Chains of Freedom

by Selina Rosen

  "There is another reason." He looked at RJ. "I don't like the Reliance; I never have. I don't like what they've done to the world. I have been waiting for you or someone like you for five hundred years. The computer and this base, as well as my services, are at your disposal," he finished with a grand flourish and a bow in RJ's direction.

  "You have a funny way of displaying your eagerness to help," Whitey said angrily.

  "Letting Marge fall into the hands of an unorganized rabble would have been the same as letting the Reliance have her."

  "You would have let us drown if Mickey hadn't shown up when he did?" David asked, accusingly.

  "If he hadn't shown up, you would have flunked the test," Topaz said simply.

  RJ caught Poley running his hand over the computer's console lovingly, and wished she could crawl under a rock somewhere.

  Topaz saw where RJ's eyes rested and gave her a big grin, his teeth shining.

  "Rather appropriate, really," he said.

  So, RJ thought uncomfortably. He knows what Poley is. Well, of course he does. With this thing on deck he could probably reproduce old Tin Pants. It might even have told him what I am.

  "Am I to be trusted? Before you ask, perhaps I should tell you that Marge has localized armaments. If I had wanted to kill you, all I would have had to do was say the word."

  "I never doubted that."

  RJ looked at Mickey and nodded her head. He put away his laser reluctantly.

  "Come then, let us retire to some more comfortable surroundings. Marge, prepare the viewing room."

  "As you wish, Master," the computer cooed.

  RJ grimaced.

  "I did that voice myself," Topaz explained. "I wanted it to be female, but didn't have a woman at my disposal, so . . ."

  "I understand."

  They followed him to a large room. Plush couches and chairs lined the walls. The floor was covered in elaborately decorated rugs. The walls were covered with tapestries depicting forest scenes as well as some depicting ancient forms of battle in which men wore metal suits and fought with all manner of sharp metal objects. On one wall was a huge viewing screen.

  "I managed to save a great deal of our old culture by putting movies onto laser disks. I think you will enjoy it. Before the Reliance, we used viewing screens for entertainment purposes. Marge, put something on for our guests, and bring us some drinks." Then as an afterthought he added. "And do bring our friends some dry clothes. I'm afraid I find the nakedness of this young man," he pointed at Poley, "to be quite intimidating."

  "As you wish, Master," Marge responded sweetly. In a matter of seconds, the wall lit up with an ancient movie about warriors like the ones depicted in some of the tapestries hanging on the walls around them. The men were immediately captivated. RJ had seen something similar at the pleasure station in Vector 6. Of course, the satellite in orbit around the planet Deaka was strictly off-limits to anyone who wasn't high-ranking Reliance personnel, so it was all new to the men.

  A drone hustled in carrying a stack of khaki-colored clothing. RJ went through the clothes, sorted them by size, and handed them out. Poley dressed as she, Whitey, Alexi, Levits and RJ stripped. Mickey and David looked at each other and then at Topaz.

  Topaz smiled indulgently. "There's a room right down the hall and to your right," Topaz said.

  RJ looked up from where she was finishing wrapping the chain around herself.

  "Oh for shit's sake," RJ said, a bit disgusted with them. "Look, I'll turn around and close my eyes."

  When she did, Mickey and David quickly changed. Of course even the smallest clothes Topaz had on hand didn't fit the midget, but he was used to having to modify his clothing, and after a few rolls and tucks he wasn't tripping over them anymore.

  "All right," David said when they'd finished dressing.

  RJ turned around, mumbling something about the stupid modesty of civilians.

  A second drone rushed in carrying a load of bottles and glasses. It went to Topaz first, and he grabbed a bottle and a glass and poured. He set the bottle back down, and took a sip.

  "Ah," he smiled in pleasure. "Nothing quite like seven-hundred-year-old Scotch."

  The drone stopped next in front of RJ, who was the only one who still hadn't sat down. She took the bottles one by one and read the labels. Topaz wasn't kidding. Some of this liquor was hundreds of years old. She finally settled on the bottle of whiskey and took the whole thing.

  RJ took a seat somewhat removed from the others and was joined by Topaz.

  "So, now that the others are busy, perhaps we can talk."

  RJ nodded, but said nothing, waiting with interest for him to start the conversation.

  "The Reliance is an unholy abomination. I would have thought there'd have been an uprising long before this. But I guess humankind sort of lost all its spirit." He got off the couch, and started to crawl around on the floor on his hands and knees.

  "Can I help you?" RJ asked, intrigued.

  "Do what?"

  "Look for whatever it is you've lost."

  "I haven't lost anything yet. I just want to be prepared when I do. You know, make a list of places to look. Did you ever wonder where those little balls of lint that get under everything come from?" he asked seriously.

  "No, I really can't say I have. You were saying something about human kind losing its spirit?"

  Topaz got up and sat back down on the couch next to her. "Well, the trouble all started with Earth's not having enough countries . . ."

  David was enjoying the movie until he saw RJ and Topaz talking. He didn't want to be left out, so he got up from where he'd been sitting and moved to sit down beside RJ.

  "Anyway, each country had its own government. This usually worked out OK, except that some countries got bigger than all the rest. Now the big countries tried to get along, but they never really did. We called them Super Powers. The reason they didn't really get along was that they couldn't agree on how you should run a country. They had lots of things called cold wars, where no one really fought, but it was really more scary than when they were really fighting . . ."

  While Topaz talked to David and RJ, the others watched all of the first movie and a second one about a guy who wore a loincloth and fought with a really big sword. When it finished Topaz had Marge play something non-violent. The men watching didn't seem to care what was on. Topaz got the idea that they would enjoy a documentary on dirt as long as it wasn't sanctioned by the Reliance. Even the robot was watching intently. What was more, he seemed to be enjoying it.

  But what Topaz found most interesting was the reaction of the hardened military bitch. While she had totally ignored the first two pictures, she could hardly keep her eyes off this one. Amusingly, this one was a romance.

  RJ tried to pay attention to what Topaz was saying, but she found that her eyes kept straying to the viewing screen. The first two movies hadn't interested her. She had lived battle all her life, and she didn't find it particularly amusing to watch. But this one enthralled her. The woman was singing part of the movie, and there had been very little song in RJ's cold, realistic life. It was an entertaining story, and she had to work on listening to Topaz.

  "It was fear that allowed the Reliance to come to power. Fear that let the monster rear its ugly head. See, the Super Powers had created a weapon capable of destroying the entire planet. Nuclear warheads."

  "What's that?" David asked.

  "It's a bomb . . ."

  "You mean an uncontrolled nuclear explosion?" RJ said in shocked disbelief. He had her full attention again. The concept was outrageous. Nuclear power ran many starships. It ran many electrical generating stations on the outer planets. She knew the power they contained; she had seen it at work. "Such a weapon would destroy everything for miles wherever it was dropped! It would make the soil infertile and cause mutations. Who can win a war fought with such weapons?"

  "Exactly. And they didn't have just a few of them. They had many. Hundreds of thousands of the damn things.
Unknown numbers were detonated as tests. At least two were actually deployed. Thousands were killed, and others were left scarred and diseased. The land was infertile for generations, and there were mutations. Still, they built more. Knowing that to use them would mean the end of our race, nuclear winter, and the destruction of the planet, didn't keep them from building more bombs in great numbers. Everyone was scared. The possibility of nuclear holocaust was something that generations grew up with, but that no one ever got used to. Someone might fire a rocket, and someone else would retaliate, and before you knew it—no more world. Some fool could push a button, and . . ." he snapped his fingers, ". . . BOOM! Instant Armageddon. Then, as one of the Super Powers started to collapse it caused even more tension, because no one was sure who had control of their buttons anymore. Just when they thought they had everything figured out and they could relax, the smaller countries—the ones run by all the crazies and religious fanatics—started to make weapons of mass destruction. They started playing with stuff even more frightening than the atomic bomb: chemical and biological weapons. While the Super Powers had been experimenting with the same crap for years, no one trusted these morons to even be able to keep their experiments contained. When you're talking about biological weapons, all it takes is one leak, one mistake. In a global economy, within days everyone's infected. In a few weeks—maybe less—everyone's dead."

  "And into this uneasy climate crept the Reliance," RJ said, putting all the factors together.

  "Precisely!" Topaz clapped his hands, delighted with his new pupil.

  "I don't get it," David said. "What does one have to do with the other?"

  "Everyone was so afraid of the threat of total annihilation that they would have done anything not to have to live with that terror over their heads," RJ answered.

  Topaz nodded. "Exactly. Moreover, the truly ironic part of it is that the Reliance was behind the whole thing from the beginning. They had infiltrated the central governments of both Super Powers, and the news media as well. Therefore, when the Super Powers had their famous 'peace talks,' the Reliance was there—firmly planted in both houses behind the scenes—making sure peace didn't break out. The powers would make progress toward peace one minute, then backslide the next. This went on for decades, and the whole time the Reliance grew stronger. Like a sore, it festered and grew. It was nurtured on fear and discord. It was as secret and silent as cancer; then, early in the twenty-first century, it burst to the surface."

  "What happened?" David asked.

  "I would think a major assassination or two," RJ said, matter-of-factly.

  Topaz looked at her in disbelief.

  "A calculated guess."

  "And a correct one. Mind you, it didn't look like it, but I'm sure it was the Reliance. First, Air Force One took a nose-dive into the Florida Keys, killing the American President. Then several key leaders of the former USSR died of an unknown and virulent disease that they contracted while attending a conference that was supposed to resolve the problems caused by the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc. China had so much internal discord that it was an easy mark. Their own citizens tossed their leaders out of power."

  Topaz realized that the place names were lost on these two. Foreign words to them, but he couldn't tell the story without them. "People stepped in to take over the positions of the dead or ousted leaders, and amazingly they immediately signed peace accords. They compromised on a few ideological points, and with a little red tape here and there, good media coverage, some politicking where necessary, and one or two more assassinations in the former Soviet Bloc countries . . . Wham! Bang! Boom! You have the Reliance."

  "But you said one of the Super Powers dissolved. Didn't you just say that the people of the other Super Power were self-governing and free? Why didn't they fight?" David couldn't fathom this. Here they were busting their asses to have freedom, and these people had willingly given it up.

  "No, I said that was the principle that the government had started with. They let their officials make so many laws that there really were no freedoms left. Somewhere between the far-Left that passed laws to give lots of things to people who didn't work and let criminals run free, and the far-Right that made everything enjoyable illegal, the working class lost its freedom. People forgot that it was their duty to stay informed about what was going on at all governmental levels, and so these laws passed undetected. One day they woke up trapped; they had lost most of their personal freedoms. The saddest thing is that most of them either didn't recognize the trap, or simply didn't care. By the time the Reliance came to power, they no longer knew what freedom was. They'd forgotten that freedom isn't ever either free or easy. They had forgotten how to fight. The Reliance did away with the threat of war and death, and that made everything OK. By the time the people realized what they had settled for, it was easier – and safer—to go along with it than to fight."

  "Once—only once—a small group of people tried to buck the Reliance. They might even have won; who can say? But we found Trinidad, and not long after that made contact with the Aliens. At the behest of the twin gods Economics and Security, the people bound themselves to the Reliance forever."

  "Huh?" He'd lost David again. "What did the Aliens have to do with anything?"

  "With the threat of an alien race, the people had a common enemy," RJ explained. "No matter how they might feel about the Reliance, they would stand united against this common foe. You see, the devil you know is better that the devil you don't know."

  Topaz was startled again. "Where on Earth did you hear that one? I haven't heard that expression in . . . well, over five centuries."

  "My father used to say it," she smiled, remembering him. "Come to think of it, he used to say a lot of strange things." Suddenly, all her attention was drawn to the screen where a couple was kissing passionately.

  "RJ? You OK?" David asked, slightly concerned.

  RJ's thoughts scattered like leaves in the breeze as she watched the couple on the screen. This was something she could never have.

  "RJ?" David tried again.

  "I'm feeling a bit tired . . ."

  "Of course, how rude of me! Almost drowning would make anyone tired." Topaz stood up and helped her to her feet. "Come on, I'll show you to a room."

  He had obviously knocked out walls and made three cells into one room. In the middle of the room was a king-sized bed covered in black satin sheets. Such elegance was usually reserved for high-ranking Reliance personnel, but RJ hardly noticed it. Topaz turned to leave then turned back.

  "Are you OK, child?"

  "Just tired."

  Topaz nodded and left through the curtained doorway.

  RJ unwound her chain and let it fall. She pulled her laser from its holster; it still wasn't dry. She sat down on the bed and started to break it down. It wasn't that she feared attack; she simply needed something reassuringly routine to do.

  What a mess! How had she ever allowed herself to do something as stupid as to desire something that she could never have?

  Romance, she decided, was not logical. She hated it.

  Life sucked! No one ever got what they wanted. Well, maybe she shouldn't generalize.

  My life sucks and I never get what I want.

  She finished stripping, drying and reassembling the laser. She lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. As usual, as soon as she wasn't using it, her right arm started to jerk. Funny, it had never really bothered her before. Now it did. It was just one more obstacle on the road to normalcy.

  She felt vulnerable again. God, how she hated that.

  She'd almost died. So what?

  Whitey had saved her. That must mean something.

  Poor Whitey. She knew now a bit of what he'd been going through.

  As if thinking of him had called him up, he appeared in the doorway. He smiled, and she felt like the world's worst bitch.

  "How ya feeling?" he asked.

  "Like an idiot. I never should have tried to catch that door. Thanks." She wasn't
able to scrape up more gratitude than that. Not for her life.

  He crossed the room and lay down beside her. She didn't have the heart to send him away. He ran his hand over the sheet.

  "What's this?"

  RJ shrugged. Fabric wasn't her forte.

  "It feels good." He ran his hand over her arm. "I thought I'd lost you. We could have all died. Anything is possible, RJ." He was out of his clothes faster than RJ could protest. He covered her lips with his finger. "Look me in the eyes, and tell me you don't want me."

  She looked him in the eyes, and prepared to tell the worst lie of her life. But she never got to it. He kissed her, and she responded. He moved his mouth away from hers.

  "You couldn't say it," Whitey said smugly.