Politician by Piers Anthony
But it was not primarily the dream of sanctuary, power, or wealth that brought me here. It was Megan.
I had one true love at age fifteen, the refugee girl Helse, then sixteen. We were to marry, but she died in her wedding dress, so that I could live. There could be no complete love for me thereafter, until I encountered the one other woman my heart could accept: Megan. I had never met her, indeed had seen only her picture as she was at age sixteen, bearing a haunting similarity to Helse. It had been a false similarity, for the picture had been five years out of date; Helse had been only eleven when it was made. In addition, Megan was Saxon, while Helse was Hispanic. Those were, perhaps, the least of the differences between them, and this I have always known.
But man is not a rational creature, and the Latin temperament may be less stable than others, and I less stable and rational than most Latins. I say this with a certain bemused pride. Megan was the niece of a kindly old scientist who had helped Helse and me when we were desperate; my gratitude to him overflowed the boundaries of rationality and found a partial focus on his niece. When Helse died, that focus strengthened. I explain this objectively, but it has more power than that. Only through Megan could I recover any part of either Helse or the scientist—and I had to have that part. In Megan I might recreate my One True Love in her moment of greatest beauty and joy.
My eyesight blurred as I stared at the savage maelstrom that was the face of Jupiter. The turbulence between the bands was at once more vast and violent than any effort of man, and more measured and lovely in its slow motion. Huge and ruthless currents played across those fringes in their gargantuan rituals. Only the surface of that three-dimensional flux was visible, yet all of it would manifest in its own time and fashion. Nothing man could do would change this progression; we could only watch and wonder, trying to glimpse at least a fraction of our own ignorance of the phenomenon. Even so was my feeling for Megan, the woman I had never met. The submerged currents of my being had been progressing for fifteen years in their slow, but inevitable, pattern, and now they were bringing me to her at last. A spectator might protest that it was foolish of me to pursue such a dream so late, but the spectator could not see the deeper imperatives that drove me, like the massive coriolis forces of Jupiter. Megan! As moth to candle, I was coming to her.
In the long interim my sister Spirit had sustained me; she was my strength in adversity, and my most intimate companion and friend. Without her I could not have gotten through. Spirit was the only one who truly understood. Oh, there had been other women along the way, good women, and I had interacted with them to the extent I was able. But I had been able to leave any and all of them, as indeed I was doing now. They had been wonderful, but they had become part of my past.
Down we moved, following the planet around to the east, matching its velocity of rotation. The giant bands alternated colors; there were shades of blue, brown, and orange, demarked by lines of black and yellow and spots both bright and dark. In general the white spots were high-pressure cells that had risen from the depths and were converting their heat to rotary motion, which motion was greedily sucked at by the zonal jets. The zonal jets drew their energy from the rising eddies they consumed, not vice versa; the newcomers were consumed by the hungry, established powers. There, too, perhaps, was a lesson for me.
The white spots spun counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere, and the cold low-pressure spots should have spun clockwise, but the Great Red Spot, politically known as the Nation of Redspot, was anti-cyclonic, spinning counterclockwise, too, and enduring eternally despite the hunger of the bands. Perhaps that was the example I should follow: to maintain my own orientation, to endure regardless, even if others were destroyed by the environment.
We touched the thin fringe of atmosphere and glided down toward our destination. I am of course contracting this; in the hours of descent we paused to eat and eliminate and sleep. But always we returned to view the tapestry of the Colossus, mesmerized by it. The twenty-thousand-mile broad orange band fuzzed farther, for we were technically in it now, and the separate currents and spots of it fogged out with proximity. We phased in more precisely to the velocity of the band. Jupiter rotated a full turn in about ten hours, and the winds of this band moved faster than the planet by about two hundred miles per hour, and we exceeded that by about three hundred miles per hour so that we could use vanes to plane down through the thickening atmosphere.
We passed through the ammonia-ice clouds of the one-hundred-millibar level; the ship shook as the atmosphere took hold. The screen showed only reddish haze; imagination had to fill in now. Then it cleared, the flight smoothed out, and vision cleared— until we encountered another layer, twenty miles below, this time of brownish clouds, and experienced more turbulence. Finally we came to the bluish layer, with gray and white clouds. We were at the water-precipitation level at last.
I looked down through a rift in that layer and suddenly saw a panorama of the whole of populated Jupiter—thousands of city-bubbles floating at the five-bar level, glowing like baubles in the band about the globe of Jupiter, a scintillating network of civilization ranged along the most extravagant geography extant. How paltry the land-bound cities of old Earth must have been, compared to this!
But it was illusion, a mere passing vision of the sort I am subject to. The bubbles were there, of course, but I could not see them. They were ranged one hundred, two hundred thousand miles around the planet, masked by the cloud layer; there was no way for anyone to see the entire array at one glance. Only in imagination, as I had done. But what a sight for the mind’s eye!
Below us now, the view was relatively clear, but the sheer mass of the thickening atmosphere caused my gaze to fog out. There simply wasn’t anything to see there. For a moment I felt uneasy, exposed, fearing a fall to the awesome depths of the planet. But, of course, no fall was possible; we were using gravity shielding now, as the planetary gee was over twice Earth-normal at this level.
Gravity shielding does not eliminate the force of gravity, of course, any more than a magnifying glass eliminates light, since gravity is really a deformation of space by matter, which cannot be negated. Shielding merely focuses or diffuses it, so that an object in that field is affected to a greater or lesser extent. The force of gravity is conveyed by gravitrons; when their normal pattern of flow is altered, so is their effect. Gravitrons influence everything, including others of their kind; that means that gravitrons can be used to deflect other gravitrons, at least temporarily. Then the gravitrons bend back, recovering their original configuration, like the resilient surface of a sponge, no permanent damage done. Gravity deflected for the moment, not negated: the breakthrough of the millennium.
The ship homed in on the metropolitan bubble of Nyork, one of the major cities of the Solar System. In the distance, as it floated beneath the cloud layer, it looked like a marble, then like a boulder, then like a planetoid. It floated beneath us, grandly rotating, a stream of tiny bubbles feeding into its nether hub, the local commuter traffic. We, as a shuttle ship from space, warranted the apex hub.
“It floats but it spins,” Spirit murmured appreciatively. I knew what she meant. One might have supposed that a floating city would not need centrifugal gee, as it would feel the planetary gee that was over twice Earth-normal. After all, the occupants of a boat floating on water experience full gee, and those of an airplane in flight, and those riding a balloon do, too. But the city-bubbles are, overall, more dense than water, while the Jupiter atmosphere at this level is about one-fifth the density of Earthly air. Such a bubble would plummet until it reached its level of density—down around the metallic-hydrogen translation zone. The overwhelming pressure would implode the bubbles long before they achieved that equilibrium. So they have to use gravity shielding to make them light enough to float in hydrogen gas, and therefore it is necessary to restore internal gee through rotation, exactly as in space. Only extremely diffuse bubbles could float naturally, and even those employ gee shielding to reduce their in
So the city floated and it spun. Nyork had a diameter of approximately eight thousand feet, or about one and a half miles. That was just about as big as any city got; larger bubbles were possible, but they lost cohesion and were unsafe. This one completed a full turn every six and a half minutes, which might seem slow, but that meant that its equator was traveling at about fifty miles an hour. That velocity was evident as we descended to it. Of course there was little velocity at the hub, which was why this was the point of access.
I had envisioned the cities glowing. That turned out to be false. Nyork had running lights and a beacon, but no portholes; it was basically an opaque shell, with the action all confined within. From a distance it would be no more than a dark hulk, hardly visible except in pulsar fashion, as the beacon swung brightly by. That really did not detract from its grandeur; what counts is usually what is inside, in cities as well as in men.
Tugships came out to latch on to us, and we landed, dropping vertically, the tugs employing maneuvering jets to effect contact. We descended into a circular hanger, and a panel slid over, sealing us in. The hanger was pressured in a moment, and we debarked, floating carefully out. It was all null-gee here in the hub.
We were guided along a tube-conduit to a transport chamber and elevator, where there was a routine bottleneck as the passengers had to wait their turns. I tried to look around, but there really wasn’t much to see—just the machinery of baggage handling, refueling, supplies, and maintenance. I suppose it might have been much the same when a passenger ship docked at an oceanside city of old Earth; experienced travelers would not have craned their necks to glimpse the routine procedures of ship servicing. But Spirit and I had never been to Jupiter-planet before or to a city of this magnitude, and it was all wondrously new to us.
I could see that there were real advantages to handling baggage in free-fall; one little shove and it floated right across to its hamper. As it got to the edge of the chamber it seemed to curve. That was our perspective, of course; we were already at the edge, benefiting from the trace gee there, and thought of ourselves as fixed in place. Actually we were moving with the city’s rotation while the baggage was going straight. I had seen the effect aboard ships, but here the scale was larger, making it seem like a novelty.
Then it was our turn for the elevator. We got in the cage, and it slid down the gradual curve of the bubble-shell. The cage was suspended by the top, so that as it moved outward from the pole region, it oriented to the increasing gee. The velocity was slow, but we knew why: If we were simply allowed to drop we would have fallen in an apparent spiral and crashed into something. Descent within a rotating frame is actually a matter of lateral acceleration, and it can be disastrous when uncontrolled.
After five or six minutes we stopped at a landing. We were now at full gee. We stepped out into the processing center. Most of the passengers were regular Nyork city residents with badges that let them pass without hindrance, but Spirit and I were first-time arrivals to this city and to this planet. We had to run the bureaucratic gantlet. We had to show our new citizenship papers and official releases from the Jupiter Navy and certificates of inoculation against sundry contagious maladies. It seemed that the planetary environment was not considered to be as sanitary as that of space.
“Where will you be establishing residence?” the official inquired.
I didn’t know; for fifteen years in the Navy I had always gone where assigned. But Spirit was more practical about such details. “Ybor,” she said. “In Sunshine.”
“Ybor, Sunshine,” he repeated, entering it in the proper sequence. “Nice country down there.” He completed the entries and got a printout, which he handed to me. “This will clear things when you board that bubble. Now I suggest you freshen up for the ceremony.”
“Ceremony?” I asked blankly.
He only smiled, perhaps assuming I was being coy.
We cleaned up and were conducted to another elevator that took us up to the top of the residential band. The general design of Nyork was standard; the apartments of the residents—one thousand cubic feet of space allotted per person, or a chamber ten feet on each side—were arranged in a cylinder within the bubble. The width of that residential band was four thousand feet, and the length of it about twenty-four thousand feet, theoretically providing space for 960,000 apartments per floor. Actually a lot of space was used for other purposes, such as hallways, public sanitary facilities, business and entertainment structures, storage, and the like, so that perhaps only four to five hundred thousand residential cells were there. Since there were twenty such floors on the strip, this put the total city capacity at eight to ten million people. Of course there could be more; in the slum sections large families crowded into cells meant for small ones, and some people had no established address. I knew this only from my childhood study of geography but was sure it remained true. At any rate, the rated capacity of the city was in the range of ten million, and there were a number of adjacent cities that swelled the metropolitan population to several times that figure. There were many people on Jupiter, as there were on Saturn, Uranus, and the lesser planets, such as Earth itself.
When we emerged at the top of the band, Spirit and I paused with renewed wonder. The entire center of the bubble, a space about a mile and a half across, was open, except for the mock-sun sphere in the center. By shielding our eyes from the concentrated brightness of that sun—for Earth-orbit radiation is twenty-seven times as intense as Jupiter-orbit radiation—we could look right across to the far side. There were a few fleecy clouds in the null-gee center, which made it appear as if we were peering down from above. Again I had seen similar effects before but never on this grand a scale. I simply stared, and so did Spirit.
“This way, please, Captain Hubris,” someone said. Bemusedly I went where directed and found myself sitting in a strange, four-wheeled, open vehicle with a uniformed chauffeur in front.
“A car!” Spirit exclaimed beside me. “A genuine antique automobile!”
Now I recognized it. This was a replica of the kind of vehicle once used on old Earth for transportation. Of course this one lacked the pollutive combustion motor, but in other respects it seemed authentic.
A well-dressed man took the front seat. He turned momentarily to face us. “Welcome to Nyork, Captain Hubris and Commander Hubris,” he said to us. “I am Mayor Jones.” He reached back a chubby hand, and each of us took it in turn. “I hope you enjoy the parade.”
“Parade?”
“We have to give you your hero’s welcome to the city, and to Jupiter, Captain,” he explained. “Just smile and wave every so often; it’s a necessary event.”
“But—”
“You are the bold officer who cleaned up the Belt, so long a blemish on the fair face of the System,” he explained. “We of Jupiter want to demonstrate that we really appreciate that.”
I shrugged, knowing that he gave me too much credit. I had been with a fine organization at the Belt, and even so, it had been a chancy thing, with necessary compromises and consequences. That’s over now.
The car started moving. “Well, Captain, we folk of Empire State just want you to know we’re proud of you. Nyork has a sizable Hispanic element, in case you should want to settle here. The way you handled the refugee-robbing pirates of the Juclip did not go unnoticed. We’re really glad to see a genuine Hispanic hero!”
A Hispanic hero. That was evidently what made me novel in this Saxon culture. Somehow I was not completely pleased. I knew without looking at her that Spirit shared my reserve.
“Why, you could run for President right now,” the mayor continued exuberantly. “You’d pick up all the hero votes and the minorities votes, too, and that’s a potent political base!”
I laughed as if this were humor, but Spirit gave
The car moved into a park-like region where deciduous trees lined the drive, and there were extended reaches of green lawn. Indeed, it would have been easy to believe that this was Earth itself, had it not been for the concave curve of the terrain. There was evidently an abiding longing in man for the things of Earth, evinced in the emulations of that planet that showed whenever feasible. Some of it was practical, such as the day-night cycle and standard gee, for the tides of man’s chemistry could not be changed in mere centuries; but much of it was simple nostalgia for the old planet. I could not deride this; I felt it myself.
Then we came to the parade area. Crowds of people lined the road, waving and cheering as we came among them. Confetti flew up as they threw handfuls toward us.
“Wave, sir, wave!” the mayor muttered tersely.
I raised my right arm somewhat awkwardly and essayed a motion, not sure it was really me the crowd watched.
The noise jumped in magnitude. The crowd became frenzied. Then a chant began: “Hubris! Hubris! Hubris!”