Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

“Drivel,” Sondra said. “Utterly unintelligible drivel.”

“But oddly poetic in its own way,” Raphael said mildly. “The remarkable thing is that there are people, a very few of them, who will believe, who will be impressed by that. They will entertain the possibility that a collection of eccentrics squatting in an abandoned prison crater could destroy planets. A few will join, or contribute. All it takes is one believer in a million to keep the Pointless Cause alive.

“Or at least that was true when the Purples had Earth’s eight billion for an audience. Far fewer than a billion people live in the Solar System now, and they are extremely spread out. How will a mass nut group function in a Solar System of small, dispersed populations?”

“Well, it sure doesn’t make sense. But at least the Purples wrote their piece in something that resembled prose.”

“You have another sample?” Raphael asked with a chuckle.

Sondra had never seen the man so relaxed and open. There had been a fascinating person buried deep under all that anger. Getting away from Pluto seemed an utterly liberating experience for him. “The Octal Millennialists. They put out a competing declaration—in base-eight notation. I suppose I could get the computer to translate it.”

“I doubt it would be worth the bother. Even translated it wouldn’t make much sense. The Octals select their wording for the interesting number patterns it produces in eight-mode.”

“How do you know so much about all these groups?”

Raphael smiled. “My wife, Jessie. She was a great one for exploring, finding the odd and the strange and going to take a look. And there were a lot of strange things to see on the campuses, way back when. She had a special fondness for the outfringers, even flirted with the Glibsters when we were both doing our postdoctoral work. They aren’t around anymore, but the Glibs and the Higginists were both in reaction to all the politically correct verbiage of the other groups. The Glib-Higs didn’t care what they did, or meant, as long as it was said in an entertaining or amusing manner.

“But the Purple—they’re special. Or at least they used to be. They’ve forgotten what they were, and that’s a kind of tragedy. The whole structure of the Naked Purple Movement was built on finding goals—such as inciting the nonviolent collapse of human civilization—that were outrageous, and utterly impossible. The goals they chose were not only unattainable, but deliberately unattainable. In fact, in the beginning, I believe they called themselves La Manchans, or Don Qs, after Don Quixote and his windmills. The whole idea of an unreachable goal was to leave the seeker ever striving, forever searching, never resting. Chasing an absolute, an ideal, meant never getting where you were going, which left you forced to realize none of us complete the journey of life alive. It was supposed to make you treasure the small accomplishments you did make.

“There were purposes behind the original Purple. Not merely shock, but shock for a reason. To jolt people out of their complacency, remind them that the world was not all it could be—and, by urging people on to a higher goal, at least get their minds moving again. If society ostracized you for thinking on your own, you were forced to learn of your own inner goals, thus strengthening the individual.

“Jessie showed me that it was that contradiction, and that need to strive further on, that was the true, hidden point of the Pointless Cause.” Raphael got a distant look in his eye. “Nowadays the Purple philosophy is merely blather that makes sure everyone expresses their individuality in the same way, sees to it that all are equally nonconformist. But getting mixed up with the Tycho convicts poisoned them. Jessie predicted that would happen, before she died.” Raphael shook his head. “She’d be sorry to see she was right. Nothing is left but anger in the Tycho Purple. Anger, and a sense that the Universe owes them a living. Their philosophy is a game of prattling words for arrogant people, cooked up to justify what they would have done anyway.

“There has always been anger in the Purple—but once upon a time there was hope, as well. Nowadays the Purple hope has become mere sullenness.”

Sondra was stunned, not by Raphael’s words, but by the fact that they had come from the lips of what had been such a bitter old man. “Jessie sounds like a remarkable woman,” Sondra said at last.

“Oh, she was,” Simon Raphael said wistfully. “That indeed she was. I’ve been remembering just how remarkable.”

A tone sounded, and Collier, the pilot, spoke over the intercom, his voice calm and confident. “Now thirty minutes from touchdown on the Moon. If you set your monitors to the external view cameras, you should see quite a nice show.”

Sondra breathed a sigh of relief. The endless flight was nearly ended. She turned on the monitor, not to see the passing landscape, but to watch for any signs of engine problems on these final maneuvers. She looked up for a moment as Larry emerged from his cabin, moved to his crash couch, and strapped himself in. He looked as nervous as she did. Both of them had felt certain that the trip would wreck the Nenya’s engines. The Nenya had run here from Pluto on constant boost the whole way; no way to treat engines that weren’t really designed for such work. The technique had gotten them here in sixteen days, but other than that, Sondra didn’t see much to recommend it. The ride was uncomfortable—and frightening.

Constant boost meant accelerating the first half of the trip at one and a quarter gee, and then braking at one and a quarter gee on the second half of the run. Sondra didn’t even want to think about the hellacious maximum speeds they had achieved at turnover. On the plus side, Sondra told herself, the Moon’s one-sixth gravity would seem an absolute luxury once the Nenya landed.

Larry watched the Moon’s scarred and cratered surface leaping toward them, and suddenly concerns over the nature of black holes seemed far less important. He clenched his hands into a death grip on the crash couch’s armrests, shut his eyes, and saw images of the Nenya slamming into the Moon. No good. He opened his eyes again. The engines were humming along, seeming to run far too leisurely to counteract a fall toward a planet. Then they cut out altogether, and that was far more disturbing. He fixed his eyes on the monitor as the harshly cratered surface swept past, moving faster, getting closer with every moment.

The engines flared to life again, slowing into a sensible hover. The Nenya eased herself down onto the landing field. The engines shut down, and the ship landed with a gentle and anticlimactic bump.

Larry barely had time to breathe before there was a banging and clanging belowdecks. A young man stuck his head up through the deck hatch and looked around until he spotted Larry. “Larry O’Shawnessy Chao?” he asked.

Larry stood up, more than a little wobbly in the one-sixth gee. “Yeah,” he said, recognizing the voice from his arguments over the radio. “You’re Lucian Dreyfuss.”

Lucian popped up through the hatch with a disconcerting bounce and grinned. He stuck out a hand, and Larry shook it with as much vigor as he could. Larry looked Lucian over. He was a short, wiry, high-strung-looking sort, very much the opposite of the roly-poly, easy-going Lunar stereotype. His face was narrow and pale, and his smile seemed to have a lot of teeth in it. His reddish brown hair was cut in a rather longish crew cut that stood bottle-brush straight on his head. His handshake was a bit too firm. His short-sleeved shirt revealed well-muscled arms. He was a year or two older than Larry, and there was something in his grin that said he thought he was ahead on points, as if there were already a competition between them.