Voyage From Yesteryear Part 14

"I guess you have to learn moderation in this place," Stanislau remarked, studying his half-emptied gla.s.s of dark, frothy Chironian beer. He shook his head slowly. "You know, this sounds crazy but sometimes I wish they would make us pay for it."

"I know exactly what you mean," Carson said. Driscoll nodded his mute a.s.sent also.

"I'm not so sure I agree," Swyley said, which meant that he did.

Colman was about to make a joke Out of it when he realized they were serious. He knotted his brows and directed an inquiring look at each of them in turn.

"It's this whole business of not paying for anything," Stanislau said at last. "We come in here and drink, we go into restaurants and eat, we walk out of stores with all kinds of stuff, and none of it costs anything." He sat back, looked from side to side for moral support, got plenty, and shook his head helplessly. "It seemed too good to be true at first, but that soon wears off. It's not funny anymore, chief.

It's getting to all of us."

"We feel we owe something, and we want to pay our way," Driscoll confirmed. "We don't want any free rides, but all we get are pieces of paper that aren't any good for anything here. What can you do?"

"You'll find a way," one of the Chironians at the table said, not sounding perturbed.

"Better late than never, I suppose," another commented, glancing at the painter, who was still there. The painter nodded but didn't reply.

"What does that mean?" Driscoll asked, looking at the Chironian who had spoken.

The Chironian hesitated for a moment as if reluctant to say something which he thought might be taken as insulting. Kath caught his eye and nodded rea.s.suringly. "Well," the Chironian began, then paused again.

"Most people here start to feel that way by the time they're about ten. I'm not trying to offend anyone-but that's the way it is."

Carson frowned and thought about the implications, then shook his head. "It's impossible," he said. "No system could work like that."

An intrigued and thoughtful look came over Swyley's face as he listened. He said nothing, which meant that he didn't agree.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

JEAN FALLOWS WAS beginning to hate Chiron, the Chironians, and everything to do with the lawless, G.o.dless, alien, hostile place. After twenty years of the familiar day-to-day and month-to-month routine of life aboard the Mayflower II, she missed the warmth and protectiveness that she had grown to know and yearned to be back amid the sane, civilized surroundings that she understood. She understood a way of life in which budget and necessity decided priorities of need, in which clear rules set limits of behavior, and where tried and trusted protocols defined role and function-her own as well as everybody else's; she did not understand, or even want to understand, the swirling ocean of anarchy in which she now found herself, in which individuals were expected to flounder helplessly like paper boats tossed in a tempest, with no charted sh.o.r.es, no havens of anchor, and no guiding stars. She had no place in it, and she desired no place in it. Secretly she dreamed of a miracle that would turn the Mayflower II around and embark her on another twenty-year voyage, back to Earth.

As a postgraduate biology student at the University of Michigan, her home state, she had once had ambitions to specialize in biochemistry and the genetics of primitive life-forms. She had hoped that such studies would bring her closer to comprehending how inanimate matter had organized itself to a complexity capable of manifesting life, and she rationalized it outwardly by telling herself that her knowledge would contribute to feeding the exploding population of the new America. And then she had met Bernard, whose youthful zeal and visions of the Reformation that would sweep the world had awakened her political awareness and carried her along with hint into a whole new dimension of human relations.h.i.+ps and motivations which until then she had hardly recognized as existing at all. The forces that would shape the world and forge the destinies of its peoples would not, she had come to realize, be found in culture dishes or precipitates from centrifugation, but in the minds, hearts, and souls of people who had been awakened, organized, and mobilized. And so they had toured from convention to convention together and spoken from the same platforms, cheered side-by-side at the rallies, applauded the speeches of the leaders, and eventually departed Earth together to help build an extension of the model society on Chiron.

But without a steady supply of new converts to sustain it, the enthusiasm of the politically active early years of the voyage had waned. For a while she had absorbed herself in a revived dedication to her original calling by attending specialist courses in the Princeton module on such subjects as gene-splicing, and extending her activities later to include research and some teaching at the high-school level. Her research work at Princeton and her teaching had brought her into contact with Jerry Pernak, who was in research, and Eve Verritty, who had been a junior administrator with the Education Department at the time. In fact it was Jean who had first introduced them to each other.

In the years that followed after Jay and then later Marie were born, she had tried to stay abreast of her career by attending lectures and cla.s.ses in Princeton and by setting herself a reading program, but as time went by, her attendance became less frequent and the reading was continually put off to tomorrows that she knew would never come. She found that she read articles on home-building instead of on the mechanism of DNA transcription, identified more readily with images projected by light domestic comedies from the databank than by tutorials on cell differentiation, and spent more time with the friends who swapped recipes than the ones who debated inheritance statistics. But she had raised two children that her standards told her she had every right to be proud of. She was ent.i.tled to rewards for the sacrifices she had made. And now Chiron was threatening to steal the rewards away.

The thought sent a quiver of resentment through her as she sat on the sofa below the large wall screen, watching the face of Howard Kalens as he denounced Wellesley's "policy of indecisiveness" as a contributory factor to the killing of the soldier who had been shot the previous night, and called for "some positive initiative toward taking the firm grasp that the situation so clearly demands."

"A boy of twenty-three," Kalens had said a few minutes previously. "Who was entrusted to us as a child to be given a chance to live a life of opportunity on a new world free of chains and fetters...to live his life with pride and dignity as G.o.d intended-cut down when he had barely glimpsed that world or breathed its air. Bruce Wilson did not die yesterday. His life ended when he was three years old."

Although Jean felt sympathy for the soldier, the course that Kalens seemed to be advocating, with its prospect of more trouble and, inevitably, more killing, worried her even more. Why did it always have to be like this? she asked herself. All she wanted was to feel comfortable and secure, and to watch her children grow up to become decent, respectable, responsible adults who would weave themselves into the rea.s.suring coc.o.o.n of familiarity around her-as much for their own future well-being as for hers. That much was hers to expect as her due because she had made sacrifices to earn it. It threatened n.o.body. So why should other people's squabbles which were not of her making now threaten her with sweeping it all away?

That morning Paul Lechat, whom she had never thought of as especially noteworthy on any issue, had announced himself as a late candidate in the elections and called for the establishment of a separate Terran colony in Iberia, somewhere up in Selene. He wanted to allow the people from Earth to pursue their own pattern of living without disruptive influences for the immediate future, and possibly to make such an inst.i.tution permanent if it suited enough people to do so. To Jean the announcement had come as a G.o.dsend, and to many others as well, if the amount of popular support that had materialized from all sides within a matter of hours was anything to go by. Why couldn't everybody see it that way? she wondered. It was so obvious. Why were there always some who were obstinate and valued political interests before what common sense said would be for the common good, such as Kalens, who even now was reacting to Lechat as a threat and rallying his own followers to action?

"Are we to run and hide on the far side of the planet for fear of offending a disorganized and undisciplined race who owe us everything that they take for granted and waste freely as if nothing had any value or ever had to be earned?" Kalens was asking from the screen. "Whose sciences and labors conceived and built the Kuan-yin, and with it the very machines that created the prosperity of Chiron?

Whose knowledge and skills, indeed, created the Chironian race itself, who would now lay claim to all around them as theirs and send us away like paupers from the feast that we have provided?" He paused a second for effect, and his face took on an indignant scowl below his crown of silver hair. "I say no! I will not be driven away in such fas.h.i.+on I will not even contemplate such an action. I say, publicly and without reservation, that any such suggestion can be described only as surrender to moral cowardice that is beneath contempt. Here we have come, after crossing four light-years of s.p.a.ce, and here we will remain, to share in that which is our right to share, and to enjoy that which is no more than our just due."

A thunder of applause greeted the exhortation. Jean had heard enough and told Jeeves to turn off the screen, For a while after listening to Lechat, she had entertained a brief hope that his announcement might precipitate a landslide of opinion that would force a more enlightened official policy, but the hope had faded a mere two hours later when Eve and Jerry stopped by for a brief farewell before moving out to take up the Chironian way of living. Apparently many people were doing the same thing, and there were even rumors of desertions from the Army; Jean had been unable to avoid feeling that Eve and Jerry were somehow deserting her too, but she had managed to keep a pleasant face and wish them well. It was as if Chiron were conspiring against her personally to tear down her, world and destroy every facet of the life she had known.

The house around her was another part of it. She no longer saw it as the dream it had been on the day they moved down from the Mayflower II, but instead as another part of the same conspiracy-a cheap bribe to seduce her into selling her soul in the same way as a university research post and the lure of a free home had seduced Eve and Jerry. Chiron didn't want to let her be. It wanted her to be like it. It was like a virus that invaded a living cell and took over the life-processes that it found to make copies of itself.

She s.h.i.+vered at the thought and got up from the sofa to find Bernard. No doubt he would be in the bas.e.m.e.nt room that he and Jay had made into a workshop to supplement the village's communal facility.

Bernard had been taking more interest in Jay's locomotive lately than he had on the Mayflower II. Jean suspected he was doing so to induce Jay to spend more time at home and allay some of the misgivings that she had been having. But his enthusiasm hadn't prevented Jay from going off on his own into Franklin, sometimes until late into the evening, after spending hours in the bathroom fussing with his hair, matching s.h.i.+rts and pants in endless combinations with a taste that Jean had never known he had, and experimenting with neckties, which he'd never bothered with before in his life unless told to. Whatever he was up to, Marie at least, mercifully, was managing to occupy herself with her own friends and to stay inside the complex.

When Jean appeared in the doorway, Bernard was fiddling with an a.s.sembly of slides and cranks that he had set up in a test jig. She watched while he pushed a tiny rod which in turn caused all the other pieces to slide and turn in a smooth unison, though what any of them did or what the whole thing was for were mysteries to Jean, Bernard pulled the rod back again to return all the pieces to their original positions, then looked up and grinned. "I have to take my hat off to Army training," he said. "I'll say one thing for Steve Colman-he sure knows what he's doing. Our son has produced some first-cla.s.s work here." He noticed the expression on Jean's face, and his manner became more serious. "Aw, try and snap out of it hon. I know everything's a bit strange. What else can you expect after twenty years? You'll need time to get used to it. We all will"

"You don't mind, do you? Here...the way things are...it doesn't bother you. You're like Eve and Jerry."

Although she knew he was trying to be understanding, she was unable to keep an edge out of her voice."

"Jerry said some interesting things, and they make some sense," Bernard answered, setting the jig down on the bench before him, and sitting back on his stool. "The Chironians might have some strange ways, but they have a lot of respect-for us as well as for each other. That's not such a bad way for people to be. Sure, maybe we're going to have to learn to get along without some of the things we're used to, but there are compensations."

"Was it respect they showed that boy who was killed last night?" Jean asked bitterly. "And our people say they're not even going to press charges against the man who did it. What kind of a way is that to live? Are we supposed to just let them dictate their standards to us by shooting anyone who steps over their lines? Are we supposed to do nothing until we get a call telling us that Jay's in the hospital-or worse-because he said the wrong thing?"

Bernard sighed and forced his voice to remain reasonable. "Now, come on...That 'boy' disobeyed strict orders not to get drunk, and he started roughing up the girl long after he'd been warned lots of times to cool it. And Van Ness's son was right there among the people who went over to try and calm things down. Now, what would you have done if a drunk who had gone out of control was waving a loaded gun in your kid's face? What would anybody have done?"

"How do you know?" Jean challenged. "You weren't there. And that's not the way it sounded when Kalens was talking just now. And a lot of people seemed to agree with him."

"He's just playing on emotion, Jean. I had it on down here for a few minutes but couldn't stand it. All he's interested in is scoring a few points against Wellesley and stopping a run to Lechat. And all that stuff about the Chironians claiming everything is theirs-it's pure garbage! I mean, it couldn't be further from the truth, could it, but n.o.body stops to think." He frowned to himself for a moment. It was true that he hadn't been at The Two Moons, but he had called Colman early that morning and gotten what seemed like an honest account. But with Jean acting the way she was, he didn't want to mention that. "Anyhow, the facts about the shooting are on record," he said. "All you have to do is ask Jeeves."

Jean seemed to dismiss the subject from her mind. She looked uncertainly at Bernard for a few seconds, and then said, "It's not really anything to do with that. It's-oh, I can't put this any other way-it's you."

Bernard didn't seem as surprised as he might have been. "Want to spit it out?"

Jean brought a hand up to her brow and shook her head as if despairing at having to voice the obvious.

"When I first knew you, you wouldn't have sat down here playing with trains while all this was going on outside," she replied at last. "Don't you understand? What's happening out there, right now, is important.

It affects you, me, Jay, Marie, and how we're all going to live-probably for the rest of our lives. Twenty years ago you-both of us-we'd have done something. Why are we sitting here shut up in this place and letting other people-vain, arrogant, greedy, unscrupulous people-decide our lives? Why aren't we doing something? It's that. I can't stand it."

Bernard made no reply but let his eyebrows ask the question for him.

Jean raised her hands in an imploring gesture. "Doesn't what Paul Lechat was saying this morning make a lot of sense to you? Isn't it the only way? Well, he's going to need help to do it. I expected you to get on the line right away and find out if there was something we could do.

But you hardly even talked about it. h.e.l.l, I know I'm twenty years older too, but at least I haven't forgotten all the things we used to talk about. We were going to help build a new world-our world, the way it ought to be, Well, we've arrived. The ride's over. Isn't it time we started thinking about earning the ticket?"

Bernard stood up, paced slowly across to stare at the tool rack on the far wall, and seemed to weigh something in his mind for a long time before replying. Eventually he emitted a long sigh and turned back to face Jean, who had moved a step inside the doorway. "We can still build it," he said. "But it doesn't quite work the way we thought then. Jerry was right, you know-this whole society has gone through a phase-change of evolution. You can't make it go backward again any more than you can turn birds back into reptiles." Bernard came a pace nearer. His voice took on a persuasive, encouraging note. "Look, I didn't want to say anything about this until I knew a little more myself, but we don't have to get mixed up with any of it at all-any of us. Kalens and the rest of them belong to everything we've heft behind now.

We don't need them anymore. Don't you see, it can't last?"

"What are you talking about, Bernard?"

"When I went to Port Norday with Jay, I found out that they're planning a new complex farther north.

They're going to need engineers-fusion engineers. They practically told me I'd have no problem getting in there, to a top job maybe, Think of it-our own place just like we've always said, and no more c.r.a.p from Merrick or any of them!" Bernard threw his hands high. "I could be me for the first time in my life...and so could you, all of us. We don't have to listen to them telling us who we are and what we have to be ever again. Doesn't that..." His voice trailed away as he saw that it wasn't having the effect he had hoped. Jean was backing away through the door, shaking her head in mute protest.

"It's getting to you too," she whispered tightly. "Just as it's already gotten to Eve and Jerry. Oh, how I hate this place! Can't you see what it's doing to us all?"

"But, hon, all I-"

Jean spun round and ran back to the elevator. Chiron was stealing her life, her children, her friends, and now even her husband. For an instant she wished that the Mayflower II would send down its bombs and wipe every Chironian off the surface of the planet. Then they would be able to begin again, cleanly and decently. Ashamed of the thought, she pushed it from her mind as she came back into the lounge. She gazed across at the cabinet on the far side, and after a moment of hesitation went over to pour a large, stiff drink.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

"HE'S AMAZING, ISN'T he," s.h.i.+rley said in an awed voice as she leaned forward to get a better view of the table over the shoulder of her daughter, Ci, who was sitting on the floor. "It must be a genetic mutation that makes sticky fingers or something."

"Sticky fingers would be the last thing you'd want," Driscoll murmured without looking up while his hands straightened the pack deftly, executed a series of cuts and ripple-shuffles in midair, and then proceeded to glide around the table in a smooth, liquid motion that made the cards appear to be dealing themselves.

"Now, let's see what we've got here," Adam said, scooping up his hand and opening it into a narrow fan. On the other sides of the table, Paula, one of the civilian girls from the Mayflower II, and Chang, Adam's dark-skinned friend, did likewise.

"There's no need to look," Driscoll told him nonchalantly. "You've got a pair of kings." Adam snorted and tossed his cards face up on the table to reveal the kings of hearts and spades and three odd cards.

"What about me?" Ci asked, hooking at Driscoll. She leaned to one side to let her mother see the hand she was holding.

Driscoll stared at her. "Three queens, and I could beat it," he said. Ci and s.h.i.+rley exchanged baffled looks.

Paula was looking at him impishly. "Do you think you could beat mine?" she asked in a curious voice.

"Sure," Driscoll told her. His eyes twinkled just for an instant. "If you want to know how, I'd beat you with aces."

"Are you sure, Tony? Paula asked. "You wouldn't want to bet on that, now, would you?" Paula turned her head to smile slyly at her friend, Terry, also from the Mayflower II, who was watching from behind.

Driscoll met her eyes calmly. "I'd risk it," he said. "Sure, if this was for real, I'd put money on it."

"How much?" Paula asked.

Driscoll shrugged. "What would you stake?"

"Twenty?"

"Sure, I'd cover that."

"Fifty?"

"I'm still with you."

"A hundred?"

"A hundred."

Paula slapped down four aces gleefully. "You lose! Hey, how about that? I just cleaned him out. See, I knew he had to be bluffing."

"Bluffing, h.e.l.l." Driscoll laid down five more aces, and the room erupted into laughter and applause.

"Hey, you haven't asked me," Chang said. "I beat that."

"You do?" Driscoll looked surprised.

Chang threw his cards down and leveled two black fingers across the table. "A Smith and Wesson beats five aces." He grinned and stood up. "Everybody set for another drink?" A chorus of a.s.sent rose around the table, and Chang moved away to the bar on the far side of the room.

Driscoll had taken s.h.i.+rley up on her invitation to get in touch when he got down to the surface, and she had asked him along to the party in Franklin, at the same time telling him to feel free to bring anyone he wanted. So Driscoll had invited Colman, Swyley, Maddock, and Stanislau, who among them had persuaded Sirocco to come too, and Sirocco had suggested bringing some of the girls from the Mayflower II. Adam, who turned out to be a friend of Ci's, had also been invited with Kath, and between them they had brought Adam's twin brother, Casey, and Casey's girlfriend from the s.h.i.+p-the lively woman that Colman hadn't been able to place previously.

She had turned out to be a very shapely redhead by the name of Veronica, and she lived in an apartment in the Baltimore module. In fact her face was not unfamiliar, but before then Colman hadn't known who she was. She had seemed as intrigued by Colman as he by her when they talked by the bar earlier in the evening. "Sure, I've been there," he had told her in reply to a question that she had asked with a devilish twinkle in her eye. "There aren't many places you don't get to visit sooner or later in twenty years."

"Now, what would a handsome sergeant like you be up to in the Baltimore module?"

"Why would anybody be interested?"

After studying his impa.s.sive expression for a few seconds, Veronica had said in a low voice, "It is you, isn't it?"

"Even if we a.s.sume that I know what you mean, I don't think you'd expect me to answer." So now they both knew, and knew that the other knew. Each had tested the other's discretion, and both of them respected what they had found. Nothing more needed to be said.

With all public bars having been put off-limits to the Mayflower II's soldiers after the shooting, the party couldn't have come at a better time, Colman reflected as he leaned against the bar and nursed his gla.s.s while gazing around the room. Swyley and Stanislau were behind him in a corner with a mixed group of Chironians and seemed interested in the planet's travel facilities; Sirocco was with another group in the center of the room discussing the war news with another group, and Maddock, looking slightly disheveled, was sprawled along a couch in an alcove on the far side with his arm draped around Wendy, another girl from the Mayflower II, who seemed to be asleep. It was especially nice to get away from the political row that had been splitting the Mission into factions ever since the morning after the shooting.

Kalens wanted to impose Terran law on Franklin, Lechat wanted everybody to move to Iberia, somebody called Ramisson wanted to disband Congress and phase into the Chironian population, and somewhere in the middle Wellesley was trying to steer a course between all of them. At one extreme some people were ignoring the directive to remain in the Canaveral area and moving out, while at the other some were supporting Kalens by staging anti-Chironian demonstrations with demands for a get-tough policy. Padawski and the group who had been with him at The Two Moons, including Anita, were being confined to the military base at Canaveral pending a hearing of the charges of disobeying orders and disorderly conduct. In addition Ramelly had been charged with a.s.sault, and Padawski with failing to uphold discipline among members of his unit as well as with publicly issuing threats. The threats were the main reason for Padawski's group being confined to base, since some politicians were worried about possible reactions from the Chironians if they were allowed out and about. Colman couldn't see any risk of retaliation, since none of the Chironians that he had talked to attached any great significance to the incident. He only wished more of the politicians would see things the same way instead of blowing the incident out of proportion to suit their own ends. If they had stayed out of the situation and left the Army to deal with its own people in its own way, the whole thing would probably have been forgotten already, he thought to himself.

Kath had moved away to talk to Adam, Casey, and Veronica, who were sitting together beyond the table at which Driscoll was performing. Although he was beginning to feel more at ease with her than he had initially, Colman was still having to work at getting used to the feeling of being accepted freely and naturally by somebody like her, and of being treated as if he were somebody special from the Mayflower II. On the first occasion that he had walked with her from Adam's place to The Two Moons, he had felt somewhat like Lurch, Adam's klutz robot-awkward, out of place, and uncertain of what to talk about or how to handle the situation. But all through that evening, despite the shooting episode, on the way back and at Adam's afterward, and when he had met her in town for a meal after coming off duty the following day, she had continued to show the same free and easy att.i.tude. Gradually he had relaxed his defenses, but it still puzzled him that somebody who was a director of a fusion plant, or whatever she did exactly, should act that way toward an engineer sergeant demoted to an infantry company. Why would she do something like that? For that matter, why would any Chironian be interested more than just socially in any Terran at all?

"Because she's seducing you," a voice murmured from behind him.

Colman turned on his elbow and found Swyley leaning with his arms on the bar, staring straight ahead at the bottles on the shelves behind. Colman raised his eyebrows. Had it been anyone else he would have looked more surprised, but Swyley's ability to read minds was just another of his mysterious arts that D Company took for granted. After a few seconds Swyley went on, "They're seducing all of us. That's how they're fighting the war."

Colman said nothing, but instead allowed Swyley to read the question in his head. Sure enough, Swyley explained, "They don't make bombs or organize armies. It's too messy, and too many of the wrong people get hurt, they go for the gra.s.s roots. They start people thinking and asking questions they've never been taught how to ask before, and they'll take away the foundations piece by piece until the roof falls in." He paused and continued staring at the wall. "You're an engineer, and she runs part of a fusion complex. If you want out, you've got a place to go. That's what she's telling you."

Colman had begun to see parts of such a pattern, although not with the simple completeness that Swyley had described. What Swyley was saying might be true as far as it went, but Colman was certain that in Kath's case Swyley had, for once, missed something, something more personal than just political motivation, A hand descended on his arm and slid upward to tease the back of his neck. He turned round to find that Kath had come back. "You're starting a bachelors' party here," she said. "I have to break that up before the idea catches on."

Colman grinned. "Good thinking. We were starting to talk shop." Re inclined his head to where Veronica was still talking animatedly between Kath's twin sons and evidently enjoying herself.

"Somebody seems to be quite a hit over there."

"Isn't she a lot of fun," Kath agreed. "She's talking Casey into teaching her to be an architect. She could do it too. She's an intelligent woman. Have you known her long?"