by John F. Carr
“Our? All this prideful boasting of ownership.” Deliberately speaking in the half-mincing way a Harmony sermon might be delivered by one of the older Deacons, I sought to irritate him into thinking it through. Then I dropped the sneer and said, “You own what they let you. They have the superior force. You need to stop whining. Adapt or die; hell, if this lousy planet doesn’t teach you that, you’re stupider than that rope you’re always humping.”
“How dare you!”
Oh, how he glared, but I interrupted him: “How dare you, almighty leader. Ever see what an ocean does to a cliff? Doesn’t matter how sturdy the rocks, it wears it down into sand. Better to be a shore that changes as the sea demands. Better to remain whole by joining the larger forces.”
“Joining? Are you seriously advising me to join the CoDominium or one of its corporate masters? To dissolve our rocky cliff and float as grains of separate sand in a sea of—” His face grew as red as a clownfruit.
I counted three beats, then said, “I’m saying we should become mostly invisible. Like an iceberg. Most of us unseen, with the part that shows small and harmless-looking.”
He opened his mouth to shout some more, but then his fists, clenched the whole time, relaxed. He opened his hands and clasped them behind his back. His pacing slowed and his head lowered along with his brows. The red in his face faded. “Hmm.”
“We give them the Harmony Compound as our distraction, with you as our leader. Our numbers stay outwardly small, and we are careful to keep to ourselves and offer no trouble to anyone. We seek only to observe city and state council meetings, for example. Or ask for a vote now and then, just to stay legitimate. But we do not push for land grants or any of those other things that get the greedy bastards so excited.”
He paused, blew out a candle, then relit it, a nervous gesture. “How…” He paced a bit more and changed his question. “What do we do?”
“We train a new kind of Harmony. We train the top ten percent, say, of our best Deacons and Beadles to blend with the general populace. No more Harmony ceremonial robes, no more setting ourselves apart; not for that new contingent. Instead, they learn to maintain their Harmony faith in strict privacy, in their own minds, and show it to no one.”
“To what end, all this secrecy?”
“All this silence at the heart of the song, you mean. What end? To seed an abiding sympathy for the Harmony ideals, and for the Harmonies, among the controllers of Haven, by training our people to move upward in society. They will carry the secret flame, and work covertly to sway things, when possible, to our cause. They will soften the harsher blows against us, and provide a willing ear to hear our grievances, and so on.”
“A sixth column,” he said. “Campbell-Heinlein.”
“Or the C Street Dominionists of old Earth,” I suggested. “They seized control of the strongest nation on the planet by stealth and patience.”
“Yes, and money, the help of corporations.”
“True, but they converted as many billionaires to their cause as it took, if you’ll recall.”
He nodded, having read the same books I had read, having studied the same histories. “Not celebrities, but the ultra-rich…” he muttered.
He stopped pacing and looked me in the eye.
I was struck by the force of his personality.
“Yet I will have to stay here,” he said, “visible, leading the Harmonies they will be able to see.”
“Yes, and that is perfect, because you draw such attention. You are a beacon rather than a deacon. You’ll attract and blind and dazzle them.”
“A lighthouse of Alexandria.”
“A sword of light, to cut that damned Gordian knot your father left us. Alexander’s Sword, sheathed. For now.”
He glanced at the thing on the altar and turned back to me smiling. “You may have hit on something.”
At least, I thought, it isn’t that damned rope father of yours. I was sure his fists would be bloody when I got around to telling him about my next logical step in developing my iceberg approach; assassination.
* * *
Now, moving among the self-appointed elite of Haven, Wilgar’s tension had him prowling with the feline intensity of a big cat scenting blood. He was tall, with bronze skin courtesy of some mestizo in his heritage, I guessed. He had dark hair and darker eyes that flashed when he smiled, and his teeth were perfect and kept spotlessly clean, unusual on Haven. He kept his posture straight, as his father had taught him, and reflected what others gave off, a talent honed over the years to a politician’s dream sheen.
Watching him work the room made me wonder if our covert efforts would be necessary. Perhaps he could simply charm them all into according the Harmonies a permanent and honored place among Haven’s leaders.
And maybe the mote in God’s Eye would one day heal itself, I mused, thinking of our troubled sky.
Slithering women whose nudity was enhanced by jewels, sheer and gauzy costumes, and intricate coifs stalked the room or clung to this or that fat power broker’s arm, laughing at the right times, feeding insatiable egos and generally plying the trade my mother had excelled at on a rather lower, rather less gaudy level. Exotic foods tempted; goblets, and flutes and flagons of wine sparkled, while artificial lighting brightened Haven’s dull orange daylight into a golden glow. Finery prevailed from clothing through accessories. Officers in braided uniforms sported swords engraved and bejeweled and likely blooded. Furniture was all Earthish, both heavy and intricately carved. Seats were lushly cushioned, whether on chairs and benches or the rich gluttons who sat upon them. A kind of heady joy filled the room, that of self-congratulation and boastful ostentation. We eat it all, their preening proclaimed.
This single gathering, I thought, costs more than all the Harmonies earn in several years. This made me smile and I nearly laughed aloud at how socialist and ridiculous I sounded. Might made light of such considerations as fairness or equitable distribution of wealth. What nonsense, to contemplate a world where everyone had enough and no one bullied anyone else. That didn’t even happen in families. Garner Bill had known.
Haven made such notions sickeningly stupid to entertain, with its obvious hostility toward any kind of life, fair or foul. Haven gave only grudgingly what one fought to the death for. Haven wanted us all dead and gave not an instant’s concern to how high or low one’s birth might have been. To Haven, all birth was obscene.
Worse, Haveners have absorbed all that, and more. To them, a zero-sum game is molecular and basic, born and bred to the bone. They know others must lose for them to win, and if they shed tears or wasted effort commiserating over having to kill to live, they would be next on the chopping block. Haveners knew all this.
Hobbes had it only timidly right if he was describing Haven when he wrote, “…continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Of course, he wrote that on the paradise of Earth, so he must have found camping a particularly distasteful experience. Even worse, he was arguing that we need politics to escape such a situation; was he not paying any attention at all to politicians or the effect they have on others? He mistook the cause as the solution. It was downright Harmonic.
Still, Wilgar, Haven born though he was, did more for others than anyone I ever knew. That was the power of the Harmony song. It brought people together and blended their voices into a greater whole. Our chorus could prevail.
Be still as the silence at the heart of every note, they say; this means to listen. Listening lets you finally hear what music there is around you, and that gives you a chance to join in. All I was advocating was that Wilgar listen, and join in, to the song Haven now sang around him. It was different from his father’s time, and different by far from the Founder’s days.
Surely he saw that Haven’s instrumentality ruled in a way fit to make Hobbes proud. “Any abuses of power by authority are to be accepted as the price of peace,” he wrote. “There is no doctrine of separat
ion of powers.”
Blend in, in other words. Take what comes and harmonize with it. We could become the church in the state.
Hobbes wrote, “The sovereign must control civil, military, judicial and ecclesiastical powers.” So give the powers that be the illusion of control over the Harmony sect. That will satisfy their lust for control over ecclesiastical powers, and set us free, unobserved, gradually and steadily to spread our influence unnoticed among them.
Even as I slipped unremarked among the VIPs, following Wilgar, alert to anything that might threaten his bodily well-being; I began to sense something amiss, perhaps dangerous.
It was as Wilgar bent to accept a kiss on the cheek from one of the fat rich corporate leaders’ slender, young and perfumed wife or concubine that I glimpsed an unsheathed dagger. Unsettled, I moved to stand between it and Wilgar, noting the knife was clenched in the fist of an angry-looking younger man wearing the blue and gold tunic of the CoDo Marines.
When he screamed and lunged, I shoved Wilgar one direction hard enough to knock him down, then dived the other way.
My dive happened to be onto a table laden with food, all of it crashing to the ground as fine china and crystal shattered, men and women bellowed and blundered like cattle, and chaos exploded around us.
I kept my gaze locked on the knife and watched it come up in a short arc, powered by well-developed biceps, into the belly of a startled banker type, who delicately bit off the tip of one of his own fingers as the knife plunged deep and tore upward.
I imagined the canapé and fingertip the man had just compulsively swallowed meeting the knife’s tip halfway down as his guts split.
Scrambling, I shoved through confused people to Wilgar, whom I hefted to unsteady feet. “Come on, we should be gone,” I told him.
“Wait.” He resisted me, and reached for a woman whose neck was either bleeding or splattered by another’s blood. She looked placid, as if drugged.
“Who is she?” I asked, wanting to punch Wilgar for so dangerous an impulse.
“Mya—” he began, but just then someone’s fist connected with his stomach and he doubled over and staggered away from me, into a small crowd fist-fighting over, as far as I could tell, the right to stand on a particularly greasy section of floor.
Gunshots slammed the room into startled, and muffled, silence, and several armed guards waded in. All I have described can have taken no more than a few seconds, but already I was berating myself as a piss-poor bodyguard, having let my charge be swallowed from my sight by a crowd of half-drunken effete rich brawlers.
“Over here,” Wilgar’s voice said into my ear as he grabbed my arm and hauled me behind a large ice carving of a nude woman doing an impossible dance with a creature of the sea of some kind I did not recognize. Wilgar later called it a dolphin, a kind of Earth whale, apparently, smarter than man but not quite as violent.
How Wilgar had gotten behind me, I did not know, but he was giddy now, his blood running high. I was relieved it was not running out of him.
“What’s going on, do you know?” I asked.
“Stolen wife or something,” he said, shrugging. “Jealousy. Now’s our chance.”
I followed him without asking anything further as we made our way swiftly out of the room past a group of CD Marines just now darting in to see what the commotion portended. They seemed eager to get to the fight before it petered out, even though others of their kind had already restored the bulk of what passed for order. They also shot us glances of contempt, probably thinking us peaceful Harmony types cowardly.
We ran along a hall and dodged first left, up a small spiral staircase, then right, along another hall, this one far shorter, lower of ceiling, and darker. I caught the feeling of being behind the scenes. We reached an unmarked door and Wilgar, without hesitation, opened it and dashed inside.
Following, I found an office strewn with lakegrass paper, scrolls protruding from a wall that reminded me of a Tri-V image of a wine cellar I’d seen once, and all manner of books. “Start looking for schematics, plans, maps, anything like that,” he said, digging into a pile of papers on a desk.
We rummaged for several minutes until the sound of voices reached us. We both froze.
People ran by the office, shouting angrily.
We agreed via glance our time was up. Taking what we’d found, we stuffed a pouch hanging by the door, which I then shouldered. Peering, then slipping out the door, we retraced our steps, only to find the party was, remarkably, still convened, with people milling, chatting, eating, and drinking as if nothing had happened.
“Oh there you are,” a woman said, buttonholing Wilgar, while I snatched a glass of what I thought was Harmony honey wine. Turned out to be a fiery mead, delicious but with lip-numbing properties that lasted a good half hour; deliciously above my credit line.
And that was how we accidentally acquired the plans and blueprints and sewer schematics and so on that have served us so well of late.
* * *
Training our selected few and scouting for more recruits of a quality and quantity to convene a second and subsequent class kept us busy during the next months. It reminded me of how we had chosen Irregulars in our childhood. Turns out we’d learned a lot by mimicry of those old Doyle stories.
* * *
“How does this sound?” I asked one afternoon as Wilgar and I sat in his father’s chamber doing paperwork. “We can call them Ice Bergs, with ice an acronym for Invisible, Covert and Exceptional.”
“The kids, you mean?”
It had occurred to us that children should be trained into this, from the start, in order to indoctrinate a new generation of unseen Harmonies.
“Yes, the kids.”
“So what’s a berg?”
I sighed. I had not gotten that far yet. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s silly anyway.”
“No, no. It’s not, really. The ice acronym is fine for kids, they’d like that. Hell, I know some adults who’d eat it up. People love being part of a secret organization.”
“Yes, so they can brag.”
“Exactly.”
“So putting a name to it is a bad idea.”
“Probably, but kids would respond. Maybe that can be the outer layer, from which we recruit the real ones.”
“Ah, esoteric approach.”
He smiled at me and returned to his list of potential positions where we might be able to place or recruit someone sympathetic to our cause.
He looked up after a few seconds. “Important, Considerate, Energetic. There’s your outer meaning. Then, when you recruit the few who get to know the next part, tell them the real meaning, the one you came up with. Lead them through layers of revelation.”
“Testing for trustworthiness along the way, yes.”
“That way we can cull without letting on.”
Without having to kill, I thought. Waiting for Wilgar to realize our new tack led inevitably to being forced to assassinate certain key enemies and opponents was nerve-wracking, but I still worried springing it on him would cause him to reject it outright. If the Harmonies were to survive long term, that could not be allowed to happen. Blood had to be spilled, if discreetly and selectively.
The CoDominium’s coup was proving that left and right.
* * *
In an old book—moldy from its journey from Earth under the deck plates of a cargo vessel hauling industrial parts we could not yet make on Haven—I found a story about a religious group who bought a ranch, then systematically seeded members into local elections until they controlled the city council, at which time they voted to change the town’s name and begin building a city. They were well underway when they ran afoul of state land use laws, and a mass vote of locals managed to take back the town.
What, I thought, if they had taken over and done nothing too showy? What if they had bided their time and consolidated their hold, until a big move became unnecessary? No one might ever have realized. Invisible is the way, I thought, smiling and toss
ing the book into a fire. Fire cleanses all evidence, they say.
* * *
“To be understood clearly is always a blessing, and always a rarity.” Wilgar stood tall, his voice projecting effortlessly to the crowd in the paddock. An icy wind flapped robes and tousled hair in surly rushes. He seemed naturally to speak between gusts, as if he knew they were coming, or as if they waited for him to cease speaking. Perhaps each gust carried his bursts of words to farther ears, ears muffled in muskylope wool yet still burning from the cold, ringing from the low air pressure, ears often missing chunks from frostbite or battle.
Such a harsh place, Haven, and his words so like seeds that somehow flourished; I have thought long and hard about this and have reached no profound conclusion. He was simply inexplicable at times.
Other times he was as crass and needy as any other man. “We need to be understood clearly, like a man needing a woman to ease the tension in his loins. Like a woman needing a man to fill her ache. Like an empty belly needing filling with any nourishment. Like an ice sword through a bloodthirsty heart.”
We’d argued over that sequence. I found it crass and needy, as I’ve stated. He found it blunt and effective. “Speak to them on their body level,” he told me, “and their minds follow.”
“And their spirits?”
He glanced at me askance. “Oh, those,” he said, smiling. “Those are inconsequential in a silent coup.”
How I hoped he was right about that.
* * *
His paddock speech eased them toward anger, then banked their fired up emotions with talk of home and hearth. He had them on an Archimedes pump, screwing them higher only to dump them into another channel. My gaze flicked across faces rapt and hands clasped. I saw no weapons raised against him, and all hearts raised by him and for him.
That damned charisma.
“In their vast palaces,” Wilgar said, raising his face to project his voice across the paddock crammed with milling acolytes eager to join us.