Звезда Пандоры

When he drove home that particular Friday evening, he wanted nothing more than to scream at the planet where it could shove his exemplary life. For a start he was late out of the plant, the guy on the next shift had called in sick, and it took the duty manager an hour to get cover organized. This was supposed to be Mark’s family day, the one where he got home early and spent some quality time with those he loved. Even the traffic didn’t want that to happen. Cars and trucks clogged all six lanes on his side of the highway, corraling his Ford Summer. Even with the city traffic routing arrays managing the flow, the sheer volume of vehicles at this time of the evening slowed everybody down to a fifty-five-kilometer-an-hour crawl. He’d wanted a house nearer the factory, but AEC didn’t have any to rent in those districts, so he had to make do with the Santa Hydra district. It was only sixteen kilometers inland, but that put it uncomfortably close to the Port Klye sector, where one of New Costa’s nests of nuclear power plants was sited.

Mark opened the Summer’s side window as they turned off the highway and onto Howell Avenue, which wound through the Northumberland Hills. It was a district that senior management favored: long clean boulevards lined by tall trees, where gated drives led off to big houses in pretty emerald enclaves surrounded by high walls. It wasn’t because there was crime on Augusta—at least, noncorporate crime; the well-to-do simply enjoyed the sense of physical separation from the rest of the megacity. Low sunlight gleamed off the district’s buildings and sidewalks, creating a hazy lustrous shimmer. He breathed in the warm dry air, trying to relax. As always when the tiny blue-white sun sank down toward the horizon, the warm El Iopi wind blew out of the southern desert toward the sea. It swept the day’s pollution away, along with the humidity, leaving just the scent of blossom from the trees and roadside bushes.

During his childhood, his parents had taken him and his siblings out into the desert several times, spending long weekends at oasis resorts. He’d enjoyed the scenery, the endless miles of flinty rock and sand, with only the rainbow buds of the scrawny twiglike native plants showing any color in that wasted landscape. It was a break from the megacity that was all he’d known. The rest of Sineba wasn’t worth visiting. That which wasn’t desert had long since been put to the plow. Giant mechanized farms had spread across the continent’s prairies, ripping up native plants and forests, and replacing them with huge fields of GM high-yield terrestrial crops, their leaves awash with pesticides and roots flooded with fertilizer. They poured a constant supply of cheap crops into the food processing factories dotted along the inland edge of New Costa, to be transformed into packaged convenience portions and distributed first to the megacity’s inhabitants, then out to the other planets, of which Earth was the greatest market.

After snaking down through the Northumberland Hills, Howell Avenue opened out into Santa Hydra, a broad flat expanse that led all the way across to the coastline twenty-five kilometers away. He could see the Port Klye nest in the distance, eleven big concrete fission reactor domes perched along the shore. The ground around them was a flat bed of asphalt squares, where nothing grew and nothing moved, a mile-wide security moat separating them from the megacity that they helped to energize. Pure white steam trickled out of their turbine-building chimneys, glowing rose-gold in the evening light. He couldn’t help the suspicious stare he gave the plumes, even though he knew they weren’t radioactive. The coolant system intake and outlet pipes were miles out to sea, as well, reducing any direct contamination risk. But the power plants were all part of his general malaise.

Slim pylons carried superconductor cables back into the megacity, following the routes of the major roads before they branched off and split into localized grids. Other, larger pylons carried the cables along the shoreline to the foundries. It was the heaviest industries that had colonized the land above the ocean, the big dirty steel mills and petrochemical refineries that used the seawater for coolant and the seabed as a waste dump.