Earth Made of Glass Page 2

  I cleaned up, changed shirts, washed my face, and swallowed an alcohol scrubber to get the last of the afternoon’s wine out of my system. I combed through my hair again and looked into the mirror at the emerging monk spot on top of my head.

  “Sinking into melancholy again?” Margaret asked, coming up and putting her arms around me.

  I dropped an arm around her wide, strong shoulders and leaned a little against her. “Ja, you could say that. Trop de tristejoi.”

  “Semper valors,” she said, hugging back. “It’s funny how hard vacations are on you; you get so tired of work, but after a few days away from it you sink into this.”

  “I suppose I miss the jovent more here,” I said. “Even though it’s in your culture that I left it.”

  She stiffened; I had said the wrong thing again. My going to Caledony had led to two things, besides my personal end of adolescence: Margaret became the most important person in my life, and my life became the work did for the Council of Humanity and the Office of Special Projects.

  But now and then—well, every day—my thoughts would begin to turn to my old jovent days, and though I was too old for it now, and anyway the old jovent life was gone and no one in Nou Occitan did it anymore . . . I wished I hadn’t had to leave the party so early. I wished I were back. I wished a lot of stupid things. And Margaret had been with me for so long that by now she knew every stupid thing I wished, whether I voiced them or not. “Sorry,” I said.

  “Sorry you said it, you mean. You still think it.”

  “I can’t help that.”

  “You could try.” She wrenched out of the one-armed hug I had been giving her and was through the door before I could think of anything else to say. I heard her stamping down the hallway.

  I knew that Margaret and I would be trying to make it up within an hour or less. Lately, though, I often had the feeling that a day would come when making it up would no longer seem worth the effort. And what then? I sat on the end of the bed, feeling sorrier and sorrier for myself.

  I heard the swift thudding of Margaret’s feet in the hallway. She threw the door open, smiling as if she had it in mind to tease me. “Hey, husband, are you still pitying yourself?”

  “Uh, not for any longer than I can help. What—”

  “It’s Shan. We’ve got another assignment.”

  She was gone down the hall again, forcing me to run after her to my parents’ parlor, where the image of Shan, twice life size, looked patiently from the screen toward us.

  “Aha, Giraut, there you are,” he said. A slight twitch at the corner of his mouth told me I must look disarrayed. It happens when you allow your personal grooming to be interrupted by fits of melancholy. “I hope that neither of you has any pressing commitments more than four standays from now?”

  “None really,” I said. The Dark was going to fall soon—the time when Terraust’s forests and ranges would burn, and Wilson’s sky would be darkened with the fine soot that chilled the world every six stanyears. I had enjoyed the Darks I could remember, when everyone in Nou Occitan stayed home and did creative work or held long parties with friends. But there would be other Darks, and besides, right now I had far too much time to think, anyway.

  “Well, then,” Shan said. “I have a thoroughly bad situation. If we succeed I suppose it will be a feather in all our caps and you will be in line for some promotions and commendations, but that is because no one expects us to succeed. Is that intriguing enough to make you interested in taking the job?”

  Margaret made that flapping noise with her lips that sounded like a disgusted horse. “You know perfectly well that all we’re doing here on leave is sitting around getting on each other’s nerves and bickering. This is a job for the Office of Special Projects, isn’t it?”

  Shan grinned with something that might have been the glint of battle, or just his usual appreciation for Margaret’s cut-the-crap approach. “Right. You’re both secretly activated as of now in your appointments with the Office of Special Projects. As always your cover story will be that you’re there on Council of Humanky business—as far as the Council, or any outsiders, are concerned, you’re going to be cultural envoys again, which is something you are both experienced and effective at. It should be a good cover for you, because, in this particular case, the ability to roam about freely—or at all—is going to be critical. You’re going to just about the worst trouble spot the Council has to deal with, and I’m not even going to pretend that you’re likely to like it. In addition to two impossible local populations and a lot of complicated politics, you’re going to be coping with high gravity, intense humid heat, foul air, and way too much shortwave ultraviolet. Not a bad looking place on postcards but that’s all the closer I’d ever want to get to it. Have I scared you off yet?”

  Margaret said, “You want us to go to Briand, don’t you? Of course we will.”

  I felt a cold chill even before Shan slowly nodded yes. “I thought you’d guess it from that description. And I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you accepted the job. Yes, it’s Briand. Right now I have several of the OSP’s field agents there, and we need more, as even a casual scan of the news would tell you. Unofficially, let me add, it’s far worse than what the news depicts.”

  We made the arrangements quickly—shipping our personal effects from Wilson, and our furniture and warm-weather clothes from storage on Earth, to Briand in forty-five standays, setting up our appointment at the training school on Earth, for the rapid orientation we had to have first; and arranging concierge services for all the myriad of weird small things that always crop up in jumping tens of light years.

  After that, there wasn’t much left to talk about, and Shan rang off. Margaret got on the com to send a fast letter to her mother in Caledony and tell her we wouldn’t have a chance to jump over for another visit on this vacation. I went back to my parents’ guest room, stretched, and set about finishing my toilet. The hair finally wouldn’t lie down till I put some antistatic on the comb, and then it took all the more effort to fluff it properly, and no matter what, that little hairless patch on top, like a death’s-head surfacing from a sea of hair, could not be made to disappear or fit in.

  But I was cheerful as I worked on this, and I could hear Margaret’s fingers clattering away on the keys quickly and forcefully, not because we were in a hurry but just because she too had a lot of extra energy. All it took to banish depression, fighting, bad sex, and the tendency to drink a lot, in either of us, was a call from Shan with a job. It had been that way for some stanyears now, and I still had no sense of whether that was a blessing or a curse.

  Neither of us knew much about Shan. Though I had known him for a decade of stanyears, I didn’t even know if “Shan” was his given name, family name, patronym, matrenym, clan, generated name, or what. He had no other name I was ever made aware of. As I had advanced in both my covert and overt positions, I had found myself at more formal receptions and on more platforms with him, and become steadily more aware both of how little I knew him, and how far-reaching his political power really was.

  But even though I listened ever more closely for clues to his origin—or just to his full name—always it was the same. “Ambassador Shan.” “Envoy Shan.” “Minister Shan.” Once, in a blistering hot graveyard on the beach of a salt-saturated sea, local officials had called him “Colonel-Commander Shan,” but that culture had had no army for more than three hundred stanyears, and out of the seventeen cultures on that planet that had had armies, not one had ever had any such rank. I knew because I had checked.

  So I knew Shan the same way that everyone did, as far as I could tell: not at all. And probably I knew almost everyone who knew him, across all the human-settled worlds.

  The Council of Humanity’s diplomatic service embraces a small bureaucracy on Earth, not more than four hundred people in all, plus the ambassadors to the Thousand Cultures (of which there are actually 1228), plus the Embassy staff—and each staff might be at
most ten people, with three being much more typical. The Council Special Police, the military muscle behind Council decrees, number just twelve thousand. So the whole personnel roster of the Council of Humanity, from the three secretaries- general down to the lowliest private, is probably not as large as the population of most culture capitals.

  The Office of Special Projects, within which Shan was not only my senior colleague but also my direct supervisor, never had more than a thousand personnel, and almost all of them also held jobs with the Council of Humanity.

  Yet within either of those very small circles, no one I knew, who knew Shan, knew anything about him. It may have been no more than that he was very private, I suppose. Whatever the reason, despite the way in which he utterly shaped my life, I can’t say I really know a thing about him, even if years later I could instantly remember his appearance down to his particular way of twitching an eyebrow or the slight pursing of one side of his thin lips that always meant he was looking forward to surprising some deserving toszet with bad news.

  I was reasonably sure he liked me, and Margaret as well. Since we had entrusted our whole existences to him, that mattered.

  That evening, after dinner with my parents, when we had told them that in four standays, just under five days local, we would be off yet again to do what we could to keep the human race together, Margaret and I sat out on the little terrace my father and I had built, enjoying the reflection of the stars on the calm black sea far down the mountains from us. “There are times when I wonder why I ever left,” I said, “and then there are times when I wonder why I ever come back.”

  Margaret shrugged. “I feel the same way about my parents’ house in Utilitopia. I guess next vacation it’s their turn to put up with us.”

  “That’s the system so far,” I agreed. “I suppose we could change it sometime, and probably we should, but so far it's been very comfortable, don’t you think?”

  “If it’s comfortable not to have to make any decisions, well, sure, I suppose.” She sighed and leaned against me; I slipped an arm around her and waited. Usually, anymore, this was the start of a fight. “Giraut, if you had stayed here, what would have happened to you?”

  “Hmm. What would have happened to me? Well, I suppose, oh, I’d probably have been a drunk like poor old Marcabru, maybe even killed myself the way he did. Or I might have died in a duel like Raimbaut, or been killed in a sporting accident like Rufeu. Poor toszet; I’m always afraid I treat him as if he were mentally six years old, rather than just physically. At least he had the good sense to get killed after the modern psypyx came along; nowadays I guess it’s what, eighty percent of the time they can manage a transfer of the last recording to the cloned body? He only lost a few weeks—”

  “Giraut, my husband and lover,” Margaret said, “quiet! You’re babbling. I know it’s because you’re nervous, but it’s only making me nervous and I don’t think it’s helping you. It’s making us sound like an old couple gossiping at a news broadcast.” “Right as always, midons.”

  “Now could you stand it if I ask you the same question seriously?”

  “Perhaps.” A skimmer was crawling slowly out on the black mirror of Totzmare, running on his electric motor, no sail up and no sound coming to us two kilometers above and behind him. The black shape cut forward like a knife blade across the sea, and the stars reflecting in it danced in mad circles as his slight wake stirred the water. “Ask again, then.”

  “What I meant was what you might be like if you had lived. You described dying, or having to restart from a psypyx. I mean, what sort of person might you have become?”

  “Well, I think I’d have grown old deploring everyone around me, especially as the old jovent lifestyle was being abandoned, and then found some quiet corner to retire to where I could detest everyone else, plus myself, more and more. Maybe become a solitary drunk. I don’t know. Nothing good, anyway, Margaret.” I shuddered. No Occitan is really fond of the truth when anything more attractive is available.

  “Kind of what I thought, too. And you know what would have happened to me, back in Caledony? I would have gotten married to some nice older man who would take a plain-looking woman like me. I’d have spent my work time on some clerical job and my off time going to church and raising kids, I guess.”

  “Do you want kids?”

  “God, no. That’s not the issue. It’s just ...” She sighed. “I never seem to be able to explain it once I lead up to it.”

  That had been true for at least a stanyear’s worth of these conversations, so I let her have a long silence in case she might happen to think of what it was that she wished she could say. But she didn’t, that night, or any of our remaining ones in Elinorien.

  Just before dawn on the fifth day following, with our bags already sprung to the Office of Special Projects prep base at Manila, we hugged my parents and then walked the kilometer into Elinorien, where we went to a public springer. With no particular reason to delay, we stepped through the gray featureless fog of the springer, going from Elinorien’s deep red dawn (stained by the permanent cloud of carbon particles that hangs above Wilson always) to the blazing greens and blues of Manila at 10 a.m. (whenever possible they try to have you do long springs between times of day that are not too far apart; it supposedly minimizes spring lag).

  Twenty-five light years is a long way, and I was glad that the Office of Special Projects budget was picking up the cost of springing us. Nonetheless, although the springer had to instantaneously burn four and a half times the equivalent energy of the cube of the gravitational potential between a 7 AU orbit around Arcturus and a 1 AU orbit around Earth, this was one of the gentler springs between the settled systems: the surface-to-surface gravitional change wasn't much—Earth’s surface gravity is about four percent less than Wilson’s.

  That was a great benefit, because Margaret is as susceptible to springer sickness as I am blessedly immune, and the little change of gravity didn’t do more than make Margaret stumble and retch.

  We had arrived at an ordinary public springer near the newer business district of Manila, from which we could walk to the nondescript office building that is the training headquarters for the Office of Special Projects. Somewhere, our special springer passcards had just run up an enormous bill that would be quietly erased from the record; the passcards that OSP agents carried while on mission, so far as I knew, were unique, in that they overrode all security and credit checks—any springer with access to enough energy could send us to any other springer, even fifty light years away. As long as it was on OSP business, we could spring to anywhere in settled space on no notice at all. Shan had once mentioned that we could spend up to seventy times our annual salaries on the longer springs, but I’d never heard of anyone getting into trouble about overspending the card.

  The public springer was just down the street from the training center, and our luggage had gone there the day before; we walked the short distance at a leisurely pace, since it was four hours till our first class. The sea in the distance, it seemed to me, was so blue that it was vulgar; the scraggly looking palm trees seemed washed out in the harsh, pale light. I was back on Earth, and, as always, already working up a defensive dislike for it.

  Earth is old and crowded and awfully beat up. Most of the population lives in little concrete boxes for years on end, circulating from the kitchen to the bathroom to the virtual reality hookup, over and over, for all except their lifetime’s seven “outside years” during which they supposedly earn enough money to pay for their ninety-odd years on the dole. (I knew from some figures collected by the Office of Special Projects that it cost more to keep the Earth people outside doing supposedly productive things—done better by robots—than it did to keep them in the concrete boxes, but the people in the boxes were voters, and, true or not, they wanted to feel they had earned their supposed keep.)

  Manila is a startlingly ugly city of nineteen million, an agglomeration of huge concrete blocks that stretches all
the way around the bay, down to Cavite, and up to Malolos, making it look like a large squashed bug from orbit. The old center city was bombed out in the Slaughter, so the “new” capital area—just over five hundred years old—is a collection of post-reconstruction stained concrete pyramids and domes, remarkable for its dullness and its interchangeability with other places of the same era. Still, at least it’s on the sea, near the equator; we had once had to spend a sustained period of Olympic City, a transpolis of seventy- five million surrounding Puget Sound that could make anyone appreciate Manila.

  Manila had always been a capital or administrative center— first for different native kings (one of whom had been lucky and smart enough to kill Magellan), then for the Spanish, American, Japanese, Indian, and Javanese Empires at various times, for a while as a province of Australia, of Old America, of Alaska, sometimes as a nominally independent country but usually under someone’s domination. Until the Slaughter the people there had done fairly well during most changes of hands.

  Now they were one of several international cities that the Earth Administration leased to the Council of Humanity, and their main job was consuming the dues payments that came in from the Thousand Cultures by employing human beings to do the filing and recording that could be better done (and had to be checked) by a computer.

  The Office of Special Projects training facility is just a large office building with some pretty good neuroprojection setups and a lot of temporary apartments. It’s where you go to study before going on a mission, to learn the basics that you’re going to need and get the situation firmly into your head, so that your first few weeks can be reasonably gaffe-free. “Is this our tenth time here?” I asked Margaret, after we collected our key from the front desk.

  “Why, are you hoping we’ll get our next trip free?”