A Future Satire;
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The startling, sparkling wall of
polished Douglas Fir logs
(overlaid, of course, with a
chain-link grid pumped full of enough
megawattage to fry even a slimeroller) that
was wrapped around Eugotopia was visi
ble for kilometers. The Muckers, sloshing
and slucking through the Fem Ridge Goo,
could see it, and, if the wind was right,
could smell the squeaky purity of the set
tlement within with their nosegills. The Al
banogs could not smell it, evolution hav
ing mercifully replaced their noses with a
soot-wiping appendage that cleared the
grimy airborne stuff from their shrunken
eyes, but they could see it on rare days
when the atmospheric viscosity was
sub-milkshake. And even the tiny car
boniferous Springfield polyps, though
lacking eyes ana noses, could sense the
thrumming vibrations of life within with
their cilia-lined tentacles, and painted
crude pictures in their nerve-bundle minds
of the great cylindrical enclave, rising like a
defiant god on the banks of the
Willamette’s bubbling sludge.
But being a nonmutant and a resident
of Eastern Subsurface Subsector 23-R, 1
had not shared the good fortune of the
Northwest adaptoids. who metamorph
osed from larva to humus almost in the
shadow of the legendary site. All of my
knowledge of Eugotopia had been sifted
from cubetapes and juiced out of smog
skipper pilots who occasionally flew over
the area on algaecide raids. The informa
tion gleaned from both sources was in
furiatingly vague: some fuzzy references to
“nature ”, “pottery”, and “whole-wheat”
and a description of the exterior as being
“frighteningly clean.” 1 felt lost, hours in
the hypno-libe and 82 stellars wasted on
tongue-loosening happy juice had
brought me no closer to what 1 really
wanted to know: how to get inside.
You might well ask why a purestrain like
myself, with a comfortable if slightly leaky
slimebuffer suite and a yeast ration as long
as an ash-eater’s beak, would even con
sider leaving his sector for a region that,
by all accounts, was foreign to my
chemically-sanitized, windowless, pres
surized and plasticized lifestyle as the sur
face world dozens of kilometers above, a
quivering quagmire of ever-mutating in
dustrially excreted glop.
Yes. you might well ask, for 1 had asked
myself the same question many times. 1
was asking myself again in the graylight
period of Twelvespin the 42nd, as 1 sat
with my fellow Manuals at the unmated
table in the sector’s Auto-Mess, picking at
my warm, pink brick of macronutrients.
And as always, the answer was the
same; Terra’s radiant face appeared in the
steam that rose from my beige vitamin
broth, her golden hair done up in tiny
braids, a sprig of barley tucked seductively
behind her ear, and a sunflower-seed
necklace making an alluring parabola ac
ross the bib of her overalls. For the nth
time, my mind tubed back to our first
meeting. . .
She was an official Eugotopian ambas
sador, I, just a neophyte muckraker for the
East-Urb Trog, a predictable piece of
overrecycled pulp that hissed into the
pneumoboxes of the sector’s private
cubicles and exited, usually unread,
through the disposal chutes of the same
cubicles, where its molecules were rear
ranged into blank stock only slightly
grayer for the journey. I had hoped that a
piece on the arrival of a legit Eugotopian
— the first such visit in history-would at
tract a few readers and slow down their
reflex rejections. But then, who was I kid
ding, I had sighed to myself — the mere
mention of Eugotopia aroused hostile
stares from the Neural Patrol, and any
thing I wrote had about as much chance of
getting past the Censor’s Sensors as a
clean nightie had with the Venetians.
So I had been in a mottled funk as my
canister thumped at Level 34B, the site of
Terra’s press conference. 1 knew that the
rumor about the Eugotopians planning
V V V
y ^
some sort of polylevel invasion was pure
germicide, screened up by the twisted
transistors of the SocialComp over at the
Positive Paranoia Center. I was barely
succeeding in suppressing my anger as 1
stepped through the sphinctering door
into the press conference.
There is little point in detailing
the rest. 1 saw Terra and vice
versa, we fell in love, the Neur
als found out, they ’tubed my mate and
little replacement to Carlsbad, vaporized
my procreation license, plugged me into a
must have knocked me on the medulla
because the rest of the escape is pretty
fuzzy. All I really recall is that when i
awoke, lovely Terra was stroking my skull
with her delicious right hand and nudging
the ’simmers joystick with her left.
“Terra, dearest! But what did. how did
you. where . .
“Mellow thyself, my poor oppressed
flower, ambassadors can open doors that
others cannot.”
1 took her small, sweet hand in mine.
“So shall we now go to Eugotopia?”
She smiled one of those earthy, incan
descent smiles and waved at the semicir
Brainwipe (which I escaped by bribing the
attendant with my last stellar) and
changed my designation to Manual.
All that had been 420.6 lightperiods ago
as I sat at that table during the graylight
period, poking absently at the 2,000
calories of nutrients in yeast binders that
would give me the strength to spend
another endless whitelight period (the
Great Trog only knew when they were
going to stop stretching the whitelight to
increase productivity) using my pocket
excavator to blast holes for new slimebuf
fer suites in the putrid bedrock.
I sighed, and, for the 420th time, dis
missed Terra’s mental image from the at
mosphere before me. But this time,
miraculously, the beautiful face refused to
dissolve.
She was really there.
“My dearest, bravest R-6,” she cooed,
“There is no time to explain. My scum
skipper is outside and the sleepytab 1 slip
ped the slimelock guard will wear off any
millicycle. Utmost speed!”
I dropped my foodstick and leaped
from the bench, racing with Terra past the
burly backs of the other Manuals. We
dived into a cannister before any of them
could react, and soon were whooshing
through the steel arteries of the sector
toward the exit tunnel — and the
slimelock.
I can’t rescan much of what ensued.
There was a laserzap ambush which I held
off with my pocket excavator and two
Tzai-Tao confrontations, but something
cles that the muckwipers had cleared in
the slime-shield. “Don’t you see, my darl
ing? We are there!”
As I peered out, the shell of goo that had
coated the ’skimmer’s bubbletop was
stripped away by soapy jets that filled the
cockpit with a clean pine smell. A quick
rinse, the top cracked open and a dozen
other smells floated in, which I recognized
from the olfactory imprinting of replace
ment school: the warm, deep fragrance of
wheat germ, the moist, acrid odor of wet
clay, the tang of fermenting yogurt and
fruit wine and the unmistakeable
roasting-turkey aroma of smoldering
hemp.
But the real sensory barrage was de
cidedly optic. The bubble swung back and
Terra and 1 stepped out onto the hand
hewn wooden platform attached to the
slimelock through which we had just pas
sed, and the patchwork of Eugotopia lay
stretched before us, bathed in warm
earth-toned light that shone down from
above.
“It’s from the dome, " Terra purred, fol
lowing my gaze. Her milky hand swept
across an enormous stained-glass skylight
of incredible brilliance and intricacy that
capped the Douglas Fir fence.
“It depicts the struggle of the Eugoto
pians against the Biocidal Corporate
Despots. Over there is the Prophet Rust,
leading the infamous “Battle of the
Hoedads” against the Weyerhaeuser
Mandarins, and next to that, the BRING
soldiers catapulting solid waste at Pape
Cat from the Glenwood Receiving Station
trenches. Over there is the attack of the
Blackberry Defoliant Mutations, and to
the north. .
Beautiful as the dome was, my attention
was drawn to the earthscape below. A
mad swirl of colors and shapes, it was too
distant and unfamiliar to allow me to pick
out detail, but the scene somehow
seemed to emit oscillations — “vibes,”
Terra would say — of perfect peace, love
and harmony.
With one exception. Stacked on the
platform around us were severed huge,
inlaid cedar chests that bore bas-relief
mushroom clouds carved deeply into their
sides. I tried to tell myself that the carver
had probably just been clumsy or perhaps
a surrealist, and that the boxes probably
contained just mushrooms, but after Terra
trotted off to dock the ‘skimmer my
muckraker’s curiousity got the better of
me and I cracked open the lid of the chest
nearest to me.
It was chock-full of Q-bombs.
Suddenly a hand, small but sur
prising in its strength, grasped
my own, and I dropped the lid
with a thud.
“Why Terra,” I stammered, “I was just
“Come,” she said through smiling lips,
though her eyes were cold as titanium
bearings and the petite, satiny hand
pushed the kilograms-per-centimeter total
to a pressure that made my knuckles un
comfortably intimate. “Let us explore
your new home and new life with me in
the mellowness of Eugotopia.”
“Well, uh, affirmative,” 1 consented,
pulling my hand free and rubbing it won
deringiy.
We walked — it seemed odd to walk, in
the subsector the citizens pneumotubed
everywhere, even to the excratory — and
as we entered Eugotopia proper. Terra
explained the surroundings.
“Our economic system is based on the
ancient Saturday Market.” She swept a
slender forearm to indicate the rough
hewn stalls around us, staffed by young,
robust artisans and stuffed with wares.
“It’s Jeffersonian Marxism,” she exp
lained. “The workers control the means of
production, yet the market is open and
uncontrolled.”
As she continued outlining the unique
hybrid system, I took a closer scan at the
stalls.
“But why , Terra darling,” I said at last,
“are only pots and belts being sold? And
why are all of the prices at the same out
rageously high level?”
“Because, dearest,” she smiled, taking
my hand again and applying a subtle pres
sure, “that would be competition — most
un mellow.”
“I see. Then the prices are fixed by the
artisans to create a corporate monopoly . ”
“No, dear," Terra whispered. My hand
began to throb. “They cooperate. F m af
raid you have a lot to learn about our
perfect society.”
“Affirmative,” 1 agreed.
In any case, it uxisaesthetically pleasing,
and the populace seemed happy enough.
Bearded men and pink-cheeked women
in the Eugotopian uniform — slapping
sandals, oversized overalls, flannel shirts
with sleeves rolled up two centimeters
above the elbow and caterpiUar hats —
called out to Terra as we strolled down the
grassy ribbon called Oak Street, and she
responded with greatings like “Peace,
Frodo,” and “Stay mellow, Sunshine.”
Once, a virile-looking hunk named
“Warm Breeze” lifted a hand palm
upward and muttered, in contrast to his
smiling face, “This rain’s a bitch, isn’t it?”
“Rain?” I asked after he had passed,
peering up at the dome.
“It’s an old customary greeting,” Terra
explained. I was relieved, the prospect of
airborne water pellets osmosing throuc^i
my jumper made me nervous.
The promenade of Eugotopians grew