Withûr We

by Matthew Bruce Alexander

  She smiled back at him but declined to repeat it. Rolling over to his side, Alistair faced Giselle and placed a stroking thumb on her cheek.

  “Will you tell me your last name?”

  “La Triste.”

  “I mean your real last name. The one you had before.”

  Now it was Giselle’s turn to roll onto her back, her left hand flopping down on the mattress, and she stared at the ceiling.

  “I will never pronounce that name again.”

  Her words were gentle enough not to hurt, but firm enough to stop the inquiry. Alistair sadly stared at her and felt disappointed, forgetting his own impenetrability. What was to have happened next, however, will never be known, for at that moment there was a knock at the door. Alistair tore himself from Giselle, tossed on a few scraps of clothing and went downstairs to see who was visiting at that hour.

  He opened the thick wooden door at the back of his cabin to reveal Gregory. Srillium’s red orb was directly overhead and its light bathed the top of the doctor’s head, leaving only a small puddle of a shadow at his feet. He offered Alistair a tentative smile, and Alistair grasped his friend’s shoulder and guided him inside.

  He took a few moments to fumble in the dark with a bulky contraption that served as a lighter and he soon got some sparks to catch on a piece of parchment he used to light the wick of a candle. The blackness of the bottom floor was pushed back a few feet by the dim light. Moments later they were sitting at the kitchen table, each with a wooden cup of water and a pineapple split open between them. While they conversed they sliced off pieces and popped them in their mouths around sips of water.

  “I didn’t mean to come so late,” began Greg with the tone of an apology. “I didn’t realize how far north the lake was.”

  “Wouldn’t worry about it. We’ve got guest quarters here. You can stay as long as you like.”

  “I came to ask a favor…” Gregory paused, almost wincing as he formed the next sentence in his head. “I don’t know if this is something you would want to do. I came to ask if you would donate to my hospital.”

  “Why don’t you let me invest in it instead?”

  “I don’t want to run a capitalist hospital. And I’m not criticizing you.” Gregory leaned forward and his manner became earnest. “I have to admit something to you: I’m amazed by what you’ve accomplished here. I admit… it works. I never thought of courts and police without government, but… really they’re just services, and they can be provided on the market, and we’re doing it.”

  “We’re not the first.”

  “I know, Ireland, Iceland, Kaldis… but it’s one thing to hear you tell stories about anarchist societies. It’s another thing to actually live in one. The Law is straightforward. There are hardly any lawyers, no Byzantine legal codes only they can guide us through. Policemen are friendly. There are no taxes… things are working well. I mean that. You deserve to hear it, especially after how many times you’ve been ridiculed. But… I want to provide medical care for free. At least for the poor.”

  “Almost everyone here is poor right now.”

  “This is important to me. Maybe health care isn’t a right, but I want to provide it for people cheap. I don’t want to charge like a profit seeking company.”

  Alistair considered his friend. “Thank you for what you said about our law system. I wish you could see profit as something other than dirty and exploitative.”

  “It’s not that I think it’s dirty…”

  They became aware of Giselle who came down the stairs and stepped into the light of the candle, her bare feet making soft whispers on the wooden floor. She wore only a robe and with a friendly smile for Gregory she sat down next to Alistair at the table. Drawing her brunette hair behind her ears, she leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table, curling her legs under her backside.

  “Hello, Giselle.”

  “Hi, Greg.”

  “Greg,” said Alistair, “you’re participating in the market. That’s unavoidable.”

  “I know that. I—”

  Alistair raised a hand to quiet him. “No one can build and run a hospital by himself. You need the talents and resources of other individuals to build it for you, to supply you with your medical equipment, such as we have right now, and you need others to help staff it and run it. It’s a market situation without question.”

  “I know that.”

  “Well, everyone who donates something to your hospital has to forgo donating that something to someone somewhere else. It’s called opportunity cost. If I give you a heart monitor, supposing we get to the point where we have heart monitors again, it is made of materials that cannot be used now for something else. And the labor that goes into manufacturing it cannot be used for something else. Resources are scarce, and we have to be careful about allocating them. How are we to decide what should be allocated to your hospital? Or if it even makes sense to build it in the first place?”

  “I think a hospital is unquestionably worth building.”

  “If you use donations to run your hospital, it will use up resources in relation to the goodwill of the people who donate. Your hospital will grow in proportion to our friendship. But what is your hospital for? Are you building it to give me something to feel good about or to serve the sick?”

  “To serve the sick.”

  “Then I think your hospital should grow according to the needs of the sick, not the goodwill of your friend. So charge the sick according to their desire to pay. If your hospital is free you will get overrun with people using medical services they don’t need. If you charge them, they will come only if they want to pay for their medical care. You raise the price of your services until the number of patients who come in equal your ability to serve them. Otherwise, you won’t be able to help everyone who wants it, and your low prices will keep other people from starting hospitals to help the sick. You remember the waiting lines on Aldra.”

  “Yes I do,” said Greg softly, thoughtfully. “But what about people who can’t afford to pay?”

  “You can charge different prices for different customers,” suggested Giselle.

  “Something which the law prohibited on Aldra,” said Alistair.

  “Well, what about an endowment for the poor?”

  “Will you let me invest in your hospital and also make an endowment?”

  “Yeah, Al. I guess that makes some sense.”

  “Excellent. I’ll have Darion look into it tomorrow when I get back.”

  “And then the big trial the day after,” said Greg and he slipped a piece of pineapple into his mouth. “A lot of former warriors are calling for an execution.”

  “There will be no executions on Srillium,” Alistair firmly said.

  Their conversation was interrupted by another knock on the door. Alistair looked at Greg but Greg merely shrugged his shoulders. Rising from his seat, Alistair went to answer. Giselle and Gregory, through the pitch black of the hallway leading to the door, saw a sliver of red light that widened into a rectangular shape. Alistair and another’s black silhouettes stood out and a hushed conversation followed. A moment later the figure entered and the door was closed and then Alistair reappeared in the candle light, an unknown young man in tow.

  “Greg, you are welcome to stay here for the night. I have to be going.”

  Giselle and Gregory were both out of their seats.

  “What happened?” asked the doctor.

  Alistair cut off one last piece of pineapple and downed the water in his cup. “The Incarcerator is back.”

  ***

  Only a few months before there was a stone tower on the plain, a marker indicating a drop off site, but it was torn down and its material used elsewhere. Now there was only the open plain. The first transport ship to drop, appearing at first as a speck of fire in the sky, arrested its fall from the clouds a couple hundred feet above ground and lingered there.

  “They’re fussin’ over the tower,” muttered a man near to Alistair, and there wer
e a few murmurs among the group.

  Alistair stood with Taribo, Miklos and Ryan as well as a handful of other men, some of whom he hired to be salesmen for his firm and some of whom had their own business. Duke and Wei Bai were a few yards away with their own group, and Mordecai came as well, arriving late with his contingent. They were a few kilometers removed from the drop off point, but the wide open plain gave them a perfectly good view of things. A few dozen pegs were driven into the ground where they stood, spread out over a large area and stuck in the dirt in groups of four in the shape of rectangles measuring twenty feet to a side.

  Duke wandered away from his group and drifted towards Alistair’s.

  “They’re taking a long time about it.”

  “They’re waiting for instructions,” said Taribo. “The tower’s disappearance has puzzled them.”

  A soft wind rustled the tall grass around them, save for the more rigid stalks found inside the rectangles described by the posts. Upon closer examination, these stalks proved to have been painted green and were not living material like the grass around them.

  “We should have done something about saving the tower,” muttered Alistair as the transport continued to hover in the air, completely undisturbed by the wind around it.

  “You can’t anticipate everything,” said Duke. “What with so many people suddenly on their own. Can’t think of everything.”

  “That’s sort of my motto,” Alistair replied.

  The soft chatter among the men faded as they grew uncomfortable. Silence turned to restlessness, but eventually the transport completed its descent. Almost immediately, a line of naked prisoners jogged out of the exit portal and down the ramp. It looked as if the ship were leaking some mottled liquid forming an ever expanding puddle over the ground. Eventually, the drainage stopped, the portal doors closed as the exit ramps were retracted, and the ship fell upward.

  Three more times this process was repeated as the sun tracked over the sky, and each time the puddle grew larger. By early evening, when the hot air lost its edge, there were a few thousand new inhabitants milling about, waiting for something to happen. Alistair had long since taken a seat on the ground and, his evening meal of bread and strawberries recently finished, was contemplating his skin, grown a few shades darker since his arrival.

  Wei Bai caught him in mid contemplation when he approached to make a suggestion.

  “Four loads is the typical limit. We believe the mother ship stays at high noon over the planet. We are approaching sunset now and the transport ships will look for closer landing sites.”

  “Let’s wait a bit longer,” suggested Alistair. “That crowd isn’t going anywhere and I’d rather not risk running into a fifth transport.”

  They waited until the sun was low on the horizon and casting a pinkish glow before they stirred. The stakes were pulled from the ground and the painted stalks of grass, which proved to be the covering for some tarps, were pulled away. Underneath were several pits. Inside each was an aircraft whose top rose nearly to the level of the ground above. In all, nine were concealed in the earth and their top hatches were now opened and men disappeared into them. Moments later the drone of engines was heard, followed by the silver forms rising out of their holes. Skimming mere feet above the ground, they accelerated.

  The vast throng regarded the oncoming vehicles with trepidation. The specifics of the situation on Srillium were mysterious to most, but it was generally known what they were witnessing should not be happening. In their already unsettled state, a disconcerting event such as that struck a panic in some, and that contagion spread until, when the airships got to where the crowd had been, it was no longer there. Remaining to observe the crafts approach and touch down and to see the occupants come out and give a friendly salute were a handful of brave souls, resigned souls who figured they were no match for an aircraft anyway, and a few others who simply lacked the wherewithal to run. Some of the panicked herd looked back and discovered the stragglers were not immediately slaughtered and in fact appeared to be having an amicable discussion with the pilots. These few stopped running, and those that noticed them also stopped. In this manner the stampede was arrested by degrees. The rapid flow out, as if a meteorite displaced the water of a pond, turned to a cautious trickle back in.

  Alistair was the first out of his craft. Next came a man from China, half Negro, who was looking for labor for his new clothing factory. After him came a representative of a worker’s commune looking for new members to come live and work with him and his fellows. Third after Alistair was another fledgling industrialist, a blacksmith, also in need of labor. The other eight hovercrafts bore men like them who were paying for a chance to get first crack at recruiting the new exiles.

  The men Alistair hired swiftly moved into the crowd, still largely dispersed, and began to make their pitch. Each carried loads of clothing and food and kept an eye out for potential workers for AS&A. To each was given some clothing and a small, cold meal; if they contracted with AS&A for six months they were given more food. Within minutes a large group of subscribers gathered around Alistair’s contingent, newly dressed, hunger attenuated. In short order they boarded his transports, most having already contracted to work with other industrialists, a few preferring to strike out on their own. Their first order of business was to fly back to the heart of civilization and sign with Giselle and be briefed as to how things worked in their corner of Srillium. From there some would set out on foot while others were destined for another flight, their final stop determined and paid for by the entrepreneurs who hired them.

  They saw no horse riders and they saw no butchery. They chose their path rather than be forced down one. The lowest and meekest was better fed and clothed, within an hour, than the chosen warriors after previous drop offs, and all who desired were gainfully employed before finishing their first meal.

  There was an important commodity the new exiles brought with them, apart from their ability to work, and that was news. It could not be determined exactly what date it was, but the new exiles knew at least the date of their own embarkation. Since the Incarcerator ships made numerous stops on their long, circuitous journey through the civilized galaxy, it turned out some of them were placed into hibernation even before Alistair, Greg and Ryan. Others they found who were shipped off six full months after the Aldran trio, and it was from them they got the most interesting news.

  An older man named Angus proved to be the most loquacious. He was Negro with roughened and wrinkled skin the color of coal and puffy hair the color of chalk. His toughened hide had been beaten, scraped, rubbed and blasted in countless factories. His English was native but with an accent Alistair did not recognize, and he looked like he would be most at home on a bar stool, wearing sturdy denim and leather, with a mug of ale in one hand and a cigar pinched between his stained teeth.

  “The Kaldis war all over but the shoutin’,” he informed with the air of one who is pleased to be imparting news to eager listeners. He took a moment to prod at a tooth with his tongue, perhaps to dislodge a bit of food from his recently devoured snack, and then continued. “The occupation… yes, that the problem we have now. ‘Cause the killin’ ain’t stopped just on account o’ the Terrans sayin’ it over. But that hardly the worst of it. The last Kaldis kingdom to fall… well they don’t go quiet. They shoot off a Juggernaut in the last hours; slip it right through the blockade. Last I hear it out there, somewhere, and nobody knows where it headin’. Maybe a year away, maybe two; maybe just a month. Nobody knows.”

  The news brought a depressed hush over the listeners. A Juggernaut was the greatest weapon of destruction ever created. They were enormous unmanned vessels laden with nuclear weapons and capable of traversing the entirety of the civilized galaxy from one extreme to the other, a distance of about one thousand light years. Upon entering a targeted system, the ship braked into orbit around the star and launched an armada of smaller, unmanned craft that spread out at sub lightspeeds, and each launched its own nuclear m
issiles at the targeted homeworld. Some Juggernauts could launch a mere thousand nuclear missiles, while the greatest of them could launch a hundred times as many. Once the mother ship itself dropped below lightspeed, it could be detected within the system, but unless a station was near enough to detect it quickly, it was nearly impossible to stop the swarm that scattered from the mother ship. That these launch vehicles would then trail their own missiles and defend them from attack only made the situation more hopeless for the targeted world.

  Once the missiles were launched, they glided through space at an ever increasing rate. Launched from, for instance, Neptune, they would reach Earth within three or four days, pelting it with missile after missile and effectively destroying the planet. None had ever been launched except in test attacks on unoccupied worlds, but it was considered doubtful whether any system, even Terra, could completely defend itself from a Juggernaut. Once the button was pushed, it was a death sentence for the target, a delayed sentence but a near certain one. Prospects were made even bleaker by the fact that transmissions were still constrained by the speed of light. If the Juggernaut were fast enough, it would reach its target system at about the same time as the messengers sent to warn of its coming.

  “And you heard this news on your planet?” asked Duke, his voice somber and his head down.

  “I hear this news on Tantramon,” replied the man. “Everyone hear it.”

  “Tantramon is…” Duke came up with a quick estimate, “… two hundred light years from Kaldis? The fastest ship ever built would take five months to reach you just in the hyperjump. When did you hear this?”

  “It broadcast about a week before I board the Incarcerator.”

  “And you had to be at least two or three months in hibernation before you got here? Ladies and gentlemen, whatever happened with the Juggernaut, wherever it was going… the thing’s done. Or will be soon. Unless they miscalculated their launch, some system has been destroyed.”