Cristopher Stasheff - Escape Velocity

“Right in here.” Stroganoff hauled open a door that looked like a huge airlock hatch. “Stage Ten.” As Sam filed past him, he added, “ ‘Fraid I didn’t catch your name, citizen.”

“She’s Ori Snipe,” Whitey called back over his shoulder, and Sam forced a quick smile and handshake as she left Stroganoff in her wake.

They walked into chaos. Dar’s first whirling impression was of a thousand people frantically everywhere, doing purposeless things and shouting at each other in an arcane jargon. But after a few minutes, he began to be able to make sense out of it. There weren’t really a thousand people—more like three dozen. And they weren’t really moving very quickly—it was just that there were so many of them moving in so many different directions that it seemed frantic. He locked his gaze onto one woman and watched her for a while. She was riding around on a lift, a slender telescoping column on top of a three-wheeled dolly, adjusting the lights that hung far above him. Her movements were methodical, almost plodding—nothing chaotic about them at all. He dropped his gaze to watch another person, then another.

“It may look confusing,” Stroganoff said beside him, “but everyone knows what he or she has to do, and does it.”

Dar glanced up at him, saw a frown. “Something wrong?”

Stroganoff shook his head. “No, it’s all going smoothly. A little ahead of schedule, in fact.”

“Then what’s the matter?”

“Oh, nothing, really.” Stroganoff forced a smile. “It’s just that sometimes the phoniness of it gets to me.”

Dar frowned. “But you’re making stories, here—and stories have to be made-up; they can’t be real.”

“Oh yes, they can.” Stroganoff pursed his lips. “There’re a lot of really great stories in the history books.”

The statement had a ring of familiarity to Dar; suddenly, he could almost believe he was back in Cholly’s Tavern. He cleared his throat to get rid of a sudden tightness. “That almost sounds like education.”

“Sh!” Stroganoff hissed, finger to his lips. He glanced around furtively, then breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank heaven! No one heard you!”

“Why?” Dar stared. “What’s wrong with education?”

“Be quiet, can’t you?” Stroganoff glanced around again. “Don’t you dare say that word in here!”

“Why? What’s the matter with ed … uh … hum … you know!”

“What’s the matter with it is that it pulls low ratings,” Stroganoff explained in a lowered voice. “ That kind of program never attracts more than a handful of viewers.”

“Yeah, but that’s a handful of all the people in Terran space! A handful out of a trillion-and-a-half!”

“So that ‘handful’ is a billion or so people; yes, I know.” Stroganoff nodded. “But that never sinks in, to the people who run this company. All they know is that they can get a higher price for a more popular show.”

“So.” Dar frowned. “You don’t dare put in anything ed … uh … at all deep, or they’ll cancel the script.”

Stroganoff nodded. “That’s the basic idea, yah.”

“And you don’t like it that way?”

Stroganoff hesitated; then he shook his head.

“So you don’t like your job?”

“Oh, I like it well enough.” Stroganoff looked around him. “There is still a fragrance left, out of the old glamor I thought was here when I was a kid. And it is exciting, putting together a story, even if it’s purely trivial dross. It’s just that … well, sometimes it gets to me.”

“But why ?”

“Because I wanted to educate.” Stroganoff turned back to Dar with a gentle, weary smile. “Not just a few interested students in a classroom—but the whole, huge mass of the audience, the billions of people who aren’t interested, who don’t want to learn all those ‘irrelevant facts’ about Socrates and Descartes, and Simon de Montfort and the Magna Carta.”

“I kinda thought knowing about the Magna Carta was necessary for all the citizens in a democracy,” Dar said uneasily. “At least, if that democracy is going to survive …”

“ If ,” Stroganoff said, with a sour smile. “Look around you.”

Dar swallowed. “I think you’ve got a point.”

“Oh, I know I do.” Stroganoff looked up at the lights on their grid of pipes, gazing at them but not seeing them. “And I knew 3DT was the perfect thing to teach with—give the people lectures, but make them so visually interesting that they’d watch it in spite of themselves. Don’t just tell them about Waterloo— show it to them, the actual place, the way it is today, and the way it was then. Then show them the battle, reenact it, cut to an overhead shot so they can see how Wellington and Napoleon were moving their troops …” He trailed off, a faraway look in his eyes.

“Wait a minute!” Dar stabbed a finger at the producer “I saw that battle! In an old 3DT program! The charge, and the horses galloping into the sunken road—then you saw from overhead, watched Napoleon’s army folding in, but while you were watching it, you heard Wellington describing his strategy …”

“Sure you didn’t read that in a book somewhere?”

“Yeah, but it didn’t make any sense until after I saw the program! Josephine’s Boudoir , that was it!”

“Yeah, it sure was.” Stroganoff’s mouth worked as though he’d tasted something bitter. “I’m surprised you’re old enough to have seen it.”

“I was way out on a, um, frontier planet. I remember it was mostly a pretty risqué version of Napoleon’s private life—but it did have the battle of Waterloo in it.”

“Yes. It did have that.” Stroganoff smiled out at the studio. “Not much education in it—but some. It’ll do.”

“Why didn’t you go into educational programming?” Dar asked softly.

Stroganoff shrugged, irritated. “I did, fresh out of college. But they insisted that everything be dull and dry. Claimed the students wouldn’t take it seriously if it was too entertaining—and they had research studies to back them up. Strange as it may seem, most people don’t believe it’s education if it isn’t dull—and that means it reaches a very few people, indeed.”

“Most of whom would learn by themselves, anyway?”

Stroganoff nodded. “The minority who read. Yes. They’re wonderful people, but they’re not the ones I was worried about, not the ones who endangered democracy.”

Dar nodded. “It’s the ones who don’t want to learn that you want to reach.”

“Right.” Stroganoff closed his eyes, nodding. “Not that it’s going to do any good, of course. Oh, if I’d started a hundred years ago, maybe …”

“It can’t be that bad!” Dar frowned. “I thought a democracy had to become decadent before it collapsed.”

“So?”

“But we’re not !” Dar spread his hands, hooked into claws. “Where’re the orgies? Where’s the preoccupation with sex? Where’re the decadent aristocrats?”

“At the I.D.E. enclave in New York.” Stroganoff gave him a wry smile. “Ever seen ‘em? Funny about that …”

“Well, okay. But the orgies …”

“Been looking for them pretty hard, haven’t you? Well, don’t worry—they don’t need to be there. How many orgies do you think the average Roman shopkeeper saw? Look for the decadence in the small things—the people who don’t bother to vote because the candidates’re ‘so much alike.’ The people who think it’s fine for the government to crack down, as long as it doesn’t interfere with their getting their supply of their favorite euphoric. The people who think talking politics is in poor taste. There ’s the decadence that kills a democracy.”