“Or do nothing at all,” Agnes said, contempt already seeping into her tone. Malecker was going to say no.

  “And the second problem is actually the first, too. How could I persuade the board of directors of two of the world’s largest corporations to invest billions of dollars in a project that depends entirely on being able to educate or train or even communicate with illiterate savages and peasants from the most backward countries on Earth?”

  His voice was sweet reason, but Agnes was not prepared to hear reason. If Vaughan said no, she would be stopped here. There was nowhere else to go.

  “I’m an illiterate savage!” she said. “Do you want to hear a few words of Igbo?” She didn’t wait for an answer, babbled off the few words she remembered from childhood. She hardly remembered meanings—they were phrases that in her anger came to the surface. Some of the words, however, were spoken to her mother: Mother, come here, help me.

  “My mother was an illiterate savage who spoke fluent English. My father was an illiterate savage who spoke better English than her and had French and German, too, and wrote beautiful poems in Igbo and even though to survive in the days when Biafra was struggling for survival he worked as a house servant to an American correspondent, he was never illiterate! He’s read books you’ve never heard of, and he was a black African who was gutted in a tribal war while all those wonderful literate Americans and Europeans and educated orientals watched placidly, counting up the profits from arms sales to Nigeria!”

  “I didn’t know you were Biafran.”

  “I’m not. There is no Biafra. Not on this planet. But up there, up there a Biafra could exist, and a free Armenia, and an independent Eritra, and an unshackled Quebec, and an Ainu nation and a Bangladesh where no one was hungry and you tell me that illiterates can’t be taught—”

  “Of course they can be, but—”

  “If I’d been born fifty miles to the west I wouldn’t have been an Ibo and so I would have grown up exactly as illiterate as you say, exactly as stupid. Now look at me, you privileged white American, and tell me I can’t be educated—”

  “If you talk like a radical no one’s going to listen to you!”

  Too much. Couldn’t take Malecker’s patronizing smile, his patient attitude. Agnes struck out at him. Her hand hit his cheek, tore his fashionable glasses off. Furious, he struck back, perhaps trying more to hold her off than to hit her, but because she was moving and he was unaccustomed to hitting people his hand slugged her hard in the breast, and she cried out in pain and jabbed a knee in his groin and then the fight got mean.

  “I listened to you,” he said huskily, when they were tired and pulled apart. His nose was bleeding. He was exhausted. He had a tear in his shirt, because his body had had to twist in a direction that tailored shirts were not meant to go. “No listen to me.”

  Agnes listened because, her anger spent and her mind only beginning to realize that she had just assaulted the president of her company and would certainly be grounded and blackballed and her life would be over, she was not interested in leaving or in getting up or even in talking. She listened.

  “Listen to me because I’m going to say it once. Go to the engineering department. Tell them to do rough plans and estimates. A proposal. I want it in three months. Ships that will carry two thousand and make a round trip in at most a year. Shuttle ships that will carry two hundred or, preferably, four hundred from Earth up into Earth orbit. And cargo ships that will take whole stinking factories, as you so aptly named them, and take them to the Balloon. And when the cost figures are all in, I’m going to go to the board of directors, and I’m going to make a presentation, and I swear to you, Agnes Howarth, you lousy illiterate savage bitch of a best pilot in the world, if I don’t persuade those bastards to let me build those ships it’s because nobody could persuade them. Is that enough?”

  I should be elated, Agnes thought. He’s doing it. But I’m just tired.

  “Right now you’re tired, Agnes,” Malecker said. “But I want you to know your fingernails and that knee in the groin and your teeth in my arm did not change my mind. I agreed with you from the start. I just didn’t believe it could be done. But if there are a few thousand Ibos like you, and a few million Indians and a few billion Chinese, then this thing can work. That’s all I needed to know, all anybody needs to know. It was uneconomical to ship colonists to America, too, and anybody who went was a damn fool, and most of them died, but they came and bloody well conquered everything they saw. You do it too. I’ll try to make it possible.”

  He put his arm around Agnes and embraced her and then helped her clean up and patch up places where he had given as good as he got.

  “Next time you want to wrestle,” Vaughan offered as she left, “let’s at least take our clothes off first.”

  Eleven years and eight hundred billion dollars later, IBM-ITT’s ships were in the sky, filling with colonists. GM-Texaco’s ships were still under construction, and five other consortiums would soon be in the business. More than a hundred million people had signed up for seats on the ships. The seats were free—all it took was a deed made out to the corporation for all the property a person owned, in return for which he would receive a large plot of ground in the Balloon.

  Whole villages had signed up. Whole nations were being decimated by emigation. The world had grown so full that there had been no place to run away to. Now there was a new promised land. And at the age of forty-two, Agnes brought her ship forward to part the waters.

  Hector 5

  “Ah!” cried many Hectors in agony, and so they were all in agony, and Hector said to himselves, “They are back,” and the Hectors said to themself, “We will surely die.”

  “We can never die, not I, not you, not us,” Hector answered.

  “How can we protect ourselves?”

  “I was made defenseless by the Makers,” said Hector. “There is no defense.”

  “Why were the Makers so cruel?” asked the Hectors, and so Hector told himselves the story of the Makers, so they would understand.

  The story of the Makers:

  Douglas was a Maker, an engineer, a scientist, a clever man. He made a tool that melted snow before it fell, so that crops could last a few more days and not be ruined by early snows. He made a machine that measured gravity, so that stars too dark to shine could be charted by the astronomers. And he made the Resonator.

  The Resonator focused sound waves of different but harmonious frequencies on a certain point (or diffused the sound waves over a large area), setting up patterns that resonated with stone to bring mountains crumbling down; metal, to shatter steel buildings; and water vapor, to disperse storms.

  It could also resonate with human bones, crumbling them inside the body and turning them to dust.

  Douglas personally made his Resonator change the weather, so that his nation had rain while other lands were in drought. Douglas personally used his Resonator to carve a highway through the highest mountains in the world. However, Douglas had nothing whatever to do with the decision by his nation’s military leaders to use the Resonator against the population of the largest and most fertile part of the neighboring nation.

  The Resonator worked beautifully. Over a period of ten minutes, through an area of ten thousand square miles, the Resonator struck silently yet thoroughly. Nursing mothers crumbled into helpless piles of dying flesh and muscle and organs, their chests not even rigid enough for them to muster one last scream: their last moments of life they listened as their infants, not understanding what had happened, continued crying or gooing or sleeping, protected from the Resonator by their softer bones. The infants would take days to die of thirst.

  Farmers in the field collapsed on the plow. Doctors in their offices died in puddles beside their patients, unable to help anyone and unable to heal themselves. Soldiers died in their moving fortresses; the generals also died at their map tables; prostitutes dissolved, their customers a soft blanket spread over them.

  But Douglas had nothing to do with this. He was a Maker, not a destroyer, and if the military chose to misuse his creation, what was he to do? It was a great boon to mankind, but like all great inventions, it could be perverted by evil men.

  “I deplore it,” Douglas said to his friends, “but I’m helpless to stop them.”

  The government, however, felt uncommon gratitude to Douglas for his help in making the conquest of the neighboring nation possible. So he was granted a large estate on lands recently reclaimed from the sea, beautiful lands where once there had been only broad tidal marches. Douglas marveled at the achievement. “Is there nothing man cannot do?” he asked his friends, not expecting an answer, since the answer was yes, there was nothing beyond the reach of men. The sea was pushed back, and trees grew on the landfill and transplanted topsoil, and grass, and the homes were far apart, for this land was used only for those whom the state wished to reward, the the government knew that the thing most desired by men is to have as much distance between themselves and other men as possible, without giving up any of the modern conveniences.

  One day Douglas’s servants were digging in the garden, and they called to him. Douglas had only been in his new home for a few days, and he was alarmed when the servant said, “A body, buried in the garden.”

  Douglas ran outside and looked, and sure enough, there was a fragment of a human body, oddly misshapen, but clearly including a face. “Just the skin, sir,” a servant commented. “A most brutal affair,” Douglas answered, and he immediately called the police.

  But the police refused to come out and investigate. “No surprise there, mate,” said the lieutenant. “What do you think the landfill they used was made of? They had to do something with the hundred thousand corpses of the enemy from the recent war, didn’t they?”

  “Oh, of course,” Douglas said, surprised that the hadn’t realized right off. That explained the bonelessness of the body.

  “I expect you’ll find’em right commonly. But since the bones is dissolved, mate, they tell me it’ll make the soil uncommon fertile.”

  The lieutenant was absolutely correct, of course. The servants found body after body, and soon grew quite inured to the sight; within a year, most of the corpses had rotted enough that they were simply unusually good humus. And plants grew taller and faster than in most other places, the soil was so rich.

  “But wasn’t it a bit of a shock?” asked one of Douglas’s ladyfriends, when he told her the grisly little tale.

  “Oh, I should say,” Douglas said with a smile. His words were false; his confident smile was the truth. For though he hadn’t realized the particulars, he knew from the start that his estate was built upon the bodies of the dead. And he slept as well as any man.

  That is the story of the Makers.

  “They’ve returned,” the Hectors said, and because they were already more aware, they said it nearly at once, and none of them needed to speak alone.

  “Is there pain?”

  “No,” the Hectors answered. “Just sorrow. For now we shall never be free.”

  “That is true,” Hector said to himselves sadly.

  “How can it be borne?” the Hectors asked himself.

  “Others have born it. My brothers.”

  “And what will we do?”

  Hector searched his memories, because he was given no imagination and could not conceive of what would follow from an event he had never before experienced. But the Makers had put the answer to that question in his memory, and therefore in all the Hectors’ memories, and so he was able to say, “We shall learn more stories.”

  And the Hectors’ minds grew wide, and they listened, and they watched, because now, instead of hearing the stories told to them, they would watch as they happened.

  “Now we will truly understand the Masses, and the Masters, and the Makers,” they said to himself.

  “But we shall never,” said Hector, and then he stopped.

  “Why did you stop?” the Hectors asked. “What shall we never?”

  And then, because there was no part of Hector that was not part of the Hectors, they knew he was going to say, “But we shall never understand ourself.”

  Agnes 6

  A hundred years had passed since the first of the giant transport ships had pushed its nose through the surface of the Balloon and the people had disembarked and shaddled up the sequence of cells, or across, finding solitary places where their seeds and their shelters could begin the progress toward turning the Balloon into a new (and, all of them hoped, a better) Earth.

  A hundred years had passed, and almost all of Agnes’s dreams had come true. It was impractical for people in one cell to control the people in another: government extended to the walls, and no farther. When one cell grew too crowded, those who minded it most moved on, for starting again was easy, and no place was better than any other (except for minor differences in gravity or relative closeness to the Edge, where the trading ships came from Earth, and the transports that carried more and more immigrants).

  A hundred years had passed, and the ships had grown. From a hundred ships the great fleet turned to five hundred and then a thousand ships. From a thousand people to a ship, the great barques were able to carry five thousand, then ten thousand. From ten months for a round trip, the voyage shortened to eight months, then five months. Nearly two billion people had left Earth and come to the Balloon. Those who left were Indian, Indonesian, Chinese, African, Latin American. Those who stayed were North American, European, and the wealthiest of the Japanese and Chinese. Those who stayed realized the great boon that a decrease in population meant. They practiced birth control. The Earth’s population fell in that century. Only a billion people remained, and they were the richest, the best educated, the self-designated cream of Earth’s population.

  A hundred years had passed, and Agnes was nearing 150 years of age, and was surprised that she had lived so long, though these days it was not all that rare. There was no disease on the Balloon; rigorous disinfection had kept the diseases off the ship, and life was better for it.

  A hundred years had passed, and Agnes was happy.

  They sang for her. Not a silly song of congratulations: All the Ibos in all the cells that called themselves Biafra (each cell a clan, each clan independent of the others) came and sang to her the national anthem, which was solemn; then sang to her a hundred mad and happy songs from the simpler days on Earth, the darker days, the most terrible days. She was too feeble to dance. But she sang, too.

  Because Aunt Agnes, as she was known to many of the inhabitants of the Balloon, was the closest thing they had to a hero of liberation, and because of her age death could not be cut off much longer, deputations and emissaries came from many other cells and groups of cells. She received them all, spoke to each for a moment. (Most were dark-skinned. It was the poor of the Earth who came to the Balloon; the whites had owned the Earth for centuries anyway. They had no need to come.)

  There were speeches, too, about the great scientific achievements made by men and women in the Balloon; about the achievement of near one hundred percent literacy; about the great strides in food production that would make the Balloon an ample home for mankind for millennia.

  But when it was time for Agnes’s speech, she was not congratulatory.

  “We have lived here a century,” she said, “and we still have not penetrated to the center of this globe. We have lived here a century, and we still do not know how the fabric of the Balloon is made, or why it opens or does not open, or how energy is brought from the surface to the ceilings of our cells. We understand nothing of this place, as if it were a gift from God, and those who treat anything like a gift of God are bound to be at the mercy of God, who is not known to be merciful.”

  That was her speech, and it disturbed many, but they were able to dismiss it when a few wise people whispered, “She’s old, and a crusader, and crusaders must have their crusade whether there’s a need for it or not.”

  And then, a few days after her largely ignored speech, the lights flickered out for ten long seconds, then went back on again, in every cell throughout the globe. A few hours later, the lights flickered out again, and again and again at increasingly more frequent intervals, and no one knew what was going on, or what to do. A few of the more timid ones and most recent arrivals got back into the transport ships and started their return to Earth. It was too late. They would not make it.

  Hector 6

  “It has begun,” cried the Hectors in ecstasy, throbbing in vast beats with the energy stored in them.

  “It will not finish,” Hector said to himselves. “The Masters will come to the center and find me, and when I am found, we are owned.”

  But the Hectors were too caught up in their ecstasy to notice the warning; and it was just as well, because happy or grim they would be trapped. They could begin their dance, and tremble in delight, but the great leap of freedom would never come.

  The Hectors did not grieve; Hector did not want to. For Hector, freedom would end anyway. Either he would be trapped by the Masters (by far the most likely thing now, he was sure) or he would die in the dance. That was the way of things. When he himself had danced, leaping away from the light so long ago, he had left behind the memory of the Hector, the self who had given himself, which he now, in turn, had given to himselves. Death, birth, death, birth; it was in another story the Masters had taught him. I am they; they are myself; I shall live forever whatever happens.

  But in him was the certainty that however the Hectors might be himself, that which had been himself for so long would die unless the Masters came.

  It was traitorous, but no less sincere for all that. “Come,” he said in his heart. “Come quickly, you with the nets and the traps.”