Звезда Пандоры

“Ticket, please, ma’am,” he said politely.

She handed over the small pink hard copy the machine at the end of the platform had printed out for her. He produced a pair of clippers, and punched a small Z-shaped hole in the corner.

“Won’t be long now,” he said, and touched the peak of his cap.

The one hundred fifty years of cynicism and cultural sophistication that formed her usual defensive shell wilted away. “Thank you very much,” she said, and meant it. There was a great deal of comfort in a culture that was so honest and straightforward.

She held the ticket in her hand, looking at it as the steam engine tooted loudly and began to pull out of the station amid a cloud of pure white steam and clanking pistons. In theory Huxley’s Haven represented home, though she felt no attachment of any kind to the planet and its people. Going back would seem to any observer (and she was sure Hogan would be keeping a virtual eye on her) as if she were running for cover, returning to the one place she would fit in.

There was the usual slow crawl across the planetary station yard. Other trains seemed to charge past, the lights from their carriage windows producing a smear of illumination. Signals were bright red or green points against the dark background, stretching away for kilometers like a thinly populated city. Every now and then the glaring front lights from a heavy goods train would flow across the silver rails, followed by the dark bulk of the wagons, eclipsing the rest of the yard.

Their gradual progress forward took them into a pale amber light that washed across this section of the yard like strong moonlight. When she pressed her face against the window, Paula could see the gateways lined up ahead of them, over two-thirds illuminated by the daylight of the worlds they led to. In front of them, the rails were full of trains. It was unnerving seeing how little distance there was between each one as the station traffic control arranged them in a continual sequence. Only the single track that the steam engine rolled along was empty ahead and behind. They curved around to face the gateway, which glowed with a diffuse primrose light.

Paula experienced the usual tingle over her skin as they passed through the gateway’s pressure curtain. Then they were on another world and in full daylight, picking up speed across a rolling countryside that was made up from verdant checkerboard fields. Dense, neatly layered hedges were used to separate out the land, with the occasional drystone wall acting as a more substantial barrier. Native trees with reddish leaves were interspaced with terrestrial oak, ash, sycamore, and beech. All of them had been pollarded, their thick main trunks sprouting long vertical branches. The farms used the cut wood for fuel during the winter months, reducing dependence on fossil reserves. One of the benefits of using such simple mechanical technology was the low energy requirements; all of the planet’s electricity was easily supplied from hydro dams.

She could see farmhouses sitting amid the folds of land, big brick buildings with blue slate roofs nestled at the center of Dutch barns and pigsties and stables and store sheds. Some of them had grain silos, tall clapboard structures painted dove-gray, which she knew were among the tallest buildings on the whole planet. Single railway tracks branched off from the main line, snaking out to the silo yards through narrow cuttings and along embankments. The rails were rusty now, in early summer when the grains were still green in the fields; but later in the year when the harvest was gathered the grain wagons would make daily collections; the lines would be shiny again and the weeds coming up between the wooden sleepers would shrivel and die from the heat of the engines and blasts of steam. Paula had to admit, it looked every bit the bucolic idyll. She accepted now what she had so strongly rejected as a confused uprooted teenager, that the whole point of this society was that it didn’t change, that was what its people were designed for. The Human Structure Foundation had chosen a level of technology equal to the early twentieth century, prior to the electronic revolution; the kind of engineering and mechanics that was easily maintained. Nothing here needed computer diagnostics when it broke down; engineers could see what was wrong amid a machine’s cogs and cables. It was the same with information, there were no arrays, databases, or networks; offices of clerks and accountants kept books and files and Rolodexes. The Foundation had designed people to work at specific jobs, and those jobs wouldn’t metamorphose with progress—there was no progress. Huxley’s Haven provided its inhabitants with the most secure stable society it was possible to have. She still couldn’t decide if the Foundation had been morally right to begin the whole project, but looking out at the trim neat fields and the picture-perfect farms, she had to admit now that it worked.