That meant the vats for me. I decided that maybe I should start taking this whole training course a lot more seriously, even if it did mean staying submerged for a few months.
“Right, Kasia,” I said in my best perky fashion. “What’s on the agenda for today?”
“I’m still not well enough calibrated to start your actual training program, so we’ll spend today completing the calibration. But first some breakfast.”
“I’m not very hungry.”
“You are seventeen kilos underweight, and you can’t pass this course while being a weakling.”
“Food is scarce on New Kashubia, or hadn’t you heard?”
“It’s not scarce in here. Everything is recycled, my stocks of make-up chemicals are full, and you can have as much as you want.”
“It’s this recycled business that bothers me,” I said.
“That’s irrational, Mickolai. You have been eating reprocessed food all your life. On Earth, it was reprocessed through the natural biosystem, and on New Kashubia, it has been reprocessed through the hydroponic vats. The only difference is that now it is reprocessed through your own, personal, private system. You should feel good about that.”
“I should feel good about eating my own shit?”
“Would you feel better about eating someone else’s? Because that is precisely what you do with a large, public system, be it natural or hydroponic.”
“But I didn’t have to think about it then,” I said.
“You don’t have to think about it now, Mickolai. It’s time for another nap. You’re getting sleepy, Mickolai. Very, very sleepy . . .” she said with her soothing, wonderful voice.
I woke up feeling hungry, and Kasia came up with something that tasted just like the beef we sometimes used to get back on Earth! After breakfast, I asked about the day’s agenda.
“More calibration, I’m afraid. Only this time, I want you to subvocalize rather than to actually talk. I’ll be picking up what you mean to say from the nerve impulses in your spinal column. You were telling me about your trip to New Kashubia.”
“Please, one thing first. I’d like to contact my relatives and tell them that I am all right.”
“That is not allowed, Mickolai. During the training period, you are forbidden to have outside contacts. Your relatives have been informed that you are in good health, and I assure you that they are all fine as well. Should these statuses change, you and/or they will be informed. No further contacts are permitted.”
“Is that legal, to stop my mail?”
“At this point it would be legal to stop your heart! I can legally kill you and send your body to the hydroponic tanks for fertilizer.”
“Uh, yes. Well. What was it you wanted me to do next?”
“I want you to continue your story, but rather than speaking, I want you to subvocalize.”
Okay, I thought. Is this what you want?
“Just fine. Keep it up, Mickolai.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Like I was saying yesterday, as soon as we got to New Kashubia, we were divided into two groups, men and women, and we never saw the women again, not legally anyway, except on television. They had us strip off our filthy clothes, for washing, we thought, but we never saw them again, either. Actually, they just burned them, and the ashes and fumes were fed through hydroponic vats. We needed organic chemicals that badly. They sprayed us all down at the same time as the mattresses were washed and stripped of their plastic covers, which were carefully saved for reprocessing into electrical insulation. Then we were handed the mattresses as one of the few bits of personal property we owned. The interior of the canister was steam cleaned, with the garbage carefully saved, and the bunks were folded up.
The space thus available was filled with such metals as had been ordered from Earth. Gold, mostly, and the canister was evacuated, since we needed every bit of air we could get.
Our ship was sent back by the same route for another group of colonists. On the average, one shipload of them had been arriving every five minutes for two and a half years. Now and then a canister came in with air or food, but not quite often enough.
We refugees of an uncaring system were forced to live in bunk beds with one hundred men to a room, with foul air to breathe and not nearly enough to eat. Yet the walls of our rooms were of solid gold!
We were forced to import the air that we breathed, the water that we drank and fed to our food plants, and the raw materials for much of what we absolutely needed. Furthermore, these things had to be imported from outsystem, since all of the usual debris of a solar system, even the cometary belt, had been blown into interstellar space when our star went supernova. Ours was a singularly empty system.
Transportation costs were kept artificially high by the Wealthy Nations Group, who by this time owned Pildewski Interplanetary Transport, Inc., and thus the Hassan-Smith transporters. The cost of bringing in a shipload of water is only slightly less than the Earth price of a shipload of gold. Not that it costs them anything to send it to us. I mean, the power required comes from the sun, and the equipment is all just sitting there idle, most of the time. The explanation the bastards give is that it is necessary to recover the high costs of the initial and continuing exploration of human space. In reality, of course, practices like this are the reason why the Wealthy Nations stay that way.
“You sound very bitter, Mickolai,” my tank said.
“Bitter?” I said out loud, “You’re damn right I’m bitter! Look, I was a student in school, minding my own business and getting decent grades. Then just because my great-grandfather pulled an innocent little con job, I got yanked out of class a week before graduation! I was robbed of all of my property, even my underwear! I got stuffed into a tin can half full of floating vomit and shit and piss and screaming people for almost a whole day! I was stripped naked and forced to live in a barracks with a hundred other smelly men! I’ve spent almost three years breathing foul air and eating half rations that wouldn’t satisfy a rabbit, and you ask me if I’m bitter? I’m forced to go two years without even seeing a female human being, and you ask me if I’m bitter? And when I finally do manage to meet a nice girl, we’re limited to what you can do through a goddamn hole in the wall! And then, despite all I’ve done for this colony, they murder our child and sentence the two of us to death or life sealed up in a goddamn tank, and you ask if I’m bitter? Hell yes I’m bitter! I’m bloody fucking goddamn well pissed off is what I am!”
“Yes, Mickolai. You have a very real grievance. I would like you to tell me about it. But would you subvocalize, please? I need to complete my calibration,” she said in a sweet and all too reasonable voice.
Okay, I thought to her, we’ll go at it again. You see, the Japanese had never kept more than a hundred people on New Kashubia, there being limits to what even a Japanese engineer will put up with. With that low a population and plenty of ships returning empty, anyway, they had simply imported all of the food, air, and other things they needed for survival. No attempt had been made to recycle anything locally.
Things had to be done much differently with eleven million largely untrained Kashubians to somehow support.
There were plenty of automatic factories around, although they were mostly set up to build heavy industrial goods and metal components for the various luxury products in demand. While the automatic factories couldn’t directly produce many of the things that were desperately needed, they could produce other factories that could make useful stuff, providing that the engineering and the raw materials were available.
There weren’t many of us with a technical background, but we could get the engineering done. Raw materials were the problem. We had almost no light elements at all. I helped design a factory that made growing lights for the food production tunnels, but sand had to be imported from Earth to make the glass. Copper for wires was available by the megaton, but the plastic to insulate the wires had to be imported. Plumbing was cheap, but the sewage in the pipe was vastly expensive and had to be reprocessed quickly. This forced us to use very small drain pipes that were constantly getting plugged.
Some things could be improvised using local materials. We’re pulverizing gold and palladium and using it as soil to support the roots of food plants. It’s a lot cheaper than importing dirt. At least we don’t have to build reflectors for the lights. The drilled tunnels are already bright and shiny.