The Avatar (15 page)

“Let me repeat, we who look after the common weal counted on years in which to prepare for your return. Foreseeing the danger, we intended both to strengthen institutions of law and order and to educate the public. Frankly, by coming back this early, you yourselves have precipitated the emergency.”

Rueda flipped an arm upward. “Don’t you know why we did?” he called.

Taken aback, the minister heard his own voice: “What? Well…well, no. I guess not. It’s doubtless in the reports—Colonel Troxell tells me you’ve been pretty frank—but that’s a huge amount of material and I didn’t want to keep you waiting longer—” He rallied. “Very well, Sr. Rueda. I took for granted that that was how the gate works.”

“Wrong, Mr. Quick,” the mate said. “The Betans have had a thousand years to study the T machines. They developed cheap probes that they could send out by the billions, where we’ve sent a few thousand. So they got some back. Given that much information, they could begin to see traces of a pattern, begin to get inklings of a theory. They are far from a complete understanding, true. But they have found how slight variations in a guidepath, not enough to take you to a different destination in space, will take you to different moments in time. The range isn’t great, a matter of a decade or two either way. Beyond that, their information is still too incomplete. But they told us they could calculate a guidepath around the machine at Centrum which would bring us out before or after the hour we left Phoebus, by anywhere—anywhen—within several years.

“We elected to return to a few days after our departure. That it was months, instead, is because we can’t conn
Emissary
as precisely as they control their ships.

“It was our decision. Ours.”

Langendijk frowned. Rueda shook his head at the captain.

Appalled—he felt his lips go numb—Quick breathed, “Why?” though already he guessed the response.

“We did not forget the debates beforehand,” Rueda said. “No, we spent eight years thinking. We saw the risk that your faction, sir, would prevail, because it knows exactly what it wants, while our kind of people promise nothing except hope. We decided we had better arrive home early.”

Above his dismay (because, Jesus Christ, time travel on top of everything else!), Quick was pleased to note how ready was his counterattack. “Thank you, Sr. Rueda,” he purred. “I wish you’d tell me what my faction, as you call it, does want. I’d be interested to know. I thought the Action Party and like-minded organizations simply aim at the well-being of mankind.”

Rueda shrugged. “What is the well-being of mankind? Who determines? Let me cite a little history too. Several centuries back, the shoguns of Japan excluded foreigners—anything new, anything fresh. Mr. Mitsukuri has told me how they then tried to regulate the whole of life, down to the price you might pay for a doll to give your child.”

“Festung Menschenheim,”
von Moltke added nastily. “But this hermit kingdom could last. Keep missiles at either T machine and blow to bits whatever strange may show itself. Oh, yes.”

Not altogether a bad idea
. Quick raised his hand. “What sort of monster do you take me for?” he cried. “How do you expect me to reply to that kind of charge? Have I stopped beating my wife? Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t want to believe those years at Beta made paranoids of you. I beg you, stop talking that way!”

Captain Langendijk intervened. “If you please, everyone, if you please. Let us stay civilized.” He got up and addressed the stage. “Sir, we did not advance our return date because of a persecution complex. It merely seemed sensible. Besides, you can imagine personal reasons. In eight years, a number of those we care for would have died, the rest aged. We hoped to escape that.”

Quick attempted a reply. Langendijk’s polder-level voice went on: “As Carlos said, we remembered the big arguments before we left. Over and over, we discussed them—including the danger of reviving the Troubles. We found the danger is negligible.

“You speak of a flood of newness. Well, this cannot happen. In a hundred years, we have barely begun to know Demeter, and it has no intelligent native race. As for Beta—the Betans, who
are experienced at meeting different species, they estimate fifty years before they and we can move beyond the exchange of cultural and scientific missions. We will need that long to get acquainted. Earth will have ample time to adapt.

“Please. Let me finish. Technology will enter faster than that, yes. But what of it? Or what
not
of it? The technology most immediately significant will be astronautical. Routes through the gates; cheap, plentiful, truly serviceable spacecraft; uninhabited Earthlike planets—the safety valve, can you not see? Freedom to get away and start fresh, not a few thousand per year crammed in a transport, but unlimited. Freedom. This is what we bring back with us.”

He sat down, red-faced, unused to orating, and waited. The whole room waited.

Quick let silence grow, to emphasize the words he was assembling, before he took to the lectern again, reassumed his pastoral posture, and told them:

“We’re all idealists here. You wouldn’t have gone to Beta if you weren’t. I wouldn’t serve in Toronto and in Lima if I weren’t. For that matter, the men who’ve been taking care of you here wouldn’t have accepted their hard, thankless job if they weren’t.”

I shade the truth a trifle,
he thought.
Emotionally speaking, it must be
I,
Ira Wallace Quick, who forces destiny into shape. There is no ecstasy like that. On the crudest level, hearing a crowd cheer me, seeing them adore me, beats taking a woman to bed
.

How very honest I am with myself. (I am being wry. I often am. I like that trait, in moderation.) Therefore I dare be frank and add that somebody has to assume the stewardship and I, over the years, have come to know the common man and what he needs
.

“Captain Langendijk,” he said, “I admit you’re sincere, but have you really considered the consequences of recklessly introducing that kind of astronautics? You spoke of a safety valve. Let me, instead, speak about the wretched of Earth, whole nations that have not yet climbed back from starveling barbarism, millions of poor and downtrodden within the so-called advanced countries. Have they no call upon us? Surely you don’t imagine they could pack up and go. Where would they get the price of the cheapest ticket, of the tools necessary at the far end? Where would they get the education required for
survival? Demeter has claimed her hundreds of lives already, from carefully selected emigrants to a carefully researched world. Where, even, would the poor get the incentive to go, the bare energy?

“No, what you propose would divert vitally needed resources and still more vitally needed skilled labor. For the benefit of a privileged few, the many would be cast into suffering deeper and more prolonged. Have you no sense of obligation toward your fellow humans?”

“Mamma mia,”
Benedetto yelled, “have you no sense of elementary economics? You cannot believe that
sciocchezza!”

Quick stiffened. “I believe in compassionate government,” he declared.

Ky stirred in her chair. “‘Compassionate government,’” she said, “is a code phrase meaning, ‘There will be absolutely no compassion for the taxpayer.’”

That can’t be her jape,
thought Quick in anger.
She’s too divorced from reality. I’ll bet she heard it from Daniel Brodersen, that bastard on Demeter. The detectives told me she and he had a close relationship
.

He mastered himself, relaxed muscle after muscle, leaned across the lectern and urged with all the mellowness at his command:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I realized you’d feel bitter. I did not foresee our meeting would stray this far or get this hostile. Look, I shunted my other responsibilities aside and spent days traveling from Earth in order to work out a plan with you that’ll satisfy you in your private lives while fulfilling the duty we share to mankind and civilization. Let’s hold a genuine dialogue, shall we?”

Hours later, he sat in the apartment given him, a Scotch and soda in his grip, and fumbled after a decision. Soon he must join Troxell for dinner. No doubt he could fob off undesirable questions and suggestions, pleading weariness. It wouldn’t be feigned, either. Under no circumstances could he be candid. And he mustn’t stay here long, caged in outer space while events ran wild at home. For him, the Wheel was bad karma. So if he could structure the conversation this evenwatch, he might elicit clues as to how best to proceed. But this involved having at least a tentative scheme of action, which in turn demanded that he stare down some rather horrible facts.

A hot shower had washed the sweat off him, a change of clothes rid him of the stench. The lounger cuddled his body. The tumbler was cool in his hand, moist, each sip reminding him of smoke—bonfire at a political rally, campfire in the Rockies, hearthfire
après-ski
in a Swiss chalet, cigar after a four-star dinner and, across the table, a worshipful young female from the governmental programmer pool…. Haydn lilted. Stars marched magnificently across a port in the wall. He barely noticed any of it.

What to do, what to do?

Tragedy, real tragedy, a light-year past what he went through as a junior attorney in the Judge Advocate’s bureau under the old martial government, helping prosecute malefactors who were actually the products of a society in chaos. They who boarded
Emissary
for Beta were in their fashion the finest Earth had to offer, gifted, educated, high-minded. He could not even call them rabid technophiles, any more than they could properly call him a rabid xenophobe. He and they held separate parts of the truth, like the blind men feeling the elephant.

He had to confront the hard questions, though, or stop thinking of himself as a statesman. Which position was more nearly right, or less grossly wrong? What was more essential to the elephant, its tail or its trunk?

I’ve seen too much misery in the wake of the Troubles, read the statistics on too much more
. He would forever be haunted by a little girl he never knew. A border clash had occurred between units of the United States and the Holy Western Republic, a mortar shell went astray, he as an officer of the joint armistice commission had poked around for evidence of culpability and found, instead, her holding a teddy bear against the wound that bled her to death. And at that, she’d gone fast, in the ruins of her home. Famine was worse, pellagra worse yet.
What
raison d’être
does government have, except to care for people? And who will care for them except government?

Quick gulped a mouthful, paid attention to it going down his throat, became consciously sardonic.
Now I’m quoting Speech No. 17-B
. That helped calm him, without changing the facts.

The foremost fact was that Homo sapiens had no business among the stars. Eventually, yes, when he was ready, then let him go forth. But first he should put his own house in order. One could actually argue that interplanetary enterprises, from the original Sputnik, had been a mistake. Granted, this was heresy. Quick had never publicly uttered it. The technophiles would
have come down on him like an avalanche, with their figures of increases in real wealth due to minerals and manufactures, their citations of advances in scientific knowledge and everything that that meant in every field from earthquake control to medicine; and they would have been truthful. What they never stopped to wonder was what mankind might have done in the way of building a decent, stable world, had mankind stayed quietly at home.

Be that as it may—
Oh, damn the Others! If they aren’t already damned. They’re enough to make a man believe in Satan
.

Helter-skelter, off to Demeter, at whatever cost in work and material, to give new hope to thousands out of Earth’s Billions…. Yes, yes, the investment was paying off, Demeter was returning a nice profit, some of which the general public was getting in the form of higher wages and lower prices—but what about the poor who must scrounge along while the investment was being made? That capital would have bought them a lot of welfare.

More important, fundamental, unhealing, was the drain on
attention
. The best of Earth, in ever-increasing numbers, no longer cared much about the government of Earth. They were off into space. Turn them completely loose, let in the Betans, and that would spell the end of Ira Quick’s program for a humane and rational civilization.

He stroked his beard. The silkiness was minutely soothing as he continued to review. His was far from the sole interest at stake. No two of his allies had identical motives. Stedman, of the Holy Western Republic, feared the collapse of a faith and a way of life already weakened by secular Terrestrial influences. Makarov, of Great Russia, foresaw his dream of reunification with Byelorussia, Ukrainia, and Siberia coming to naught. Abdallah, of the Meccan Caliphate, suspected that Iran, already committed to high-energy industry, would gain a decisive advantage over his part of Islam. Garcilaso, of the Andean Confederacy, had brought his corporation into a viable relationship with its chief competitor, Aventureros Planetarios, and didn’t want that upset, less because he would lose money than because his family would lose standing. Broussard, of Europe, talked practical politics, but basically dreaded the oblivion into which his culture and tradition might sink. The list went on.

Quick halted his reverie and clenched his drink. A realist must accept reality. He couldn’t wish away Demeter, the star gates, the Others, or even the Iliadic League. Water does not run uphill. However, you can dig a catch basin to stop it. After that, perhaps, given luck and devotion, you can install a pump to force it back where it belongs.

Today I confirmed my fears. There is no way to make that crew cooperate. I can only be thankful that none of them have the skill to pretend, with the aim of betraying me later
.

They are valuable human beings; and no doubt the alien among them has the same claim on my conscience. We can’t hold them captive till they die of age, can we? No. Too many chances for the secret to escape
.