A World Between

by Norman Spinrad

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

Pacifica was a monument to freedom and equality-until the off-worlders came. The Femocrats, a party of female separatists, and the Transcendental Scientists, an institute of technofascists dedicated to male supremacy. Carlotta Madigan, Pacifica's prime minister, and Royce Lindblad, her handsome young lover and media adviser, had to find a way to stop the Pink and Blue War-without becoming casualties themselves.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 298

Sample

RIDING THE WEST WIND ON THE EDGE OF AN ONRUSHING thundersquall, Royce Lindblad sat barechested in the open cockpit of the Davy Jones, conning the sailboat by the tiller, the boomline, and the seat of his green velour pants. Lightning hissed and crackled in the black thunderheads behind him, but no rain fell on the choppy azure surface of the Island Sea, High above the single mast, a flock of bright yellow boomerbirds rode the same wind on their great motionless wings, hooting their good-natured defiance of the elements in tubalike tones. As long as the boomerbirds remained aloft, there was no imminent danger of the squall transforming itself into a tornado, and therefore no need to retract mast and sail and go to power.

Unplugged from the net and his responsibilities by choice, Pacifica’s Minister of Media was in no particular hurry to rush home to Carlotta and affairs of domestic life and state. Although it was only two hours from Gotham to Lorien Island even under sail, time had a different meaning out here; you could expand or contract it at will. Flung across half a million square kilometers of shallow ocean, the thousands of isles that made up the Island Continent could be either the suburbs of Gotham or a vast outback of sea and sky and untouched beaches, depending upon your chosen speed.

Twelve million people, nearly a third of the planetary population, lived out here, none of them more than an hour and a half from the center of Gotham under powered flight. From a commuter’s point of view, the towns on many of the larger islands and the private villas that, hugged smaller bits of land were all a quick jump from each other and from the Pacifican capital. When the island of your nearest neighbor was only minutes away, you forgot that those minutes could be thirty kilometers of open sea. When you could jump from Gotham to the furthest island in the archipelago in under two hours, you forgot that the twelve million Islanders and all their works were but a thin dusting of humanity sprinkled over a virgin immensity of sea and wooded islands on a planet fifty light-years from the sun that gave their kind birth.

But down here on the surface of the sea, the Island Continent became a vast world entire, more empty than inhabited, more Pacifican than human, and you were a lone sailor on an alien sea, the clock of your mind keeping the, oceanic time of wave and wind.

Horvath Island loomed fuzzily on the far horizon, and Royce thought he could make out the blue fusion flame of a liner coming north from Thule arcing in for a landing at Lombard. As if to distract his attention from this reminder of the world of men, a big marinerdyle breached the surface not a hundred meters from his boat in a sudden explosion of foam. The huge reptile raised its spindly forelimbs into the air, and the translucent membranes of its twin sails unfurled and caught the wind with an audible snap, to the hooting derision of the boomerbirds. Cupping the wind with its sails of skin with a precision and delicacy that Royce could not hope to match, the creature paced the boat for several minutes, and was pulling away when it finally sounded with a nose-thumbing flip of its great tail-flukes.

Royce adjusted his course, steering well clear of the powered traffic around Horvath Island and the liner port of Lombard. Beyond Horvath Island was a long sickle-shaped chain of small islets with only half a dozen estates scattered among them, and in the middle of the chain, about twenty-five kilometers away now, was Lorien.

Royce had homesteaded Lorien long before he met Carlotta Madigan. Carlotta had changed the vector of his life in most ways, drawing him into orbit around her rising star. Carlotta might have been on her way to her first term as Chairman even then, but if she wanted to share her bed with Royce Lindblad on a long-term basis, that bed was going to be on Lorien, not in that tower apartment smack in the middle of Gotham where they had first met. They still kept the city apartment for convenience’s sake, but Lorien was home—they had designed the house together, and Royce had insisted that the deed to the place be a joint contract, too. He was traditionalist enough to believe that a man must choose the home, even if his lady was destined to head the government. Especially if she was a power in the world—a bucko had to be king of the castle when the lights went out, didn’t he?

Truth be told, the Island Continent was Royce’s first love, something that perhaps only another child of Mainlanders could fully understand. His parents were wheat farmers in the rich lower Big Blue River valley, but even as a small boy, romances of the Island Continent had been his favorite entertainment channel fare. By the time he came into his citizen’s stock at seventeen, he had sailed these seas thousands of times on the net and in his dreams, and he had long since known that on his seventeenth birthday he would put the mainland of Columbia behind him.

His father—a big graceful man whose thoughts ran slow but deep—had understood this for a long time. That last afternoon, they had sat together on the mossy bluffs overlooking the Big Blue. Behind them, the yellow carpet of ripening wheat rippled contrasting textures in the breeze like ruffled velvet. Below them, the river poured between banks rich with kelly-green Pacifican lawnmoss. Spiderwebs of white cloud wisped across the sky. The air was golden with the perpetual warmth of the eternal Columbian summer. Hydrobarges laden with grain and vegetables from further upriver jetted down the river southeast toward Gotham, scoring the turquoise water with the white wakes of commerce. It was peaceful, it was beautiful, it was home, but…

“Don’t be down, bucko,” his father said. “You’re only blueing it because you feel you should be. For your mother and me, or so you think.”

“You don’t feel I’m letting you down, dad?”

His father shook his head and smiled. “This is my piece of the planet,” he said. “This is what sings its song to me. You hear a tune from somewhere else, you’ve got to dance to it. It’s a roomy planet, Royce. What sort of bucko would you be if you stuck yourself in one corner of it just because you happened to be born there? Look at me, my father was an engineer in Thule, and here I am. Now, if you were telling me you intended to go eat ice half your life, then I’d tell you you were whackers!”

They laughed in unison, men together.

“You don’t think I’m whackers for calling a place I’ve never been ‘home?’ ” Royce asked.

“Ah, we’re all whackers that way, now aren’t we?” his father said. “We all get itchy for somewhere else until we land someplace that scratches us right. And those islands—ah, yeah, those islands… nothing like the Island Continent on any world I ever heard of. You ever wonder why the Founders left ’em alone and put their roots down here in Columbia?”

“Now that you mention it…”

Royce thought he knew his history as well as the average Pacifican. The Founders had colonized Pacifica directly from Earth some three centuries ago, and for the first couple of generations, humans had stuck pretty much to their farms on the rich plains of eastern Columbia. But come to think of it, how could those people have stood on, the shore, looking west across these flat plains, and east across the vast and mysterious sweep of the Island Continent, and still have chosen to ignore the beauty and complexity of the great archipelago for the fertile sameness of the continental veldt?

“Well, I’ll tell you what I think, bucko,” his father said. “The Founders were people with a dream, and this was it.” He spread his big arms wide. “Back where they came from, land like this was only a memory and a promise. So when they saw these plains, they knew they were home. But they were no simple folk, our ancestors. They were smart enough to invent electronic democracy and the net and all the rest of it. And they knew about dreams. They knew that people don’t dream about where they grow up even if their parents did. Maybe especially if their parents did…”

He hunkered forward and wrapped his arms around his knees, staring across the Big Blue at the far bank. “So what I think, Royce, is that they saw those islands, and they knew that their children, and their children’s children, wouldn’t dream of being farmers out here on the plains. So they left the Island Continent alone for someone else to dream on when their time came.”

He stood up and put his arm around Royce’s shoulders. “So I don’t want you to dream my dream bucko,” he said. “It’s right that you dream your own. That’s what Pacifica’s all about. That’s why I’m going to be proud tomorrow when you leave for your islands. Hang loose, bucko, and listen to your own song.”

Though no man could dance entirely to his own music around a woman like Carlotta Madigan, Royce had never forgotten that going-away present from his father. Though his father might have been an unsophisticated Mainlander in the eyes of Gothamites, he had still managed to teach Royce what it was to be a real bucko, a male human, subspecies Pacifican.

And out here on the open waters, holding the power of the wind through the boomline, the inertia of the sea through the tiller, and experiencing himself as the controlling interface between them, Royce always felt time, history, and karma slip away, paring him down to his essential maleness, reconnecting him to that young bucko saying his goodbye on the bank of the Big Blue.

For being a bucko was much like being a lone sailor on this protean sea. You could choose your wind, set your tiller against the resistance of your own karma, and by playing the two against each other, use both to propel you along the course set by your own will.

It was this essentially bucko secret that Carlotta could never quite grasp. That was why they moved under power when they traveled between Gotham and Lorien together, and it was also why, despite her intelligence, her experience, her statecraft, and yes, her wisdom, it was he who conned their political boat through the quicksilver winds and currents of Pacifican electronic democracy.

He had tried to teach her how to sail, but the trouble was that she had no feel for the art of tacking.

Now Horvath drifted by far off to port. Clear of this human settlement, Royce changed course again, pointing his bow along a straight vector toward Lorien, the wind directly astern now, blowing him along at maximum sailing speed, skipping homeward across the surface of the sea like the discrays that leapt clear of the wavecrests and bounced along on their flat bellies like thrown stones with loud, crisp smacks.

Just as well that Carlotta isn’t into this, Royce thought. A man shouldn’t share everything with his lady; he’s got to have a quiet place to hear his own song. Without that, there’d be nothing within him to give in the softness of the night, and that’s what makes the world go round, bucko.

The villa that Carlotta Madigan and Royce Lindblad had designed together was a low crescent hugging the inner shore of Lorien Island’s small lagoon. The exterior walls were latticeworks of chocolate-brown stonemeld and slightly bluish windows, and the shallow-peaked roof was of deeply grained royal blue bongowood from the Cords, weatherproofed with a microglass glaze. A wide veranda shelfed out onto the lagoon from the front of the house on pilings with the boat berths beneath it. The landward side of the building faced the heavily forested hills of the island across a rather formal garden—a small fountain, a manicured Earth-grass lawn, bongowood garden furniture, and beds of Earthside roses, tulips, and chrysanthemums in red, white, blue, and yellow.

Royce’s netshop overlooked the lagoon, with a glass door leading directly out onto the veranda, but Carlotta’s was on the other side of the house, looking inward on the garden and the virgin native woods beyond.

In theory, this was supposed to afford her a tranquil and changeless natural backdrop for conducting affairs of state, but in practice she hardly ever even glanced out the window when she was plugged into the net.

Indeed, the screens of her outsized net console faced the big window, so that her back was to the garden when she sat in one of the two loungers facing them, enfolded within the curve of the emeraldwood-paneled cabinet. The standard Pacifican net console was a six-screen job: one for the personal communication channels, one for the hundred broadcast channels, one for computer interfacing, one for the accessbanks, one for the gov channels, and a sixth for general utility functions like grounds surveillance, video games, and general electronic doodling. Carlotta’s console, like Royce’s, had four additional screens: one for intragovernmental communications, one for continuous Web-monitoring, one for interfacing with the Parliamentary Computer, and one for the planetary observation system.

When Carlotta plugged into the electronic universe of the Pacifican media network, the immediate ground-level world outside faded almost at once from the surface of her mind as her sensorium went multiplex and electronic. Through cameras, microphones, and screens, her sight and hearing became not only planetwide but multiplex and compounded like the vision of an insect. The face and voice of virtually everyone on Pacifica—and indeed on worlds beyond—could be called before her with a quick verbal command. All of human history since the invention of videotape might march before her eyes at whim. Computers would advise her on anything from simple arithmetic computations to the long-term trends in the balance of payments between Pacifica and fifty other human worlds. Anyone on the planet with an ax to grind or a philosophy to expound would harangue her directly if she chose to hear. Ninety channels of entertainment vied for her idle attention, and if nothing in realtime piqued her fancy, there was half a millennium of taped programming in the accessbanks. Current news was available from the points of view of the government, the administration, the oppositions, Marxists, Free Libertarians, Transformational Syndicalists, Sardonic Fatalists, and Platonic Absolutists, among a whole zoo of others. If Pacifica was not world enough, the Galactic Web brought in shrill Femocrat propaganda from Earth, travelogues from thirty worlds, Transcendental Science musings, the latest vicious gossip from Thunderball, a tachyon-borne smorgasbord from the scattered planets of men.

All this was the electronic universe of every Pacifican, except those who unplugged from time to time with severe cases of media cafard. But as incumbent Chairman of Pacifica and a Parliamentary Delegate for nearly sixteen years, Carlotta Madigan had an even more complex and intimate feedback relationship with the media net.

For on Pacifica, media was politics, and politics was media, and had been from the days of the Founders. Geographically isolated farmsteaders could only cohere into a political whole through the media network and the instantaneous plebiscites of electronic democracy. In the beginning there had been no Parliament and hardly any real politicians—just a computer complex in the little town of Gotham to record and tally the electronic votes and a small staff of bureaucrats to implement the directly expressed will of the people. Now, however, that initial simplicity had evolved, along with Pacifican society, into a complexity that nevertheless still cohered through the net at electronic speed.

Now there was a Parliament, and Delegates, and administrations, and elections, and electronic votes of confidence, and government corporations both temporary and permanent, and export industries, and currency controls, and economic planning, and full-time politics and full-time politicians with a vengeance—all of it in perpetual flux and most of it transpiring electronically via the net.

As Carlotta Madigan sat alone on Lorien, tens of kilometers from the nearest human and further still from the capital at Gotham, it all flowed through her via screens, microphones, speakers, controls, satellites, laserpipes, and computers.

Lean and bodily youthful in her mid-forties, Carlotta was graced with a face that on the comscreens of subordinates, colleagues, and political adversaries was an ageless image of authority that flowed not so much from her office as from who she was. Though her fair skin was barely lined at all under flowing black hair, her blue eyes were old steel, and her proud nose and full expressive lips might have been those of an ancient Doge of Venice. With Royce Lindblad as her helpmate, she was the best damn Chairman Pacifica had had in two generations, and no one knew it better than she did.

Carter Berman, the current Minister of Industries, a gray-haired man in his seventies who had shuffled in and out of that office more often than probably even he cared to remember, was on the comscreen now, in something of a defensive dither, trying to persuade her to establish a Pacifican Skyliner Corporation to bring down the fares on the routes between Gotham and the Cords, and Carlotta was getting that familiar sphinxlike look which should have told him that it was a lost cause.

“… as things stand now, there are only two lines operating between Gotham and the Cords, and the competition is virtually nil, Carlotta…”

As he spoke, Carlotta punched up the traffic figures on her access screen. “So is the traffic,” she said. “The two lines operating now are averaging only 61 percent of capacity.”

“But check the fare structures.”

Carlotta punched up the figures. TransColumbia was charging 180 valuns for coach and 230VN for first class. Zipline was charging 167VN and 240VN. “So?” she said testily. “There’s absolutely no evidence of price-fixing.”

“Look at the charge per passenger-kilometer and compare it to routes of similar length.”

When Carlotta punched up the figures, she saw that the charge per kilometer was nearly 30 percent higher than Gotham-Valhalla or Valhalla-Lombard and even 17 percent higher than Gotham-Godzillaland. But on the other hand, the profit margins didn’t really seem excessive.

“Look at the figures yourself, Carter,” she said. “The profits aren’t out of line.”

“They’re 25 percent above what they should be. A government corporation could cut the fares 20 percent and still show a respectable profit.”

“At the same capacity figure?”

“Of course,” Berman said, squinting quizzically.

“Well hell, Carter, what makes you think we could run that line at 61 percent?” Carlotta snapped. “Demand’s inelastic. Compete with TransColumbia and Zipline, and all the liners will be running less than half-full, and the govcorp will run at a loss along with the freecorps. Then they’ll drop their routes and we’ll be stuck with them.”

“Have you modeled that or are you just winging?” Berman asked, beetling his brows in annoyance.

“Winging it,” Carlotta said. “And so are you, right? You don’t have a computer projection on that, do you?”

“No,” Berman admitted.

“Well, when you come up with one, plug me in again,” Carlotta said, unplugging herself from the circuit. She sighed. For all his Technocrat pretensions, Berman was an Interventionist at heart. If he had things his way, there’d be a new govcorp every time someone’s profit margin went half a point above 10 percent. For her part, Carlotta preferred to leave the free market alone until something got really flagrant.

The Constitution gave the government monopolies in energy production and mining, which was more than enough to let the government run at a profit, pay a decent dividend on citizen’s stock, and keep the total economy on an even keel by manipulating energy and metals prices. Within those parameters, the free market could pretty well run by itself.

The govcorp business had started only a century ago, when the freight-booster companies had been caught fixing prices. Profit margins of 40 percent had been excessive by anyone’s standards, but regulating the free market went against everyone’s grain. Instead, Parliament had set up a government freight-booster corporation to drive down prices by competing in the free market. It worked so well that the gov was able to dispose of its stock in the corporation within five years at a nice capital gain for the citizenry.

But what had begun as an emergency program inevitably became institutionalized. Now there was pressure to set up a competing govcorp every time the profit margin in an industry exceeded about 10 percent and pressure to sell it out to free-market interests the moment the profit margins dropped below that arbitrary figure, whether it made sense in current stock exchange terms or not.

As far as Carlotta was concerned, it was a visionless, rigid way to run a planetary economy, and she had been willing to lose the Chairmanship over just such issues several times. Not without a vote of confidence you don’t, Carter! she decided. She smiled her Mona Lisa smile. And we both know the votes aren’t there, she thought, calling up a status report on agricultural prices and production.

Now here’s an area where the free market doesn’t work at all without constant finagling, she thought. The five million Columbian farmsteaders could grow enough food to feed quadruple the planetary population if they had any incentive to do so. But most of them could grow all their own food and take care of their other economic needs out of their citizen’s dividends. As a result, the free market in foodstuffs would heterodyne wildly without continual government intervention. Shortages when overproduction dropped prices so low that the farmsteaders stopped producing surpluses for the money economy, followed by sudden rises in prices, followed by more overproduction, another price drop, another shortage, ad nauseam. An agricultural govcorp would have made the most sense, but the Mainlanders had too much political clout for any such proposal to get through Parliament So the Ministry of Agriculture was forced to buy and sell commodities in huge amounts in order to keep prices relatively stable.

According to the current figures, wheat production was down, and soybeans were going into a glut situation. Carlotta plugged in to Cynthia Ramirez, the Minister of Agriculture.

“Buy a hundred million bushels of wheat futures at 12VN,” she ordered. “Sell soybean stocks at 6 until the price drops to 9.”

“We’re going to have to release wheat soon at 9,” Cynthia pointed out. “And we bought those soybeans at 8. We’ll take a beating all the way around.”

Carlotta shrugged. It was virtually impossible to run the Ministry of Agriculture at anything but a loss. “Do it,” she said. “We can always boost the price of iron to make up the loss.”

If that’s not too inflationary, she thought as she unplugged. The job of Chairman was essentially a juggling act. The gov as a whole had to run at a healthy profit or the voters would swiftly boot out the administration that reduced their citizens’ dividends. But the gov also had to keep the total economy and the currency in balance, which often meant doing things that were totally counterproductive in profit-and-loss terms. The Chairman had to walk this fine line continuously while juggling the entire economy, which was why any Chairmanship that lasted a full fiscal year was cause for smug self-congratulation.

Carlotta had already been in office for two quarters this time around, but her smugness about it was tempered by the knowledge that Royce was at least half-responsible. There had never been a Minister of Media better than Royce, and never a team like the two of them in the top two offices…

Idly thinking of Royce out there in the Davy Jones, Carlotta programmed a general weather review from the planetary observation system. The obscreen split vertically. On the left, temperature, humidity, and barometric readings; on the right, realtime images from standard observation cameras scattered around the planet.

A heavy windless rain fell on the western slopes of the central Sierra Cordillera mountains, soaking down through the laden branches of the towering trees and turning the loamy forest floor to chocolate-colored muck sprinkled with brilliantly colored fungi…

Rain always reminded Carlotta of that party at her Gotham tower apartment where she had first met Royce. It had been pouring that night, great driving sheets obscuring the lights of the city below and drumming against the windows. It was supposed to be one of those political gatherings put on by a rising hopeful—a great stew of power with just a flavoring of sex. And then she saw him, barechested in the then-current bucko fashion, skin-tight white pants, high black boots, a short red cloak flung casually over his bare shoulders, long brown hair, and that silly, endearing droopy mustache—a transparent attempt to look older that only made him seem even younger, even more desirable. For a moment, politics suddenly seemed so unimportant—

A merciless sun fried the perpetually cloudless sky over the Wastes. Heat waves shimmering above the dungray sands caused the far-off slate-colored mountains to waver like a mirage of themselves…

—They had spoken only once during the party, and that only briefly. Carlotta had been holding court with a small group of older Delegates, impressing them with her grasp of the issues, whatever they had been at the time, with her momentum, her easy disdain of their temporarily higher status. She turned to get a drink, and saw him, leaning up against a wall, pelvis arched forward, looking at her.

“Like what you see, do you?” she said with as much imperiousness as she could muster.

“You’re a winner,” he said. “I’m at your mercy, lady. You can have me if you want me.” He laughed—boyishly, ironically. “You might even persuade me to vote for you.”

“You certainly consider yourself a hot little bucko, don’t you?” Carlotta said.

Royce laughed, arching himself languorously toward her. “Don’t you?” he said, looking into her eyes.

Carlotta moved closer, piqued by his classic bucko narcissism, leavened as it was with a saving self-irony. “I might be interested if your bark’s not better than your bite.”

“Oh, I never bite,” Royce said. “Do you?”

Carlotta laughed and flicked a finger at the V of his pants. “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she said, snapping her teeth together—

A sprinkling of snow drifted down from the leaden skies over Thule, lightly powdering the eternal glare ice of the frozen antarctic continent. Only the far-off domes of Valhalla fractured the endless flat white monotony of the polar cap like carefully placed dots of contrasting pigment on some minimalist abstract painting…

—Two moments at a party like hundreds of others. A good-looking woman turning thirty and climbing up the power curve had endless young buckos offering themselves up to her, some just for the night’s pleasure, but just as many angling to make orbit around a rising star, and Carlotta had supposed that this was just another handsome and available young body in the crowd. She had thought little of it, and had gone back to politicking, perhaps with a slightly enhanced sense of her own personal charisma, certainly not thinking of that young bucko as anything more than a tasty possibility for some idle evening—

A strange howling windstorm roared through the dense verdant jungle of Godzillaland, rainless, whipping showers of brightly colored blossoms through the tangled undergrowth. Flitbats bounced from tree limb to tree limb in skittish panic, and something huge crunched through the jungle near the edge of the obscreen…

—Carlotta had been tired but exhilarated by the time the last of her guests left; fatigued, talked-out, but emotionally buoyed by how well it had gone, filled with a sense of impending triumph at the thought of what now seemed like her certain election to Parliament when the present administration fell.

Absorbed in political calculations, she walked into the bedroom—and there he was. Stretched out naked on the carefully turned-down bed with a glass of wine in his hand and his red cloak draped with minutely calculated carelessness over his loins, the quintessence of bucko insouciance.

He sipped his wine and stared at her over the rim of the glass. “Are you through conquering the world for tonight, Carlotta Madigan?” he said.

Carlotta choked back a laugh. It was too much, it was like some silly porn opera, and yet… And yet, when he crooked his finger at her imperiously, she went to him. When he kissed her, her lips opened to his, and whatever she had been thinking about was forgotten.

It was the perfect bucko performance, so physically perfect as to seem almost soulless, a porn opera for sure. Afterwards, he propped himself up on one elbow and regarded her with classic insolent smugness.

“Who are you?” Carlotta said softly, playing her own part as the script would have it.

“Royce Lindblad,” he said huskily.

“And what manner of creature are you, O mysterious and masterful stranger?”

“Well, truth be told, I’m an assistant producer for the Web,” he said sharply, abruptly changing verbal tone. “Porn operas for export.” And he broke up into gales of laughter.

“You fucking son of a bitch!” Carlotta managed to shout before she started laughing with him—

White clouds scudded across a clear blue sky over the eastern end of the