Visions of Liberty (26 page)

"I didn't mean to gape," the woman said. "But I haven't seen anyone from the Earth ship this close before. I was just curious."

"Oh, I wouldn't worry about it," Duggan answered. "I've seen plenty of people from Tharle. The only trouble is, I haven't managed to talk to too many of them."

"They're curious too, but trying to mind their own business. It's considered good manners. . . . Some of them are worried about what the soldiers are doing here, too."

"So what makes you different?"

She shrugged. "I just wanted to see for myself what you were like—try to talk to some of you. I hear what other people say, but I never know whether to believe it."

"What do they say?" Duggan asked.

The woman thought for a few seconds, her mouth twisting wryly in the way of someone searching for a safe answer. "They call you Pinkies," she said finally.

He stared at her, then laughed. The barrier of tension they had both been reacting to revealed itself as an illusion and came tumbling down. "Paul Duggan," he said.

"My name's Tawna."

"So . . . hi."

"Hi."

The feelings coming back at him were good. She was looking at him directly and openly with an expectant expression, fears allayed, eager to learn more. Duggan turned his head and lowered his tone to mouth at the escorts. "Why don't you guys get lost for a half hour? Take a walk around; get yourselves a coffee or something."

"Can't. Orders," one of the troopers replied woodenly.

Duggan sighed and turned back to Tawna. "I'm with what the mission calls its Office of Exorelations. That means we're the ones who are supposed to deal with whoever's in charge of things here. But we're not having much luck finding anyone. That's why I decided to come out and walk around the town. Nothing we got over the communications channels made any sense."

Tawna looked puzzled. "I can't see why that should be a problem. There are people in charge of things everywhere."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, it depends what you're looking for. In charge of what, specifically? The Waterfront Agency looks after the harbor installations and the docks. The Power Company produces power. The highway companies consolidated into the Road Services League because tolls got to be such a hassle. . . ."

Duggan waved a hand. "But above those—the works, all of it. Who runs the whole system?" Tawna seemed to want to be helpful, but she appeared honestly not to know what he meant. "The laws," he said. "Who makes the laws here?"

"Laws?" she repeated, as if hearing a new word in the language for the first time.

"What you can do, what you can't. How you're allowed to treat each other. Who tells you the rules?"

"Tells us? . . . Nobody. . . . Why would they?"

"Then where do they come from?"

Tawna showed a hand helplessly. "They don't come from anywhere. They're just . . . there. Who tells you rules for how to breathe air or how to grow older? Nobody needs to. You already know. You just do it."

Duggan glanced again at the two troopers. Trying to pursue the subject further in a place like this, and under these circumstances, would be impossible. But he felt that at last he'd made some rapport and found a line that could lead somewhere eventually—and conceivably in more senses than one. "So what do you do here?" he asked Tawna, abandoning the tack for the time being.

She seemed relieved. "Me? Oh, I'm a dance teacher most of the time—keeps me fit. And I'm also a musician and help organize shows. I've tried writing a couple of plays too, but they weren't very good. I probably let myself get paid too much for them."

It was the same illogic that Duggan had been hearing all over the place. He didn't want to go any further into it now, he decided, anymore than trying to find out who ran the system. "Is Ferrydock where you're from originally?" he asked instead.

They chatted for a while. She had grown up in a farming area on the far side of the mountains standing distantly in the purplish haze to the northeast, and moved here to be with friends. She was curious about Earth and would maybe have kept them both there for the rest of the day with her questions, but her knowledge of its affairs was dated, reflecting the politics and geography of the period around a century ago, before the colony world of Tharle had become isolated.

"We need to talk some more," Duggan said when he spotted the scout car from Base 1 coming to collect him. "Somewhere different from this—where it's quieter, more private."

"I'd like that," Tawna said.

"How can I get in touch with you?"

She gave him the call codes for her personal phone, which turned out to consist of the blue-jeweled ear rings with silver mountings and matching pendant that she was wearing. Duggan would never have guessed. He gave her one of his official departmental calling cards with contact details. Communications engineers aboard the
Barnet
had already programmed the ship's system to interface with the planetary net. Tawna waved brightly after them as people parted to let him and his two escorts through to the waiting car.

Duggan stared out at the town's busy sidewalks and pedestrian precincts as they began the short drive back. The last problem anyone had anticipated the mission would come up against in reestablishing contact with the colony's government when it got to Tharle was
finding
a government. He looked down at the compak that he was still holding in his hand, where he'd stored Tawna's call codes. Electronics so advanced that he hadn't even recognized it; technology to put satellites aloft; sophisticated air travel available when the need arose. And yet, at the same time, the deep-space-going capability that the founders brought had gone into decline; people spent much more time getting around than they needed to, sailing in ships or plain walking; and the supposedly fundamental laws of market trading somehow worked backwards.

Nothing made sense.

Nobody knew who the "Barnet" was or had been, whom the ship was named after. Typically, it would have been some long-forgotten bureaucrat from an extinct department. Duggan sometimes wondered if it might have been the one responsible for the blunder that had resulted in Tharle's disappearing from the records for almost a hundred years. Two rival sections of the Colonial Affairs Administration had each recorded that the other was responsible for handling Tharle, out at Xylon-B, and a hundred years was how long it had taken for the realization to dawn that nobody was. Contact was established, and the
Barnet
and its mission hastily despatched to reintroduce formal diplomatic relations. In the furious exchanges of messages and memoranda, accusations and denials, evasions of blame and attempts to direct it elsewhere that followed discovery of the fiasco, it apparently escaped everyone as significant that in all that time nobody on Tharle had chosen to draw Earth's attention to its omission.

Back aboard the orbiting
Barnet
, Pearson Brose, head of the mission's Office of Exorelations and Earth's designated ambassador-to-be if a government could be found that wanted one, was getting impatient for results. "Of
course
they have to exist," he fumed at the review meeting of his staff, including Duggan, gathered in the conference room of his unit's offices in the Planetary Department section of the Administrations deck. He had a florid face with long, wispy white hair that flailed like a stormy sea when he jerked his head about—which he did a lot at times like this. "They're probably paranoid and gone underground for reasons best know to themselves. Why? What reason have we given them to do that? Have we made threats? Are their cities quavering under weapons that we have deployed? I see no weapons. We've shown nothing but reasonableness and a desire to advance our common interests. So what have I missed? Where am I going wrong? Somebody tell me."

Everybody knew that Brose hadn't gone wrong anywhere. The melodramatic flourishes were his way of reminding the world of how much his responsibilities required him to endure and suffer. Zeebron Stell, with his hefty build, swarthy skin, short-cropped black hair and shaggy mustache, almost an inverse of Brose, brought them back on track. He was supposed to be Duggan's colleague and virtual opposite number, but they seemed to end up at odds over everything. "Well, I did get to talk with that scientific group up north. They're into a new line on catalyzed nuclear processes that will need a high-energy installation and big bucks."

Brose forgot his lamentations and became interested. "Ah yes, the research institute. So where does the funding come from. Did we find out?" He always said "we" if the prospective news was good. It was taken for granted that such a source would be some branch or other of government, the uncovering of which would hopefully lead to the rest.

"Not really," Stell answered. "That is, nothing that you'd be interested in. The bread comes from all kinds of places: a bunch of corporations, as you'd expect; an amazing number of individuals; even a school science club. But none of it was like what we were looking for." Brose looked at him sourly, as if asking why he had bothered bringing it up if that were the case. Stell went on, "But the way they were going about it says to me that they don't deal with anyone in the government anyway."

"How do you mean?" Brose asked.

Stell showed his hands and turned from side to side in an appeal to the others that he wasn't making this up. "When we asked them about procedures, they started telling us that their biggest problem is arguing grants
down
to
less
than the sources want to give them—as if that was obviously what anyone would do. They thought that accepting too much would make them look incompetent. Who ever heard of a government funding agency that would have problems dealing with people like that?" A baffled silence engulfed the room. Then Milford Grimes from Research Resources pronounced what was going through all their minds.

"That's insane."

Amelia Jonkin, another of the Exorelations staff, looked from one to another as if inviting any better ideas before voicing the only one she could come up with. "Maybe they're a second-rate outfit. It could be an indication of lack of self-esteem there, or that they have an inferior image of themselves." She didn't sound as if she really believed it.

"The stuff they were doing looked right-on to me," Stell said. "And Dransel Howess who was with us thought so too. Nuc-cat is his line, and he was big-time impressed."

Duggan shifted in his seat. He had been quiet for a long time. "I saw the same thing when I was down in Ferrydock," he told the room. "They've got a marketplace there in the town, and people haggle. Except they try to sell lower and buy higher. I tried getting some of them to explain it, but nobody could. They couldn't understand what was so strange that needed explaining."

"It just shows that they're all simpletons," somebody from the Planning Group said. "We can't let people like that get the better of us, surely." The tone was facetious.

"Perhaps we should look for the big houses," Amelia mused. "The real rulers in any society always live in the biggest houses."

And that seemed to exhaust the suggestions. Brose looked around for further comment. After a second or two of more silence, it came from the commander of the mission's military contingent, General Rhinde, who was sitting in and so far had maintained silence with visibly rising impatience.

"This nonsense has gone on long enough. You're not going to get anywhere creeping around like tourists frightened of giving offence, and asking polite questions." He glowered around, challenging anyone to disagree. Nobody dared. "The people you're talking about will be all office clerks, anyway, even if you find them. The true government of a country, planet, whatever, is whoever defends it. The way you find them is make them come to you. Just march in, say you're taking over, and wait to see who appears. If nobody does, then you know who the government is anyway. It's you."

Nobody was prepared to argue. But at the same time, it was clear to everyone except Rhinde that nothing that drastic was a candidate for the time being. Ever the able and resourceful organization man, Brose tabled the proposal for further consideration and appointed someone to form a subcommittee to look into it.

After the meeting adjourned, Duggan approached Brose privately in his office at the Executive Suites end of the Planetary Department. "I'd like approval to roam around freely down there, without escorts," he said. "There isn't any threat, and the presence of weapons inhibits the Tharleans. It's a barrier to further progress in getting through to them."

"You really think it's likely to make much difference?" Brose queried. His conviction seemed distinctly far short of total. "I mean, what progress at all is there to take further? Have
you
, for instance, met anyone who looks even remotely capable of being gotten through to?"

"I think so, maybe. Yes."

"Hm." Brose sniffed. "And what if we have to scrape you up out of an alley one morning, and it gets back that I waived regulations. How would I be supposed to explain it?"

"Well, we'd better come up with something before Rhinde gets his way and ends up starting a war," Duggan said. "Would you rather have to explain that?"

Duggan got his request approved—on signing a disclaimer that it was at his own instigation, and against the advice of his superior. "I'm doing it to give you a chance to rack up some points for promotion to subsection supervisor when we get back," Brose murmured confidentially as he signed the paper. "I think you'd be more suited to it, Paul." Duggan had little doubt that Brose was saying similar things to Stell too, who was also a candidate for the slot. Fostering a healthy competitive spirit between rivals was encouraged as part of the Department's management style. It was considered the astute way to develop human resources. They were what at one time had been called "people."

"I'll be coming back down tomorrow," Duggan told Tawna when he called her a half hour later. "No guards to get in the way this time, so we can have that talk. Tell me a good place to meet."

The bronzed, orangey-haired face on the screen looked genuinely pleased. "That's wonderful! Then you can tell me all about Earth." She must have caught a hint of a reaction in his face. "And talk about other things too, naturally. What did you want to do down here?"