Jumping off the Planet

RIDDLES

The pizza arrived then, filling the apartment with thick rich tomatoey smells. I didn't know pizza could smell so good. At home, pizza is an industrial product, little squares rolling out of a machine. But this one was round and Olivia said it was hand-made. I couldn't imagine that.

Before Olivia could finish laying out plates on the table, a laughing woman in a wheel chair came rolling in. Judge Griffith. "I hereby declare this dinner officially in session," she boomed. And rolled right up to the table to put a small vase of flowers in the center. "From my own garden, Olivia. You always liked the blue roses, didn't you?"

Her chair had a built-in swivel, she wheeled around to face us. We were both staring at her open-mouthed. "You must be Charles and Bobby. Douglas? Pleased to meet you. Max Dingillian? Wish I could say the same. You sure stirred up a fine kettle of worms. Made a lot of extra work for all of us—but as my old sainted gramma used to say, 'the best reason for stirring up a kettle of worms is to make sure the sauce gets evenly distributed.' Bobby, you must show me that trick you made your monkey do for Howard. And all the other tricks too. My goodness, I haven't laughed so hard since the day the Thomas case blew up in his face." She looked around, blinking. "Where's Mickey?"

"Late as usual," Olivia said. "He inherited that from his father. No matter, we can start without him. Come on, everybody to the table—did you kids wash your hands? No? Well, hop to it. The pizza's getting cold. More wine, Your Honor?"

"How can I have more when I haven't had any yet?" Judge Griffith held out her glass impatiently.

Were all lawyers and judges like this?

"Excuse me?" Dad said, when we were finally all seated and Olivia was passing out thick slabs of fresh hot pizza. "But am I the only one who sees a possible conflict of interest here? The lawyer and the judge and the defendants all having dinner together?"

Olivia and Georgia exchanged glances. And laughed.

Georgia said, "If this were a trial, yes, there would be a conflict of interest. But you're not defendants. Not yet. Tomorrow's hearing is investigatory, not evidential. My coming here is to obtain background information on the case, at the request of your attorney. And just in case you haven't noticed—" Georgia pointed toward two of the corners of the room where cameras were mounted"—your kindly old Auntie Olivia is recording everything. For her protection, and for yours. When did you start the files, dear?"

"When you rolled in, Your Honor. All of the discussions we had before you arrived are in separate files, private-coded. These recordings are being made with grade-three authentication."

"Good." Georgia patted Olivia's hand. "That's why you're such a good lawyer. You don't leave anything to chance." To Dad, she continued, "The point is, if I'm to make a ruling about what's best for your children, I need to see them in a less formal situation, and in relationship with you—not all scrubbed and polished for a court appearance, but in a more relaxed family setting. There are precedents for home interviews and home studies. This is upside law, not downside. We do things differently up here. You may have noticed that already. We don't have time to spend a year or two on a legal matter that should be resolvable in a couple of days. Nobody benefits from that. Justice delayed is justice denied. And pizza delayed is asphalt. So eat before that piece cools off in your hand."

Dad took a bite. Thoughtfully. Then another. He looked uncomfortable and he kept looking back and forth between the two women at the table. We'd just met the both of them and suddenly our lives were in their hands. How had we stumbled into this? Was this going to turn into an even bigger mess?

Olivia noticed first. "Max," she said, almost conversationally, "do you have community standards classes in your town? Seminars?"

"Sure, doesn't everybody?"

"What's the stated purpose?" The way she asked, there was obviously more to her question than curiosity.

"To establish stability for the entire community. The most good for the most people."

Olivia looked to Georgia. "Sounds good to me—for dirtside. How about you, Your Honor?"

Georgia shrugged and spoke around a mouthful of salad. "Yeah, sounds good for dirtside."

I was starting to get the feeling that "dirtside" was a nasty word. A rude way of talking about people who lived on the ground.

"Well, it is good," Dad said. "There are seventeen billion people on the planet. You can't have everyone running around freely making up their own rules and setting their own standards. The, uh—the social contract and all that. The common good requires that people have a common context."

"That sounds pretty common to me," Olivia nodded.

"Yep," agreed the Judge. "Me too."

Dad finally got it. He narrowed his eyes. "Is there something wrong with the idea of the common good?"

"Nope," Olivia said innocently. "If you don't mind being common."

Judge Griffith leaned forward then to explain. "Max, downside, you can talk about things being common, because for most people, that's exactly how they are. Common. Ordinary. But up here—" She waved her hand to indicate not just the room but everything beyond it. Geostationary. The Line. The moon. "Up here—nothing is ordinary. Everything is extraordinary.

"People don't come up here looking for more of the ordinary, they come up here because they want to get away from the ordinary. That's what space represents, the chance at an extraordinary life.

"Most people on Earth never get a chance to feel what it's like to be extraordinary. The best they get are pictures of other people being extraordinary. And once in a while, some lucky schmuck gets an extraordinary experience and it transforms the quality of his life from that moment onward. Because once you've had one extraordinary experience you know that once isn't enough. You want your whole life to be like that. So people come up here, Max, looking not just for an extraordinary experience, but, for what they wanted all along—extraordinary lives."

Still talking to Dad, the judge pointed to us kids. "You knew that when you kidnapped them—sorry to be so blunt about it, Max, but let's be honest. You knew what you were doing, and you'd do it again if you had to. You saw a chance and you grabbed it, and you grabbed your kids so they could have the same chance too. And the fact is, there isn't a parent on Earth who doesn't secretly envy your bravado—even while at the same time hating you for it. You've grabbed a piece of something." She waved at the space around her. "This is a lifeline for the human race—a way out of the trap."

Dad shook his head. "The last report I saw said that there are still three million babies being born every day, something like that. The Line would take eight months to boost that many people into space. No, the beanstalk isn't a way out—it's a luxury."

"No, it isn't," said Olivia abruptly. "It's a lifeboat. And there weren't enough lifeboats on the Titanic either."

That made for a moment of uncomfortable silence, until Judge Griffith rescued the conversation. "The point is," she said, "we're trying to get as many kids into the lifeboats as possible. And world-builders. And people who know how to make a difference. We might lose the Earth, yes—it sure looks like it this week—but we're not going to lose the game."

Dad made a face. I could almost understand why.

"Yes, I know that downsiders hate it when an upsider talks like that, but the nasty truth is that what's consuming the Earth is everybody's insistence on grinding everybody else down. There's no energy left for anything else. That's why you bailed—"

Dad conceded the argument with a shrug.

Olivia interrupted then. "Your Honor, if I may—?"

Judge Griffith waved her hand. "Go ahead, Counselor."

Olivia leaned toward Dad. "The job of the Presiding Judge of the Superior Court for the Geostationary Jurisdiction as authorized by the Singapore Treaty and confirmed by the local representatives of the Corporate Signatories to the Colonial Agreement is to rule on conflicts between upside and downside law. The unspoken part of that job is to guarantee and protect the interests of upsiders against spurious downside claims." She glanced over to the judge. "Right?"

Judge Griffith waved her wineglass in vague agreement. "We get a lot of interesting actions filed up here. Everybody downside thinks everybody upside is rich." She stopped talking just long enough to push another bite of pizza into her mouth. Still chewing, she held up a hand to indicate that she hadn't finished her thought yet. She mopped her mouth with one of Olivia's ample cloth napkins and held her glass out for more wine. "I shouldn't, but the counselor has an excellent wine cellar—thirty-six thousand kilometers that way." She gestured off to her side. "Or am I turned around? No, I was right. It's that way. Earthside and starside, Charles. Remember that. Keep the Earth to your left and you're facing spinward. Here, I'll give you an interesting little puzzle to consider. If I take away from you the words right and left, how else can you speak about your right and left side?"

"My heart's on the left," I answered immediately. And then added quickly, "Your Honor."

"You can call me Georgia. We're not in session here. And that's the B answer. Your heart is actually in the center, leaning left. Now, try for the A answer. How would you explain left and right to a Martian? Someone who doesn't have the same language you do. What physical criteria can you use? Think about it for awhile." She turned back to Olivia, leaving me puzzling over the riddle. If there was another answer, it wasn't obvious.

After her glass was refilled a second time, Georgia turned back to Dad. "I'm well aware that if I grant your wife's claim tomorrow, I'm establishing a precedent for future downsider claims against upsiders. So even though what's at issue for you is only your future, what's at issue for the rest of us up here is a lot larger. This is one of those really annoying cases that calls into question the whole matter of jurisdiction.

"You see, if I vacate Howard's request for an investigatory hearing, that will be viewed downside as a larger refusal to hear any downside claims, which will lead us ultimately toward a hearing in the World Court. Not this case, of course—you'll be long gone by then—but eventually, the jurisdictional matters are going to have to be resolved. Sooner or later, we're going to get a really nasty test case. I just want to make sure that this isn't it, because if this one ends up in the World Court, it'll be ruled against us. And regardless of the outcome of this case, I don't want that precedent over my head. So the best hope for the upside is to delay those kinds of confrontations for as long as possible to give the colonial signatories a chance to build up a counterweight authority.

"Even though we're well into orbital space, we're still attached to the Earth. Therefore Earth assumes that Earth should have authority over the entire length of the beanstalk. Upsiders feel that, as a matter of course, the beanstalk should be viewed entirely as a space-borne agency, because once someone's up the beanstalk they're under beanstalk control, and the bulk of the beanstalk is in space. At the moment, the dividing line is One-Hour, with Earth maintaining authority over One-Hour and everything below, and Geostationary maintaining authority over everything above.

"But none of that is your concern. It's mine." To Olivia she said, "I assume you've got Betsy scouring for useful precedents?"

Olivia nodded. "Have been all afternoon."

Georgia stuffed the last bite of pizza into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. "Well, you're going to have to show me some damn good reasons for disregarding Maggie Dingillian's claim. No matter what. Now, I'll interview the kids. Douglas? You have a question?"

He pointed to the cameras. "How much of what you just said was for them?"

She laughed. "All of it, sweetheart. These recordings may never need to be shown, but just in case—I have to make the speech. I know who elected me and I know why."

Mickey showed up then, looking very unhappy. Without a smile, he didn't look like the same person.

"I told you not to be late," said Olivia. "Your pizza's cold."

"I'm not hungry—"

She put her hand on his forehead to see if he had a temperature. "What's the matter?"

He sat down at the table and picked up a piece of pizza anyway. "I got terminated."

Olivia sat down opposite him, immediately all business. "On what grounds?"

"No grounds." He nodded in the direction of Dad. Or Douglas. "Getting involved." He looked embarrassed.

"Do you want me to file something?" She looked to Judge Griffith. "Georgia?"

"It's a little premature, Olivia. Let's hear what the boy has to say."

"I'm not a boy, Aunt Georgia. I'm twenty-two."

"Mickey, I'm your god-mom. I used to change your diapers, for God's sake. Now just tell us what happened."

Mickey shrugged. "The kids were in trouble. I helped them. Kelly found out and reported me to the supervisor."

"Kelly? Is that the ugly one or the nasty one?" Olivia asked.

"Mom—your feelings are showing."

Olivia ignored it. "Anyway, they can't fire you for that."

"They didn't."

"Eh? What were the grounds for termination?"

Mickey looked embarrassed. "Having sex ... with a passenger."

Silence in the room for a moment. Olivia looked around, saw that Douglas looked particularly embarrassed, pretended she didn't notice, then looked back to Mickey as if she wanted to say a whole lot of things to him, but didn't dare.

"It's not Mickey's fault," Douglas blurted abruptly. "I asked him. He didn't ask me. And he said no the first two times I asked."

"Thank you for that, Douglas—but it still doesn't change Mickey's responsibility in the matter. How old are you, Doug?"

"I'll be eighteen next month."

"Close enough. No problem there. It's consenting adults," said Olivia.

"Line policy," countered Georgia. "They have a case. Tell me, did you do it on your own time?"

Mickey nodded.

"Well ... at least they can't get him for neglecting the customers," Georgia said, then laughed at her own inadvertent joke.

Olivia turned to Mickey now. She lowered her voice. "Just tell me one thing—"

Mickey already knew the question, even before she asked it. "Yes, Mom. He is special."

Olivia gave Douglas a warm smile, then turned back to Mickey. "That's all I wanted to know." She patted his shoulder. "Just so long as you're sure." She made me wish our mom were as understanding. Mickey hung his head in his hands and started to cry softly. Olivia pulled her chair closer and put her arm around his shoulders. "Hey, hey—it's all right. Momma's here. Come on, kiddo. I'm right here. Just let it out—"

Mickey looked up, red-eyed. "But it's not fair, Mom. Kelly's got her legs up in the air for anything with a tongue. One year, for her birthday, we got her a German shepherd and a jar of peanut butter."

Olivia reached around behind herself and grabbed a yellow legal pad. "Did you tell Smeagle that? Not the part about the German shepherd, the other part."

"Yes, I did."

"And what did he say?"

"The two cases are different. He said if they fired everyone with a loose zipper, there wouldn't be anyone working the Line. It's when we let our feelings influence our professionalism—blah blah blah. I'm pretty sure there's more to it than that—"

"There always is," said Olivia, scribbling furiously. "But we've got grounds. Unfair discrimination. Do you want me to file?"

Mickey shook his head. "I don't know. We've gotta talk, Mom. Things are getting really bad downside. You haven't seen the traffic we're getting. I don't know if I want to keep doing this anyway."

"Mickey, please—you're too valuable where you are."

"Mom—? Please? You said I could say 'when.' Well, I think I'm finally saying when."

Olivia nodded reluctantly and put the pad aside. "Okay. Whatever you want, sweetie—but let me file anyway. Let them pay for your silence. And the money will be useful. We'll talk about this later, I promise." She patted his hand.

Georgia interrupted then. "Tell me about the traffic, Mickey. What's going on?"

"We're getting too many rich emigrants. Whole carloads. Groups. They all know each other, and they're very tight-lipped about where they're going. It's that thing Mom's always talking about—a massive evacuation of rodents. Well, I think it's happening."

Georgia nodded. "We've noticed the traffic through here. We have some idea where they're all headed. It's legal. And you could probably find a lot of other reasons to explain the increase—like having three extra brightliners available, the new catapult, the shift in immigration policies, the changes in the transportation laws—"

"—and the population clock has just hit half-past midnight! Aunt Georgia, this isn't eco-theory anymore. The plagues in Africa are worse than the news is reporting. And they've already leapt across to India and Pakistan and China. A lot of people believe we're looking at the first stages of a genuine population crash—enough people to create a real panic."

Georgia rubbed her cheek thoughtfully. "I'm not willing to rule on it yet, Mickey. I'm still hearing evidence."

"Aunt Georgia, this is really one time I wish you weren't so rigorous—because by the time you have compelling evidence, it'll be too late! The people we have coming up the Line now are the kind of folks who have access to information that the rest of us aren't getting yet."

"Mickey, I know you. I know you're not an alarmist—and I trust your instincts about a lot of things, especially about people. But ... "

"But—I know. Okay, here's one more for you. Last month, we had a family come up, you know what was in their luggage? Industrial memory. Nothing else. Forty bars of it. Probably three or four billion dollars worth. They had to pay a surcharge for the extra weight; they didn't even flinch at the cost. Georgia, they had enough raw memory for a small government. Or even a corporation. Whose data were they carrying off world? And why? And where?"

"There's nothing illegal about transporting memory."

"No, there isn't. But on this big a scale? Doesn't it make you a little bit suspicious? What if it were bars of gold?"

"It wouldn't be worth as much—"

"That's right. And this is the fourth time this year we've had a passenger like that. At least that I know about. I'm only on one car. There are ninety-five other cars a day between dirtside and here. If what I've seen is one percent, then what would it mean if there were three hundred and eighty more passengers like that?" Mickey spread his hands wide. "I'm just telling you what I've seen, Your Honor. You be the judge."

Georgia smiled. Obviously, it was an old joke. She said, "I already am."

Mickey turned to his mom. "You know that booking we've been talking about? I think it's time to use it."

Olivia's face clouded. She said, "Shh, we'll talk about it later."