"We said that we couldn't afford to do this. The court said that we had received over two trillion yen over the last sixty years, and that was enough money to terraform anything. We said that we had spent it.

The court said 'tough.'

"We said that there would be nothing to eat. The court recommended fluorescent lights and hydroponics.

We said that the power plants on New Kashubia couldn't produce that much electricity. The court said that we should build more electric power plants. We had automatic factories and plenty of uranium. That was some help. We hadn't known about the automatic factories.

"We'd never asked.

"Anyway, the court gave us three years to be gone, and there wasn't much that we could do but go.

"Tokyo Mining and Manufacturing was very helpful, since the Japanese feared that if we were pressed too hard against the wall, we might nationalize the very profitable installations that the corporation had built over the decades. The corporation did its best, according to its own lights and providing that it didn't disturb its profits too much. And to tell the truth, I have to say that our colonization efforts probably would have failed, leaving us dead or at least with no place to go, without the technical help and leadership of the Japanese.

"But we Kashubians are not Japanese! Those people have some kind of automatic respect for authority and they are all eager to get in neat straight lines and march in step, singing the company song.

Kashubians are Poles, and Poles have never responded well to regimentation. Yet it was clear to both the Japanese and to us that the free and easy ways of the past would have to go.

"We would have to live Spartan lives or not live at all!

"New Kashubia is incredibly rich in metals. The planet was probably a gas giant at one time, but when the local sun went supernova a few billion or so years ago, all of the planet's outer layers, which contained the lighter elements, were blown away. Any lighter stuff mixed with the remaining core soon boiled off.

"All that was left of the entire planet was a molten metal ball, and as it cooled, various metals froze out of solution with those of the highest melting points near the surface, and those of progressively lower melting points farther in. It was sort of like zone refining on a planetary scale. While a good deal of natural alloying took place, this planet was a series of concentric metallic shells with a two-hundred-foot thick layer of almost pure tungsten at the surface and a pool of liquid mercury at the core.

"Except for that core, the entire planet is solid and not particularly hot. Metals are much better conductors of heat than the rocky covering that Earth-like planets have. All of the original heat has long since dissipated on New Kashubia, and the heat of decay from the more radioactive layers finds its way to the surface easily.

"Kasia, my throat is getting dry."

THERE IS A WATER TAP NOW EXTENDING JUST TO THE LEFT OF YOUR MOUTH.

"It extendedinto my mouth," I said with a rubber water tap in my mouth. "Look, I'm not very thrilled about drinking my own reprocessed urine."

THIS IS NOT REPROCESSED ANYTHING, SINCE YOU HAVE YET TO URINATE. IT IS.

SIMPLY DISTILLED WATER FROM MY INTERNAL STORES.

"Right. It tastes warm and flat."

TRY IT AGAIN.

"Hmm. Much better. What did you do?"

I APPROXIMATED THE CHEMICAL COMPOSITION OF SPRING WATER AND DROPPED.

THE TEMPERATURE TO FIVE DEGREES CENTIGRADE.

"You can do that? Thank you."

ALL PART OF THE SERVICE. NOW, YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT THE FOUNDING OF.

NEW KASHUBIA.

"Yes, ma'am. Over the decades, the Japanese robots dug their way straight to the center of the planet to tap the mercury, and tunnels went off this central shaft at those levels that contained metals most in demand.

"You know that gold is a very useful metal. Even though they don't use it for money anymore, it is attractive, malleable, noncorroding and rare, which makes it expensive enough to be transported profitably. Naturally, the gold layer on New Kashubia is among the most exploited and had the most extensive system of tunnels. The gold layer was fairly deep, so that the gravity was low there and people burned less food moving about. That and the fact that gold is among the least poisonous of metals meant that these tunnels were the first to be sealed off for housing the eleven million Kashubians who were arriving as fast as there was the least bit of room for them.

"You see, when the money was being distributed, everybody who was even a little bit Kashubian was eager to claim to be one of us, and benefits were handed out in proportion tohow Kashubian you were.

Even a one-sixteenth share was well worth cashing the check on. Then when the Civil Dragoons came rounding people up for export, they used our own disbursement lists as a guide, and never mind that only one of your great-great-grandparents was Kashubian. They were worried about world overpopulation, not about justice.

"Many people came to regret their grandparents' greed. I mean, some of the people they sent to New Kashubia looked Chinese, and a few of us were even black, if you can believe an Afro-Kashubian. Me, I always was one hundred percent Kashubian, so I never had much choice one way or another.

"I had managed to get a few student deferments, so that I could complete my education before I was forced to emigrate, but they yanked me out of school just before I graduated, right in the middle of final exams. Even so, I was on almost the last immigrant canister to go to New Kashubia.

"I guess a degree wouldn't have made much of a difference here, anyway.

"They had me fly from my school in England to Warszawa International, but then I had to get on the same ancient, decrepit railroad train that everybody else used when they were being deported. They didn't want us in a group at the airport to remind thenice, decent people of what they were doing to us.

"We were transported from a station in what had been Belgrade, Yugoslavia, before the Yugoslavs had left twenty years before, to the vast relief of everyone around, the Wealthy Nations Group included. For variously historically significant reasons, those people had been responsible for causing, or at least starting, at least three major wars and who knows how many small ones, including World War I, the Bosnian Conflict, and the Serbian Reunification. Yugoslavia, of course, had so many ethnic minorities that it actually didn't have any group in the majority, so they just gave the whole nation a planet of their own.

"Now, of course, that whole area of Europe is a resort area used by the citizens of the Wealthy Nations Group, so we disreputable Kashubians were shuttled directly from our railroad cars to the transport station in closed busses, before we had a chance to disturbnice, decent people and cause their wonderful property values to drop.

"I watched when our canister came in, and over three thousand tons of gold were pulled out of it with sturdy lift trucks, to be shipped to the Wealthy Nations. Then collapsible bunks were folded out and thin, new, plastic covered mattresses were put on them. We soon found out the reason for the plastic covers.

"They'd told us that absolutely no luggage or personal effects were allowed, but some people still didn't believe them.

"Their property was simply trashed by the guards. We had nothing but the clothes on our backs, and we'd be losing even those before it was through. We colonists were loaded forty at a time into tiny ships that consisted of nothing but a metal canister with a minimal life-support system and tiny bunks that had been designed by a very short Japanese engineer.

"These ships, like most of those used throughout human space, had been built in an automatic factory right here on New Kashubia, but we unappreciative occupants were not gratified. The ships had no propulsion system, no guidance system, no pilots, and no windows.

"As the door was being sealed shut from the outside, one of the guards handed my uncle a manual written in Japanese. They told him to read it to the group to let them know what was happening. Not that my uncle or any of the rest of us could read Japanese. I tell you that it was not an auspicious beginning!

"The Hassan-Smith transporters work on the principle of shunting matter through several alternate dimensions. This made our trip much shorter, but did not reduce it to zero. The trip took us colonists nineteen hours, and the consensus was that it was probably better that we couldn't look out of the windows that weren't there. Things were bad enough as it was. Once we left Earth, there was no gravity and only one Porta-Potty.

"From Belgrade we were transmitted to the Solar Factory Station inside the orbit of Mercury, where transmitter power was cheap. After only a few minutes in free fall, just long enough for Mrs. Mostnikow to vomit, we were sent to the station that orbited New Kashubia's neutron star. Of course, this meant almost a day without gravity, so everybody had a chance to catch up with Mrs. Mostnikow, which we did. Also, nobody got the hang of using the Porta-Potty in free fall, so vomit wasn't the only lovely semisolid floating around.

"The station at New Kashubia's star was in a synchronous orbit, which kept it out of the searchlight beam of deadly radiation, and for a few minutes we had some gravity. Only it was tidal gravity that pulled us and our messes to both ends of the canister, and a few of the people at each bottom nearly drowned.

Even without that, I wouldn't have wanted to stay there. A twenty-two second orbit is scary!

"From there, our unfortunate group was transmitted down to below the surface of the planet and we colonists, coated with every possible noxious human effluent, were decanted.

THAT WILL BE SUFFICIENT FOR THE TIME BEING. I WILL REQUIRE SEVERAL HOURS.

TO CORRELATE MY DATA, AND YOU ARE SCHEDULED FOR A SLEEP PERIOD.

ANYWAY. GOOD NIGHT MICKOLAI.

"I'm not tired yet."

YES YOU ARE. YOU ARE GETTING VERY SLEEPY. VERY, VERY SLEEPY. . . .

And then I fell asleep.

CHAPTER FOUR.

CONCERNING CONDITIONS ON NEW KASHUBIA.

"Good morning, Mickolai," said a pleasant feminine voice.

"Who are you?" I said, groggy without my morning caffeine pill.

"I'm Kasia, of course. You won't be talking to anybody else until the training course is over."

"You sound different. Better." I was feeling much better today, not as closed in and confined as I had been yesterday. I guess a man can get used to anything, after a while.

"Thank you. It's part of the calibration procedure, and things will get much, much better as time goes on, and I really get the feel of your spinal column."

"Right. So just how long is this training period, anyway?" I asked.

"That depends on you, Mickolai. It's over when you complete the course. The record for basic training is three months, but most people take five or so."

"What's the worst record? I just might beat that."

"Oh, I hope not. Some people never do pass, you know. They have to be sent back."

"What happens to them then?"

"That depends. If they were really volunteers, they simply go back to their old civilian jobs. Those who were sent here by the courts go to their alternate punishment."

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.