Tom Paine Maru - Special Author's Edition (28 page)

“People like war,” I defended with a cynicism grown hard inside me. “They will do anything, sacrifice anything. It is instinctive with them.”

“Nonsense, Corporal. War is the health of the state, and of nobody else. Put an end to the machinery of war, government, and you put an end to war. Simple, but most Kilroys are blind to it because, as much as they desire peace, they want to keep the state around for other reasons.”

I strapped on my gunbelt, then joined her in the hall. After a longer than usual transport patch ride, we were crossing a medium-sized park when the sky overhead went abruptly from blue to starry black.

Edwina stopped because I was gawking. “This isn’t what I meant, but it’ll be quite a show, I promise. Let’s stay a moment. We’ll watch it.”

Hoand’s outermost satellite was a worthless cinder a few hundred klicks in diameter, reminiscent of everything that circled the sun of Vespucci.

Including Vespucci.

Hoandians had reached their other moons by way of clumsy rockets, planted flags, made speeches, returned home when air or courage ran low. They had not yet come this far. Markers on the sky-display showed where camera-landers sat in meteoric dust, one or two still operating. An orbiter relayed signals to the planet, five or six light-seconds away.

Motion in the park came to a halt. Confederates standing around, sitting on benches, going places, as we were, or simply lying in the grass became statues as Koko’s amplified voice rang throughout the ship.

“Five, four, three, two, one, commence firing!”

From the broad underside of the mighty vessel came a blast twelve kilometers in diameter, a beam so intense that it looked like pieces might be cut off to build new starships. On the surface of the target moon, an explosion to end all explosions endowed that barren sphere—temporarily—with an atmosphere. Smoke cleared into the airless void, revealing a churning lava pool twice the size of
Tom Paine Maru.

The beam winked off. Folks breathed again. There was a pause, then suddenly a cheer went up, thundering through the ship, buffeting my ears.

“We’ll give the leaders about an hour,” said Edwina, resuming her purposeful stride, “to hear from their tame scientists. This spot isn’t directly visible from the planet. You need access to telemetered data.”

I confess that I did not care. I wanted badly to ask about her sister, anything to help me understand. I did not know how to begin. Howell had said Lucille’s period of stasis had been intermittent, interrupted frequently for courses of experimental treatment. Complete “regeneration” (whatever that tantalizing phrase meant) had been prevented for years by a genetic disorder inherited from her father. Finally cured, she emerged from her nightmarish ordeal a changed personality.

I started to speak, but we entered a room at the edge of the park. Koko, Howell, a few familiar others waited. It was difficult to tell, as half of the place was darkened. Lucille was there. The other half, separated from us by a transparency, contained four comfortable chairs, one of them occupied by Geoffrey Couper, freshly shaven from the blunt prow of his massive chin to the polished crest of his great cranium.

The big man’s smartsuit was adjusted to metallic reflectivity, its collar turned up high, fastened with a crisp, military appearance—the man would look military in pajamas—I wondered if Lucille ever criticized him for that. On his feet were matching silver boots. A pair of silver gauntlets rested in his lap. He turned toward the partition, which Edwina said was a mirror on his side. “You people ready?”

A pause I thought I was beginning to understand, then: “Fifteen seconds, Geoff,” said Koko. “They’re having trouble lining up on the Premiere.”

“Okay. Sure wish I could have a smoke, but it would spoil the effect.”

All the way across the darkened room, I somehow, unexpectedly caught Lucille’s eye. She shot a dire glare at her sister, then gave me a rueful, appealing look. I was never going to figure the woman out.

A warning ping. A blinding, brilliant blue at their wire-fine perimeters, broach-openings appeared over the unoccupied chairs, widened, then deposited three human figures in varying attitudes of astonishment.

The first individual was neatly dressed for business. Like Couper, he was a big man. He had been caught, fork in hand, chewing something. He looked up, his eyes widened. He looked down at the fork in his hand, changed his grip to make it a weapon. Then he glanced at Couper, whose rig included a plasma pistol, laid the fork on the arm of the chair.

At the same instant, there was a shout as a fat man in a garish night shirt awoke in a sitting position in the next chair. He rubbed his eyes, snarling in a language that I could not understand. Then he started to get up, but he could not. The chair was holding him fast. He slumped, staring about him like a trapped animal. He did not seem to notice Couper. He had eyes only for the big man in the business suit.

“Get those hamblasted translators on line, stat!” Couper barked. In the back of the darkened half of the room, someone scurried to comply.

The third man—the Premiere of Uxos, my companion told me—was naked, a roll of toilet paper in his hand, the most surprised expression of the three upon his face. Couper tossed him a blanket, then waited for them all to overcome their astonishment enough to listen.

“What we have here, gentlebeings,” Couper lectured as he waited, to an unseen audience behind the transparency, “are the three most politically powerful individuals on the planet Hoand. Not terribly prepossessing, are they?” At mention of their planet’s name—apparently the only word they understood—all three looked up at Couper.

Edwina whispered: “You’re about to see what we call the old Galactic Police gag. I wish he’d stop clowning, he could mess up the whole—”

Clowning?

“Greetings,” Couper said suddenly, “from the Galactic Confederacy. As you may have noticed, my speech is being translated into each of your respective languages. I need not introduce you to each other, nor apologize for the abruptness of the summons. The continued existence of your world, and of all the people living on it, hinges on this event.”

“What is the meaning of this outrage?” demanded the blanket-covered Premiere. The head of Obohalu, the fellow in the night shirt, nodded belligerent agreement with his erstwhile enemy, glaring now at Couper.

When the others had finished their expostulations, the Houttian Chancellor quietly said, “I would like very much to know how this was accomplished, sir. The lunar explosion was spectacular, yet somehow comprehensible. This is nothing short of magnificent. Will you tell me?”

“In due course, sir, that is but the smallest fraction of our available powers. For now, we have other matters to discuss. Are you prepared?”

“Provided,” he said, “the Premiere and the President are likewise prepared.”

“Gentlemen? Your attention? We are perfectly willing to confer with members of your opposition, if necessary. Or go directly to the public.”

More grudging assent I have not seen concentrated in a single room, before or since. The Chancellor alone seemed collected. The only sign that he was alive was an occasional blinking of his cool gray eyes.

“Very well. Your sun system, while well within our boundaries, was only recently discovered to be inhabited. I welcome you into the Confederacy, and advise that you are in violation—unknowingly, I’m sure—of certain statutes.” He pointed to a stack beside his knee, three massively-thick aluminum-bound books, the first I had seen aboard ship. “This must be repaired. These step-by-step instructions, carefully tailored for your individual nations, will tell you how to begin ... ”

-4-

Yes, of course, I was back together with Lucille by that evening. We had dinner with Couper’s team after the Hoandian bigwigs were sent home with promises this time, not threats, that if they ran into any trouble with heir political opposition, that those folks would be treated to the Galactic Police gag, too, in order to insure their cooperation.

The aluminum-covered books were check-lists, nothing more, for winding government down to its total abolition. Taxes and conscription feed the machinery of war and must be shut off. In one country, the first step was surrendering money-production to private banks. In another, it was opening the arsenals to the people. It all hinged on local conditions, the exact steps, their number, the order they must be carried out in, requiring years of calculation by praxeologists. The people of the planet might never know we had been there. Promising to let word out of an alien invasion had been Couper’s last, best lever.

Lucille and I made love again that night, the same violent, soul-shattering act that never failed to frighten us both, that made us irresistible to one another. By morning—also of course—we had another screaming fight. As I wrenched out through the door of her stateroom, she shouted after me, “This time, it’s for keeps!” I got back to my own compartment just in time to receive a wall-message from Howell:

“Whitey!” The coyote’s fur was bristling in the display, “Get over here as quickly as you can! I’m in your Lieutenant’s quarters! He’s collapsed! It’s brain embolism, they’re telling me! In any event, he’s comatose. And unless you act immediately, he’ll be dead within twenty minutes!”

accountants of the soul

BLAAAMM!!

The Dardick bucked in my hand. The repulsive smelly thing that had attacked me dissolved, but another was right behind, fangs dripping saliva.

BLAM! BLAM!
The rotor whirled; ivory-colored tround-casings littered the ground at my feet. Claws extended, the monster lumbered closer ...

“Too bad, Whitey,” said a disembodied voice, “That one ate you.”

How had I gotten into this mess?

Arguing with Lucille, of course.

-2-

The truth was, it had disgusted me, the way the Hoand dignitaries—rulers of an entire planet—had been treated like so many naughty children.

Naturally, I had made the mistake of saying so.

“You’ve gotta be kidding!” She ground out her cigarette, disbelief written on every centimeter of her otherwise lovely face. She turned away from me, pulled the sheet around her shoulders, spoke to the air in the bedroom. “Those criminals? Those mass-murdering butchers? Those ... those ... ”

“Human beings,” I supplied. “Living on their own little world, not bothering anybody in your overpraised Confederacy.” Sitting up, I put a hand on her thinly-covered shoulder, made her turn to look at me as I spoke. “Do you know how mean, how small it looks, taking advantage of your superior technology to press people into frightened compliance with what you Confederates, in your infinite wisdom, regard to be right?”

Lucille did look at me, then, straight through me to the wall behind. It was a trick of hers. I was already sorry I had made her do it.

“I see,” she said. “The fallacy of collective self-determination. Corporal, you’re ridiculous. Last year, eighty thousand ‘human beings’ were massacred in Uxos. The socialized farming system failed—again—as it was bound by nature to fail, and somebody had to suffer for it.”

On Vespucci, when I was only a child, the government had given up on collective farming for that very reason. I opened my mouth to say so—

“In Houtty, every year, thousands of dissenters, petty criminals, and so on are shipped to their antarctic to mine a variety of ice-mold that the
nomenklatura
of the rich nations find palatable. It never seems to bother anyone that ninety percent of them die and have to be replaced.”

“
Nomenklatura?”

“Later. In Obohalu, the tax-rate is sixty-nine percent. For every three people being taxed, two productive human lives are effectively obliterated. If you think economic mass-murder is any less brutal than what happens in Uxos and Houtty, if you think it isn’t the right of anyone who happens along to interfere, it’s you who’re small and mean, Corporal.”

I took the hand off her shoulder, folded my arms. “Do not call me Corporal, Lucille. You do not respect the rank, nor the nation that conferred it. My name is Whitey. It is not much of a name, as you have been at some pains to point out, but it is all the name I have. How do I know what things are like on Hoand? My government always says similar things about every country it invades. Is your word any more reliable?”

She hit me first, that time.

Before my angry departure from her quarters, after the short-lived passage-at-arms that had preceded it, two additional things happened: we made love again; she dared me to go see things planetside for myself.

Not Hoand. That was over with for now, the ship already moving on.

Which is how I found myself training for Afdiar.

-3-

Notes from the
Asperance
Expedition

Armorer/Corporal YD-038 recording

Page Seventeen:

Repression spares us the memory of birth, along with the painful remembrance of many agonies of childhood or adult life, but it has unfortunate side-effects. It creates the subconscious, which is simply a repository of repressed data. According to the praxeologists, a sane person would have no subconscious. It lowers effective intelligence by tying up physiological hardware, intellectual software, also, physical energy.