Gordon R. Dickson (41 page)

"Well, you must think
something's wrong or you wouldn't be acting this way. What is it?"

"You."

"Me?"

"You want to be a damn fool, go
ahead and be one."

I lost my temper.

"How can I be a damn fool? I've
got to find some way to deal with her and do it with gloves on. She can wipe us
all off the map if I don't!"

Ellen got up out of bed, put on her
clothes and went for a walk —at three in the morning. Nobody but she could have
done something like that with such finality and emphasis. Her back was an
exclamation mark going out the door.

Bill did not like her either.
Neither did Doc. For that matter, neither did the Old Man, who always
disappeared when Paula came on the scene. I began to feel like the tragic hero
in a Greek play with the chorus in unison warning me of disaster at every step.
I did not mention any of this to Paula; but she evidently sensed some of it at
least, because along about the end of the week she got off on a subject that
was particularly timely in view of the situation.

"... It
is
a lonely
life," she said, apropos of something I had said. We were taking a stroll
through the woods below the summer palace early in the morning. "Rank does
more than isolate you socially. Do you realize, Marc, you're essentially the
only person in the world I can talk to on the level, so to speak? With everyone
else, I have to remember I'm the Empress. But it's not even
that
so much
as having to put myself in the balance sometimes against everyone around me
when it comes to making decisions. Every so often, all the advice I get is
one-sided; and sometimes I have to brace myself to turn it all down and go just
the opposite way, because when it gets down to it I have to trust my own
decision more than all of theirs or else I'm not a fit ruler."

"I know what you mean," I
said.

"Sure you do." She glanced
at me for a moment, then looked ahead the way we were walking. "You can't
take on responsibility without taking on everything else that goes with
it."

She stopped and turned to face me. I
stopped also, necessarily, and turned toward her.

"That's why it would mean so
much to have you with me, Marc," she said. "I know you've got your
own work with the time storm. I've only just begun to realize these last few
days how important that is. But what you're needed more for, now, is to help me
unify this torn-up Earth we've got and put it on a single, working community
basis. That's your higher responsibility, at the moment"

"And if I'm not with you, I'm
against you?"

"Oh, Marc!" she said,
sadly. "I'm not a monster."

I felt slightly ashamed of myself.
It was a fact that, so far, I had seen nothing in her that was not reasonable
to the point of being admirable. The only evidence I had ever had that
contradicted this was contained in the large body of rumor about her; and I had
some experience with rumors, having heard some of the ones that circulated
about me.

"Well," I said, "how
much time are you asking me to invest?"

"A couple of years at the
most." She looked sideways at me as we walked. "Certainly no more
than that."

"You think you can take over
the world in two years? That's better than Alexander's record, and he was only
thinking about the Asian continent."

"There aren't that many people
nowadays. You know that as well as I do," she said. "And it's a
matter of contacting just the large population centers. Once those are
organized, the small communities in each area and the individuals will want to
adjust to the situation on their own."

"Two years..." I said. All
at once, it seemed like a long time away from here, away from the library and
Porniarsk's workroom.

"Look," she said, stopping
again. Once more we faced each other and, for the first time since I had known
her, she touched me, putting a hand lightly on my arm. "Let's forget about
it for today. Why don't we do something different? You let me entertain you for
a change."

"How?"

"We'll fly to my base camp and
have lunch there. You can see for yourself what my regular soldiers are like
and why I think it won't take even two years to bring order to the world."

"I don't know," I said.
"The others may worry...."

"Even if they do, it'll do them
good," she said. "When they see you coming back safe and sound after
going off alone with me, they'll understand I'm no one to be afraid of."

"All right."

We went back up to the palace. I did
not quite feel like telling Ellen or Marie I was taking a solo jaunt into
Paula's armed camp, so I looked for Bill or Doc. Doc was the one I found first;
and he took the idea of my going calmly enough. In fact, it seemed to me his
eyes even lit up a bit at the idea.

"Want me to come?" he
asked.

"It's not necessary—" I
checked myself. "Come to think of it, why not? You may be able to see some
things there I won't."

I sent him to tell Bill we were both
going and went back to explain to Paula that there would be two of us, feeling
somewhat smug with the notion that I had taken some of the force out of the
objections the others would have to my going entirely alone.

"Of course, bring him,"
said Paula graciously, when I mentioned that I couldn't come after all, unless
I had someone like Doc along with me. It had occurred to me that, just as I
had, she might be underestimating Doc because of his youth. I had learned
better during the past few months; but if she was making the same initial
error, it could do us no harm and might turn out to our advantage. On the
helicopter ride to her camp, accordingly, I watched her closely for any sign
that this was the case, but saw no clear signals either way. She was friendly
but a little condescending to him, which could mean that she did not, in fact,
recognize his worth, or simply that she lumped him in with all those human
bodies she looked down on from her status as Empress.

The camp, when we got there, was
impressive enough. Paula's soldiers might or might not love her, as rumor had
it, but they were well-uniformed, well-armed, and under good discipline. Their
field tents were pitched in a hollow square with Paula's clump of larger tents
at the center, so that these were protected on all sides. The helicopter that
brought us put us down in the open space outside this interior clump of tents
and within the camp area. If Paula had been intending to make me prisoner once
she had me here, she would have had no difficulty once we had landed. There
were armed guards ten deep around me in all directions.

But as it was, our visit was nothing
but pleasant. Paula evidently travelled with a full complement of personal
servants—I estimated at least two full helicopter-loads worth, which meant that
she might not have needed to be so saving of fuel as I had guessed —including a
number of younger women, none of them quite as good-looking as she was, but
close enough. These were dressed as unpractically as she was, with an eye to
appearance rather than practicality; and this puzzled me until I began to
realize that their primary job, or at least their highly important secondary
job, was to act as ornaments and geishas. They were all over Doc and me while
we were having cocktails before lunch, and they both served and joined us at
the meal itself.

I did not at all mind being fussed
over by these attendants; and I could all but see Doc's ears wiggling. I say, I
could all tout see his ears wiggling. What I saw, of course, was that they did
not wiggle at all, and he was so poker-faced and determinedly indifferent to
the attentions he was getting that it was almost painful to watch. Being a
little more case-hardened by years than Doc, I had a corner of my mind free to
note that it was a shrewd move of Paula's to provide herself with such
courtiers. Not only did they act as a setting to show her off and emphasize her
authority, they added an extra level between her and ordinary female humanity.
Perhaps her troops did worship her, after all, seeing her set off this way, in
the same way that they might worship a god or a demigod.

After lunch, Paula called in the commander
of her soldiers, a small, lean, grey-haired man named Aruba with three stars on
each shoulder strap of his impeccable uniform. General Aruba and Paula together
took us out to look over the camp and observe her troops. Those in uniform were
all young. I saw some boys and girls I could swear were no more than fourteen
or fifteen years old. They were all cheerful, bright-looking and had the air of
individuals aware of themselves as members of an elite group. There was a
curious uniformity among them, too, which puzzled me for a while before I
realized that I saw no tall bodies among them, either female or male. Like the
general, they were short, and most tended to a squareness of body.

Aside from their size, though, they
were impressive. They were apparently spending their time in active training
while awaiting the results of Paula's negotiations with us. They had set up an
obstacle course outside their camp, and we watched as some thirty or forty of
them ran through it, looking like trained athletes. They were, as Gramps Ryan
had hinted, a far cry from my part-time militia.

After the inspection tour, we
stepped into Paula's largest tent once more for drinks and then were flown back
to the summer palace. I was itching to know what Doc's reaction was to everything
we had seen; but I was back in host position again and could not abandon Paula
to plunge immediately into conference with one of my staff. So it was nine that
night before I had a chance to get together with him and the others. We held a
staff meeting down in the City Hall, safely away from the summer palace and the
view or hearing of any of Paula's attendants.

"Well," I said to Doc,
when we were at last gathered over the coffee cups in Ellen's office—he and I,
Ellen, Marie, and Bill— "how about it? What did you think of those
soldiers of hers?"

"Well," Doc scratched his
right ear, "they're in good shape physically. They're well-trained.
They're young and bouncy and they've learned to obey orders. I'd guess they
know their jobs—"

"Tough as we've heard they are,
then," said Ellen.

"Maybe," said Doc.

"Why maybe?" I demanded.

"Well," said Doc,
"they're not veterans. My dad and the other officers used to talk a lot
about that; and it was a fact. I mean, I could see it too. The ones who'd
actually been shot at somewhere along the line knew what it was like; but there
was no way the ones who hadn't been shot at could know what it was like. My dad
and the others used to say there was no telling what a man who hadn't been shot
at was going to do the first time he was."

"What makes you so sure the
ones we saw haven't been shot at?" Bill asked.

Doc shrugged.

"They just look like they
haven't. I mean, it shows."

"How?" I said. "For
example?"

"Well..." he frowned into
his coffee cup for a second, then looked back at me. "They're too
bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Too gung ho. You understand? If they were
veterans, they wouldn't be wasting energy except when they had to. For example,
when they were off duty, you'd see them off their feet, sitting or lying down
somewhere. That sort of thing."

We thought about it for a moment.

"You try to remember," Doc
said, "when it was you last heard of the Empress actually fighting anyone.
Maybe on the Islands, where she started, there was some fighting. But ever
since she landed on the west coast, it seems she just shows up with all those
guns and whoever she's dealing with surrenders."

"Then you think we might have a
chance, fighting her?" Bill asked. "Is that it?"

"We might have a chance,"
Doc said. "One thing for sure, the people we've got carrying guns are
going to use them and keep on using them when the fighting starts."

There was another short silence,
full of thought.

"I don't like it," said
Marie finally. "There's still too many of them compared to us."

"I think so too," I said.
"Even if we were sure of winning, I don't want our town wrecked and even
one of our people killed. Now, Paula's been after me to join her for the next
year or two while she brings the rest of the world under control—"

They all started to talk at once.

"All right, now just hang on
there for a moment!" I told them. "If I do decide to go with her, it
doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to stay for two years, or even one year. But
if that's the best way, or the only way, to get her to leave everybody else alone
here, then my spending some time with her is a cheap way to buy her off."

"But what sort of a place will
this be without you?" said Marie fiercely.

"Come on, now," I said.
"The rest of you run everything here. All I've been doing is sitting
around and reading books. You can spare me, all right."

"Marc," said Bill,
"you aren't needed here because you've got duties. You're needed here
because you're the pivot point of the whole settlement."

"Let him go," said Ellen.
"It's what he wants to do."