“My friend Con says to tell you to get properly arrested this time.”
“You tell your friend Con to take a running jump at himself.”
§
In front of the august stonework of the House of World Assembly, within eyeshot of the Teleport Authority’s massive dark premises, the crowd atomized once more. Hot food steamed from scattered portable autovendors, melodiazam infused the air with sentimental mush. Succumbing to the fiesta mood, Ben declared his intention of purchasing them all tubes of floss.
“Don’t get lost,” his wife warned him in a low voice. “Lonek and Dav are liaising with some of the other resistance groups, we’ll be moving in twos and threes out to the edge of the crowd nearest the ‘Port.”
Tactics and black wind-blown hair: she was lovely, and Ben leaned forward and kissed her mouth. He gave her a parting clip on the rump and pushed off in search of his sticky treat.
Had the legation already arrived? Probably got here days ago, Ben told himself, it’s not unknown for long-distance teleporters to come in from the central Archives despite the excruciating expense of fitting them out surgically for the trip. There’s an entire hospital embedded in that place, they don’t need all the folderol of ambulances and famous medicos standing by. Bloody creepy in any case, getting humped for the voyage, years of biofeedback training to perfect the yoga trance needed to keep you sane.
He remembered the high, cold place. Tachyons follow a duration path at right-angles to relativity time. The elementary tertiary implants fired up the curves and equations into his preconsciousness, facts begging for attention like trained grundles.
It was supposed to be called “humping” because of a mythical beast named the, what was it, the camel, it stored enough food for six months in its hump and all the water it needed in its grotesquely swollen balls. Females of the species must have gone thirsty. Or maybe it was the females who carried half a year’s supply of milk in their udders.
What would it feel like to be lugged into the Aorist Closure with a tonne of additional concentrated flab grafted to your torso, air sacs under hideous pressure swelling on your back, dialysis loops turning your piss back into lubrication?
A silly ditty ran through his mind as he bought a bunch of high-pressure floss tubes, greedily squirting a mouthful of pink sugar: de hip-bone connected to da, thigh-bone, de thigh-bone connected to da, knee-bone, de knee-bone connected to da....
“Give me some of that at once, you great guts.”
Ben allowed Catsize a tacky bite.
“That was a beautiful advertisement, Catsize. Do you think it’ll do any good?”
“If not now, one day, my good Griffith. You must learn to take the long view.”
“Try telling Anla that.”
A blast of trumpets rang out as Ben passed his tubes around. Magnificent in formal clobber, the Universal Emperor smiled austerely down on them from a grandiose hundred-meter projection.
His shiny black hair decreed a new fashion, clipped straight and clean in line with the tops of his small ears. He had been ruth-stabilized slightly past the full vigor of young manhood, and his brown flat cheeks were etched with faint lines, echoing those at the edges of his dark, epicanthic eyes.
The effect of subtle authority, Ben thought, was vastly more effective than the pseudo-age of Anla’s Co-ordinator, bloody old ranting Grey. In his chased, gorgeous armor-of-office, the Lord Lee Sun Chien Shiung was a figure of inconceivable potency.
Prime Speaker Wallechinsky led a standing ovation to the holographic eidetic, the Congress took their places in sight of the crowd and the media pickups, and the Lord Lee faded into the night.
“Where’s Catsize gone?” Anla looked swiftly about. “Okay, you and I can start moving now, Ben. Kael, you and Theri stick around for a couple of minutes and follow us. Everyone’s gathering for a break to the Teleport, we’ll see if this herd follows us when we make our move. See ya.”
Wallechinsky’s magnified voice was saying, “Latest reports from Central Co-ordination tell us that the Legates have not yet arrived, citizens. Let us begin the presentation of petitions. Rest assured that you will be informed the moment the Emperor’s envoys arrive from the Aorist Closure. I now call for the first petition.”
Amid a scattering of applause, a burly, ferociously bearded man stepped forward from the front line of the crowd and stood before a visual repeater. His amplified image clarified in front of the Congress.
“To the Parliamentarians of Victoria, greetings from the Arctic Settlers Collective. We humbly petition the people that consideration be given to the establishment of a new power maser in synchronous orbit to provide additional beamed energy to....” The man’s bass came in the slightly stilted intonations of one following a peptide prompt. He finished and retreated; a woman from the Attaché’s Guild came forward with that body’s modest proposal.
It’s stupefying, Ben thought. Half these requests have been blocked for the express purpose of allowing them now, magnanimously, as acts of Parliamentary discretion. The other half are harebrained schemes that no one in his right mind would countenance—but giving them an airing here permits the lunatic fringe to bask for an instant in the illusion of momentous contribution to the commonweal.
He gave a gasp of laughter, which sneezed pink floss over a surprised child, as a spokesperson for the Autonomous Aerial Objects Skywatch craved funding to track down the alien spacecraft and their gray crew that were haunting the galaxy, as the conspiracy of bureaucrats knew only too well. The fellow seemed set to launch a detailed exposition of his case when the repeater shifted deftly to a woman from the Bookmakers’ Union.
Anla nudged him, glancing up from her library.
“They’ve arrived. One of the South glacier Teleports.”
“That’ll disappoint the sightseers. Standing in the rain half the night and they’d have been better off at home in front of their hollies.”
“If they’re cross enough, we might be able to get them to follow us.”
For a quarter of an hour, no further announcement was forthcoming, Ben licked the last of his floss from his moustache and placed the spent tube in a disposal. The crowd stirred restlessly; enough of them had been checking their libraries for the word to get around. The Prime Speaker’s face flashed into existence above them.
“Fellow citizens, good news!” Yells and stamping feet. “The Legates have arrived, and bear news that will cheer us all. We shall return to the declaration of petitions in a few minutes. First, I have the great honor of announcing a message to the people of Victoria from His Majesty.”
Trumpets blared again, and some of those squatting on their heels stood up. “On your feet, you fuckwits,” Anla hissed to several diehards. “Do you want to attract attention?”
Ben gazed about in gloomy boredom. The moment was gone, if it had ever put in an appearance. Half listening, he learned that His Supreme Majesty was (1) in spiffing good health, both of mind and body, (2) the parent of certain additional children, and (3) contesting the next election—surprise, surprise—to the Imperial Throne. Not one to stand down politely at the end of ten terms, old father Lee.
Something caught his attention; he looked up at the holographs of the three Legates. In the congealed seconds that followed he stared at the robust portraits: the heavy Slavic cheeks of Olaf Basov, the hooded, mahogany eyes of Trofim Buist, the broad, pore-pitted nose of Marie Wang Dawson.
From somewhere near at hand came the electrifying scream of someone’s awful premonition.
“...that ninety-three years ago those responsible for the treasonous insurrection mounted a total internal blockage on the planet’s Teleport loci. Despite repeated pleas from His Majesty, the rebel leaders refused to relinquish their illegal seizure of Imperial property and command-posts. Troops dispatched to restore order were poisoned as they emerged helpless and unarmed within the illicitly-occupied munitions fortresses. Imperial authorities were dispossessed and ousted by the criminal regime, and carried
the news of an entire planetary population in revolt against His Majesty.”
Anla’s fingers pressed Ben’s to the bone; they stared at one another with the gaze of the dead.
“Accordingly, on July 4, 3921, His Majesty ordered the launching from the nearest Regional Armory of a relativistic warship bearing two photospheric disrupters.”
The man standing in front of Ben started to cry; the child in his arms, uncomprehending, began to wail as well.
“The population was informed of their sentence two months before star-zero, and invited to abandon their blockade. They refused. Apparently an attempt was made to divert an asteroid into the trajectory of the warship; the attempt failed. Even then, less than ten percent of the insurgent population chose to enter the Aorist Closure. Most of these had small infants with them, and have been remanded in custody.”
The Prime Speaker was silent for a moment. His huge image stared down at the crowd, flanked by the faces of the Legates. He smiled as he said:
“You will be pleased and relieved to hear that this intolerable threat to His Majesty’s authority is now at an end. Sixteen days ago, I’m sorry, uh, thirty-one days ago, the star NGC 621-upsilon 904 was triggered to nova. The planet Chomsky, and its intransigent rebels, no longer exists.”
A light wind shook the leaves of a nearby tree. Ben felt his legs tremble slightly, and the inside of his cheek was bleeding. In the mighty trumpet fanfare, he thought he heard delayed screams and cries, but the brazen sound echoed and re-echoed in overwhelming triumph.
He had turned with Anla toward the Teleport buildings, was running in tear-blinded savage fury to rend and destroy, when he realized that the monstrous sound behind him was not electronic stridency, not the crashing of an impossible surf. He stumbled, half-incredulous, his throat working, and turned back again.
Most of the assembly was a blur of jerky motion, jumping up and down, their hands coming together before their faces with a roar of triumph. They were applauding the death of the uppity anarchists’ world.
§
The autonomist fragment of the assembly raged in the glistening black and yellow night toward the symbol of murder.
Kael felt a weird clinical detachment. Is this grief we’re riding?.
His own cheeks were dry, though Theri’s ran with tears.
I have never known anyone from Chomsky, he realized. It has always been a place of abstracts: charged with distant hopes, yes, an archetype of the impossible-made-flesh, a symbol, but not a neighborhood one has walked.
The news embargo had been almost total. Hardly a face one could summon from eidetics, and those dredged up from sources old a millennium ago. Hardly a name one would recognize. Our grief, if that is what it is, has an impersonal quality.
Chomsky has gone. He tried to get the fact down out of his cortex and into his nerves, his endocrine centers.
The air in his immediate vicinity stank with fury and fear. Library reports flickered at light-speed in the moving web of the human-slow ranks. Voices shouted, ran together.
“They’ve barricaded the way to the Teleport.”
The vanguard slowed, allowing the column to bunch up. Oxygen-debt, Kael noted to himself, and the thought was ludicrously apt to his floating mood. His lungs pumped, and his muscles began to feel the pace they’d been sustaining.
“They want us to do this,” he said to Theri. It was hard to speak. She gave him a look of stoned bewilderment. “There was absolutely no reason to tell us about Chomsky at that point.” Somehow it was important to keep talking, to work this out. “It was a provocation. They must know—”
The rows had thickened to twenty or more.
Someone shouted, “Link arms!”
How many are we? Five hundred? Not much more. Those fucking bastards were cheering.
Theri, at his left, slid her arm through his, and a heavily muscled man locked himself to his other side. The tightly knit human block started to rotate on one corner, swinging slowly into the square fronting the Teleport Authority.
Forty or fifty light years. Nearly a century in transit, the extinction of a solar system in the bowels of a splinter of steel.
The long view: Catsize and the Empire both. You could see the hideous logic of it. Let one world through the gap into freedom and that world could build starsmashers of its own. If you stop Imperial guerrillas from getting in through the Aorist system, it’s hard to get out yourself and there’s not much you can do at the far end, naked and frail. But if you have the industrial capacity and the freedom to use it, you can terrorize any world in reach of near-light-speed delivery. Even without nova igniters, the punitive ship was itself a relativistic bomb carrying enough kinetic energy to smash a world as it slammed in from the depths of night.
Blue and orange burnt the sky: police reinforcements fell into the square, lining up behind and alongside the marching rebels. Kael shuffled on, held firmly by his mistress and the manual toiler.
They went forward now in a sacred hush—no weeping, no chanting, no angry songs of resistance, just the shuffling of wet feet and the clash of steel commando boots.
Kael shivered as an angry murmur rolled from the front of the column. A hundred meters before the empty Teleport lobby a barricade of sullen red light lay across the ground. What are they doing with innocent incoming voyagers, he wondered, arriving all unknowing, from the stars and galaxies fading into the billion light-year darkness behind those gathering clouds? Taking them out through the emergency tunnels, or giving them free buzz and pleading emergency?
Reports came in from the other side of the immense building. The organizers had their intelligence network nicely set up in advance. Not unexpectedly, a similar line of defense protected the Teleport from a feinting attack in the reciprocal direction. Within this ring of glowing force-fields a solid body of police and armored skites waited silently.
Kael felt the rising tension of the group; his arms were tugged in their sockets by its physical expression. Without turning his head, he sensed the police closing in from behind, sealing the trap.
From the roof of the hotel opposite a blast of light smashed through the renewed rain onto the sea of heads. A billion spectators, sitting before their hollies, were about to get an unprecedented chance to test their wits as realtime strategists in the warmth and dryness of their own homes, to choose their teams for the coming tournament, relayed live from the arena.
How many would be mourning Chomsky? None of them had conscripted relatives there; that was one blessing, Kael thought bitterly, in sanitizing an internally blockaded world.
He peered between the heads of the front lines at the grim power-wall and the blue-flickering line fixed shoulder to shoulder behind it. Why are they doing it this way, he asked himself, why are they making it a brute contest of muscle and bone? Whatever we do, he thought in sudden piercing despair, we cannot escape the realization that they have modeled our options in advance, to the last memetic detail, and prodded us to their own ultimate profit.
In the Newstralian surf, last summer, knowing he had caught a bad wave and having forsaken the moment of grace when the swimmer can pull out, Kael had seen, from its surging crest, the inevitability of the dump onto the hard sea floor. Locked in tight, now, to this slow human wave about to spend itself in a splatter of scorching sparks, Kael felt in his stomach the unavoidable, fore-ordained crash.
We must mourn them, but it is too late to help them; we must carry their lives into our own, not to our deaths. What expiation can we win if we bring the beating down upon our own bodies?
He looked sideways at Theri. Arms enmeshed in the human chain, she stood with hands clasped in front of her, responsive to the electric tug and surge of the crowd, the justified cohesion of the multitude. He himself felt none of it. The chemical bond had been false, a mere accident of contiguity; the truth of the matter was that he wanted to go home.
The front line of the block came abreast of the barriers. Pressure from behind built up quickly, the grip on his a
rms tightened; a sonic grenade exploded a few meters ahead, sending Kael to his knees. He came close to whimpering, totally trapped.
Smog bombs ignited in the front lines. The media lasers from the hotel roof turned the smog and rain to a dancing, golden haze.
An immense lace of sparks flung upward triumphantly and a section of the field died, countermanded by some electronics genius. Little Con? The pressure from the line of bodies in front of his own suddenly vanished and Kael was flung and dragged forward.
With a hoarse cheer the human tide surged through the gap. Theri tripped, swung like an infant from the arms of Kael and her other companions, regained her balance.
Swearing cops ran in from the flanks, trying to stem the flood by hand. No energy weapons had yet been fired. A cyborg soared out of the smog, the lasers catching his cruel metal features. It was theater, really, nothing more.
Kael staggered, found himself free of clinging arms, and waited alone for the rapidly clearing smog to reveal the state of play.
§
Catsize, in fugue, ran.
I am the shadow of the waxwing slain
Ah, Vladeema, dead yourself these twenty centuries and more, you would not have relished the planet Chomsky. A stinking hot world at the best, under its fat white star. Few enough peaks there of alpine crisp, and no lucerne for the melting snow. 0 my prophetic soul. The bolt of stellar incandescence, human steam smoking from her womb. They were my friends and now they have gone away.
He found, within his ancient mind, a place to hide. It was a corner of concealment where he’d dallied before, treading the boards for his solitary amusement. His mood of voiceless, uncoupled desolation spangled in the momentary vision of the wild throng lifting their faces to the flaring light and bursting into song, police and anarchists joining hands in long, high-stepping chorus lines. Color by technicolor; lyrics, Gilbert and Sullivan.
§
Valencies: A Science Fiction Novel Page 18