by John Varley
“I…have little good to offer you in the short term. I believe that in the long term, most of you will appreciate what I am doing today. Only the exploiters, the slavers, the killers, will never regain their present positions. The rest of you will reap security and the benefits of an organized human society.
“I demand to see the following persons at the building known as the Loop within ten hours. Any who do not come will be shot in the eleventh hour.”
Cirocco read a list of twenty-five names, compiled with Conal’s help, of the most influential mafia, tong, and gang leaders.
When she had finished, she read the statement in French, and once more in her halting Russian. Then she relinquished her chair to a woman from the Free Females who read it in Chinese. There were a dozen other translators waiting, human and Titanide. Cirocco hoped to reach every new citizen of Bellinzona.
She felt drained when she was finally able to sit by herself. She had worked on the speech endlessly, it seemed, and was never able to make it sound good. It seemed to her there ought to be ringing declarations in there someplace. Life, liberty, and the Purfoot of Happinefs, maybe. But after a lot of thought, she realized there wasn’t anything she believed in as a capital R “Right.” Could any mortal claim a Right to Life?
So she had fallen back on pragmatism. It had served her fairly well through a long and pragmatic life. “This is the way it is, you poor silly suckers. Get in my way and you will be obliterated.”
Even starting from the best of motives, that didn’t taste so good in her mouth—and she was far from sure of her motives.
***
Life in Bellinzona was not what you could call dull. Violent death was all around and could happen at a moment’s notice. For the well-connected, it was at best comfortable, and at worst nervous. One never knew when a particular Boss would be defeated and all one’s careful preparations for the soft life come to nothing. Still, it was better than being down in the faceless masses. For them, Bellinzona was a special kind of hell. Not only were they constantly in peril of enslavement…most of them had nothing to do.
There were always the needs of survival, of course. That kept people busy. But it was not like having a job. It was not like farming one’s own fields—or even the fields of a landlord. In most neighborhoods people owed allegiance to a Boss, a Shogun, a Landlord, a Capo…some local Mr. Big. For a woman it was even worse, unless she happened to have been taken in by the Free Females. Female slavery was rampant. It was more than the labor-slavery experienced by the men. It was old-fashioned sexual slavery. Women were bought and sold ten times as frequently as men.
And at the end of one’s usefulness, there was the butcher’s block.
Actually, there was relatively little killing for food. It happened, but with the manna and the bosses that sort of thing was fairly well under control. Still, with the meat shortage many of the corpses destined for the communal pyre were diverted to the hook, the knife, and the skillet.
Boredom was a big problem. It bred crime—senseless, random crime—as if Bellinzona needed any more reasons for violence.
It would be fair to say Bellinzona was ripe for a change. Any change.
So when the blimp drifted over the city, things ground to a halt.
Bellinzonans had seen blimps, from afar. They knew they were large. Many had no idea they were intelligent. Most knew the blimps never came near the city because of all the fires.
Whistlestop apparently didn’t care. He mooched up to the city as if he did it every day, and spread his gargantuan shadow from the Slough of Despond clear out to the Terminal Wharves. He was almost as big as Peppermint Bay itself. Then he just hung there, by far the largest object anyone in town had ever seen. His titanic hind fins moved languidly, just enough to keep him positioned over the center of town.
That in itself would have been enough to stop traffic. Then a face appeared on his side, and began to say the most amazing things.
Twelve
Twenty revs after usurping power, Cirocco was wishing she had left Bellinzona alone. She had anticipated the squabbles, but it didn’t alter the fact that squabbles bored her. She sighed, and kept listening. It was best, at this point, if those she hoped would be her allies accepted the fact without the sort of demonstration that had been so useful with Maleski.
More demonstrations had been needed, but she had expected that. Of the twenty-five she had named, eighteen were now dead. Seven had come in, weaponless, to pledge their fealty to the new Boss. She knew damn well she couldn’t trust any of them with a brass paper clip, but it was best to let them sink themselves through their own greed, let them hatch their conspiracies and hang them with due process of law. One could be perceived as fair, even when the fix was in.
So, in that sense, the bad guys were no problem. As usual, it was the good guys who gave endless headaches.
“We cannot and will not give up our separate enclave,” Trini said. “You haven’t been around here much, Cirocco. You don’t know how it was. You can’t understand how bad it was—and is!—for a woman to try to live in Bellinzona. Some of our women were subjected to…oh, Cirocco, it would make you weep! Rape was the least of it. We have to remain separate.”
“And we won’t give up our weapons,” Stuart said. Stuart was the man who had come in response to Cirocco’s demand for a representative of the Vigilantes, just as Trini had come as an elder of the Free Females. “You talked about law and order. For seven years, we’ve been just about the only group that has tried to maintain a degree of decency for all humans in Gaea”—and here he glared at Trini, who glared back. “We have been and remain willing to protect even those who don’t belong to our organization, subject only to the availability of manpower and weapons. I won’t claim we’ve made the streets safe. But our aim has been decency.”
Cirocco looked from one to the other. Oddly, both of them had summed up their respective positions in two minutes. It was likely that neither of them remembered they had been arguing and embellishing for ten hours without saying a hell of a lot more than they had just said.
At any rate, they shut up for a moment, and looked anxiously at Cirocco.
“I like you both,” Cirocco said, quietly. “It would bother me a lot to have either of you killed.”
Neither of them flinched, but their eyes looked a little hollow.
“Stuart, you and I both know my weapons policy couldn’t last long. I have been given one very large break, and I intend to use it for all it’s worth. I control all the ammunition in Bellinzona. There are plenty of guns around. I intend to round them up, with house-to-house searches, if necessary. Making useful guns is beyond Bellinzona’s industrial capacity, and will be for quite a while. But you can and will make knives, more swords, and bows and arrows and blackjacks…and so forth.”
“I’m going to use this short time when everybody is disarmed to…to give the people a chance to breathe freely. There’s going to be a lot of killing in the next few days, but it’s going to be Titanides killing humans. If a human kills another human, execution will be swift and public. I want people to see that. My goal here is to get a social compact going, and I’m starting practically from zero. My advantages are superior force, and the knowledge that most of these people came from lawful societies before the war. They’ll soon remember the ways of getting along.”
“You’re trying to make a paradise, is that it?” Stuart sneered.
“By no means. I have few illusions about what’s going to happen here. It will be brutal and unfair. But it’s already better than it was twenty revs ago.”
“I felt safe twenty revs ago,” Trini said.
“That’s because you lived in a walled camp. I don’t blame you; I’d have done the same thing, in your positions. But I have to tear down the walls. And I can’t have a lot of sword-toting Vigilantes swaggering around until I know more about them.” She turned to Trini.
“I have a couple things to offer you. After the disarmament, I’m going to have a
period of time—possibly as long as a myriarev—during which only the police will be allowed to carry swords and clubs. And only women will be allowed to carry knives.”
“That’s not fair!” Stuart shouted.
“You’re damn right it’s not fair,” Cirocco went on. “It also isn’t fair that most of the women who arrived here after the war were knocked out and dragged away by some large hairy item and sold at public auction.”
Trini was looking interested, but still dubious.
“Some women will die,” Trini pointed out. “Most of them don’t know how to handle a knife.”
“Some women died yesterday because they didn’t have one,” Cirocco replied.
She was still looking dubious. Cirocco turned to Stuart.
“As for your Vigilantes…we are going to be needing human police after this initial period. I intend to give preference to the Vigilantes.”
“Armed with sticks?” he asked.
“Don’t underestimate the billy club.”
“So my people will be going up to guys and searching them, right? What happens when the guy pulls a knife?”
“It depends on how good your man is. He may very well die.”
She let them think it over again. It was a great temptation to come right out and say it: you don’t have any choice. But they knew that. It would be better if they found a way to like it, or at least part of it.
“So there will be laws, and courts?” Stuart asked.
“Not just yet. I’ve already sketched out laws about slavery and killing. For now, they’ll be enforced at the scene of the crime with Titanides acting as judges. Pretty soon we’ll elaborate the laws and go through the formality of arrest and some sort of trial.”
“I’d feel better with some laws and courts right now,” Trini said.
Cirocco just looked at her. She did not mention that there was an even more brutal alternative which she had considered for some time—and had not totally ruled out even yet. She called it the Conal Solution. The Titanides could make judgment calls that Cirocco trusted utterly. If they said this or that human ought to be killed, she knew they were right. There was no denying it would make things quicker and easier.
She didn’t even know if it was wrong. Cirocco believed in good and evil, but right and wrong were something else entirely. Trini craved the sanction of law because that’s what she had grown up with. Cirocco had, too, and believed it was ultimately necessary if humans were to live together. But she didn’t worship it. She had no doubt that a Titanide’s innate knack of smelling out evil in humans was better than the judgment of, for instance, a jury of twelve humans.
But it didn’t feel right. So she had elected the more arduous course.
“We’ll have laws and courts eventually,” Cirocco said. “We’ll probably have lawyers, too, in time. But that’s all up to you.”
Trini and Stuart looked at each other.
“You mean the two of us?” Stuart asked. “Or all the citizens?”
“That’ll be up to you, too. If you can get along with me for a while, you’ll be in an excellent position to take over government when I leave.”
“Leave?” Trini said. “When would that be?”
“As soon as I can. I’m not doing this because I want to. I’m doing it because I’m the only one who can do it, and…for reasons that don’t concern you now. I’ve never had any urge to govern. I expect it’s going to be a huge headache.”
Stuart was looking more and more thoughtful. Cirocco thought her original assessment of the man was correct. He had the hunger for power. She wondered how high he had gotten in government before the war. She had no doubt he had been in government, though she had not asked him.
Trini had the same impulse, though in a different form. Cirocco had known Trini for twenty years. It was only in the last seven that Trini’s hidden perversion had surfaced. All things considered, she had done rather well with it. She had been a founding mother and guiding force behind the Free Females. She was basically a good person. Cirocco didn’t need a Titanide to tell her that.
So was Stuart. Cirocco didn’t really like either of them. She felt that the urge to lead large groups of people was basically not very nice, but knew such people had to exist. She could deal with them when she had to.
“What sort of government did you envision?” Stuart asked, cautiously. “You abolished private property. Are you a communist?”
“I am, temporarily, an absolute dictator. I’m doing the things I believe need to be done, in an order I have worked out very carefully. I abolished private property because Bellinzona is a found object. The most powerful people live in the biggest buildings. The poorest don’t even have clothes. That came about because there was no law here when they arrived. The solution I came up with was, first, to abolish slavery, and, second, to wipe out all the outsized gains the more ruthless citizens made simply because they were sons of bitches. Here’s one of the headaches I mentioned. As of now, I own the city of Bellinzona. But I don’t want or need it. I intend to return the buildings, rooms, and boats to the people…and I want to do it fairly. A lot of these people have worked hard. They built boats, for instance. I just stole them all. One of the things I hope you two will help me do is set up some sort of mechanism for sorting out claims to personal property and real estate and dwellings. So, yes, I’m sort of communist right now. But I expect that will change.”
“Why not let the State keep everything?” Trini asked.
“Again, that will be up to you. I’d advise against it. I think you’ll be more popular and sleep easier if you try to be fairer than that. But that may just be my own prejudice. I’ll admit to a bias toward private property and democracy. It’s the way I grew up. But I know there are other theories.”
She again watched Stuart and Trini study each other. These two were going to be interesting, she decided.
“For now,” she went on, “I need answers. Can you work with me, knowing my decisions are absolute?”
“If they’re absolute, why do you need us?”
“For advice in making them. For criticism when you think I made a bad one. But don’t think you’ll have a vote.”
“Do we really have a choice?” Trini asked.
“Yes. I’m not going to kill you. If you refuse, I’ll send you home and get another Free Female, and keep doing that until I find one who’ll work with me in getting the Free Females back into society. Somebody will, you know.”
“Yes, I do know. It might as well be me.”
Stuart looked up.
“Me? Sure. I’ll start right now by telling you it’s a bad mistake to have Titanides killing humans. It’s going to foster race prejudice.”
“That’s a chance I’m willing to take. The Titanides can defend themselves. If anybody’s in danger here, it’s the human race, not the Titanides. If things can’t be worked out peacefully in the end, they will simply kill every one of you, man, woman, and child.”
Stuart looked startled, then thoughtful. Cirocco was not surprised. Even seven years of Bellinzona had not eroded the man’s anthropocentric conviction that humans would eventually triumph over all other species, just as they had done on Earth. He had just now entertained the notion it might not be so. He didn’t like it.
There were going to be plenty of things he didn’t like.
Thirteen
Rocky didn’t like police duty. He wasn’t alone in this; none of the Titanides cared for it. But the Captain had promised them most solemnly that this was the way to get the Child back, so he patrolled diligently.
It had been an interesting time.
On the first day he had participated in a raid on a Boss’s headquarters that had left three hundred dead, including one Titanide who had taken an arrow through the head. Rocky himself had received an arrow wound, not serious but painful, in the left hindquarter. He was still favoring that leg.
That had not been the worst raid. One Boss had held out for almost a hundred revs. The Titanides bes
ieged the building and built fires all around it to make the interior as unpleasant as possible. At the end, the Boss’s troops had thrown the man’s head out the front door and surrendered. Three Titanides had died in that action.
Altogether, Rocky knew of a dozen Titanide deaths. The human deaths were in the thousands, but most of them had come in the first forty revs, with another brief spurt when the disarmament policy went into effect. Now all the gangs were dispersed. Humans eyed Rocky with suspicion and fear, but no one had taken any action against him in quite a while.
So he strolled his beat, his sheathed sword tapping against his left foreleg, and looked for trouble, hoping not to find any. From time to time he passed a human of the kind Cirocco called crazy, but who Rocky thought of as having worms in the head. All humans were crazy, it was well-known, but with most of them it was a glorious thing. A minority were something else. The English word for it was psychopath, but the word held no flavor for Rocky. They were the ones he knew should be killed on the spot, as the only question about them was not if they would have to be killed, but when.
But the Captain had said no one was to be killed unless caught “red-handed,” to use her phrase, in a capital offense.
Actually, by now that was fine with Rocky. He had seen enough killing. Let the humans kill their own mistakes.
Rocky preferred to think of more pleasant things. He smiled, startling a human woman who, after a brief hesitation, smiled back. Rocky tipped his ridiculous hat in her direction, then scratched under his shirt. Clothes bothered the hell out of him. Sometimes even the Captain had to be humored in her craziness. Wear the uniforms, she said, so Rocky did, and scratched all the time.
He heard the vague, dark thoughts of Tambura in his mind, and smiled again.
Tambura was his daughter. She wasn’t very old yet. Valiha had kept the semi-fertilized egg for a while, waiting for a good time to approach the Wizard. Cirocco had given her permission, and a decarev before the invasion of Bellinzona Serpent had quickened the egg in Rocky’s womb. And there she nestled in her third decarev of life. She was just a microscopic smudge of dividing cells now, with a brain the size of a walnut—a brain that had once been Valiha’s egg. Within the crystalline egg structure were molecular lattices organized quite differently from those of the human brain. The ability to sing was already programmed in. Many things Valiha had learned in her life were stored in there, too, including all of the English language. There were memories of Valiha’s life, and of all her foremothers stretching back to the foremother of the Madrigal Chord, Violone. To a lesser extent, the forefathers and hindfathers were represented, in the only form of immortality that mattered to a Titanide.