Fool's Hill

by Richard A. Lupoff

Genres: Science Fiction; Military Sci-Fi; Space Opera

Synopsis

GENOCIDE - IN THE NAME OF LOVE Across the planet, only a handful of giant, overcrowded, doomed cities exist - cities like Norcal, where multiple marriages are recommended and drug-taking is encouraged. Across the planet, everyone waits for the reclamation of a lost technology that can save them. Everyone, that is, except for the members of the Order of St Jerome in Norcal. The Order of St Jerome believes in peace, in morality, in two-person marriages and old-fashioned values. The trouble is, in the name of love the Order of St Jerome has decided to sacrifice the Earth...

Release date: July 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

Outside the particles struck, each making a noise so tiny that the human ear, unaided, would have been unable to detect it. But the particles—each minute in size, crystalline in form, of colors ranging nondescriptly through olive, brown, gray, and black—numbered in the endless trillions.

Collectively they hissed as they struck.

The millions of facets of the transparent dome vibrated continuously. The particles, prevented by the vibration from settling on the facets of the dome, tumbled away, streaking the nearly vertical segment of the structure nearer ground level, accumulating finally in the gigantic rammed-earth trenches that surrounded the dome.

Periodically great ocean locks were opened by automatic machinery. Dead water crept sluggishly into the trenches. Pumps pushed the water through, flushing their accumulated contents of combustion products and organic poisons back into the oil-coated ocean.

Through the plexiglass facets of the dome the sun was discernible by day, a fuzz-edged orange-brown blob casting its diffused light through thick layers of dust and filth. Even within the dome, clouds formed periodically within the high webwork of supporting girders, producing an occasional drizzle that did little to clear away the accumulated grime on the aging structures below.

Sunsets were lengthy and gradual as the sun’s departing rays were shattered and diffused by atmospheric particles, but once full darkness fell the night was a thick shroud dotted only by the sparse worklights of maintenance crews keeping the girders and the dome itself in good order.

The only known life within a thousand miles struggled through heavy days and moaned through thick nights within the confines of Norcal dome. The dome’s faceted walls stretched from what had once been Bodega Bay on the rocky coast to the north, eastward to Santa Rosa and Winters, southeast then to Stockton and Manteca, then westward again to encompass the heights of Orestimba Peak and Mount Oso, crossing the site of Los Gatos and La Honda, to meet the sea once more at Pescadero Beach.

Pescadero—Fisherman’s Beach it had been called, in the time of fishermen and of fish.

Thirty million people lived beneath the dome.

It was Monday the fifth of June in the year A.D. 2000.

In Sproul Plaza a young Chicano wearing the maroon-and-gray badge of the Order of St. Jerome forced his way through a late-afternoon crowd and pushed to the outer edge of the crowd surrounding Tico’s Tacos, a short-order pushcart operated by a pimply-faced private entrepreneur. The Chicano jostled others impatiently as Tico served customers and took their ducats from them.

By the time the Chicano had reached the head of the line he had alienated a dozen other customers. Now he ordered a tamale, peeled back the refillable polyester corn husk, and bit off a mouthful of presto-protein ground meat.

Tico held out a grease-crusted hand and growled, “Hey, ten ducats, spic, and give somebody else a turn!”

The Chicano took another mouthful of tamale as he reached into a fold of his clothing and pulled out a food card. He shoved the coded plastic square at the vendor.

“No food cards at street stands, wiseass!” Tico shouted. “Cash! Come on, I need the ten or I’ll have the meanies on you!”

The customer jerked back his card and shoved it again into his clothing. At the same time, he spat a mouthful of tamale into Tico’s acned face. “Fuck you, bastard! If you don’t like it, take your shitty food back!”

Tico screamed in rage. Without bothering to circle the vending cart, the food seller launched himself across its steaming top, crashing into the Chicano and rolling them both onto the pavement. From onlookers cries went up:

“St. Jerome! St. Jerome!”

“Somebody call the meanies!”

“Get those guys apart!”

Half a dozen ragged figures began looting the pushcart. Tico, rolling on the ground with his opponent, pulled free and ran to rescue his stand.

People surrounding the melee were shoved and trampled. They fought back.

From a window in Davis Hall overlooking Sproul Plaza a black girl shouted, “Hold on, we’re coming!” In a matter of seconds a score of young men and women, all bearing the maroon-and-gray badge, began shouldering their way across the plaza, trying to reach the struggling mob around the overturned pushcart.

A siren began to howl to the south, near the old school building at Ho Chi Minh Park where the meanies had their sector headquarters. A blue electric bus filled with meanie riot troopers struggled to make its way to the plaza before the minor scuffle could grow into a major disturbance.

Back at Sproul Plaza, the struggling mobs had grown to several hundred on each side, the St. Jerome faction forming itself into disciplined wedges, splitting the more numerous but unorganized street people into straggling groups. Three of the disciplined wedges battled to converge on the original point of struggle and rescue the Chicano.

Before the St. Jerome forces could reach him, however, the meanie bus had ground to a slow halt at the edge of the plaza and meanies were pouring out of the bus, struggling through the crowd, and making their way toward the center of the turmoil.

The left flank of the wedge of St. Jerome supporters faced down a line of meanies, the badges of the rioters reflecting off the metallic NMPSD insignia of the meanies. The wedge quivered and bulged, its members shifting nervously. The meanies advanced slowly past them, moving street people out of the way, their line of advance paralleling the side of the wedge until they reached the overturned taco cart. The troublesome customer glared defiantly at the approaching meanies, his exit blocked by a semicircle of nondescript persons bearing a vague resemblance to Tico. The vendor himself was conspicuously absent.

The meanie at the head of the line surveyed the wreckage of the looted pushcart and laid a hand heavily on the Chicano’s arm. “You come with us,” he grunted. He passed the youth down the line of meanies to the bus.

The wedges of St. Jerome members slowly withdrew toward Davis Hall. A few of them shouted briefly at the Chicano and the meanies. People started picking apart the remnants of the taco pushcart, looking for leftover bits of food or for parts they could put to use or convert into scarce ducats.

Life in Sproul Plaza returned to normal.

The sign over the main entrance of the sector meanie headquarters read NORCAL MEGALOPOLIS PUBLIC SERVICE DEPARTMENT. Inside its main reception room the Chicano from Sproul Plaza was stripped and searched. His only possessions—the food card, apparently legitimate, and a battered roach holder made of an ancient paper clip—were held and receipted. Their owner was ushered into an office.

The nameplate on the desk inside the office said LT. OLIVER GONZALEZ. The lieutenant was bending over a dossier as the younger man entered. The Chicano stood silently, conscious of the meanies behind him waiting near the open doorway, ready to act before he could reach Gonzalez’s desk, should he move against the official.

After a wait that seemed endless, Gonzalez looked up from the folder on his desk and motioned to a straight-backed chair in front of his desk. The lieutenant waited until the youth was seated, then gestured to the meanies in the doorway. In an instant the door was shut.

Gonzalez looked at the newcomer. “Well, Marco, I thought we weren’t going to see you around here any more.”

The Chicano did not reply.

Gonzalez rubbed a hand over his ruddy, fleshy face. “Don’t want to talk to me? Maybe you will after a while in the back.” He stared at the other’s dark face.

“It was that fucker’s fault,” Marco grumbled.

“What happened?”

“Hell, I was just buying a little grub from him. He started a fight for nothing!”

“Nothing? Did you have any ducats with you?”

“I gave him my food card.”

“You know that’s only good for municipal cafeterias or groceries. Pushcart service is a luxury, and the megalopolis is only pledged to provide you with the necessities of life: housing, a set of clothes every two years, and nourishment. Such as it is. Health care when you need it, and cadaver disposal when you die. Enough entertainment to keep you busy when you’re out of work.” He interrupted himself, locked eyes with Marco’s darkly angry orbs. “You are out of work?”

Marco nodded in fury. “Sure I’m out of work. Who isn’t?”

“I could name a few, starting with me,” Gonzalez said. “And some walking-around money. We used to call that an allowance. We gave allowances to children when I was your age, Marco.”

Marco started to spit on the floor, caught Gonzalez’s expression, and held back. “Yeah. An allowance. There’s no work.”

Gonzalez leaned back and clasped clean hands over his small paunch—a rarity in Norcal dome. “Well, let’s not quarrel over that,” he said. “Neither you nor I can change it. What I want to know is what to do with you. It seems to me that if you’re really looking for a trip outside, you’re doing just right”

Marco stared sullenly at the dossier on Gonzalez’s desk. The lieutenant followed his gaze. “Hard to read upside down, Marco. It says ‘December 22, 1997, arrested shoplifting, charges dropped.’ What did you want a brassiere for, Marco? You’re not into transvestism.”

“It was for my old lady.”

“I didn’t know you had one then.”

“I didn’t. But I figured …”

Gonzalez sighed.

“‘Unable to pay restaurant bill, March 13, ’98. Agreed to work off debt.’ Now why go into a diner and order food that you know you don’t have the ducats to cover?”

“I was hungry. I got stoned, it made me hungry.”

Gonzalez ran his eye down the page, turned the yellow sheet over, and examined the other side. “I’m not going to read you all this. You know your story.”

“Yeah, they docked my allowance.”

“One more and you go outside. If you’d been involved in an injury offense you’d be outside already. And today wasn’t far short of that. Somebody could have got mashed in that fracas.”

Marco shrugged.

Gonzalez closed the dossier. “You still in that double, Marco?”

“Yeah. Me and my old lady. We like it.”

“Sure you do, that’s fine as far as it goes. But don’t you realize that two-marriages are unstable, dangerous? How many doubles in Angela Davis Hall?”

“A lot. Krishna Lafferty thinks they’re a good idea, back to traditional values, you know? And it’s legal.”

Gonzalez nodded wearily.

“So me and Cuda like it. We’re like an old-time family.”

Gonzalez grunted. “I’m not quarreling with your legal rights, Marco. But we know that there’s more violence between members of two-marriages than any other members of society. So I’m suggesting that you and Cuda find some single who’s looking for an old man and lady and form a triad. Or just find another couple and set up a quad.”

“Just like you, I suppose.”

Gonzalez looked at him, surprised. “Yes, like me. I’m in a quad. Two men, two women. We’ve been together for six years now.”

“And I suppose everything’s sweet and light.”

“We have our problems. But we try to keep our group head up. One of my wives is trained in group-head coordination, and she keeps us pretty straight.”

“You trip a lot too, I bet.”

“Maybe St. Jeromes would be better off if they’d do a little tripping. You people are just so backward, you’re amazing. Two-marriages, no drugs—”

“We blow grass.”

“Come on! You ought to check some history films, Marco. Those traditional values you people keep talking about, they didn’t survive because they just didn’t work. All the time the law was coming down on psychedelic people, when they were the most peaceful citizens. We had one flap after another over heroin as a cause of burglaries—the poor addicts were only burglars because the law pushed the price up and they couldn’t afford their fixes.”

“You can’t be effective if you’re smacked out.”

“I’m not telling you to do smack, wiseass. At least we’re rid of that, once and for all. I’m talking about how your order gets things so damned turned around! Like that big hassle over contracepting the water supply.”

“That was before my time.”

“Your leader Krishna Lafferty fought it all the way.”

“He was right, you know.”

Gonzalez snorted. “Lafferty came around.”

“Yield ye may to gain another day,” Marco recited.

“Anyway,” Gonzalez resumed, “I didn’t have you brought in here to discuss philosophy or talk about Krishna Lafferty. I want to tell you that another stunt like that near-riot today and out you go. How long do you think you’d last outside the dome?”

Marco shrugged defiantly. “Maybe it ain’t so bad out there. You ever been out?”

Gonzalez shook his head.

“You know anybody who has?” the youth persisted.

“Not the point, Marco, as you know. The air outside is poisoned, the water is dead, the earth itself hardly supports life. And it gets worse every year, with the wastes dumped by all the domes. We’re in here to stay, for all the official line about recovering our strength and remaking the outside world. Whoever gets put out is as good as dead. And we can’t stand troublemakers in as jammed-up and delicately balanced a society as this one is.

“That’s why it’s a trip outside for violent crimes. First offense. And I tell you frankly, you’re on the thin edge.”

Marco slumped low in his chair. “Okay,” he grumbled, “I’ll be a good boy. Now will you tell your junior meanies to give me back my stuff and let me go home?”

Gonzalez waved him toward the door and lifted a handset as Marco headed out of the office. He spoke briefly into the machine.

He put the papers from his desk into drawers, closed them and spun locking dials, then started to leave. It had been a pretty quiet day altogether, with only the Sproul Plaza tiff to lend it excitement. Well, a little tranquility was good.

Gonzalez stopped at the duty desk and told Sergeant Seabury he was headed for home, signed out, and left the meanie station through a side door. He took a meandering path through Ho Chi Minh Park, trying to breathe the meanie atmosphere out of his system. As usual, the park was filled with people as the early evening turned to gray-brown dusk.

The few lights in the girders above were not on yet—or not visible, at any rate. The scrawny trees that survived in the park stretched dying, leafless branches toward the dome and the faint glowing blob that moved daily across its curvature. Patches of ragged grass alternated with hard-packed dirt, struggling stubbornly to retain their hold on the earth but losing it slowly, a few square yards a year, defeated by the imperfectly balanced atmosphere, the faint sunlight, the heavy traffic of human feet by day and recumbent bodies by night.

The park’s vegetation had been retained at the building of Norcal dome for biological as well as psychological reasons. The planners of the domes had known that mankind’s animal nature calls out for renewal through intercourse with green life and natural surroundings. Centuries of city building and the ceaseless rise of criminality and madness had proved man’s self-styled superiority to wildlife an arrogant and tragic conceit.

And with the building of the domes, the utter abandonment of the wilderness countryside, it had become necessary to establish a new ecological balance. The oxygen-producing plant life of the forests and plains was mostly dead now, as was that of the sea. The only contact between the enclosed enclaves of humanity and the open land came in the form of waste disposals. Waste disposals and the rare, fleeting passage of a hermetically sealed transit capsule beating its way slowly through the air, carrying sparse trade goods and a handful of passengers between one domed megalopolis and another.

Most of the oxygen needed for the preservation of human life was provided by photosynthetic processes in huge alga beds that covered most of the area that had previously been San Francisco and San Pablo Bays. The stimulus and energy supply of the faint, diffused sunlight was supplemented by powerful lamps. Additional oxygen was produced by the megalopolis’s jealously preserved parks and by experimental machinery that, it was hoped, would some day distill oxygen in useful amounts from the poisonous exterior atmosphere.

Progress was slow, and the gradual death of the parks threatened the oxygen balance of the dome, but the alga beds did provide almost all the breathable air that was needed.

Gonzalez took a semicircular detour to avoid a group of naked lovers tangled on the ground. Ahead of him a drug vendor had set up a small stand and hung out his daily price list. Gonzalez stopped and studied the prices, checked his cash level, and decided that the day’s specials didn’t warrant an expenditure. He tried to remember the level of supplies at home, decided that Min-yi would be keeping careful track of them, and passed the vending stand with only a wave and a casual exchange of pleasantries.
. . .