New Novel Liveblogging 2

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Written by: Thomas Collette

Published: 26 October 2008

Down in the hole, as they are fond of saying, you are the most powerful human being in the Solar System. Contending with the planet's center of gravity at some depth below ground being the cause of that conceit. Almost nobody here knows any of the Far-Flung, but the occasional news feature that almost nobody watches and even fewer read were full of the mythological deeds of denizens of the rocks—clinging to their airless half-acres and yet managing to carve out a fruitful existence. Lionel Dangko, like his cohorts, is glad the transmissions from the digital wafer repeaters are undecipherable at the depths they work. If anybody owned a set anyway, they were neither proud enough nor had the time, energy or intellectual curiosity to discover what the rest of the universe was up to—it was just the thought that not even the emanations could touch them. But every season or so, another troop of scribes, computer literate sons and daughters of the last great white hope on Earth, the pimps who hold and trade the DNA futures that keep their jobs financed and the miserable lot of them down here in the hole, show up at the great gray gates. Dangko suspects there's a lottery, that the "winner" is plucked from the shaft or shower or mess line, depending upon the shift working when they show. Dangko's one of a handful of miners who's actually seen a broadcast. They set the subject down before their bright halogens and deliberately open their lens apertures—making the lucky soul, already pale as a cavern fish, termite or other subterranean creature, look positively fluorescent. So he sits there shivering and blinking while they fire away, impertinent queries to cull descriptions about the work environment, until one slip dooms him. The slip always comes, given the chance to vent, because there is nothing else to say about such hideous labor. Finally they encourage him to tantalize the meager but hopeful audience on planet and the meager and apathetic beyond with anticipated discoveries.

"We understand there are possibilities of soon unearthing material that will help us recover the Nova Scotia salmon, the Asian peacock, the monarch butterfly" or whatever else is trading briskly on the market that season. If they are lucky enough to get a shift foreman or shaft paleontologist, they will at least get an informed response, regardless of its veracity. If they get a shovel operator or scrap retriever the payoff is more likely to be anything from a blank stare to outright hostility, the spread of the spectrum usually being a function of their years of experience. If any of them live long enough, they are aware that winning the lottery is almost always a death sentence. There was a time when Dangko believed their was no lottery, that the winner was chosen not at random but quite purposefully, almost certainly as punishment for some transgression, either political or on the job—someone disparaging a foreman behind his back, failing to brace the entrance to a new dig as it got wider. It would explain why the winner would soon be out of a job, because the experience was emotional equivalent of taking the man up, putting him in an airlock and quickly evacuating the chamber. It took everything out as surely as explosive decompression—his guts anyway. Morale is low enough for anyone in this line of work, but having the tasks you carried out every shift without much thought as to why suddenly questioned as if there were any other possibilities in life was enough to take the metaphysical floor out from under anyone unprepared for what awaited in the compound theater.

Dangko's opinion took a mighty turn when he was called up. He'd been on the job two years, no black marks on his record, a swift career ladder from digger to sorter to shovel operator to shift foreman. Twenty-one months in, he noted the sloppy work of a bracer, not to an overseer but to the men at risk, bypassing official policy. He avoided a write-up only on the testimony of the twenty diggers he had saved—and his timely find of pheasant bones and feathers, the leavings of a state dinner held in 2003, judging by the embroidery on a linen napkin wedged between broken crockery, all bearing the presidential seal. These they discarded, along with the bracer. About three months later, a well-dressed slick from the public liaison office reeking of Recessant cologne shook Dangko awake by the ankle, thinking it was his shoulder and earning him a heel to the left nad, owing to his habit of shrouding his face with the blankets  like a corpse during daylight hours. In his confusion upon finding out what was in store for him he thought this was the reason for the trip down to the compound theater.

The lights in the theater are merciless halogen, white point of 3400° Kelvin, yet when Dangko saw a replay several weeks later, when everyone thought he'd already be history and he was still on the job, he seemed an uncommonly paler version of his already pale self. Besides opening up the apertures an extra stop, washing what little red complemented his skin tone, the video engineer is also instructed to adjust the white point to 2000°K, so that the subject blue-shifts like Sirius on a collision course. No matter how the audience feels about people who dig through landfills for a living, the empathy still must belong to those asking the questions, especially when they inexorably turn to the subject's opinion of his situation vis-a-vis the Far-Flung. It's a tradition that the newest reporter on the scene gets to be the cat's paw, asking something along the tangent of "What keeps you going day after day, digging in the bowels of the earth, among centuries-old garbage heaps, your life in constant danger..." and so and thus, as if the guy needs a diuretic for self-esteem—which coin of psychological tender was then flipped to read "...when you could be, if circumstances of birth and genetic composition were different, prospecting the riches of the Beltway?"

Because they are dealing with working class stiffs so unlike themselves, on both ends of the cameras and bitstreams, it's all bathos. Viewers always know it's coming, and yet they're always back for more. Genuine anger, neatly packaged for instant consumption, in contrast with the comedies and dramas of indefinite length that nobody has time or attention span to watch anyway. It comes pouring out in rushes for the journalist's gallery, in wide-angle shots of fists accelerating out of the middle distance and arriving in screens of frozen pixels or static, in torrents of expurgated obscenities. Bob Biltsberg at parties proudly shows off his bridge where one subject knocked out two incisors and a bicuspid, and it's no secret that Jerima Bellows used her abrasions and contusions from a flying chair as the ticket to gratis cosmetic surgery on a workman's comp claim. Gage Killsaw later built his career out on the hair-pulling, furniture-tossing circuit, twelve E-years in Beltway-wide syndication, jaw ever extended in scowling faux underbite, exploring topics such as "I Lost My Woman to a Trash-Digger" or "I Survived Dangerous Sexcapades in Zero Gravity AND Vacuum." Afterwards, the subject is either arrested, or, if the response is unsatisfyingly laconic, dropped a few rungs down the company ladder and sent back into the hole to do the same labor he thought he had long surpassed. Either way, the results are almost identical—in a few weeks or months, he's out picking through the more recent discards, trying to pull nutrients from between his own teeth and those of a System that found his contributions too miniscule even for a proper burial, or, if he was lucky enough to pull off a more imaginative boner, a one-hour gig on the Gage Killsaw show.

Dangko's responses to the journalists' questions are so uncharacteristically eloquent, so their queries and follow-ups rise to the occasion. No one else they've ever encountered from this social stratum had ever speculated on how long the human race ignored the warnings that the planet would one day be reduced to this. Certainly no one had ever spontaneously compared his work to that of Schliemann and Dörpfeld, and even the Leakeys. Producer Ric Pantfest quietly shifts his big behind back in the control room lander parked out in the mud behind the building. Headsets buzzed, and the floor director gives the whirling signal with his finger that we need a wrap. Ask the Question now!

Hans Greenside feels an elbow in his back, knows from it and the expectant silence that his time has arrived. He clears his throat, and in a voice nearly spent from rehearsing a pontificating inflection and unconciously trembling in awe at Dangko's unlooked-for intellect, says, "we know there is no love lost between the people stuck on this planet, or even Mars, and the Far-flung. Would you go so far to say there is rampant racism here?"

Back in the truck, Pantfest grabs his hair, bangs his head against monitors, grinds his teeth. How had this happened? Who fed the greenie the cue to ask, when nobody had obviously briefed him on the proper phrasing, the terminology to avoid. The deadliest sin was to say anything here was racist, not to support the illusion that there wasn't, but because once the subtlety was gone, so surely would the semgent's perennial appeal.

"If there is a racist left on Earth, then God is a racist. This is by His design, after all."