way or the other. But the Helmers liked to argue that it was time for a change; the engineers had run Titan for long enough, and they had the perfect replacement, who would bring intellectual distinction to his world.

  At thirty-six, Karl still possessed the charm that had captivated all his peers, but it seemed to many — and certainly to Duncan — that this was now underlined by something hard, calculating, and faintly repellent. He could still be loved, but he had lost the ability to love; and it was strange that none of his spectacular marriages had produced any offspring.

  If Armand hoped to challenge the Makenzie regime, Karl's lack of an heir was not his only problem. Whatever the Seven Worlds might say about their independence, the center of power was still on Earth. As, two thousand years ago, men had once gone to Rome in search of justice, or prestige, or knowledge, so in this age the Imperial planet called to its scattered children. No man could be taken seriously in the arena of Solar politics unless he was personally acquainted with the key figures of Terran affairs, and had traced his way at least once through the labyrinth of the terrestrial bureaucracy.

  And to do this, one had to go to Earth; as in the days of the Caesars, there was no alternative. Those who believed otherwise — or pretended to — risked being tagged with the dreaded word “colonial.”

  It might have been different if the velocity of light were infinite; but it was a mere billion kilometers an hour — and therefore, realtime conversation would be forever impossible between Earth and anyone beyond the orbit of the Moon. The global electronic village which had existed for centuries on the mother world could never be extended into space; the political and psychological effects of this were enormous, and still not fully understood.

  For generations, earth-dwellers had been accustomed to being in each other's presence at the touch of a button. The communications satellites had made possible, and then inevitable, the creation of the World State in all but name. And despite many earlier fears, it was a state still controlled by men, not by machines.

  There were perhaps a thousand key individuals, and ten thousand important ones — and they talked to each other incessantly from Pole to Pole. The decisions needed to run a world sometimes had to be made in minutes, and for this the instantaneous feedback of face-to-face conversation was essential. Across a fraction of a light-second, that was easy to arrange, and for three hundred years men had taken it for granted that distance could no longer bar them from each other.

  But with the establishment of the first Mars Base, this intimacy had ended. Earth could talk to Mars — but its words would always take at least three minutes to get there, and the reply would take just as long. Conversation was thus impossible, and all business had to be done by Telex or its equivalent.

  In theory, this should have been good enough, and usually it was. But there were disastrous exceptions — costly and sometimes fatal interplanetary misunderstandings resulting from the fact that the two men at the opposite ends of the circuit did not really know each other, or comprehend each other's ways of thought, because they had never been in personal contact.

  And personal contact was essential at the highest levels of statesmanship and administration. Diplomats had known this for several thousand years, with their apparatus of missions and envoys and official visits. Only after that contact, with its inevitable character evaluation, had been made, and the subtle links of mutual understanding and common interest established, could one do business by long-distance communications with any degree of confidence.

  Malcolm Makenzie could never have achieved his own rise on Titan without the friendships made when he had returned to Earth. Once he had thought it strange that a personal tragedy should have led him to power and responsibility beyond all the dreams of his youth; but unlike Ellen, he had buried his dead past and it had ceased to haunt him long ago.

  When Colin had repeated the pattern, forty years later, and had returned to Titan with the infant Duncan, the position of the clan had been immensely strengthened. To most of the human race, Saturn's largest moon was now virtually identified with the Makenzies. No one could hope to challenge them if he could not match the network of personal contacts they had established not only on Earth, but everywhere else that mattered. It was through this network, rather than official channels, that the Makenzies, as even their opponents grudgingly admitted, Got Things Done.

  And now a fourth generation was being prepared to consolidate the dynasty. Everyone knew that this would happen eventually, but no one expected it so soon.

  Not even the Makenzies. And especially not the Helmers.

  6

  By The Bonny, Bonny Banks of Loch Hellbrew

  In the past, Duncan had always cycled to Grandmother Ellen's home, or taken an electric cart whenever he had to deliver some household necessity. This time, however, he walked the two-kilometer tunnel from the city, carrying fifty kilos of carefully distributed mass — which, however, only gave him ten kilos of extra weight. Had he known that such characters had once existed, he might have felt a strong affinity with old-time smugglers, wearing a stylish waistcoat of gold bars.

  Colin had presented him w
ith the complex harness of webbing and pouches, with a heartfelt "Thank God I'll never have to use it again! I knew I had it around somewhere, but it took a couple of days to find. It's only too true that the Makenzies never throw anything away."

  Duncan found that it needed both hands to lift the harness off the table; when he unzipped one of the many small pouches, he found that it contained a pencil-sized rod of dull metal, astonishingly massive.

  "What is it?" he asked. "It feels heavier than gold."

  "It is. Tungsten superalloy, if I remember. The total mass is seventy kilos, but don't start wearing it all at once. I began at forty, and added a couple of kilos a day. The important thing is to keep the distribution uniform, and to avoid chafing.

  Duncan was doing some mental arithmetic, and finding the results very depressing. Earth gravity was five time Titan's — yet this diabolical device would merely double his local weight.

  "It's impossible," he said gloomily. "I'll never be able to walk on Earth."

  "Well, I did — thought it wasn't easy at first. Do everything that the doctors tell you, even if it sounds silly. Spend all the time you can in baths, or lying down. Don't be ashamed to use wheelchairs or prosthetic devices, at least for the first couple of weeks. And never try to run."

  "Run!"

  "Sooner or later you'll forget you're on Earth, and then you'll break a leg. Like to bet on it?"

  Betting was one of the useful Makenzie vices. The money stayed in the family, and the loser always learned some valuable lesson. Though Duncan found it impossible to imagine five gravities, it could not be denied that Colin had spent a year on Earth and had survived to tell the tale. So this was not a bet that promised favorable odds.

  Now he was beginning to believe Colin's prediction, and he scarcely noticed the extra mass — at least when he was moving in a straight line. It was only when he tried to change direction that he felt himself in the grip of some irresistible force. Not counting visitors from Earth, he was probably now the strongest man on Titan. It was not that his body was developing new strength; rather, it was recovering latent powers which had been slumbering, waiting for the moment when they would be called forth. In a few more years, what he was now attempting would be too late.

  The four-meter-wide tunnel had been lasered, years ago, through the rim of the small crater which surrounded Oasis. Originally, it had been a pipeline for the ammoniated petrochemicals of the aptly named Loch Hellbrew, one of the region's chief natural resources. Most of the lake had gone to feed the industries of Titan; later, the tapping of the moon's internal heat, as part of the local planetary engineering project, had caused the remainder to evaporate.

  There had been a certain amount of quiet grumbling when Ellen Makenzie had made her intentions clear, but the Department of Resources had pumped the remaining hydrogen-methane fog out of the tunnel, and now it carried oxygen, to the annual annoyance of the auditors, on inventory as part of the city's air reserve. There were two manually operated bulkheads, as well as the city's own backup seals. Anyone went beyond the second bulkhead at his own risk, but that was negligible. The tunnel was through solid rock, and since the pressure inside was higher than ambient, there was no danger of Titanian poisons leaking inward.

  Half a dozen side tunnels, all of them now blocked, led out of the main passageway. When he had first come here as a small boy, Duncan had filled those sealed-off shafts with wonder and magic. Now he knew that they merely led to long-abandoned surge chambers. Yet though all the mystery was gone, it still seemed to him that these corridors were haunted by two ghosts. One was a little girl who had been known and loved by only a handful of pioneers; the other was a giant who had been mourned by millions.

  There had been endless jokes about Robert Kleinman's name, for he was almost two meters tall, and proportioned accordingly. And his talents had matched his physique; he had been a master pilot at the age of thirty, despite the difficulty of fitting him into standard space equipment. Duncan had never considered him particularly good-looking, but in this matter he was outvoted by a small army of women — including Ellen Makenzie.

  Grandma had met Captain Kleinman only a year after the final parting with Malcolm; she may have been on an emotional rebound, but he certainly was not. Yet thereafter the Captain had never looked at another woman, and it had become one of those love affairs famous on many worlds. It had lasted throughout the planning and preparations for the first expedition to Saturn and the fitting-out of the Challenger in orbit off Titan. And as far as Ellen Makenzie was concerned it had never died; it was frozen forever at the moment when the ship met its mysterious and still inexplicable doom, deep in the jet streams of the South Temperate Zone.

  Moving rather more slowly than when he had started his walk, Duncan came to the final bulkhead. On Grandma's hundredth birthday, the younger members of the family had painted it in brilliant fluorescent colors, which had faded not at all in the last dozen years. Since Ellen had never referred to it, and never heard questions which she did not wish to answer, there was no way of discovering if she appreciated the gift.

  "I'm here, Grandma," Duncan called into the antique intercom which had been presented to her by some anonymous admirer long ago. (It was still clearly marked "Made in Hong Kong," and had been dated circa 1995. Shameful to relate, there had been one attempt to steal it, though since theft was virtually unknown on Titan, this was probably only a childish prank or an anti-Makenzie gesture.

  There was, as usual, no reply, but the door unlatched at once and Duncan walked through into the tiny foyer. Grandma's electrocycle occupied the place from which it had not moved for years. Duncan checked the battery and kicked the tires, as he always did with great conscientiousness. No need for any pumping or charging this time; if the old lady suddenly felt the impulse to descend upon the city, there was nothing to prevent her.

  The kitchen, which was a unit lifted intact from a small orbital passenger shuttle, was a little tidier than usual. Presumably one of the voluntary helpers had just made her weekly visit. Nevertheless, the usual sickly sour smell of slow culinary disintegration and inadequate recycling was heavy in the air, and Duncan held his breath as he hurried through into the living room. He never accepted more than a cup of coffee from Grandma, and feared accidental poisoning if he ever sampled the products of her robot reconstituter. But Ellen seemed to thrive on it; over the years she must have established some kind of symbiosis with her kitchen. It still lived up to the manufacturer's “fail-safe” guarantee, even though it did produce the most peculiar odors. Doubtless Grandma never noticed them. Duncan wondered what she would do when the final disaster occurred.

  The main living room was as crowded as ever. Against one wall were the shelves of carefully labeled rocks — a complete mineralogy of Titan and the other examined moons of Saturn, as well as samples from each of the rings. As long as Duncan could remember, there had been just one section empty, as if, even now, Grandma was still waiting for Kleinman to return.

  The opposite wall was more sparsely occupied with communications and information equipment, and racks of micromodules which if completely saturated, could have held more knowledge than all the libraries of Earth up to the twenty-first century. The rest of the room was a compact little workshop, most of the floor space being occupied by the machines that had fascinated Duncan throughout his childhood, and that he would associate with Grandma Ellen as long as he lived.

  There were petrological microscopes, polishing and cutting tools, ultrasonic cleaners, laser knives, and all the shining paraphernalia of gemologist and jeweler. Duncan had learned to use most of them, over the years, though he had never acquired more than a fraction of his grandmother's skill and almost wholly lacked her artistic talents. What he did share, to a much greater extent, were her mathematical interests, exemplified by the small computer and associated holographic display.

  The computer, like the kitchen, was long overdue of retirement. But it was completely autonomous, so Grandma did not have t
o rely in any way upon the immensely larger storage facilities in the city. Although her computer had a memory scarcely larger than that of a human brain, it was sufficient for her rather modest purposes. Her interest in minerals had led her, inevitably, to crystallography, then to group theory, and then to the harmless obsession that had dominated so much of her lonely existence. Twenty years ago, in this same room, she had infected Duncan with it. In his case, the disease was no longer virulent, having run its course in a few months; but he knew, with amused tolerance, that he would suffer occasional relapses throughout his life. How incredible that five perfectly identical squares could create a universe that neither man nor computer would ever be able to explore fully...

  Nothing in the familiar room had changed since his last visit, three weeks ago. He could even imagine that Grandma had not moved; she was still sitting at her worktable, sorting rocks and crystals, while behind her the read-out screen intermittently flashed solutions of some problem the computer was analyzing. She was, as usual, wearing a long gown that made her look like a Roman matron, though Duncan was quite sure that no Roman matron's dress ever appeared quite so disheveled or, to be perfectly frank, so overdue for the laundry. While Duncan had known her, Ellen's care of her equipment had never extended to her personal appearance.

  She did not rise, but tilted her head slightly so that he could deliver his usual affectionate kiss. As he did so, he noticed that the external world, at least, had been touched by change.

  The view from Grandma's picture window was famous — but by reputation only, since few indeed had been privileged to see it with their own eyes. Her home was partly countersunk into a ledge overlooking the dried-up bed of Loch Hellbrew and the canyon that led into it, so it presented her with a 180-degree panorama of Titan's most picturesque landscape. Sometimes, when storms raged through the mountains, the view disappeared for hours behind clouds of ammonia crystals. But today the weather was clear and Duncan could see for at least twenty kilometers.