Free Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson

every meal break he shambled into the galley black-fingered and smelling of motor grease and concrete floors, to contemplate over his meal the beakers at their round tables chatting away, completely oblivious to him. Of course there was no such thing as class in America, which was why the beakers here could be outfitted in red parkas with their names on their lapels, while the ASL folks generally wore tan Carhartt overalls with labels on the lapels that said Small, Medium, Large or Extra Large—pick your size!—and yet no one noticed this distinction or commented on it. The beakers wandered over to the galley from the Crary Lab, on their own schedules, clearly having the time of their lives; they were on fast career tracks by being down here doing whatever they were doing, mostly wandering the landscape and knocking off bits of it, as far as X could see, and then dating the bits. And this was their work; people paid them money for this; they had nice upper-middle-class homes and families and lives and careers, all from doing this kind of thing. This was how they earned their paychecks! While fraternizing with them in the same galley were people working for hourly wages, on seasonal contracts—lifting loads, freezing their butts, losing fingernails crushed under metal objects, running machinery, crawling in utilidors, gaining no career credits to speak of—all to keep the infrastructure and services going which allowed the beakers to gallivant about fishing or watching penguins, or deciding whether their bits of rock were old or real old.
    So X fumed as he returned from the galley to his concrete floor and resumed sorting ironmongery. No, it was a class
system
, no doubt about it. Watching the scene in Mac Town, X’s reading was finally beginning to coalesce for him; it was all beginning to fall intoplace. Back in the world the overwhelming flood of information clouded the certainty of any analysis, there was just so much of everything that any description of it might be true. But here they were living in a stripped-down microcosm, “Little America” as one precursor base had been named; and X saw that it was the global class system in miniature, everything clearly laid out, and shockingly similar to accounts he had read of Tsarist Russia, not to mention pharaonic Egypt: a ruling caste and an underclass, aristocrats and serfs, with a few middlemen thrown in. The red parkas and tan Carhartts only color-coded it, as if ASL and NSF knew all about it and knew also that they could shove it in people’s faces and no one would protest, not in this the globally downsized postrevolutionary massively fortified stage of very late capitalism. The in-your-face effrontery of it made X even angrier, and as he continued to pluck up nuts and washers from the concrete and drop them in their proper bins, he fantasized images of slave revolts, Spartacus, general strikes—in short,
revolution
. Guillotines on Beeker Street!
    Except with a little more thought—and sitting on that cold concrete, he had a lot of time for thought—the image of the guillotine made it clear how impossible these fantasies were. Not in the practical logistical sense, as the heavy shop could probably bang together a guillotine in a day—but in the problem of all the fraternizing, the small numbers, the close quarters, the common galley. The common workout on the ice. All that meant that he and the rest of the Carhartts met a lot of beakers at least briefly, and 90% of them were very nice people—or say 80%—or at least 75%—but wait, there he was going into beaker mode himself, got to watch out for that, it was catching—anyway, they were just people. Lucky to have good jobs, and often kind ofeccentric, but nice—the young women very nice, in fact, and seldom at all standoffish, nicer often than the ASL women in fact, counting on the red parka to protect them perhaps—but nice smiles, very friendly, and often very smart. But also quite often deeply spaced,