Visions of Liberty (28 page)

Through the early part of the evening, Duggan had watched a rehearsal for one of Tawna's shows. The Tharleans handled their personal affairs in the same way as their financial ones, he noticed: when asked for help, they gave more; when offered a favor, they settled for less. Afterward, he and Tawna joined a group from the cast and supporting staff for a dinner of salad and a taco-like dish of bread, meats, and spicy fillings at a cellar bar along the street. Then the company gradually broke up in ones and twos. After staying to finish a bottle of one of the locality's wines—vaguely Rhônish, but with the ubiquitous Tharlean purple touch—Duggan and Tawna found themselves leaning on a parapet of the downtown riverbank among the nighttime strollers, staring out across the water toward the distant lights of the Strandside bridge. "I can't imagine it," Tawna said. "You mean they just try to keep on accumulating more and more, like the Winteys?" She searched for an analogy. "That would be like eating all day. Obviously, you need to have enough to keep you going. But once that's satisfied, other things in life become more important. You make it sound as if how much people own is the only measure of what they're worth. . . . Why, that would be as ridiculous as everybody being judged solely by weight and competing to be the heaviest!"

Financial obesity, Duggan thought to himself. Not a bad way to put it. It was hardly the first time in history for such an observation to be made; but the trouble with giving handouts to the ones inevitably left behind in the race had always been that it produced more and more free riders who eventually brought down the system. Somehow the Tharleans seemed to have solved the problem of restraining excess without perpetrating injustices or undermining initiative. How, then, did it work with power?

"So who makes judgments and decisions?" he asked. "You have to have disputes, the same as anyone else. Who has the final say when nobody involved can agree?"

"It's true. Somebody has to do it." Tawna made it sound like cleaning the sewers or defusing bombs. "They have a kind of lottery, and the losers get appointed. It's only for a year—and people are sympathetic, so they try to be supportive."

"You mean it's a lousy job. Nobody wants it?"

"Well, of course. Why would anyone . . ." Tawna stopped as she registered the astonishment in Duggan's voice. "You mean that on Earth . . ."

He nodded. "Having power over people is considered a big thing. They fight each other for it. Okay, now go ahead and tell me: you thought maybe it would be something like that."

Then he realized that she was giving him a long, contemplative look that held little real interest in such things just at the moment. He forgot about the subject and held her eye quizzically. "You're different from Lukki," she said. "He was like a child, never questioning anything. You do. You see things, and you think about them. It makes you . . . interesting." She slid closer along the rail of the parapet. Her fingertip traced over his arm. Duggan turned toward her. Her hair and skin shone softly golden in the light from the embankment lamps . . .

Beep . . . Beep . . . Beep . . . Beep . . .  

Duggan cursed under his breath and tugged the compak from his shirt pocket. The caller was Brose's assistant aloft in the
Barnet
. All ship's personnel were recalled to base immediately. General Rhinde had finally gotten his way and announced plans to take over Ferrydock as a military demonstration. The occupation force had begun mobilizing aboard the
Barnet
and would descend from orbit at dawn.

Four flights of assault shuttles made synchronized landings at key points and deployed with alacrity to seize and secure the prime means of access and communications. Two task forces sealed the main highway and rail links north and south, another commandeered the airport, while the last took the Strandside bridge and sent a column into Ferrydock to occupy the broadcasting stations and news bureaus. Meanwhile, special details sped through the town to install military administrators and technicians in the offices responsible for transportation, power generation and distribution, and communications. By midday the operation was completed as per the timetable. At noon precisely, General Rhinde went on the air to inform the inhabitants of Ferrydock that their town was now under Terran military jurisdiction and subject to the laws of its governing council. Communications and public services were under control of a colonial administration reporting to an appointed governor, and regulations concerning the conduct of business and finance would be announced shortly.

The townspeople seemed to think it was a great idea. An enthusiastic crowd in the central square greeted the news, relayed through their personal phones or from loudspeakers set up for the occasion, and by early afternoon representatives from the sanitation, harbor facilities, and water supply services were appearing at the governor's downtown headquarters offering their organizations for takeover too. Meanwhile, the management at places the Terrans had declared themselves to be in control of were resigning or taking a holiday to disappear to the beaches at Strandside, visit with grandchildren, or spend time on their hobbies. By next morning, the town was in chaos. Half the communications were down, the airport was barely functioning, and services languished as employees took breaks to line up enthusiastically in hundreds to be issued newly introduced permits and licenses. In the end, Rhinde's officers were forced to send out squads to track down essential professionals and bring them back at gunpoint to carry out tasks which until yesterday they had performed readily and willingly. That was when Duggan began getting his first strong intuition that this wasn't going to work out in the way that had been envisaged.

When all-out war failed to materialize, the restrictions confining non-occupation personnel to base were eased. Duggan was standing on a street corner with Tawna, watching two troopers shouldering assault rifles and clad in riot gear, posted to protect the Municipal Services Building from a gaggle of curious onlookers, when Zeebron Stell called from the office suite he'd rented as a trading base. He sounded agitated.

"Dug, where are you?"

"A few blocks away from you on Johannes Street. You know, Zeeb, I think Gilbert and Sullivan could have done a lot with this."

"Is Tawna with you?"

"Yes, she is. What's up?"

"I've got problems. People here don't seem to understand that I'm running a business, not a thrift store. Can you get over? Maybe she'd be able to do a better job of getting the message across."

"It's Zeeb, from his emporium," Duggan murmured to Tawna. "He's having some kind of trouble with the locals. Wants us over there to see if you can maybe talk to them. Is that okay with you?"

"Sure."

"We're on our way, Zeeb."

A miscellany of vehicles was parked outside the building in which Stell had his premises, including a beat-up truck. Inside, they found him remonstrating with a dowdily dressed woman who seemed interested in some toilet preparations that he had amassed a stack of in one of the rooms. Elsewhere, a couple with two small children were examining a shelf of electronics appliances, while a small, bespectacled, bearded man, wearing a tweed jacket with deerstalker-like hat and waving a list of some kind, hopped about, trying to get Stell's attention. "
No!
You're outta your mind," Stell told the woman. "How is that supposed to be doing me a favor? It's not even what I paid." Then, to the man, "Look, I told you I'm not interested. I don't even know who any of those people are. How in hell do you figure you're helping
me
?" Another man appeared in a doorway at the rear, smiling and holding an elaborate wrist unit of some kind that had a miniature screen. Stell groaned, then caught sight of Duggan and Tawna and steered them gratefully back into the entrance hallway.

"There's some kind of victimization conspiracy," he told them. "With each other, they're real generous. I know. I watched 'em. But when they come here, they try and rip me off with pennies and buttons. It's almost like they think I
owe
them. And Sherlock Holmes's brother back there keeps pestering me with every hard-luck story in town. One guy's house got flattened in a mudslide. Somebody else's baby needs surgery. I even had a lady in earlier, asking if I wanted to put something into an education fund. What's going on?"

Tawna nodded. "Of course. These are people who really do
need
help . . ."

"But they're talking about helping
me!
" Stell protested.

"Well, yes . . . that too." Tawna obviously still couldn't see anything strange.

"How do they figure that?" Stell demanded.

"Well . . ." Tawna hesitated in the way of somebody reluctant to spell out what should have been clear. "To enjoy pride and self-esteem, the way everyone wants to," she said. "The more wealth and material things you acquire, the more you can make things easier for those going through hard times. Once you're reasonably comfortable yourself, it starts to mean more, right?" She glanced at Duggan. "It's like what we were saying the other day about eating all day. Beyond a certain point, any more doesn't make sense."

Stell's eyes bulged. "You mean they'll hassle me like this forever here?"

"Oh, no. Only until you learn to judge for yourself what share to put back in, like everyone else. Since you don't know how it works yet, they're probably just trying to help. It might take a little time."

"Well, suppose I don't want them telling me. What if I put my own guards on the place and keep 'em away?"

"That would be up to you, of course.
 . . . 
But why would anyone want to?" She looked at Duggan again and caught the resigned expression on his face. "Okay, don't tell me, Paul. Back home they're all like that. Yes?"

General Rhinde's measures weren't having the intended effect. In a closed-door meeting of the political and military chiefs aboard the
Barnet
, it was agreed that the citizens of Ferrydock were undergoing too little violation of their freedoms and rights to provoke whoever was supposed to defend them into coming out and doing so. Accordingly, since there was no set precedent at Tharle to say how far these things should be taken, the governor was instructed to issue a declaration stating that to facilitate improved control and efficiency, the Terran administration now owned everything in the name of everybody and was taking charge of manufacture, distribution, employment, and other services directly.

But the populace seemed happy to let them take it. A mood of festivity spread as virtually the whole of Ferrydock shut up stores and offices and took to the boulevards or sat back in the sun to await decisions and directions. Very soon, surface landers were shuttling frantically between the
Barnet
and Base 1, bringing extra details of planners and controllers to relieve the harried supervisory offices, now working around the clock. Meanwhile, ostensibly to bolster the security of all by setting up a centrally managed disaster relief agency—in reality, to get faster results through imposed austerity—huge stocks of food, fuel, clothing, materials, and other supplies were impounded and locked up in a large warehouse near the airport requisitioned for the purpose and officially renamed the "Federal Emergency Relief Repository." (Use of the word "federal" was a bit premature since as of yet there were no political entities other than Ferrydock to federate with it, but the planners were already shaping up grand schemes and visions of the future.) The repository was duly furnished with a ten-foot wire fence, traffic barrier and checkpoint at the gate, and a billet of armed guards.

However, the harassed Terran administrators were like innocents in a Casbah bazaar before the demands of Tharleans taking them at their word that they were now responsible for everything, and in a short space of time just about everything of utility or value had vanished from the stores and the streets. By the terms under which the Repository had been established, the circumstances qualified as a disaster deserving of relief, and the officer in charge dutifully commenced handing back to the town, at enormous cost in overhead and added effort, the goods that had been confiscated at comparable cost in the first place. Eager to help Terran officialdom find satisfaction and self-esteem by the terms of their own morality, the Tharleans didn't take long to exhaust the stocks completely. Since there was nothing in the regulations that said otherwise, the guards continued, befuddled but doggedly, patrolling outside to protect the contents of the empty warehouse. The only threatening incident they had to deal with, however, was when a small procession of trucks from some outlying farms arrived full of vegetables and other produce that the growers didn't know what else to do with—only to be turned away again because there were no orders for dealing with anyone trying to bring things
in
.

By this time, the political opponents of the mission's incumbent regime, seeing ammunition here to unseat their rivals, formed a dissident faction to fire off a joint protest to Earth, giving all the facts and details. A directive from Colonial Affairs Administration terminating the
Barnet
's mission and recalling the ship forthwith arrived within forty-eight hours.

* * *Γ Γ Γ

Base 1 was an abandoned shell, unsightly with the litter left by departing military anywhere. Children in makeshift helmets and carrying roughly fashioned imitation rifles marched each other to stations at the main gate guard posts. Duggan stood with his arm around Tawna's waist among a crowd watching the last shuttle out climb at the top of a pillar of light through scattered, purple-edged clouds. If the figure he'd heard was correct, he was one of forty-six who would have been unaccounted for when the muster lists were checked, and whose compaks hadn't answered calls or returned a location fix.

"No reservations or second thoughts, Dug?" she asked him. "No last-minute changes about everything, like Zeeb? I hope not. It would be a bit late now." Stell hadn't been among them at the end, after all. Driven to distraction under the pressures of trying to give things away, he had turned a complete about-face and stormed back up to the ship, berating anyone who would listen that he couldn't get back to Earth fast enough.