"Um. PTA shipment? I'll sign for it in a minute. Just got to finish this one thing. . . ."
The contact button's resolution wasn't enough for Nancia to read the words on the computer screen, but she recognized the seven-tone response code that chimed out when Blaize slapped his open hand on the palmpad. An interplanetary transmission—no, intersubspace; he had just sent something to . . . Nancia rummaged through her files and identified the code. To Central Diplomatic headquarters? What could they have to do with Angalia, a planet where no intelligent sentients existed? Had Blaize's net of corruption drawn in some of her father's and Forister's own colleagues?
"There!" As the last notes of the code chimed out, Blaize swung round, a seraphic smile on his freckled face. "And what—"
His expression changed rapidly and almost comically at the sight of Micaya Questar-Benn in full uniform. "You," he said slowly, "are not PTA."
"Quite correct," said Micaya. "Your activities have attracted some attention in other quarters."
Blaize's jaw thrust out and his freckles seemed to take on a glowing life of their own. "Well, it's too late. You can't stop me now!"
"Can't I?" Micaya's tone was deceptively mild.
"I've sent a full report to CenDip. I don't care who your friends in PTA may be, they'll have to leave Angalia alone now."
"My dear boy," said Micaya, "haven't you got it backwards? You're the one employed by Planetary Technical Aid. Or rather, you were."
Nancia had been so caught up in the dialogue, she never noticed when Forister slipped out of her central cabin and made his way down the stairs. She was as startled as Blaize when Forister appeared in the doorway of the hut, just on the periphery of her view from the contact button.
"Uncle Forister!" Blaize exclaimed. "What's going on here? Can you help—"
"Don't call me uncle," Forister said between his teeth. "I'm here with General Questar-Benn to stop you, boy, not to help you!"
Blaize went green between the spattering of freckles. He closed his eyes for a moment and looked as if he wanted to be sick. "Not you too?"
"You didn't think family feeling would extend so far as helping you exploit and torture these innocents?"
"Torture? Exploit?" Blaize gasped. "I—oh, no. Uncle Forister, have you by any chance been talking to a girl named Fassa del Parma y Polo? Or Alpha bint Hezra-Fong? Or Darnell—"
"All three of them," Forister confirmed, "and—what the devil is so funny about that?"
For Blaize had all but doubled up, snorting with repressed laughter. "My sins come back to haunt me," he gasped between snorts.
"I don't see what's so funny about it." Forister's own face had gone white and there was a pinched look about the corners of his mouth.
"You wouldn't. Not yet. But when I—Oh, Lord! This is one complication I never—" Blaize sputtered into hysterical laughter that ended only when Forister slammed a fist into his belly. Blaize was still crowing and wheezing for breath when a second blow to the jaw knocked his head back and flung him in an undignified collapse against the rickety table where his computing equipment had been stacked. Blaize's legs folded under him and he slid gently to the floor. Behind him, the table rocked and wobbled dangerously. The palmpad skated to one corner of the table top and hung on a splinter. A shower of flimsy blue hardcopies fluttered down over Blaize in a gentle, rustling rain of reports and accounting figures and PTA instructions.
Forister snatched one sheet as it drifted down and studied the column of figures for a moment, brows raised. When his eyes reached the bottom of the page, he looked tired and gray and showed every year of his age.
"Proof positive," he commented as he passed the paper to Micaya, "if any was needed."
Micaya held the paper where Nancia could focus on it through the contact button. The figures wobbled and danced in Micaya's hand; grimly Nancia compensated for movement and enlarged the blurred letters and numbers until she too could read the flimsy.
It was a statement of Blaize's Net account balance for the previous month. The pattern of deposits and withdrawals of large sums made no immediate sense to Nancia, but one thing was clear: any single figure was considerably larger than Blaize's PTA salary, and the total at the bottom was damning—more than thirty times as much credit as he could have accumulated if he'd saved every penny of his legitimate pay.
"Uncle Forister," said Blaize from the floor, tenderly massaging his aching jaw, "you have got it all wrong. Trust me."
"After the evidence before my eyes," Forister spat out, "what could you possibly say that would incline me to trust you?"
Blaize grinned up at him. His lip was bleeding and one front tooth wobbled alarmingly. "You'd be surprised."
"If you were thinking of a small bribe out of your ill-gotten gains," Micaya told him, "you can think again." She lowered her head to speak directly into the contact button and Nancia hastily reduced the amplification. Softshells never could quite understand that they didn't need to shout at a conduct button; the speaker might be tinny, but the input lines were as powerful as any of a brainship's on-board sensors. "Nancia, please enter the Net with my personal ID code. That's Q-B76, JPJ, 450, MIC. Under that code you will be authorized to freeze all credit accounts under the personal code of, let me see. . . ." She squinted at the top of the flimsy, peering to make out a code sequence that Nancia could read perfectly well with the vision correctors damping down movement and enhancing blurred letters. "Oh, never mind, I guess you can read it," Micaya recalled a moment later.
"Correct," Nancia sent a vocal signal over the contact link.
"Don't do that!" Blaize scrambled to his feet, swaying slightly. "You don't understand—"
Forister moved to one side more rapidly than Nancia had ever seen him step, a blur of motion that placed him between Blaize and Micaya with her copy of the account balance. "I understand that you've been exploiting nonintelligent sentients to enrich yourself," he said. "You can make your explanation to the authorities. Nancia, I want you to file a formal record of the charges now, just in case anything goes wrong here,"
"Done," Nancia replied.
Blaize shook his head and winced at the motion. "Ow. No. Uncle Forister, you really have got the wrong end of the story. And there's no way you can have me up on charges of—what did you say?—exploiting nonintelligent sentients. On the contrary. The Loosies are entitled to Intelligent Sentient Status and I can prove it—and nobody can stop me now; I've just sent the final documentation to CenDip. Even if you silence me, there'll be an independent CenDip investigation now."
"Silence you, silence you?" Forister looked at Micaya. His gray eyebrows shot up. "No question of that. We don't deal in cover-ups. You'll have the opportunity to say anything you like at your trial. And so will I, God help me," he murmured, so low that only Nancia's contact button picked up the words. "So will I."
"If you people would just listen," said Blaize, exasperated, "there wouldn't be any need for a trial. Didn't you hear what I said about the Loosies being intelligent?"
Micaya shook her head. "You've been here too long if you've started to cherish that illusion. Face the facts. On the way here I downloaded the survey reports off the Net. The native species don't exhibit any of the key signs of intelligence—no language, no clothing, no agriculture, no political organization."
"They've always had language," Blaize insisted. "They've got clothing and agriculture now. As for a political organization, just think about PTA for a minute and then ask yourself if that's any proof of intelligence."
Micaya laughed in spite of herself. "You have a point. But we didn't come here to argue ISS certification standards—"
"Maybe not," said Blaize, "but since you are here, and—" He looked suspicious for a moment "You're not working with Harmon, are you?"
"Who?"
Micaya must have looked surprised enough to convince Blaize.
"My predecessor here—my supervisor now. Crooked enough to hide behind a spiral staircase," Blaize explained briefly
. "He's the reason—well, one of the reasons—I had to do things in this way. Although even an honest PTA supervisor probably wouldn't have approved. I have bent a few regulations," he admitted. "But just do me the favor of taking a brief tour of the settlement. I think you'll understand a lot better after I show you a few things."
Micaya looked at Forister and shrugged. "I don't see any harm in it."
"I suppose if we don't go along, you'll apply for a mistrial on the grounds that you weren't allowed to show evidence in your defense?" Forister inquired.
Blaize's face turned almost as red as his hair. "Look. You're in contact with your brainship via that button. If it's inactivated, or if she sees anything she doesn't like, the full recording can go over the Net to Central at once. What will it cost you to listen to me for once in your life, Uncle Forister? God knows nobody else in our family ever bothered," he added, "but I used to think you were different."
Forister sighed. "I'm listening. I'm listening."
"Good! Just come this way, please." Blaize pushed between Forister and Micaya and flung the door of the hut open. Sunlight and gaudy flowers and a thousand shades of green danced before them, all the brighter for the contrast with the shabby interior of the hut. Blaize started down the path, talking a mile a minute over his shoulder as the other two followed him. Nancia activated the failsafe double recording system that would transmit every word and image directly to Vega Base as well as to her own storage centers.
"The Loosies never developed spoken language because they're telepaths," Blaize explained. "I know, I know, that's hard to prove directly, but just wait till you watch them work together! When the CenDip team gets here, they should bring some top Psych staff. Open-minded ones, who'll arrange tests without assuming from the start that I'm lying. Mind you, it took me a while to figure out myself," he babbled cheerfully, turning from the main path to a secondary one that wound through head-high reeds, "especially at the beginning, when they all looked alike to me. I was so damn bored, and those croaking noises they make got on my nerves, so I started trying to teach a couple of them ASL."
"What?" Micaya interrupted.
"It's an antique hand-speech, used for the incurably deaf back before we learned how to direct-install auditory synapses on metachip and hook them into the appropriate brain centers," Forister told her. "Blaize always did have strange hobbies. But teaching the Loosies a few signals in sign language doesn't prove they're intelligent, boy. A couple of twentieth-century researchers did that much with chimpanzees."
"Yeah, well, that's all I hoped to achieve in the beginning," Blaize said. "Believe me, after a couple of months on Angalia, a signing chimp would have seemed like real good company! But they picked it up like—like a brainship picks up Singularity math. That was the first surprise. I was teaching three of them who sort of hung around—Humdrum and Bobolin and Gargle." He flushed briefly. "Yeah, I know they're damn silly names, but I didn't know they were people then. I was just copying some of the strangled noises they made when I would talk to them and they'd try to talk back, before I realized they'd never developed the vocal equipment for true speech—that was when I started on the sign language—sorry, I'm getting mixed up. Where was I?"
"Teaching Humdrum to sign 'Where ration bar?'" Forister told him.
Blaize laughed. "Not bloody likely. His first sentence was more like, 'Why did Paunch Man throw ration bars in mud and treat us like animals, and why do you make stacks and hand them to us one at a time with proper respect?'"
He stopped and turned to face them, his freckled face dead serious for once. "Can you imagine how it felt to hear a question like that coming from somebody I'd been thinking of as—oh, like a trained spider to while away the hours of my prison sentence? I knew then that the Loosies weren't animals. Figuring out what to do about it," he said, resuming his progress through the reeds, "took a little longer."
"I deduced the telepathy when I noticed that a week after Humdrum caught on to ASL, every Loosie who showed up for rations was signing to me. Fluently. He couldn't have taught them the rudiments that fast; they had to have been picking the signs and the language structure out of his mind as the lessons progressed. In fact, they told me as much when I asked about it. Which wasn't all that easy. ASL doesn't have a sign for 'telepathy,' and since they don't know English, I couldn't spell it out. But eventually we got our signals straight."
"If they were as intelligent as you claim, and had a system of communication, they should have advanced beyond their primitive level without intervention," Micaya objected.
"Easy for you to say," Blaize told her. "I wonder how well you or any of us would do if we had evolved on a planet where the only surface fit for farming is rearranged by violent floods once a week, where the caves we used for shelter crumbled and were shattered by periodic quakes? They had a hunter-gatherer culture until a few generations ago—a small population, not more than the planet could support, ranging through the semi-stable marshlands on the far side of this continent."
"Then what?"
"Then," Blaize said, "they were discovered. The first survey thought they might be intelligent and requested Planetary Technical Aid support. By the time the second survey team came along, this PTA station had been handing out unlimited supplies of ration bricks for three generations, and the culture was effectively destroyed. Instead of small bands of hunter-gatherers, you had one large colony with no food-gathering skill. There were far too many for the existing marshlands to support, with nothing to do and no hope of survival except to collect the ration bricks. The second survey, not unnaturally, decided they weren't intelligent. After all, nobody on the survey team was stuck here long enough and lonely enough to try signing to them. But they recommended on humanitarian grounds, or kindness to animals, or whatever, that we not discontinue PTA shipments and starve them to death."
"But if they're intelligent—" Forister objected again.
"They are. And they can build for themselves. They just needed a—a place to start." Blaize pushed the last of the feathery reeds aside with both arms and stepped to one side, inviting Forister and Micaya to admire the view of the mine. "This was the first step."
From this vantage point, Nancia observed, they could see far more of the mine's operations than had been visible from the landing field. Teams of blue-uniformed workers were scattered across the hillside and grouped under the roofs of the unwalled processing sheds—twenty, forty, more than fifty of them, divided into groups of four or five individuals who worked at their chosen tasks with perfect unanimity and wordless efficiency.
"Could you train chimps to do that?" Blaize demanded.
Forister shook his head slowly. "And I suppose the mine is the source of your prodigious wealth?"
"It's certainly the source of the credits in that Net account," Blaize agreed.
"Exploiting intelligent sentients isn't any better than exploiting dumb animals."
Blaize ground his teeth; Nancia could pick up the clicks and grinding sounds through the contact button. "I. Am. Not. Exploiting. Anybody," he said. "Look, Uncle Forister. When I got here, the Loosies didn't have ISS. They couldn't be owners of record for the mine, they couldn't have Net accounts, they couldn't palmprint official documents. Of course my code is on everything! Who else could front for them?"
"And your code is also," Micaya pointed out, "associated with the illegal resale of PTA ration shipments that were supposed to be distributed to the natives."
Blaize nodded wearily. "Needed money to get the mine started again. I tried to get a loan, but the banks wanted to know what I was going to do with it. When I told them I was going to revive the Angalia mines they told me I couldn't do that because there was no source of labor on the planet, because the CenDip report said Angalia had no intelligent sentients. Without credits, I couldn't start the mine. And without the credits for the mine, I couldn't—well, we'll get to that in a while. Look, I falsified a few PTA reports. Said the population had tripled. Ration bars aren't exactly a h
ot item in international trade," he said dryly. "I had to have a large surplus to bargain with. Fortunately, I had an outlet right at hand. That bastard Harmon was keeping the Loosies at semi-starvation level so he could trade some of their ration bars for liquor. I had to have a little talk with the black market trader to convince him I wanted hard credits instead of hard liquor, but eventually he . . . um . . . came around to my way of thinking."
"Don't tell me how you persuaded him," Forister said quickly. "I don't want to know."
Blaize grinned. "Okay. Anyway, you've seen the mine; now I want to take you on a tour of Project Two. We'll have to go up the mountain for that, I'm afraid; I want you to get the long view."
The path up beside the mine was steep, but switchbacks and steps made it easier than it looked from a distance. As they passed the mine door, several Loosies looked up from their work to smile at Blaize. Their loose-skinned, grayish hands moved rapidly back and forth in flickering gestures that Nancia captured as imageflashes for later interpretation. For now, she was willing to accept Blaize's translation.
"They're asking who my mentally handicapped friends are, and whether you'd like a ride down to the processing sheds," he explained.
As he spoke, the team working at the mine's mouth filled a wagon with chunks of ore and poised it at the head of the rails swooping down into the valley. The three workers perched on top of the ore, hands gripping the sides of the wagon, and a member of the next team gave them a shove that started them off on a roller-coaster glide down the hill, swerving around rocks and dipping into hollows.
"Lost a few that way, at the start," Blaize commented, "before I remodeled the rail track so that the dips wouldn't throw anybody off."
The vegetation thinned out above the mine, giving them a view of the terraced gardens that replaced cliffs and rocks wherever a shovelful of soil could find a place. Micaya sniffed appreciatively and commented on the pungent aroma of the herbs growing in the mini-gardens.
At the top of the mountain they enjoyed a panoramic view of what had been the Great Angalia Mud Basin, now a grassland in which fields of grain shared space with brightly colored blossoms.
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