Worldmakers

by Gardner Dozois

  “Could you be a spy?”

  “I’m not,” she gasped. “I swear I’m not.”

  “I didn’t ask if you were. What I want to know is could you be a spy?”

  “I’m not. It’s impossible. I’m not—” She was screaming now, but the thick walls would muffle that.

  “Karsov is going to send me to Lucifer,” he flung at her. “Isn’t he?”

  “I’m not, I’m not, I’m not—”

  He stabbed the questions at her, one after another, slapping when she got hysterical. The first two times she fainted, he brought her around again and continued; the third time, he called it off and stood looking down on her.

  There was no fear or rage left in him, not even pity. He felt strangely empty. There seemed to be a hollowness inside his skull, the hollow man went through the motions of life and his brain still clicked rustily, but there was nothing inside, he was a machine.

  The perfect spy, he thought. Except that Karsov didn’t realize Un-men have advanced psych training. I know such a state as hers when I see it.

  The work had been cleverly done, using the same drugs and machines and conditioning techniques which had given him his own personality mask. (No—not quite the same. The Venusians didn’t know that a mind could be so deeply verbal-conditioned as to get by a narcoquiz; that was a guarded secret of the Inspectorate. But the principles were there.) Barbara did not remember being taken to the laboratories and given the treatment. She did not know she had been conditioned; consciously, she believed everything she had said, and it had been anguish when the man she loved turned on her.

  But the command had been planted, to draw his real thoughts out of him. Almost, she had succeeded. And when she went back, a quiz would get her observations out of her in detail.

  It would have worked, too, on an ordinary conspirator. Even if he had come to suspect the truth, an untrained man wouldn’t have known just how to throw her conscious and subconscious minds into conflict, wouldn’t have recognized her symptomatic reactions for what they were.

  This tears it, thought Hollister. This rips it wide open. He didn’t have the specialized equipment to mask Barbara’s mind and send her back with a lie that could get past the Guardian psychotechnies. Already she knew enough to give strong confirmation to Karsov’s suspicions. After he had her account, Hollister would be arrested and they’d try to wring his secrets out of him. That might or might not be possible, but there wouldn’t be anything left of Hollister.

  Not sending her back at all? No, it would be every bit as much of a giveaway, and sacrifice her own life to boot. Not that she might not go to Lucifer anyhow.

  Well—

  The first thing was to remove her conditioning. He could do that in a couple of days by simple hypnotherapy. The medicine chest held some drugs which would be useful. After that—

  First things first. Diego can take charge for me while I’m doing it. Let the men think what they want. They’re going to have plenty to think about soon.

  He became aware of his surroundings again and of the slim form beneath his eyes. She had curled up in a fetal position, trying to escape. Emotions came back to him, and the first was an enormous compassion for her. He would have wept, but there wasn’t time.

  Barbara sat up in bed, leaning against his breast. “Yes,” she said tonelessly. “I remember it all now.”

  “There was a child coming, wasn’t there?”

  “Of course. They … removed it.” Her hand sought his. “You might have suspected something otherwise. I’m all right, though. We can have another one sometime, if we live that long.”

  “And did Karsov tell you what he thought about me?”

  “He mentioned suspecting you were an Un-man, but not being sure. The Technic Board wouldn’t let him have you unless he had good evidence. That—No, I don’t remember any more. It’s fuzzy in my mind, everything which happened in that room.”

  Hollister wondered how he had betrayed himself. Probably he hadn’t; his grumblings had fitted in with his assumed personality, and there had been no overt acts. But still, it was Karsov’s job to suspect everybody, and the death of Valdez must have decided him on drastic action.

  “Do you feel all right, sweetheart?” asked Hollister.

  She nodded, and turned around to give him a tiny smile. “Yes. Fine. A little weak, maybe, but otherwise fine. Only I’m scared.”

  “You have a right to be,” he said bleakly. “We’re in a devil of a fix.”

  “You are an Un-man, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I was sent to study the Venusian situation. My chiefs were worried about it. Seems they were justified, too. I’ve never seen a nastier mess.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” she sighed. “Only what else could we do? Do you want to bring Venus back under Earth?”

  “That’s a lot of comet gas, and you’d know it if the nationalist gang hadn’t been censoring the books and spewing their lies out since before you were born. This whole independence movement was obviously their work from the beginning, and I must say they’ve done a competent job; good psychotechnies among them. It’s their way to power. Not that all of them are so cynical about it—a lot must have rationalizations of one sort or another—but that’s what it amounts to.

  “There’s no such thing as Venus being ‘under’ Earth. If ready for independence—and I agree she is—she’d be made a state in her own right with full U.N. membership. It’s written into the charter that she could make her own internal policy. The only restrictions on a nation concern a few matters of trade, giving up military forces and the right to make war, guaranteeing certain basic liberties, submitting to inspection, and paying her share of U.N. expenses—which are smaller than the cost of even the smallest army. That’s all. Your nationalists have distorted the truth as their breed always does.”

  She rubbed her forehead in a puzzled way. He could sympathize: a lifetime of propaganda wasn’t thrown off overnight. But as long as she was with his cause, the rest would come of itself.

  “There’s no excuse whatsoever for this tyranny you live under,” he continued. “It’s got to go.”

  “What would you have us do?” she asked. “This isn’t Earth. We do things efficiently here, or we die.”

  “True. But even men under the worst conditions can afford the slight inefficiency of freedom. It’s not my business to write a constitution for Venus, but you might look at how Mars operates. They also have to have requirements of professional competence for public schools—deadwood gets flunked out fast enough—and the graduates have to stand for election if they want policy-making posts. Periodic elections do not necessarily pick better men than an appointive system, but they keep power from concentrating in the leaders. The Martians also have to ration a lot of things, and forbid certain actions that would endanger a whole city, but they’re free to choose their own residences, and families, and ways of thinking, and jobs. They’re also trying to reclaim the whole planet, but they don’t assign men to that work, they hire them for it.”

  “Why doesn’t everyone just stay at home and do nothing?” she asked innocently.

  “No work, no pay; no pay, nothing to eat. It’s as simple as that. And when jobs are open in the field, and all the jobs in town are filled, men will take work in the field—as free men, free to quit if they wish. Not many do, because the bosses aren’t little commissars.

  “Don’t you see, it’s the mass that society has to regulate; a government has to set things up so that the statistics come out right. There’s no reason to regulate individuals.”

  “What’s the difference?” she inquired.

  “A hell of a difference. Someday you’ll see it. Meanwhile, though, something has to be done about the government of Venus—not only on principle, but because it’s going to be a menace to Earth before long. Once Venus is strong, a peaceful, nearly unarmed Earth is going to be just too tempting for your dictators. The World Wars had this much value, they hammered it into our heads and left perman
ent memorials of destruction to keep reminding us that the time to cut out a cancer is when it first appears. Wars start for a variety of reasons, but unlimited national sovereignty is always the necessary and sufficient condition. I wish our agents had been on the ball with respect to Venus ten years ago; a lot of good men are going to die because they weren’t.”

  “You might not have come here then,” she said shyly.

  “Thanks, darling.” He kissed her. His mind whirred on, scuttling through a maze that seemed to lead only to his silent, pointless death.

  “If I could just get a report back to Earth! That would settle the matter. We’d have spaceships landing U.N. troops within two years. An expensive operation, of doubtful legality perhaps, a tough campaign so far from home, especially since we wouldn’t want to destroy any cities—but there’d be no doubt of the outcome, and it would surely be carried through; because it would be a matter of survival for us. Of course, the rebellious cities would be helpful, a deal could be made there—and so simple a thing as seizing the food-producing towns would soon force a surrender. You see, it’s not only the warning I’ve got to get home, it’s the utterly priceless military intelligence I’ve got in my head. If I fail, the Guardians will be on the alert, they may very well succeed in spotting and duping every agent sent after me and flinging up something for Earth’s consumption. Venus is a long ways off—”

  He felt her body tighten in his arms. “So you do want to take over Venus.”

  “Forget that hogwash, will you? What’d we want with this forsaken desert? Nothing but a trustworthy government for it. Anyway—” His exasperation became a flat hardness: “If you and I are to stay alive much longer, it has to be done.”

  She said nothing to that.

  His mind clicked off astronomical data and the slide rule whizzed through his fingers. “The freighters come regularly on Hohmann ‘A’ orbits,” he said. “That means the next one is due in eight Venus days. They’ve only got fourman crews, they come loaded with stuff and go back with uranium and thorium ingots which don’t take up much room. In short, they could carry quite a few passengers in an emergency, if those had extra food supplies.”

  “And the ferries land at New America,” she pointed out.

  “Exactly. My dear, I think our only chance is to take over the whole city!”

  It was hot in the barracks room, and rank with sweat. Hollister thought he could almost smell the fear, as if he were a dog. He stood on a table at one end, Barbara next to him, and looked over his assembled crew. Small, thin, swarthy, unarmed and drably clad, eyes wide with frightened waiting, they didn’t look like much of an army. But they were all he had.

  “Señores,” he began at last, speaking very quietly, “I have called you all together to warn you of peril to your lives. I think, if you stand with me, we can escape, but it will take courage and energy. You have shown me you possess these qualities, and I hope you will use them now.”

  He paused, then went on: “I know many of you have been angry with me because I have had my wife here. You thought me another of these bootlickers to a rotten government”—that brought them to full awareness—“who was being rewarded for some Judas act. It is not true. We all owe our lives to this gallant woman. It was I who was suspected of being hostile to the rulers, and she was sent to spy on me for them. Instead, she told me the truth, and now I am telling it to you.

  “You must know that I am an agent from Earth. No, no, I am not an Imperialist. As a matter of fact, the Central American countries were worried about their joint colony, Ciudad Alcazar, your city. It was suspected she had not freely joined this confederation. There are other countries, too, which are worried. I came to investigate for them; what I have seen convinces me they were right.”

  He went on, quickly, and not very truthfully. He had to deal with their anti-U.N. conditioning, appeal to the nationalism he despised. (At that, it wouldn’t make any practical difference if some countries on Earth retained nominal ownership of certain tracts on Venus; a democratic confederation would reabsorb those within a generation, quite peacefully.) He had to convince them that the whole gang was scheduled to go to Lucifer; all were suspected, and the death of Valdez confirmed the suspicion, and there was always a labor shortage in the mines. His psych training stood him in good stead; before long he had them rising and shouting. I shoulda been a politician, he thought sardonically.

  “ … And are we going to take this outrage? Are we going to rot alive in that hell, and let our wives and children suffer forever? Or shall we strike back, to save our own lives and liberate Venus?”

  When the uproar had subsided a little, he sketched his plan: a march on Lucifer itself, to seize weapons and gain some recruits, then an attack on New America. If it was timed right, they could grab the city just before the ferries landed, and hold it while all of them were embarked on the freighter—then off to Earth, and in a year or two a triumphant return with the army of liberation!

  “If anyone does not wish to come with us, let him stay here. I shall compel no man. I can only use those who will be brave, and will obey orders like soldiers, and will set lives which are already forfeit at hazard for the freedom of their homes. Are you with me? Let those who will follow me stand up and shout ‘Yes!’”

  Not a man stayed in his seat; the timid ones, if any, dared not do so while their comrades were rising and whooping about the table. The din roared and rolled, bunk frames rattled, eyes gleamed murder from a whirlpool of faces. The first stage of Hollister’s gamble had paid off well indeed, he thought; now for the rough part.

  He appointed Fernandez his second in command and organized the men into a rough corps; engineering discipline was valuable here. It was late before he and Barbara and Fernandez could get away to discuss concrete plans.

  “We will leave two men here,” said Hollister. “They will send the usual radio reports, which I shall write in advance for them, so no one will suspect; they will also take care of the rocket when it comes for Barbara, and I hope the police will assume it crashed. We will send for them when we hold New America. I think we can take Lucifer by surprise, but we can’t count on the second place not being warned by the time we get there.”

  Fernandez looked steadily at him. “And will all of us leave with the spaceship?” he asked.

  “Of course. It would be death to stay. And Earth will need their knowledge of Venus.”

  “Simon, you know the ship cannot carry fifty men—or a hundred, if we pick up some others at Lucifer.”

  Hollister’s face was wintry. “I do not think fifty will survive,” he said.

  Fernandez crossed himself, then nodded gravely. “I see. Well, about the supply problem—”

  When he had gone, Barbara faced her husband and he saw a vague fright in her eyes. “You weren’t very truthful out there, were you?” she asked. “I don’t know much Spanish, but I got the drift, and—”

  “All right!” he snapped wearily. “There wasn’t time to use sweet reasonableness. I had to whip them up fast.”

  “They aren’t scheduled for Lucifer at all. They have no personal reason to fight.”

  “They’re committed now,” he said in a harsh tone. “It’s fifty or a hundred lives today against maybe a hundred million in the future. That’s an attitude which was drilled into me at the Academy, and I’ll never get rid of it. If you want to live with me, you’ll have to accept that.”

  “I’ll … try,” she said.

  VII

  The towers bulked black through a whirl of dust, under a sky the color of clotted blood. Hollister steered his tank close, speaking into its radio: “Hello, Lucifer. Hello, Lucifer. Come in.”

  “Lucifer,” said a voice in his earphones. “Who are you and what do you want?”

  “Emergency. We need help. Get me your captain.”

  Hollister ground between two high guntowers. They had been built and manned against the remote possibility that a convict outbreak might succeed in grabbing some tanks; he was ho
ping their personnel had grown lazy with uneventful years. Edging around the main shell of the prison, he lumbered toward the landing field and the nearby radio mast. One by one, the twenty tanks of his command rolled into the compound and scattered themselves about it.

  Barbara sat next to him, muffled in airsuit and closed helmet. Her gauntleted hand squeezed his shoulder, he could just barely feel the pressure. Glancing around to her stiffened face, he essayed a smile.

  “Hello, there! Captain Thomas speaking. What are you doing?”

  “This is Hollister, from the Last Chance air camp. Remember me? We’re in trouble and need help. Landslip damn near wiped our place out.” The Earthman drove his machine onto the field.

  “Well, what are you horsing around like that for? Assemble your tanks in front of the main lock.”

  “All right, all right, gimme a chance to give some orders. The boys don’t seem to know where to roost.”

  Now! Hollister slapped down the drive switch and his tank surged forward. “Hang on!” he yelled. “Thomas, this thing has gone out of control—Help!”

  It might have gained him the extra minute he needed. He wasn’t sure what was happening behind him. The tank smashed into the radio mast and he was hurled forward against his safety webbing. His hands flew—extend the grapple, snatch that buckling strut, drag it aside, and push!

  The frame wobbled crazily. The tank stalled. Hollister yanked off his harness, picked up the cutting torch, whose fuel containers were already on his back, and went through the air lock without stopping to conserve atmosphere. Blue flame stabbed before him, he slid down the darkened extra faceplate and concentrated on his job. Get this beast down before it sent a call for help!

  Barbara got the bull-like machine going again and urged it ahead, straining at the weakened skeleton. The mast had been built for flexibility in the high winds, not for impact strength. Hollister’s torch roared, slicing a main support. A piece of steel clanged within a meter of him.