“How are you on murder, Cheese?” Cold Breeze asked. “Suppose everyone on the hab—including you— shuffles off the coil because we sat on back, followed your plan?”
Creamcheese Deluxe glared at him. “We all die, Coldness,” she said contemptuously. “That’s the whole point of calling our bristers and sibsters to the Pointless Cause. All striving is useless against entropy. The Heat Death of the Universe is coming reel soon and—”
“Ah, knock back all that philoso-flapping,” a voice in the back said, daring to cut her off. “You an‘ Breeze both. We’ve all heard it buzz before, and I don’t need you to herd it past again. Ohio, what’s your slant?”
“No slant at all, and that’s the trub, bub. I’m right on the level.” The jive talk and double meanings fell trippingly off his tongue, but they rang false in his ear. The Breeze and the Cheese were both right. To stand by and do nothing was exactly correct, according to the Naked Purple philosophy, because the destruction of the bad old Earth civilization was inevitable.
But the whole creaky structure of Purple assumed that its goals were impossible—not only unattainable, but deliberately chosen because they were unattainable.
That had been the original Purple goal. To shock people out of their complacency, remind them that the world was not all it could be. The Purple was supposed to give people goals they could reach for, but never grasp, thus getting their minds moving again. If society ostracized you for thinking on your own, you were forced to find your own goals. Surely that was laudable, and gave promise for the future. Ohio looked around the crowded room. What goal did these people have, beyond getting to tonight’s party? There was nothing in their Tycho version of Purple. It was sterile, a game of prattling words cooked up to justify what they would have done anyway. It didn’t have to be that way. Yes, there had always been anger in the Purple—but once upon a time there had been hope as well. But that was long ago and far away, all but forgotten, corrupted by the wackos of Tycho Purple Penal. Hope had become mere sullenness.
Tycho. That was the cause of all this. Crossbreed a cult seeking individual enlightenment with a crew of third-generation convicts, and what else could you expect but angry, self-indulgent blather? No, Ohio thought, the Tycho brand of Purple had held sway long enough. It was time for the older ways to return, the old Purple that did have a goal, even if it was half-hidden. A Purple that mixed its anger with hope.
This was too serious, too deadly serious a moment for playing games with words. Ohio nodded, his mind made up. After all, what the hell kind of philosophy endorsed self-extinction?
“Great windbag Ohio turns out to be,” Cheese said mockingly. “He just sits there and nods. No opinions, no thoughts. That’s not the Purple way.”
That got Ohio genuinely mad. Cheese had spent her whole life sticking like glue to the Purple orthodoxy. No room for any thought someone else hadn’t had before. No room for un-Purple thoughts of any kind.
But, outside of this habitat, the real universe was not a very Purple place. Time to make these people run a reality check, he thought. His voice shifted, lowered by an octave. He decided to talk in the old way. Maybe that would have some sort of negative shock value. “Okay, we’ll play it your way.” He turned toward the others. “Cheese here doesn’t want to talk about real people dying, whole civilizations collapsing, maybe humanity becoming extinct, because it doesn’t fit in with the orthodox view. So we won’t. But even if you really believe that we alone of the human race are worth saving, remember that everybody dying includes us. Earth goes, we go. Let me say it in one swell foop.” Damn, a slip into slang, but never mind. “If we let Earth go, we die. We need the Earth. We cannot grow all our own food, or fix our own machines. We can’t take care of ourselves.”
Creamcheese sniffed, a bit uneasily. “Don’t exaggerate. So we buy up a few luxuries, hire a few Earthers like that Noisemaker geek to push the buttons down. It keeps us from polluting ourselves with knowledge we don’t need. As for the imports, mere fripperies for our amusements.”
Ohio couldn’t help noticing that the Purple slang was dropping out of Creamcheese’s words as well. Maybe he had her attention. “That all used to be true,” he said. “But every year, we’ve done less and less of our own work. The Naked Purple ideal called for each of us to do work when needful—but the richer we got, the more that definition of needful started to slide. Until we were buying luxuries like food and airlock repair. We hired outsiders to do our work for us, until we got to where we were buying our air from them because we were sloppy about running the airplant. At least that I put a stop to when I got stuck with this job. I bought us a new airplant and trained a crew to run it. But things like that cost money. Dirty Earth money.
“We’re dependent on Earth. We have to buy from Earth, or starve. With so many ships lost, it’s going to be a lot tougher to resupply us. If they’ll even come. With that CORE thing about to paste the Saint Anthony probe, who’ll want to risk the same treatment just to fly us some food? We might have to evacuate the habitat, move everyone back to Earth—but we don’t have the ships to do that on our own, either. At the very least, we’ll need emergency supplies launched from Earth to tide us over while we buckle down and make ourselves self-sufficient.
“No matter how it breaks, we’ll need help from Earth. Which will be tough to get if the people of Earth accuse us of allowing the Solar Area—damn it, the Solar System—to be destroyed.” Ohio felt a sudden, passionate need to call things by their right names, with no games. “We’re going to need Earth’s goodwill.”
Ohio Template Windbag looked around the shabby room, and the faces of the aggressively, lovably eccentric people in it. There was something oddly sad about them. Not just now, but something that had always been there. “The game’s over,” he said. With a sudden pang of sorrow, he remembered his own pre-Purple past, teaching school, and the desolated faces of the children when the rains came during recess.
Especially the lonely children, the ones that nobody would play with. They seemed to be the ones that gloried most of all in the open space of the school yard, most loved the one place they could at least be themselves and play their secret, solitary games without interruption.
Suddenly the blue skies would be gone, with the fat drops plashing down everywhere, thunder and lightning rumbling threats across the sky, and their secret worlds would be washed away. “Rain’s come, fun’s over,” Ohio whispered to the sad little faces he still saw. “It’s time to come inside,” he said quietly. “Back inside, and back to work.” The room was quiet. Even Creamcheese Drone Deluxe had nothing to say.
Ohio took that as a sign. He punched up the intercom, switched it over to the channel that worked, and called Chelated Noisemaker Extreme. “Frank,” he said at last, “I think we’re all about agreed up here. Why don’t you get that datatap dancing?”