Imperial Earth

  8

  Children of The Corridors

  There was a sense of sadness and finality about almost everything that he did in these last days. Sometimes it puzzled Duncan; he should be excited, anticipating the great adventure that only a handful of men on his world could ever share. And though he had never before been out of touch with his friends and family for more than a few hours, he was certain that a year's absence would pass swiftly enough among the wonders and distractions of Earth.

  So why this melancholy? If he was saying farewell to the things of his youth, it was only for a little while, and he would appreciate them all the more when he returned...

  When he returned. That, of course, was the heart of the problem. In a real sense, the Duncan Makenzie who was now leaving Titan would never return; indeed, that was the purpose of the exercise. Like Colin thirty years ago, and Malcolm forty years before that, he was heading sunward in search of knowledge, of power, of maturity — and, above all, of the successor which his own world could never give him. for, of course, being Malcolm's duplicate, he too carried in his loins the fatal Makenzie gene.

  Sooner than he had expected, he had to prepare his family for the new addition. After the usual number of experiments, he had settled down with Marissa four years ago, and he loved her children as much, he was certain, as if they had been his own flesh and blood. Clyde was now six years old, Carline three. They in their turn appeared to be as fond of Duncan as of their real fathers, who were now regarded as honorary members of Clan Makenzie. Much the same thing had happened in Colin's generation — he had acquired or adopted three families — and in Malcolm's. Grandfather had never gone to the trouble of marrying again after Ellen had left him, but he had never lacked company for long. Only a computer could keep track of the comings and goings on the periphery of the clam; it often seemed that most of Titan was related to it in some way or other. One of Duncan's major problems now was deciding who would be mortally offended if he failed to say good-bye.

  Quite apart from the time factor, he had other reasons for making as few farewells as possible. Every one of his friends and relatives — as well as almost complete strangers — seemed to have some request for him, some mission they wanted him to carry out as soon as he reached Earth. Or, worse still, there was some essential item ("It won't be any trouble") they wanted him to bring back. Duncan calculated that he would have to charter a special freighter if he acquiesced to all these demands.

  Every job now had to be divided into one of two categories. There were the things that must be done before he left Titan, and those that could be postponed until he was aboard ship. The latter included his studies of current terrestrial affairs, which kept slipping despite Colin's increasingly frantic attempts to update him.

  Extricating himself from his official duties was also no easy task, and Duncan realized that in a few more years it would be well-nigh impossible. He was getting involved in too many things, though that was a matter of deliberate family policy. More than once he had complained that his title of Special Assistant to the Chief Administrator gave him responsibility without power. To this, Chief Administrator Colin had retorted: "Do you know what power means in our society? Giving orders to people who carry them out — only if and when they feel like it."

  This was, of course, a gross libel on the Titanian bureaucracy, which functioned surprisingly well and with a minimum of red tape. Because all the key individuals knew each other, an immense amount of business got done through direct personal contact. Everyone who had come to Titan had been carefully selected for intelligence and ability, and knew that survival depended upon co-operation. Those who felt like abandoning their social responsibilities first had to practice breathing methane at a hundred below.

  One possible embarrassment he had at least been spared. He could hardly leave Titan without saying good-bye to his once closest friend — but, very fortunately, Karl was off-world. Several months ago he had left on one of the shuttles to join a Terran survey ship working its way through the outer moons. Ironically enough, Duncan had envied Karl his chance of seeing some unknown worlds; now it was Karl who would be envious when he heard that Duncan was on his way to Earth. The thought gave him more sadness than pleasure; the Makenzies, whatever their faults, were not vindictive. Yet Duncan could not help wondering how often Karl's reveries would now turn sunward, and to the moment long ago when their emotions had been irrevocably linked with the mother world.

  Duncan was just sixteen, and Karl twenty-one, when the cruise liner Mentor had made her first, and it was widely hoped only, rendezvous with Titan. She was a converted fusion-drive freighter — slow but economical, provided adequate supplies of hydrogen could be picked up at strategic points.

  Mentor had stopped at Titan for her final refueling, on the last leg of a grand tour that had taken her to Mars, Ganymede, Europa, Pallas, and Iapetus, and had included fly-bys of Mercury and Eros. As soon as she had loaded some fifteen thousand tons of hydrogen, her exhausted crew planned to head back to Earth on the fastest orbit they could compute, if possible after marooning all the passengers.

  The cruise must have seemed a good idea when a consortium of Terran universities had planned it several years earlier. And so indeed it had turned out, in the long run, for Mentor graduates had since proved their worth throughout the Solar System. But when the ship staggered into her parking orbit, under the command of a prematurely gray captain, the whole enterprise looked like a first-magnitude disaster.

  The problems of keeping five hundred young adults entertained and out of mischief on a six-months' cruise aboard even the largest spaceliner had not been given sufficient thought; the law professor who had signed on as master-at-arms was later heard to complain bitterly about the complete absence from the ship's inventory of hypodermic guns and knockout gas. On the other hand, there had been no deaths or serious injuries, only one pregnancy, and everyone had learned a great deal, though not necessarily in the areas that the organizers had intended. The first few weeks, for example, were mostly occupied by experiments in zero-gravity sex, despite warnings that this was an expensive addiction for those compelled to spend most of their lives on planetary surfaces.

  Other shipboard activities, it was widely believed, were not quite so harmless. There were reports of tobacco-smoking — not actually illegal, of course, but hardly sensible behavior when there were so many safe alternatives. Even more alarming were persistent rumors that someone had smuggled an Emotion Amplifier on board Mentor. The so-called joy machines were banned on all planets, except under strict medical control; but there would always be people to whom reality was not good enough, and who would want to try something better.

  Notwithstanding the horror stories radioed ahead from other ports of call, Titan had looked forward to welcoming its young visitors. It was felt that they would add color to the social scene, and help establish some enjoyable contacts with Mother Earth. And anyway, it would be for only a week...

  Luckily, no one dreamed that it would be for two months. This was not Mentor 's fault; Titan had only itself to blame.

  When Mentor fell into its parking orbit, Earth and Titan were involved in one of their periodical wrangles over the price of hydrogen, F.O.B. Zero Gravitational Potential (Solar Reference). The proposed 15 percent rise, screamed the Terrans, would cause the collapse of interplanetary commerce. Anything under 10 percent, swore the Titanians, would result in their instant bankruptcy and would make it impossible for them to import any of the expensive items Earth was always trying to sell. To any historian of economics, the whole debate was boringly familiar.

  Unable to get a firm quotation, Mentor was stranded in orbit with empty fuel tanks. At first, her captain was not too unhappy; he and the crew could do with the rest, now that the passengers had shuttled down to Titan and had fanned out all over the face of the hapless satellite. But one week stretched into two, then three, then a month. By that time, Titan was ready to settle on almost any terms; unfortunately, Mentor had
now missed her optimum trajectories, and it would be another four weeks before the next launch window opened. Meanwhile, the five hundred guests were enjoying themselves, usually much more than their hosts.

  But to the younger Titanians, it was an exciting time which they would remember all their lives. On a small world where everyone knew everybody else, half a thousand fascinating strangers had arrived, full of tales, many of them quite true, about the wonders of Earth. Here were men and women, barely into their twenties, who had seen forests and prairies and oceans of liquid water, who had strolled unprotected under an open sky beneath a sun whose heat could actually be felt...

  This very contrast in backgrounds, however, was a possible source of danger. The Terrans could not be allowed to go wandering around by themselves, even inside the habitats. They had to have escorts, preferable responsible people not too far from their own age group, to see that they did not inadvertently kill either themselves or their hosts.

  Naturally, there were times when they resented this well-intentioned supervision, and even tried to escape from it. One group succeeded; it was very lucky, and suffered no more than a few searing whiffs of ammonia. Damage was so slight that the foolish adventurers required only routine lung transplants, but after this exploit there was no more serious trouble.

  There were plenty of other problems. The sheer mechanics of absorbing five hundred visitors was a challenge to a society where living standards were still somewhat Spartan, and accommodation limited. At first, all the unexpected guests were housed in the complex of corridors left by an abandoned mining operation, hastily converted into dormitories. Then, as quickly as arrangements could be made, they were farmed out — like refugees from some bombed city in an ancient war — to any households that were able to cope with them. At this stage, there were still many willing volunteers, among them Colin and Sheela Makenzie.

  The apartment was lonely, now that Duncan's pseudosibling Glynn had left home to work on the other side of Titan; Sheela's other child, Yuri, had been gone for a decade. Though Number 402, Second Level, Meridian Park was hardly spacious by Terran standards, Assistant Administrator Colin Makenzie, as he was then, had selected one of the homeless waifs for temporary adoption.

  And so Calindy had come into Duncan's life — and into Karl's.

  9

  The Fatal Gift

  Catherine Linden Ellerman had celebrated her twenty-first birthday just before Mentor reached Saturn. By all accounts, it had been a memorable party, giving the final silvery gloss to the captain's remaining hairs. Calindy would have sailed through untouched; next to her beauty, that was her most outstanding characteristic. In the midst of chaos — even chaos that she herself had generated — she was the calm center of the storm. With a self-possession far beyond her years, she seemed to young Duncan the very embodiment of Terran culture and sophistication. He could smile wryly, one and a half decades later, at his boyish naïveté; but it was not wholly unfounded. By any standards, Calindy was a remarkable phenomenon.

  Duncan knew, of course, that all Terrans were rich. (How could it be otherwise, when each was the heir to a hundred thousand generations?) But he was overawed by Calindy's display of jewels and silks, never realizing that she had a limited wardrobe which she varied with consummate skill. Most impressive of all was a stunningly beautiful coat of golden fur — the only one ever seen on Titan — made from the skins of an animal called a mink. That was typical of Calindy; no one else would have dreamed of taking a fur coat aboard a spaceship. And she had not done so — as malicious rumor pretended — because she had heard it was cold out around Saturn. She was much too intelligent for that kind of stupidity, and I knew exactly what she was doing; she had brought her mink simply because it was beautiful.

  Perhaps because he could see her only through a mist of adoration, Duncan could never visualize her, in later years, as an actual person. When he thought of Calindy, and tried to conjure up her image, he did not see the real girl, but always his only replica of her, in one of the bubble stereos that had become so popular in the ‘50’s.

  How many thousands of times he had taken that apparently solid, yet almost weightless sphere in his hands, shaken it gently, and thus activated the five-second loop! Through the subtle magic of organized gas molecules, each releasing its programmed quantum of light, Calindy's face would appear out of the swirling mists — tiny, yet perfect in form and color. At first she would be in profile; then she would turn and suddenly — Duncan could never be sure of the moment when it arrived — there would be the faint smile that only Leonardo could have captured in an earlier age. She did not seem to be smiling at him, but at someone over his shoulder. The impression was so strong that more than once Duncan had looked back, startled, to see who was standing behind him.

  Then the image would fade, the bubble would become opaque, and he would have to wait five minutes before the system recharged itself. It did not matter; he had only to close his eyes and he could still see the perfect oval face, the delicate ivory skin, the lustrous black hair gathered up into a toque and held in place by a silver comb that had belonged to a Spanish princess, when Columbus was a child. Calindy liked playing roles, though she took none of them too seriously, and Carmen was one of her favorites.

  When she entered the Makenzie household, however, she was the exiled aristocrat, graciously accepting the hospitality of kindly provincials, with what few family heirlooms she had been able to save from the Revolution. As this impressed no one except Duncan, she quickly became the studious anthropologist, taking notes for her thesis on the quaint habits of primitive societies. This role was at least partly genuine, for Calindy was really interested in differing life styles; and by some definitions, Titan could indeed by classed as primitive — or, at least, undeveloped.

  Thus the supposedly unshockable Terrans were genuinely horrified at encountering families with three — and even four! — children on Titan. The twentieth century's millions of skeleton babies still haunted the conscience of the world, and such tragic but understandable excesses as the "Breeder Lynching" campaign, not to mention the burning of the Vatican, had left permanent scars on the human psyche. Duncan could still remember Calindy's expression when she encountered her first family of six: outrage contended with curiosity, until both were moderated by Terran good manners. He had patiently explained the facts of life to her, pointing out that there was nothing eternally sacred about the dogma of Zero Growth, and that Titan really needed to double its population every fifty years. Eventually she appreciated this logically, but she had never been able to accept it emotionally. And it was emotion that provided the driving force of Calindy's life; her will and beauty and intelligence were merely its servants.

  For a young Terran, she was not promiscuous. She once told Duncan — and he believed her — that she never had more than two lovers at a time. On Titan, to Duncan's considerable distress, she had only one.

  Even if the Helmers and Makenzies had not been related through Grandma Ellen, it was inevitable that she would have met Karl, at one of the countless concerts and parties and dances arranged for Mentor's castaways. So Duncan could not really blame himself for introducing them; it would have made not difference in the end. Yet even so, he would always wonder...

  Karl was then almost twenty-two — a year older than Calindy, though far less experienced. He still possessed the slightly overmuscled build of the native-born Terran, but had adapted so well to the lower gravity that he moved more gracefully than most men who had spent their entire lives on Titan. He seemed to possess the secret of power without clumsiness.

  And in a quite literal sense, he was the Golden Boy of his generation. Though he pretended to hate the phrase, Duncan knew that he was secretly proud of the title someone had given him in his teens: “The boy with hair like the sun.” The description could only have been coined by a visitor from Earth. No Titanian would have thought of it — but everyone agreed that it was completely appropriate. For Karl Helmer was one of those m
en upon whom, for their own amusement, the Gods had bestowed the fatal gift of beauty.

  * * * * *

  Only years later, and partly thanks to Colin, did Duncan begin to understand all the nuances of the affair. Soon after his twenty-third birthday, the Makenzies received the last Star Day card that Calindy ever sent them.

  "I still don't know if I made a mistake," Colin said ruefully as he fingered the bright rectangle of paper that had carried its conventional greetings halfway across the Solar System. "But it seemed a good idea at the time."

  "Well, I don't think it did any harm, in the long run."

  Colin looked at him strangely.

  "I wonder. Anyway, it certainly didn't turn out as I expected."

  "And what did you expect?"

  It was sometimes a great advantage, and sometimes downright embarrassing, to have a father who was also your thirty-year-older identical twin. He knew all the mistakes you were going to make, because he had made them already. It was impossible to conceal any secrets from him, because his thought processes were virtually the same. In such a situation, the only policy that made any sense was complete honesty, as far as that could be achieved by human beings.

  "I'm not quite sure. But the moment I saw Calindy, shining like a nova amid all that gloom and chaos down in the old mine workings, I wanted to learn more about her... wanted to make her part of my life. You know what I mean."

  Duncan could only nod his head in silent agreement.

  "Sheela didn't mind — after all, I'm not a baby-snatcher! And we both hoped that Calindy would give you someone to think about besides Karl."

  "I was already getting over that, anyway. It was much too frustrating."