Calban In Marta City : Part 3 ( Marta & Gallanol Ch. 2)

Calban In Marta City (Part 3) copyright David Kirtley 2007

CHAPTER TWO: CALBAN IN MARTA CITY (Part 3)

When the tram came to a part of the city dense with tall buildings, which was a centre near his flat, he stood up ready for the change of trams. He had less than five minutes to change onto a different platform at a higher level and catch his normal tram to his block, which was named like many other buildings in the Empire after the ancient King of Martainia, Catorn, who had laid the foundations of the Empire by confronting the power of ancient Gallanol.

Despite Internationalism and the World Economy, the end of warfare, and the new age of Progress, many in the Empire revered Catorn’s nationalist actions as a part of the basis of the Empire’s growth which enabled the developments which eventually brought about specialisation and the developed economies of the modern world. That was about all Calban knew about the ancient King. Like many Martans he accepted that Catorn must have been an important historical figure but he felt no real interest in this distant past, except perhaps from a personal awareness that in those ancient times people had lived closer together and may have lived lives over which they held more control and seemed more important than the lives Calban and his modern compatriots lived.

Research into the past was not something Calban had much interest in, although he was aware of its potential as an escape from reality. He was however concerned about the present and the recent past which seemed more relevant to his life. He no longer cherished any hope that things would ever change, certainly not in his own lifetime, but he indulged continuously in the fantasy of what he believed his life could have been under different circumstances. He envisaged a life of indolence and no work with social and sexual companionship at all times.

The tram came to a halt at the station. Calban was at the front of the group, which stepped off onto the platform. He edged his way through the multitude which poured onto the platform just reaching a nearly full lift as its doors were closing. The sensors picked up his presence and determined that there was sufficient unutilised capacity in the lift for him. The doors retracted to enable him to get on board. He turned to face the doors as they again closed. A woman stood facing him where he had been seconds before, but the closing doors would not reopen to let her on this time. Capacity was achieved. The woman stared malevolently at him, irritated by his good fortune and her own bad luck. The viciousness of the stare surprised him, so that he felt personally responsible for her hardship. He spent most of his life avoiding contact because he feared it and people were not friendly. It shook him to be caught in such an unlooked-for situation. His normally peaceful journey home had been marred by this new revelation of human nature. Despite the doors having closed, he felt flushed and foolish. Only the other lift passengers could tell whether he actually turned red. He avoided their gaze, hoping they would not see him.

Before he had recovered himself, the lift was up to the next level and the doors opened. He felt someone touch his hip quite firmly as the passengers jostled forward onto the platform. Someone slipped by him on the lift. As she passed, he could see that it was a young woman not far from his own age. Her glance as she passed suggested that her touch may not have been accidental but he could read no obvious meaning into it. Sure however that it had not been hostile, he was better able to ignore this second unexpected invasion of his privacy than the first.

He hurried onto the platform where his tram was in, waiting for him. It would not have mattered if he missed it because they ran regularly. Another seven minutes waiting on the platform would have been the only price to be paid for missing it. Many of the busy lines ran every seven minutes; it was a standard time in Marta City, as in most of the cities of the world. The very busy lines ran every five minutes in accordance with demand.

The natural tendency of the Marta City Network in common with most self-financing commercial organisations was to make the maximum profit possible for its shareholders. Thus the organisation wished to run as few trams as possible, filled with passengers. The ideal time frequency of trams from the perspective of efficient managers or greedy shareholders would be that average time which it took to build up a full cargo of passengers. The size of the tram, or the number of tramcars, was a variable which could be decided on policy grounds. If the trams were not very large or plentiful passenger waiting times would be so long as to cause complaints from the passengers, the business community and the government, and might lead to fines. That would be self-defeating as turnover would suffer.

The whole reason for the creation of the nationalised Marta City Network under one company had been to defeat the transport confusion that previously existed. Competition between rival tram companies, usually on the same tracks had brought legal disputes and confused passengers. Fare collection had been time consuming and bureaucratic. The concentration of fly cars and ground cars in the city streets and fly lanes had resulted in traffic congestion and accidents. Legislation to ban them had been flouted by the general public, and the business houses who in those days insisted on their “rights” to “free” transport and access, regardless of the pollution and safety considerations. Only after the creation of the Marta City Network Company did it become possible to properly enforce the legislation in the centre of the city with high fines.

In the early days the Network Company abused its monopoly position for the benefit of its shareholders. Trams were not very frequent on all but the busiest lines. Passengers were expected to stand in crowded compartments, and even some safety considerations were ignored. Complaints from passengers and business Houses about the high fares reached a crescendo. Politicians became active on the issue, proof that democracy can be effective. The government was forced to legislate, despite their earlier view that the threat of action would be sufficient to force the Company to improve its public performance. A complicated set of rules, regulations and limits was imposed, a surprising piece of legislation, frequently amended afterwards by a government which believed in deregulation and non-intervention in business and public utilities alike.

Many commentators at the time suggested that it might be easier for government appointees to take over the Company’s management, even for it to be taken over by the state again. The legislation included a minimum frequency of service on the different specified areas of route, which basically determined when the trains had to run, subject to review every few years by an independent committee. As a commuter Calban benefited from the efforts the government had made, particularly from the fare prices which were regularly reviewed by the same independent committee. As an office worker who had lost faith in the system, he found the legislation appalled him because of the depth of the legal bureaucratisation that had been reached.

On the other hand, he was pleased to note one more failure of the international economy in which they lived. Market competition deemed appropriate in so many areas of life, allowing governments to disclaim responsibility for the quality of life, had proved disastrous in the past when the Marta City Network Company was set up. The market elements and the goal of profit preserved in the monopolised network had continued to show its inadequacy. The government had been forced to eat its words and extend what had begun as partial state control.

Calban was not a passenger who cared greatly how the Network operated. He would have been happy to wait for longer at platforms, although not so happy to pay more for the service. He imagined, probably unrealistically, that it might have provided the excuse for commuters to make small talk and get to know one another. This was one of his secret fantasies. It was so rare to see commuters speaking to one another that the very thought excited him. He imagined speaking confidently to some of the women he saw regularly on the tramways. Calban generally enjoyed his tram travels, and would not mind spending longer in transit. He despised those people in his Accountancy House who moaned whenever they missed a tram or when there were occasional delays. They expected a perfect service just as clients expected a perfect service from his firm. That was what made the working life a perfect hell for everyone. No one benefited from such fussy perfectionism. Calban was however aware that perhaps these people, who seemed to be most of the people he knew, had more to rush home for. Maybe they spent their free time, such as that was, more naturally, and enjoyed their free time more than he did.

In Marta and the other countries of the world, the Modernists had created a system of some perfection. 150 years before the problems of a modern efficient society had presented themselves. What should be done with all the underemployed and underachieving sections of society? They were causing social problems and holding modern progress back. So they came up with the expansion of education idea. Society had had a mixture of state and private education for many centuries and it had worked well. The population, even the underemployed, were largely literate, numerate and possessed of multi-educational achievement. But the Modernists decided that they would push society forward, making a huge persistant educational effort to get the lazy off the dole queues, away from the comfort of the Vidnet entertainments and the aimlessness of bars and clubs, to motivate them and educate them to want to succeed.

Education came in many forms. The old traditional schools were improved by targets and inspections to ensure the raising of standards. All children were to receive full Vidnet training in many computer use disciplines. They were taught a wide range of disciplines. As they progressed through the teenage years and into their early twenties they gradually expressed specialisation preferences, or were encouraged down study paths which their teachers and advisors believed would be sensible and suited to them. Many people were encouraged into the sciences, space technologies, many specialised engineering disciplines, biotechnology of food and genetic human and animal biotechnologies.

The government funded basic education and caused companies, organisations and Houses to sponsor up and coming workers for the future in their training. Part of the costs of training were employees’ study loans, which would be paid back later in working life as their salaries increased. After the age of twenty, most workers would have started jobs but their actual work would be part time. Study and work would go hand in hand, so small loans were made available to workers. Some built up large borrowed sums, which had to be paid off later in life, motivating them all the more completely to hard work.

As before the modern era began, monetary benefits for the unemployed were almost non-existent, although now they became largely so again; for medical, psychiatric and complete homelessness there were benefits. During the period of highest unemployment just before the Modernists developed their plans for the new progressive society – benefits had risen to deal with the social problems, which were occurring, but they had never been very ample. In the new Modernist period of the last 150 years benefits reduced again to “encourage” people into work, whatever they could find, if necessary, regardless of whether the work they found was what they wanted to do.

Workers were given no political choice except the Modernist economic and democratic one, which they chose through lack of the foresight to see the alternatives. Voters chose to follow the Modernist model. The workers who were the same people must follow. Everyone must work unless they were prepared to face social embarrassment, poverty, or were genuinely ill or incapacitated in some way. They must also study. For few workers were taken on or kept on if they were not prepared to study and to continue studying for many years.

For 150 years, the new Modern Society had been complete. Virtually everyone had work, or at least study, to keep them occupied and “useful to society”. Lazy sections of society hardly existed. Crime and fraud had virtually disappeared. Those who became surplus to requirements soon fitted themselves into a new economic niche, or one that was similar to before, or else they found a new direction forwards on another training course or examination path. Everyone had a place somewhere in the economic market. Meanwhile society continued to progress in science and technology, reaching out further into space, finding new ways of doing things faster, cheaper, and always more efficiently. Where progress went, workers and students followed.