Cosmos Incorporated by Maurice G. Dantec Read Free Book Online

after all, well informed of the dangers involved in any temporary or permanent move outside natural human surroundings. UniWorld disavowed any legal or moral responsibility, and serenely continued to tax them.
    Order reigned, all the better for there being none.
    Anarchy begins immediately outside the Enterprise aerostation.
    He quickly realizes that this is the city’s principal source of wealth, and that it is necessary to maintain the system of waiting and selection, as well as ironfisted control over ticket prices, in order to conserve the dynamic of this chaos, this inexhaustible source of power and money.
    For in this state of chaos, as in all others, “freedom” is only a contingency of necessity. He doesn’t yet know where this primal intuition comes from, but it makes his spirit tingle. When disorder is allowed to be society’s guiding principle, the social engine ends by breaking down completely; both the explosive matter that initiates propulsion and the basic structure that maintains coherent operation fall apart. This permits rapid and very substantial gains—people depend on liberty, which is bound to necessity; people depend on voluntary servitude. People depend on
desire.
    It is volatile fuel to depend on, fuel that makes the world itself volatile too.
    So here there is a blazing new motor—or, rather, the perfect appearance of one. It is really a simulacrum, where hundreds of thousands of human shadows move through a lovely cavern that hides the walls of an immense strongbox.
    So this is Grand Junction. It sweeps you away in a flood of human desire; it is monistic, pure, terribly active, foaming in thousands of individual droplets and dashing itself against the walls of civilization. It is a huge brothel turned toward the stars. It is a lottery, a circus act that has become a true piece of the World. That has become a society.
    Rapidly, letting his neuro-implants gather a few more bits of information as he navigates the different floors of Enterprise, he realizes that a “ticket to ride,” as they say here, for an orbital flight is worthless in itself, even at the price of a quarter of a million on a high-security launcher. It is not for one of these that all these people have waited years, some until they died, crammed into capsule motels and collapsible shantytowns, luxury hotels and casinos, squalid streets and neoclassical villas; it is not for one of these that they are ready to steal, kill, humiliate, be humiliated, cheat, corrupt, lie, hate, love. It is for a document made of cloned recyclable cellulose, courtesy of UniGlobal Recyclo™, a piece of yellow paper called the Golden Track.
    The Golden Track is an official document duly stamped by the UHU—which of course keeps a copy of the number—that authorizes you to be a permanent resident in the Orbital Ring, and to apply for a flight to one of the lunar stations or Martian colonies that was lucky enough to gain autonomy during the Grand Jihad. The Golden Track lets you rent or buy, in cash, lease, or rent to own—with the amount and type of transaction clearly stated—a UHU-approved habitation module of one type or another, before you are assigned to one or another of the colonies of orbital stations grouped in star-shaped clusters that make up the Orbring, the Orbital Ring. Without this UHU-approved piece of paper, there is no point in leaving for the Ring; no one will be there waiting for you, and you will be automatically reshuffled into the waiting crowd. You must go through the entire corrupt bureaucratic, technocratic process before you can even hope to obtain one of these yellow slips; and if you want to make sure you have even a slight chance to get one, it is in your best interest to pre-buy your place right away. The waiting list is very, very long, you see, and that is how Grand Junction prospers so easily, by fixing ticket prices while interminably drawing out the process of getting one of these passports to the sky.
    To the