Dancers in the Afterglow (9 page)

The lighting was an unobtrusive soft glow, but it was clear that nothing would go on in the people's sleeping quarters that wasn't visible to humans and Machists alike.

The captives settled back outside to think. "You believe that fence business?" one man asked skeptically.

A short silence followed, then Genji replied, "I don't think so. Sounds like a lot of scare stuff to me."

Yuri smiled. "Want to try it? We're
dying
to know," he said. Genji gave him a dirty look but said nothing.

Yuri found a rock and tossed it over the fence.

The rock expired violently.

"But why are
they
immune?" a woman wondered.

"Something they carry," Yuri speculated. "Something in their clothing, or boots, or maybe something they swallowed."

"Bullshit!" said the first man emphatically. "Let's see."

"Junge! No!"
a woman screamed, but the man, a big, muscular fellow, ran at the fence and leaped. There was a brightness in the gloom, a reddish fire that swelled up, and then engulfed the man. He was gone.

Someone sobbed. Moira was suddenly overcome with the shakes; Genji just stared at the point of the fence where the man had leaped. Azure clung tightly to Yuri, who squeezed her firmly.

A guard came to their section and looked at the fence. He nodded, smiled, then leaped over and walked up to them.

"Good demonstration," he approved, and then drew his weapon. "All right, everybody stand up, line up in front of the sleep-hut, here."

Numbed, they all complied.

"Now you will all remove all of your clothes and put them in
a big pile here," he ordered, making a mark with his foot.

There were several gasps and some protests. No one moved to comply.

The guard fingered a stud on his pistol, then glanced behind him. They followed his gaze. Two other guards stood just outside the perimeter fence with pistols aimed at them.

He pointed his pistol at a youngish, well-built woman close to him. "You first," he said.

Her face was set, grim, defiant. "No. I'd rather die," she responded proudly. He fired his pistol, but the woman didn't flare and vanish. The weapon was on a different setting. Instead she froze, her face contorted in horrible pain. He released the stud, and she pitched forward, breathing hard but still conscious. Others moved to help her, but the guard motioned them back.

"Remove your clothes and place them on the mark," he repeated.

She looked up at him, hatred and fear in her eyes, then got up, somewhat shakily, and started removing her clothes. There were a few more object lessons, but most didn't resist, either because they didn't want their own demonstration, they didn't care, or they were glad to get rid of their tattered clothing. Once done, each was told to wash himself off at the water pipe.

Finally they lined up once again in the strange yellow glow. The guard who had told them to disrobe changed the setting on his pistol arid sprayed the pile of clothing, shoes, and whatnot, disintegrating it. Then he turned back to them.

"Now that we are rid of a defiant one, we should tell you that the fence will no longer kill you. We have cut the power. Fifty centimeters this side of the fence, it will give a shock such as the pistol does. Only if you manage to go
over
it will it get stronger. This is unlikely. Thank you. Good night," he added, and jumped back over the fence.

"Animals!" Moira said suddenly, getting somewhat hysterical. "They're making us into animals!"

"Maybe that's all we are to them," a man responded.

"But we've got to
do
something!" Moira wailed.

"What do you suggest?" another replied acidly.

"I think we ought to get into the hammocks and go to sleep," Yuri told them quietly, and slowly they did just that

The mobile observers continued to broadcast. It was surprising, really. There had been a number of fly-by patrols over the bush, but no attempt to jam the bush frequencies. The best guess was that Ondine was a special case for which the Machists weren't fully prepared; most planets didn't have this sort of radio network, or need it.

"You ought to see the view from the top of Mt. Labiana," came the voice over the little receiver. "Incredible. Every clearing within fifty kilometers of Lamarine is lit by that dim yellow glow, like ten thousand fireflies. The city itself is completely dark; you'd never know it was there except for some truck lights and lights in a couple of buildings they must be using as a command center. The big flyers keep going out to camp after camp, servicing them with something from a big warehouse near the spaceport." He paused. "Whoops! Long enough. Back later," he told the listeners he hoped were there, and shut down.

A short while later a woman's voice came in over a much weaker transmission. She reported what she'd seen in the camps.

Amara turned off the receiver to conserve power and looked at Sten Rolvag.

"What do you think it all means?" she asked him.

"I read a few books for a counterinsurgency course once," he told her. "Lots in there about how revolutionary groups and conquerors handled hostile captured populations. This fits the pattern. Appears either things are similar in other places or else they read the same books."

All five women clustered around him now, listening seriously.

"So what's it all mean?" Tani, the lawyer, prodded.

"Well, in the old days they called it brainwashing," he responded. "Sometimes it was attitude adjustment or something else like that. I know of a couple of cases far back in history where it was handled this way at the start."

"Just what do you mean by brainwashing?" Amara asked him. "Do you mean they will make slaves out of their prisoners?"

Rolvag chomped down on his ever-present but never-lit cigar.

"Well, I'd say no from what they've done so far. See, what they do is take 'em down to the pits, as low as they can go. Then they offer 'em a way back to civilization—
their
civilization. If they change, accept the enemy's way, learn to think like him, act like him."

"But, surely they can't do that on such a massive scale!" protested Maga, the accountant "I mean,
some
will fall into it, but—"

"My psych teachers said that the technique, if properly applied, was almost irresistible. And they've had a dozen or more human worlds to practice on, all with larger populations." He removed his cigar, looked at it, then stuck it back in the corner of his mouth.

"And as for scale—well, hell, there are fewer people on this whole planet than in most major cities on other worlds."

"It's horrible," Tani put in.

Rolvag sighed. "More than you know. If they manage to pull it off, we might wind up fighting our own people. And I don't know a damned thing we can do to stop it."

As he spoke, far above, a strange little golden egg-shaped object braked and approached the planet cautiously, then matched orbits with some floating debris about three hundred kilometers above the surface of the planet. The new arrival was too small for Machist defenses to notice.

Solfege

THE AUTOMATIC SEQUENCING BROUGHT HIM OUT OF
the inactive mode into which he'd placed himself for the journey. He preferred to do that; otherwise the long, lonely trips led to intense brooding and depression. And that way was madness.

He began an all-band scan. The first few hundred signals he caught were all Machist, mostly automatics of one sort or another, and occasionally scrambled transmissions between the surface and the station ships in-system. A number of transmissions were point to point on the surface, but he could make no sense of them, as they were in code.

One thing was clear: all lifeforms registering below seemed to belong to the same general family. Whatever Machists they were using for occupation, they were very close to humans.

He launched a camera; it was too small to be picked up by anything on the ground, and he could store all its input for leisurely perusal in his egg. Resolution was quite good; he could pick out individual figures at a distance of more than twenty kilometers.

He saw what he expected to see. The manual they had fed him talked about the progression, the march, the camps, and here it all was.

It was clear from the number of Machist ships and supplies down there that they had carefully calculated their needs. They had little in the way of men and materiel to spare for the project, and so were making everything count. He wished for just a dozen fighter-bombers.
That
would cripple them, perhaps longer than necessary. But fighter-bombers would never make it through the highly effective defense screen they had put up.

Yet, they
were
vulnerable. The right-sized force, with sufficient explosives and expertise, could hit them in the supply depots. And they'd done a nice job on the spaceports, all except the one at Lamarine—where they had blown a lot of structures that looked effective, but kept the landing pads totally intact. Hit their supply storehouses in the sixteen cities, disable that spaceport, and they were just as trapped as the rest of the population.

But whatever could be done had to be done from the ground. No chance of getting an air strike through that picket, although, when the time came, he could sneak in unmanned modules with the necessary weapons and explosives.

Yes, he thought, everything was right there. An easy project. If there were free people around in sufficient numbers to organize, train, equip, and hit those places in one simultaneous operation. But that would take time. Lots of time. Time he had to grant the Machists.

And time was the name of the game.

He wished fervently that he knew why the hell the bastards were doing what they were.

Ritornello

TIME PASSED IN THE CAMP, AND PEOPLE, BEING WHAT
they are, adjusted.

There was some promiscuity at first, but the sight of nude bodies quickly paled as that situation became ordinary. Very quickly, they were given seeds and small plants, and allowed beyond the perimeter in the daytime to plant them. They were given no machine tools of any kind, only sticks and stones. Two who had been farmers at one point in their lives gave the others a few pointers.

There was some urgency to plant the seeds and do it right. They were informed that all the plants should mature within a few weeks to a couple of months. After that there would be no more loaves. They were expected to feed themselves.

Human feces was no longer consigned to the pit toilet, but was used as fertilizer to speed the growth of the plants in the already fertile soil.

One day a small flyer arrived in camp, and they were lined up for an inspection of some kind. A soldier who seemed just like all the others looked over each of them and gave them inoculations. They were told the shots would protect them against common dysentery and a host of other diseases.

The ship also brought the collars.

They were very thin and light, and could be form-fitted so one was hardly aware of them. They went around the neck and were sealed there. The collar was a receiver with the ability to store a massive charge from the generator. Remove it, and the discharge would kill.

The receivers were happy only when fully charged. Get too far from the generator, say a little more than a kilometer, and they would begin discharging, giving off increasingly nasty shocks. Turn back and the discharge weakened, keep going and the discharge would eventually be lethal.

Very effective, very efficient. After fitting the collars, there was no more need for the glowing fence—except for the lethally charged one around the generator.

Then came the ultimate insult. The guard building and the building of as yet unknown purpose were "wired" to be off-limits, and the guards left

All of them.

There was not a Machist to be seen.

"Now why the hell would they do this?" mused one man.

"A demonstration of power," Yuri replied. "These little things," he noted, pointing to the thin collar around his neck, "make certain we can't go too far away. We've all tried doing so already, already felt the nasty shocks. Besides, I have the feeling they're short-handed and stretched thin. They need those people elsewhere."

"But what's the purpose of all this?" Genji wondered. "I mean, here we are, no clothing, grubbing for food in the dirt, livin' like monkeys or somethin'. Why?"

Yuri sighed. "I don't know. They provided only those things we couldn't provide for ourselves due to ignorance or lack of experience. Now we're living as our remote ancestors did. But why?" He was squatting, and he turned slightly and pointed to the mysterious third building. "And what's that thing for?"

The social structure of the camp developed rather quickly. Yuri, because of his take-charge attitude and seemingly endless knowledge of a variety of subjects, became the
de facto
leader.

Many paired off. It hadn't escaped anybody's notice that there were twenty-four males and twenty-four females in the camp, but that wasn't the way the social structure evolved. Some women clung to other women, some men to other men, some paired off in man-woman fashion, and a few joined with nobody—or with everybody.

Yuri was hurt more than most. Azure's early dependence on him had vanished under the new conditions. Though she always treated him with a certain measure of respect, she was cool to him as she began to jump from group to group, trying to conquer every man and every woman sexually.

But never him.

No, they came to him with problems, to solve disputes, even to try to heal small wounds. They needed him, deferred to him, depended on him.