Dad took a bite. Thoughtfully. Then another. He looked uncomfortable and he kept looking back and forth between the two women at the table. We'd just met the both of them and suddenly our lives were in their hands. How had we stumbled into this? Was this going to turn into an even bigger mess?
Olivia noticed first. "Max," she said, almost conversationally, "do you have community standards classes in your town? Seminars?"
"Sure, doesn't everybody?"
"What's the stated purpose?" The way she asked, there was obviously more to her question than curiosity.
"To establish stability for the entire community. The most good for the most people."
Olivia looked to Georgia. "Sounds good to me—for dirtside. How about you, Your Honor?"
Georgia shrugged and spoke around a mouthful of salad. "Yeah, sounds good for dirtside."
I was starting to get the feeling that "dirtside" was a nasty word. A rude way of talking about people who lived on the ground.
"Well, it is good," Dad said. "There are seventeen billion people on the planet. You can't have everyone running around freely making up their own rules and setting their own standards. The, uh—the social contract and all that. The common good requires that people have a common context."
"That sounds pretty common to me," Olivia nodded.
"Yep," agreed the Judge. "Me too."
Dad finally got it. He narrowed his eyes. "Is there something wrong with the idea of the common good?"
"Nope," Olivia said innocently. "If you don't mind being common."
Judge Griffith leaned forward then to explain. "Max, downside, you can talk about things being common, because for most people, that's exactly how they are. Common. Ordinary. But up here—" She waved her hand to indicate not just the room but everything beyond it. Geostationary. The Line. The moon. "Up here—nothing is ordinary. Everything is extraordinary.
"People don't come up here looking for more of the ordinary, they come up here because they want to get away from the ordinary. That's what space represents, the chance at an extraordinary life.
"Most people on Earth never get a chance to feel what it's like to be extraordinary. The best they get are pictures of other people being extraordinary. And once in a while, some lucky schmuck gets an extraordinary experience and it transforms the quality of his life from that moment onward. Because once you've had one extraordinary experience you know that once isn't enough. You want your whole life to be like that. So people come up here, Max, looking not just for an extraordinary experience, but, for what they wanted all along—extraordinary lives."
Still talking to Dad, the judge pointed to us kids. "You knew that when you kidnapped them—sorry to be so blunt about it, Max, but let's be honest. You knew what you were doing, and you'd do it again if you had to. You saw a chance and you grabbed it, and you grabbed your kids so they could have the same chance too. And the fact is, there isn't a parent on Earth who doesn't secretly envy your bravado—even while at the same time hating you for it. You've grabbed a piece of something." She waved at the space around her. "This is a lifeline for the human race—a way out of the trap."
Dad shook his head. "The last report I saw said that there are still three million babies being born every day, something like that. The Line would take eight months to boost that many people into space. No, the beanstalk isn't a way out—it's a luxury."
"No, it isn't," said Olivia abruptly. "It's a lifeboat. And there weren't enough lifeboats on the Titanic either."
That made for a moment of uncomfortable silence, until Judge Griffith rescued the conversation. "The point is," she said, "we're trying to get as many kids into the lifeboats as possible. And world-builders. And people who know how to make a difference. We might lose the Earth, yes—it sure looks like it this week—but we're not going to lose the game."
Dad made a face. I could almost understand why.
"Yes, I know that downsiders hate it when an upsider talks like that, but the nasty truth is that what's consuming the Earth is everybody's insistence on grinding everybody else down. There's no energy left for anything else. That's why you bailed—"
Dad conceded the argument with a shrug.
Olivia interrupted then. "Your Honor, if I may—?"
Judge Griffith waved her hand. "Go ahead, Counselor."
Olivia leaned toward Dad. "The job of the Presiding Judge of the Superior Court for the Geostationary Jurisdiction as authorized by the Singapore Treaty and confirmed by the local representatives of the Corporate Signatories to the Colonial Agreement is to rule on conflicts between upside and downside law. The unspoken part of that job is to guarantee and protect the interests of upsiders against spurious downside claims." She glanced over to the judge. "Right?"
Judge Griffith waved her wineglass in vague agreement. "We get a lot of interesting actions filed up here. Everybody downside thinks everybody upside is rich." She stopped talking just long enough to push another bite of pizza into her mouth. Still chewing, she held up a hand to indicate that she hadn't finished her thought yet. She mopped her mouth with one of Olivia's ample cloth napkins and held her glass out for more wine. "I shouldn't, but the counselor has an excellent wine cellar—thirty-six thousand kilometers that way." She gestured off to her side. "Or am I turned around? No, I was right. It's that way. Earthside and starside, Charles. Remember that. Keep the Earth to your left and you're facing spinward. Here, I'll give you an interesting little puzzle to consider. If I take away from you the words right and left, how else can you speak about your right and left side?"
"My heart's on the left," I answered immediately. And then added quickly, "Your Honor."
"You can call me Georgia. We're not in session here. And that's the B answer. Your heart is actually in the center, leaning left. Now, try for the A answer. How would you explain left and right to a Martian? Someone who doesn't have the same language you do. What physical criteria can you use? Think about it for awhile." She turned back to Olivia, leaving me puzzling over the riddle. If there was another answer, it wasn't obvious.
After her glass was refilled a second time, Georgia turned back to Dad. "I'm well aware that if I grant your wife's claim tomorrow, I'm establishing a precedent for future downsider claims against upsiders. So even though what's at issue for you is only your future, what's at issue for the rest of us up here is a lot larger. This is one of those really annoying cases that calls into question the whole matter of jurisdiction.
"You see, if I vacate Howard's request for an investigatory hearing, that will be viewed downside as a larger refusal to hear any downside claims, which will lead us ultimately toward a hearing in the World Court. Not this case, of course—you'll be long gone by then—but eventually, the jurisdictional matters are going to have to be resolved. Sooner or later, we're going to get a really nasty test case. I just want to make sure that this isn't it, because if this one ends up in the World Court, it'll be ruled against us. And regardless of the outcome of this case, I don't want that precedent over my head. So the best hope for the upside is to delay those kinds of confrontations for as long as possible to give the colonial signatories a chance to build up a counterweight authority.