by David Weber
“In that case, what information would you require?”
“Oh, I’d want to see your analysts’ take, of course. But I’d also like access to the raw data itself. The ability to draw my own conclusions based on the original source material.”
“There’s likely to be quite a lot of that,” she pointed out, and he chuckled.
“I’m a fast study, Ms. Bardasano. I’ve had to be. And even if I can’t review all the raw data, any of it I can get through would help my feel for the situation. It certainly couldn’t hurt, anyway. And to be totally honest, sometimes the simple confidence that I’ve gotten my head wrapped as thoroughly as possible around the data helps me carry through something like this. I may not always be right in my analyses, but I am more often than not. And the fact that I think I’m right lets me move a lot more confidently. The amount of assurance I can project has a direct bearing on how readily I can get someone like Nordbrandt or Westman to accept that I’m who I say I am and trust me. As far as they trust anyone, at least.”
“I see.” She considered him thoughtfully, then nodded. “Fine. I don’t see any problem, as long as the data’s properly secured while it’s in your possession.”
“I don’t think there’d be any worries there,” Harahap said confidently.
“So you’re prepared to take the assignment?”
He considered that question very carefully. The one thing of which he was totally confident was that she wasn’t telling him everything. In fact, it was unlikely she was telling him more than a third or a quarter of the truth. In her place, he certainly wouldn’t have trusted a newly recruited field agent with the full knowledge of for whom or to precisely what end he was working. By the same token, she clearly understood that for an operation to succeed, the operators in question had to have the tools they needed. And as all those luxuriously appointed offices and suites here on Mesa indicated, it looked like there’d be some nice perks to the job, at least.
I wonder who she’s really working for? he mused. It may be Jessyk, and I’m sure it’s Manpower, but who else is involved? I doubt it’s Kalokainos at this point—not if he’s really the one who tried to have Ulrike and me murdered. But it could be. God only knows the alliances between transstellars are about as durable as an ice cube in sunlight!
“So you want me to evaluate your analyses, run down any local resistance leaders I can, evaluate how likely they are to succeed with suitable outside help, and promise them your ‘employers’ will provide that help?”
“Almost, Mr. Harahap. Almost. Except for that last bit.”
“About providing help?” Harahap frowned. “Forgive me, but I thought that was an integral part of what you had in mind.”
“Oh, it is!” This time Bardasano’s smile could have shamed a shark. “It’s just that we don’t want you to promise we’ll be the ones helping them.”
Chapter Seven
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a Government, which we might expect in a country without Government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgivers; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him, out of two evils, to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design of and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.
Indiana Graham sat back in the tattered, worn out chair, looking down at the even more worn, old-fashioned hardcopy book, and his eyes burned. It wasn’t the first time, or the second, or even the hundredth he’d opened Yumashev’s Great Thinkers of Political Freedom, and it wouldn’t be the last. He still remembered the first time his father had handed him a copy of Common Sense. He’d been only—what? eleven?—at the time. Something like that. And its archaic language—Standard English had changed a lot in the last couple of thousand T-years—had been a challenge, even with a good dictionary program. But he’d persevered, partly because he’d known it was important to his father and partly because he’d already acquired his father’s interest in history, although it had never been the passion it was for Bruce Graham until the last few years.
Of course, a lot of things had changed in the last few years.
He grimaced at the thought and closed the book. Then he climbed out of his chair—carefully, wary of its increasing senility—and crossed to the bookcase in the barren little apartment’s even tinier bedroom. He slipped the thick volume (its plastic pages were thin, but Thomas Paine wasn’t the only subversive who inhabited Yumashev’s) into its slot and stood gazing down at it for a moment. Given its content, it probably wasn’t a wonderful idea to leave it in plain sight that way. On the other hand, the scags weren’t very likely to see it unless they decided to come calling, in which case it wouldn’t matter how carefully he’d tried to conceal it. For that matter, it was unlikely a typical stalwart of the Seraphim System Security Police would have the least damned idea who Thomas Paine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, Jeremiah Towanda, or Henrietta MacIntyre had been. And given the SSSP’s general reading skills, he probably wouldn’t be able to read the titles off the book spines, anyway.
He wasn’t sure Anderson Bligh, the Seraphim System Minister of Education, had gotten around to formally banning Paine. Education—which, under the McCready Administration, also served as Seraphim’s propaganda bureau and thought police in general—wasn’t in the habit of listing the names of banned authors. Those who’d come under the displeasure of Bligh or President McCready simply disappeared from booksellers’ catalogs without fuss or fanfare. After all, if they told their citizens who’d been banned, they’d also point any of those citizens who might feel a modicum of discontent toward the very writers they most wanted to silence. He did know both Jefferson and Shklar had been on the last list Frieda Simmons, the assistant head librarian at the Cherubim Public Library’s main branch, had shown him, though. And if Paine hadn’t been added to the list yet, it could only be because none of Education’s apparatchiks had ever heard of him. As soon as one of them did, he was gone. If anyone was going to be banned by the Seraphim System government as a dangerous rabble rouser, Paine was certainly that anyone.
And it would scarcely be the first time he’d enjoyed that honor, over the centuries.
Indy stood back and ran a fingertip across the spines of the books keeping Great Thinkers of Political Freedom company. Perhaps a quarter of them had been his father’s, all he’d managed to salvage from the elder Graham’s library after the scags trashed it on the day they arrested him. He’d had less than half an hour to do the salvaging before his sister, his mother, and he had been thrown out on the street. It appeared Bruce Graham, despite having made every payment at least two weeks early ever since Indy could remember, had been over a year in arrears on his mortgage…according to the lien-holder ’s books. And since the scags had flushed his bank accounts and seized his bank records, there’d been no way for Treysa Graham to prove otherwise. Not that it would’ve mattered if she could have. The lien-holder in question, First People’s Bank of Cherubim, was owned by a crony of Economy Minister Trish Mansell, so the ledger was going to say whatever Mansell thought it should say. Besides, when Tillman O’Sullivan and the SSSP decided to turn someone into a “teaching moment,” they didn’t fool around about it.
The rest of his bookshelf’s contents had come from Frieda. Technically, they were all stolen, but he
was fine with that. In fact, he was part of what Frieda called her “off-site stacks.” Once upon a time, before the Seraphim System had been ingested by Krestor Interstellar and Mendoza of Córdoba—back when it had possessed a government that could actually be voted out of office—its library system had been remarkably well stocked for such a galactic backwater. And not just with electronic copies. The historical collection of the main library here in the capital still contained priceless hardcopies from Seraphim’s earliest settlement and a surprising number from other star systems, some quite distant, as well. God only knew how they’d drifted ashore in Seraphim of all damned places, yet there they were.
A great many of those documents were no longer available to the public, since they contained the sorts of things of which the government disapproved, but they were still there. So far, at least. And there were still thousands of hardcopy volumes—like Great Thinkers of Political Freedom, although few of the others were quite so fraught with unacceptable concepts—on the shelves.
There were fewer than there had been, though, because hardcopies were more vulnerable than electronic ones. When the Ministry of Education decided someone needed banning, its agents descended upon the catalogs of every library on the planet, and the condemned books promptly found their way into reclamation hoppers. It was even easier to purge libraries’ electronic databases, but it had also been easier for people like Frieda to smuggle out electronic books and stash them away in very small, very well hidden holes before Education got to them. Photons packed tighter than printed pages, when all was said, and she could carry an entire library in her hip pocket.
In addition to Education’s depredations, however, the library’s hardcover collection had also been depleted by Frieda’s determination to save as many endangered titles as possible. She and Bruce and Treysa Graham had been friends since grade school, and Indy remembered sitting up with hot chocolate, listening while Bruce and Frieda discussed history, politics, and the way Seraphim had slithered down the Solly python’s gullet. So he’d been a natural choice when Frieda started looking for depositories for her beloved books.
He snorted at the thought, then looked at the flashy uni-link on his wrist and muttered a curse. He was running ten minutes late. If he didn’t get a move on, he was going to miss lunch with Mackenzie. That was never a good idea…and especially not today.
He patted the bookcase with a proprietary, friendly hand and headed for the door.
Dad would be pissed if he knew about Frieda and me, he thought with a smile that mingled bitterness and amusement as he started down the narrow stairs (the elevator hadn’t worked in over six weeks) through the miasma of cooking, overripe garbage, and other best-left-undefined scents. The last thing he’d want is to have me sitting here with a bookcase full of subversives! But that’s too bad. If he didn’t want me reading them—and thinking about them—he shouldn’t have introduced me to them in the first place.
He reached the street just as one of the capital’s battered but punctual trams heaved into sight. He climbed aboard, presented his uni-link’s transponder pass to the scanner, and found a seat as the tram rumbled off.
He wondered, sometimes, if his father would have chosen not to introduce him to Paine, and all the authors he’d read since, if he’d known what was coming. He might have, actually. Bruce Graham loved his children, and that love was the reason he’d led Indy and Mackenzie into forbidden intellectual territory. He’d been determined they’d grow up knowing the things the Seraphim educational system was specifically designed to prevent them from thinking about because he’d wanted them to be more than good little helots obeying their corporate masters. But that had been before his own arrest and incarceration in Terrabore Prison, and he was also fiercely protective. These days, that love of his expressed itself in an almost desperate determination to keep Indiana and Mackenzie—and especially—Treysa out of that same grim, gray confinement.
Indy felt his eyes burn again, and his fist clenched on his seat’s armrest as he gazed out the tram’s open window at the passing street. The liquid whistles of robins (who bore very little resemblance to the Old Terran original) burbled happily to one another on tree branches and apartment ledges. It was a warm, late summer day—the sort that would have seen his family at the beach, soaking up sun before autumn put an end to such trips, when he was a boy. But instead of a daytrip to the ocean, he’d spent yesterday at Terrabore, for the one-hour, once-a-month visit with his father the scags allowed him, and he’d felt his lips go white as Bruce Graham hobbled into the cubicle on the other side of the thick crystoplast. His father was barely fifty years old, but he’d moved like a man twice that age…without prolong. His left arm had been supported by a sling, and there’d been ugly bruises down the right side of his face. The bright orange prison coverall had prevented Indy from seeing anything else, but just from watching his father walk, he’d known what he would have seen without that concealment.
He’d also known better than to ask what had happened. It wasn’t the first beating Bruce Graham had received since he’d been arrested, although this one looked worse than any of the others had been. Besides, if Indy had asked him, Bruce would simply have replied with one of the only two acceptable answers: “I fell,” or “I got between two of the other inmates who don’t like each other much.”
And then he would have given Indy “the Look.” It was the Look that said, “Don’t push it.” The Look that said “Let it go, Son.” And the Look that said, above all, “Don’t do anything stupid.”
He’d grown accustomed to that Look, Indy had. He knew exactly what it meant, why he saw it. In their very last conversation before Bruce’s sentencing, he’d told Indy—ordered, begged Indy—to stay as far away as possible from anything which might draw the scags’ attention. There’d been a time when Bruce Graham had believed it was possible for someone to scratch up a little capital, actually create his own small business—even on Seraphim—and hope to build a better future. Even that it might have been remotely possible to gradually win back a little of the political freedom Jacqueline McCready and her transstellar masters had stolen from Seraphim’s citizens. But he’d learned better, and whatever he might have been willing to risk for himself, he was unwilling for his son and daughter to risk. And the children of a convicted “enemy of the people” were bound to be carefully scrutinized by the SSSP.
And because Indy knew how much his father loved him, he’d promised no one in the entire system could be more apolitical than he intended to become. It hadn’t been simply for the scag microphones he’d known were recording the conversation, either. It had been for the father he loved just as fiercely as Bruce loved him…but he hadn’t meant it. He hadn’t meant it then, and he didn’t mean it now. There were some things he simply couldn’t do, even for his father, and keeping that promise was one of them.
He had tried, though. He truly had, mostly because his mother had begged him to, as well. But he’d already known he wouldn’t succeed—not in the long run.
* * *
The tram finally rattled up to Indy’s destination and he got off, turning left to walk the two remaining blocks to The Soup Spoon. It was a small, family-run restaurant which somehow managed to keep its doors open, and if it might lack a little something in ambience, the quality of the food more than made up for it.
“Indy!” Alecta Yearman greeted him as the door closed behind him. “You’re late! Max has been here almost twenty minutes.”
“Don’t fib to me, Naak,” he said, using the pet name her adoptive parents had bestowed upon her when she was only eight. “I’m almost exactly on time, and my sister’s never been early in her life! She may—may—have been here an entire whopping five minutes. And that’s being generous.”
“Well, maybe it just seems longer when you’re waiting for one of your favorite customers.” Alecta rose on her toes to peck him on the cheek. “Go on back. She’s holding down your regular table. I’ll be along to take your order in a minute.”
“Thanks.” Indy gave her a brief, one-armed hug and made his way through the always-crowded front dining room to the corner table in the smaller back room.
As he came out of the arch, the young woman waiting for him glanced up from her book reader with a resigned expression. She looked remarkably like Indy, not surprisingly, and she’d spent the last twenty-odd years putting up with her older brother.
“You’re late,” she observed, and he chuckled.
“Not very. Besides, if I’d been early, you wouldn’t have had anything to complain about. Think how much you would’ve hated that!”
Mackenzie Graham’s severe expression wavered, despite her best efforts, and her eyes twinkled as she shook her head and pointed at the slightly unsteady chair on the other side of the table.
“Sit,” she commanded, and Indy obeyed with a suitably meek expression which fooled neither of them.
Mackenzie was better dressed than her brother, which was a necessity, given her occupation. Hers was a more sober wardrobe, however, without the garish colors Indy’s rather different occupation favored.
Treysa Graham had left Cherubim years ago. The wife of an enemy of the people was both utterly unemployable and automatically denied any form of public assistance. She was fortunate her sister and brother-in-law had taken over the family farm after her parents’ death. At least she had a roof over her head and food on the table, which was more than many a Seraphimian might have said. And if it was much harder for her to make her own single monthly trip to Terrabore from the country, her self-exile from the capital also kept her out of the scags’ line of sight.
Besides, SSSP didn’t much care about people hiding out in the country. It was possible subversives and enemies of the people hidden in the towns and cities they worried about. Which was a bit short sighted of them, when one thought about it.