Visions of Liberty Part 13

"Pay? Chapin repeated.

"Aye, pay," Faelin growled. "You make everyone trade with you, monkey man. I won't believe that such a beauty would agree to wed a skinny old monkey like you if you didn't offer a good trade. Did you give her cousins more cattle for their farm? Or did you buy her with pretty things and the promise of a three-story stone house?"

The significance of the silk dress came to him. Vaguely Faelin recalled having seen a bolt of that fabric on his first visit to the store.

"Aye," he continued, tapping Jocelyn's sleeve. "I see she's wearing part of your trade. Well then, I've a trade for you. I'll trade you your life for the girl. Otherwise, I'm going to rip your head off those scrawny shoulders and take her home with me. What do you say to that offer?"

Chapin shook his head gently, almost sadly, then said: "I have a counter offer for you, Faelin. Look around."

And Faelin did. Behind him the a.s.sembled pakeha had drawn into a semicircle. No one carried weapons, but fists were clenched and faces were stern.

From in the midst of that crowd of disapproval, old Farmer Lamont shook his gray head.

"We don't do things that way, Faelin. Jocelyn has the right to make up her mind who she wants to marry.

If she wants to marry Chapin-for whatever reason-we support her, especially since Chapin wants to marry her, too, and no other woman has a claim on him."

There was a murmur of uneasy male laughter as if to say "What man in his right mindwouldn't want to marry Jocelyn?"

Faelin spat. "You talk of claims, of rights, Lamont. I thought Aotearoa had no laws."

"No government," Lamont said with a slight stress on the second word. "Law is not the same as government. Law is the rules by which a society decides to live. What we support here is the right of every human to decide his or her own life, free of some governing body a.s.serting its rights over theirs."

"And my rights?" Faelin countered. "Seems like since I've come here, everyone has been steering me to do things their way. I can't get a bag of flour or a pig or a few days' work on my land without trotting about doing everyone else's bidding."

"Your rights are yours," Lamont expounded, shades of the lawyer he had once been in his intonation.

"You can make your own flour or raise your own pigs or work your own land, but if you want to make someone else do something, then you'd better have the means to enforce your will. Seems to me that when you're accusing us of making you do our bidding, what you're really complaining about is that you can't make us do your bidding."

"There's no law against my way," Faelin sneered.

"No law," Lamont agreed, "but we don't like your manners much."

Faelin swung on his heel to look at Jocelyn. She was holding on to Chapin's arm, her posture protective.

Whatever Chapin had paid for her, he'd bought her well and good.

"d.a.m.n you all," he said to no one in particular.

He spotted Simon on the edge of the crowd, Roto sitting on his feet.

"C'mon, Simon. We're cutting out of here."

Simon shook his head.

"Not me. I've got dancing to do."

Faelin stared at him, then he stormed out past the circle of torchlight and into the darkness beyond. The buckskin was at least tied up and waiting. Tacking it up, he swung into the saddle.

As he rode off, he heard a wave of laughter and the music starting up again. Angrily, he turned the horse's head not west toward the claim, but north to Auckland.

Bandits stole the buckskin two days later, taking also Faelin's boots, his leather belt with its bra.s.s buckle, and the trade trinkets from his pockets. Almost as an afterthought, one ugly fellow made him strip out of his party clothes, tossing him a ragged s.h.i.+rt in trade.

Faelin made the rest of the way to Auckland half-naked and on bare feet. He hobbled into town and discovered that there was no police or soldiery interested in his sorrows. A group of bounty hunters paid him in secondhand shoes and trousers for information on the bandits. They weren't interested in his joining them, though.

"Get a horse," one said, "maybe then."

Faelin turned to robbery. After one nasty beating when he underestimated the strength of the man he planned to a.s.sault, he humbled himself to laborer's work. He stayed away from the docks, though, lest someone who'd known him in better days recognize him.

Summer wasn't too bad, nor was autumn, but winter came in wet and chill. After nearly dying of hypothermia one night, Faelin traded some of his earnings to bunk in a barracks. He was robbed there, set back to almost the same naked condition in which he'd arrived in Auckland six months before.

He began to dream of Richmont as one might a fairyland. No one had robbed him there-not even though he and Simon were two men alone and known to be rich. Folk had even been kind, after a fas.h.i.+on. Oddly enough it was little Debra Dutchman's laughing attempt to get him to dance with her that haunted Faelin most. What had he done to earn that kindness?

Winter turned to spring. With the better weather, clipper s.h.i.+ps came into dock. Faelin was drawn to them, haunted by his past. At first he watched from a distance, admiring the white spread of the sails. He began to think that if only he could get off this d.a.m.ned island, maybe he could earn enough to make his way. He'd lost weight and muscle, but the skills were there.

Soon, whenever he wasn't working-earning just enough to keep him in poor food and worse clothing-Faelin took to lurking about the docks, the pride that had kept him away faded to a shadow.

In a way he was still afraid to be seen by anyone who might know him, yet he longed for the contact that might get him a berth.

Late one afternoon in September, almost a year after he had fled Richmont, a voice spoke his name.

"Faelin?"

He looked up, trying to place the voice, realizing with shock that the man who was speaking to him was Simon. Superficially, Simon looked the same, but there was something to his bearing-a straightness, a way of meeting your eye when talking to you-that transformed him into another man. Faelin, who had been much beaten and kicked this past year, had to fight an automatic urge to cringe.

"Faelin!" Simon repeated, dropping to his knees next to him. "Man, you're alive! I'd given you up for dead. I've been looking . . ."

He stopped, shocked as he a.s.sessed his former partner's condition. Then he went on in a deliberately steady voice: "I've been looking since last year. Someone said they saw your buckskin for sale in a shady market at the edge of Auckland. I went there, but no luck, though I did find someone who remembered a man wearing what had to be your s.h.i.+rt. It wasn't you though-for one thing he was older, for another fair as a whale's belly. I kept checking for you though, came on all the supply runs to Auckland, but never got a whiff of you.

"When the clippers were due, though, I thought I'd check again. Seemed you might have gotten a berth, if by luck you'd gotten here alive. G.o.d's own, man, but what happened to you?"

Faelin told him, first crouched there on the street, later, when Simon recovered himself, in a tavern where they drank good ale and Faelin had his fill of chowder and bread.

"And so here I am," Faelin concluded. Simon's honest joy at finding him alive had robbed him of any defensiveness. He'd told the entire thing straight, even including the embarra.s.sing parts.

"And what do you want next?" Simon asked. "If you want a berth, I'll buy you out of your share of the claim, if . . ."

"You'll buy me out?" Faelin interrupted, astonished. Surely he'd abandoned any right to the claim a year since.

Simon misunderstood him, though.

"I've managed to hold it. Made a deal with the Dutchmans. I work their place in return for keeping our livestock with theirs. Got another dog and that helps with the sheep. Named it Repo. That's Maori for 'swamp,' " he added inconsequentially. "Was just as hard to house train as Roto."

"But you say I still have a share?" Faelin asked. "After I walked out on you?"

"Sure. You started the whole thing, Faelin. I'd never have had the courage to jump s.h.i.+p and find my way to Richmont without you. I owe you my life and my . . . well . . . prosperity. In a way, I owe you my happiness, too."

Simon blushed.

"I got married this winter to Lamont's younger daughter, Idelia. She's not a looker like Jocelyn, but she's a sweetheart."

"And you'd still give me a share?" Faelin asked again.

"That's right," Simon said. He looked Faelin squarely in the eye. "I'll sell enough to make up your half of the sheep and cattle-based on what we had when you left. Same for the dog and the riding stock, less that buckskin. There's something I'd rather do though . . ."

"What?"

"Convince you to come back, Faelin. You've the makings of pakeha, if you'd just get rid of the idea that something can be had for nothing but your wanting it. Idelia knows how I feel and though she's a bit nervous-you scared everybody white when you went at old Chapin-she says she trusts my judgment."

Faelin considered. Impossibly, he had a second chance and he thought he understood a whole lot better what he was being offered.

He thrust out his hand.

"It's a deal, partner."

This time, he knew he'd make his word good.

Devil's Star

by Jack Williamson

My mother had chronic bad luck, and a secret s.h.i.+eld against it. On no evidence at all, she clung to a stubborn belief that she was the great-grandniece of an illegitimate son of President Cleon Starhawke I, who had won fame for the interstellar conquests that added half a thousand planets to the Terran Republic, and notoriety for the beauty and fertility of his numerous mistresses.

"Never forget that we have presidential blood," she used to urge me. "Live up to it, Kiff, and it will make you great."

With no proof of the myth, I grew up proud of my Starhawke blood, loyal to the Republic and dreaming of a chance for some signal service to the President. My father abandoned us before I was five, migrating to a newly opened planet with a younger woman. My mother spent the next few years working as a domestic servant before she found another husband and skipped out with him, leaving me alone on Earth.

My own luck ran better. Both husbands left funds toward my education. She enrolled me in the Starhawke s.p.a.ce Academy. I came of age and earned my commission there, swearing eternal allegiance to the Terran Republic and Cleon III.

Graduating as a military historian, I begged for the chance to make my name with some active force out on the Rim frontier. Instead, I found myself still stuck on Earth, the freshman member of a little research team in the library at the Presidential War College near New Denver. Our project was to produce an updated history of Devil's Star. On my first day there, a discontented senior officer tried to shatter my illusions.

"You'll find no career here." He looked around and dropped his voice. "The library was founded to glorify the Starhawkes, but they won no wars on Devil's Star. The planet may justify the name, but it has no history."

I asked for facts about it "None worth knowing." He shrugged. "Sea level air pressure nearly twice Terra's. Surface mostly too hot and too hostile to be terraformed. No resources worth attention. The explorers had labeled it Lucifer and pa.s.sed it by."

"Wasn't it once a penal colony?"

"A death pit." He shrugged again. "Called the Black Hole. Infested with hostile life and strange disease.

Prisoners sometimes sent down in old landing craft, with no fuel to take off again. Public outrage stopped that when the truth got out. No landings since." He made a bitter face. "We're in the same fix here, condemned to our own hopeless hole."

"The convicts did survive?"

"A disappointment to the executioners." He grinned. "A hardy few climbed out of the heat, to a high mountain ridge that runs down the middle of the main continent. A cooler corner of h.e.l.l. Some are likely still alive."

Trapped there, with nothing to do and no future in sight, I was feeling as hopeless as another maroon until the day an officer in the uniform of the Presidential Guard caught me in my little cubicle with the news that s.p.a.ce Admiral Gilliyar wanted to see me at once. Astonished and a little alarmed, I asked why.

"He'll tell you why."

A luxury aircar carried us across the base to the s.p.a.ce Command Tower. We found the admiral in a huge corner office that looked across a great field of silver-bright skip-s.h.i.+ps. A big man with a bulldog chin, his bright red hair cut short, he was in s.h.i.+rt sleeves, his uniform jacket flung over the back of a chair behind a huge bare desk.

He stood up when the orderly brought me in. My heart thumping, I saluted.

"So you are Starman Kiff McCall?" He returned the salute, studied me with keen gray eyes, nodded abruptly. "You look fit for the job. Let's sit."

Breathing a little easier, but anxious to know what job, I followed him to chairs at a wide window that looked out west across the starport to snowcapped mountain summits.

"Have you done duty off the Earth?"

"No sir."

I waited, sweating.

"No matter." He shrugged again. "What do you know about Devil's Star?"

"Very little, sir. I doubt that much is known by anybody. All contact was outlawed two centuries ago."

"You'll soon know more." My mouth must have gaped; he laughed at me. "If you're ready to go there?"

"I-" I had to catch my breath. "I'm ready."

"Think before you jump." He bent toward me, hard eyes narrowed to study me again. "This will be a highly confidential mission, with no official support or public reward. Your career and even your life may be in danger."

"I've sworn an oath." Feeling like a schoolboy, I put my hand on my heart. "My life is pledged to the Republic and the President."

He smiled at the quiver in my voice.

"I trust you." He spoke very gravely. "What I say is for your ears only. Here is the situation. The sanctions against contact with the planet Lucifer have been broken. As you may know, enemies of the Republic were once exiled there. Their descendants appear to have created an outlaw society. The mere rumor of a free society is a hazard to the state. The President has ordered the planet reclaimed as Terran territory. He is sending me there as the first governor."

Muscles tightened in his jaw.

"It's been a black hole. The convict transports didn't all return. We never knew why, but those who got back called it h.e.l.l. Before any landing is attempted, we're sending an undercover agent to look the situation over and report what resistance we should expect. That's your errand."

I never returned to my library cubicle. Instead I spent a few hectic months in a cla.s.s for interstellar intelligence officers, a disappointment to me. I'd hoped for training to face the hazards of the star frontiers, but Cleon I had annihilated the alien foes he found there. These future agents were destined for duty here closer to home.