Souvenirs of Eremos were in abundance. “Yes, I suppose most of us would go back if we got the chance. Not that that’s any paradise, but you do have room to move around, a worldful of room, the deserts, the mountains—sunrises above the Bitter Ocean ... but the treaty with the natives forbids. Only personnel on active duty allowed groundside.”
“Did you foresee you’d end like this?” Torskov asked, and realized it was a stupid question.
“Ha! Of course not. We knew we’d need special support systems in terrestroid conditions, but the bonus offered made it seem worthwhile. We were young then. After our discharges—well, at last most of us gave up the struggle. It was hopeless, everywhere we tried. So we started this colony. Aubourg offered us the site free, because the construction would boost the local economy; and we still make our purchases there. No hostility. The townsfolk keep trying to be friendly, to organize joint social events, what have you. Or did. Lately they’ve quit.”
Torskov nodded. He’d heard the members of the Lodge called everything from standoffish to brainsick.
“It’s simply that we’re too different from them.” Ventura kept talking and talking. He must unconsciously have yearned through the years for someone to explain to. “That’s why we don’t tune in many shows, either, read many books, keep in touch with the outside. It means less and less to us. Or it reminds us of too much. Your stories ought to be good entertainment, if you keep them about things that are not human.”
Passersby looked hard at the stranger. Not all were fancifully costumed, but each had an emblem: headband, sash, brooch, brassard, medallion, or shoulder patch. None appeared less than about fifty years of age. Most walked in silence, whether or not they had companions. They had exhausted their conversation long ago.
The passage ended in a large central space, a kind of forum.
In its recesses, individuals played at being storekeepers or handicrafters. Torskov had noticed the work offered in Aubourg. He was told that occasionally tourists bought it.
Ventura gestured at an ornate door flanked by pillars and surmounted by a winged sun disc. “The Sanctum,” he explained. “Where we practice the Mysteries.” He glanced around and lowered his voice. “They’ve grown quite elaborate. Give us something to do. Some pretense of meaning in what’s left of our lives.”
“—no future worth having, and you know it.”
Torskov could be eloquent when he chose. His voice rolled around and around the meadow like waves, and a sea breeze was in it too, fresh from reaches beyond the horizon. The sad, angry folk watched him as compulsively as I did.
The climax smashed forth: “—never. But you’re not bound to this. You’re free men and women. You have tomorrow yet before you. Well, claim it! Make your own destiny.
“You can return to Procrustes.”
A long-drawn gasp exploded in yells. The crowd seethed.
My gaze came to focus on Deledda and his wife. They joined both pairs of hands, and a fire kindled inside them.
Torskov lifted his arms for silence. When the racket had ebbed choppily away, his words came crisp: “The Fleet has left your planet to its fate. Thus far nothing terrible has happened there, but you know that soon it must—unless you, you who are here tonight, forestall it. You can. You’re only a few hundred, but you know that world and you know your trades, war, engineering, everything necessary to take leadership. Arsenals and factories are in place. A spacecraft capable of entering atmosphere is a heavy weapon by herself; the sonic boom alone can scatter an Iron Age army. We can guard Seruenu while it builds its defenses under our guidance. Later we can rescue civilizations around the globe. Can you dream of a more splendid future?”
He had not enthralled everybody—far from it. “Yeah,” cawed a man whose missing arm was supposed to be regrown at the Port, “sure I can. Like being court-martialed.” A few laughs barked.
“Who’s going to carry us?” demanded a woman, and a chorus of “Who? How?” came after.
“I will,” Torskov answered.
I plucked Vosmaer’s sleeve. “I want to circulate and get individual sequences,” I said through the noise. He nodded absently, himself rapt and quivering. Jiao stood impassive.
I sprang down and squirmed between bodies, omnigraph in hand. Torskov’s bass rolled onward.
“I have a ship capable of taking all of you, a freighter of this Landholding. The crew are personally plighted to me. On Bellegarde, that means they’re mine in the same way you’ve been your regiments’—not your officers’—underlings, but marines of your regiments. She carries two auxiliaries for planetfall and supplies for a year, till we can get synthesis and agriculture restarted on Procrustes. And she is in parking orbit right now!”
“My God,” breathed a man under the tumult, “how much money has he got, anyway?”
He was a lean, intelligent-looking fellow with lieutenant’s bars. Probably he had served in the uplands, for he was very dark, though in his case that was by birth. I positioned myself before him and cocked the pick-up toward his face. “He’s a younger-son aristocrat,” I said. “Rich, yes, by your standards or mine; but mainly he has certain loyalties at his beck.”
The marine blinked. “Won’t this get him in trouble?”
“Oh, cosmos, yes. He must want it in his marrow, to take such a gamble.”
He looked closer. “Who are you?”
“Valya Monier, journalist. Invited because your leaders there, Brigadier Jiao and Colonel Vosmaer, want a person like me to tell the worlds your side of the story. Will you answer a few questions?”
“Uh, hold on.”
Torskov was fielding the cries that flew at him from every square meter. “—totally unexpected move. We’ll be out of reach before Fleet or planetary government know we’ve left.”
More commotion. “All right,” said the lieutenant to me. “A few.”
“Name, please?”
He gave it and said yes, he would absolutely go back if he could, though first he had business in Alison to take care of.
“Don’t you know you’re talking mutiny?” bawled a man near us. His insignia were a major’s. His cheeks were inflamed with anger.
“We are, we are,” muttered my lieutenant. “Let the Fleet make the most of it. Enough, lady.” He waved me off. “I’ve got to listen.”
Jiao took the word from the stage. A hush fell. It seemed to ring with unheard echoes. His metallic tone of authority had not changed in the least:
“Yes, we are talking mutiny, therefore already we are engaged in sedition. Do not pretend you have harbored no such thoughts. If you had never, you would not be here. We can speak of a higher duty, to allies who have trusted us or to ourselves and our families. But the practical fact is that those who go will be listed as mutineers and deserters. They cannot soon return. They must live, and raise any children they may have, on Procrustes—at least until a habitation more comfortable for some among them can be built in orbit or on the moon. Those who are not prepared for this should stay behind. “
Somehow, abruptly, he stood even more straight than before. “I will lead the exodus. You must also be prepared to come under my command and the command of my officers. You will have to sign new articles. We will be in this together, irrevocably.”
I went about recording faces. “Do you want to?” I would Whisper, and hear, “Yes—No—Don’t know—Go away—”
“What’s in this for you, Torskov?” Deledda bellowed.
The big man tossed his head—the golden mane flew—and laughed aloud. “Deeds worth doing!” he trumpeted. “And, yes, fame. I’d like to be remembered as more than a star tramp. Understand, I’ll be outlawing myself right along with you. The Council of Magnates can’t just tell the Fleet it’s sorry about this. They have a covenant. But you’ll need a space service, for transport and patrol and support of the planetside forces. Organizing and leading it wil
l be my job.”
A woman’s voice pierced the hubbub: “It’s no use. The bastards will come snatch us back and shoot us.”
“No,” said Jiao. “I have considered that, made inquiries, run psychosocial computations. Bellegarde doesn’t have any such capability. The Fleet has a war to wage on a distant frontier, plus duties throughout Alliance space. Seeking us out—on an entire large, cloudy, mountainous, wilderness-covered planet, where the natives would hide us or die to defend us—is next to impossible, totally impractical.”
“They can missile us real easy!” a man screamed. I felt shock. Had morale disintegrated to the point where anybody in the Fleet, anybody at all, could believe that of it?
Vosmaer responded first. I had not thought he ever let himself be this emotional. “Killing innocent natives by the thousands, wrecking their society, for spite against us, who threaten nobody except robber barbarians? The Fleet has not lasted a thousand years by being an atrocity machine.”
“The high command will be furious, but they will accept the fait accompli,” Jiao added. “As long as we stay in the system of Procrustes’ sun, we are safe.”
“From everything but Procrustes,” jeered a man.
It went on and on, back and forth, to and fro. Among civilians it would have become sheer turmoil. The marines had more discipline, more sense of unity. Nevertheless it began to seem that each last person there must speak his or her piece. I went around among the crowding, milling, shoving bodies and recorded. When an opportunity flitted by, I put my queries.
“—will we become Overlords? I don’t like that.”
“Who can tell what will happen?” Torskov replied. “Humans will be a special class in Seruenu, obviously. Later, everywhere on the planet. But I don’t see us ruling the natives. We’re too unlike, we and they.”
“What the hell can we do but soldier for them?”
“Be teachers and enterprisers and neighbors and friends,” Torskov said. “You’ll never be bored or feel futile, I promise you.”
“—exile.”
“Not forever. We’ll be ... citizens ... of Seruenu, which is a sovereign state that has in the past contracted treaties with the Alliance. In due course we’ll be forgiven. Successful rebels always are. I don’t suppose we’ll get back the benefits or property or status we forfeited, but we’ll have gained our own by then, and be free to move among humans again. In fact, we’ll be heroic figures.”
“If we’ve lived that long.”
“Which would you rather,” Torskov retorted, “rot or take risks?”
Questioning, quarreling, posturing, denouncing, arguing, erupting. Twice I saw individuals come to blows, though others quickly stopped them. The moons went down. The shadow of the planet crept across its rings.
Finally: “Order! Attention!” Jiao’s amplified voice hammered the racket flat. I pushed through the crowd. It reeked of sweat. With my recorded encounters I climbed back onto the dais. Things were close to climax.
When silence filled the chill air, Jiao stated: “We have had too much monkey chatter. The time is overpast for realities. How many of you will return to Procrustes?”
I deemed that a couple of hundred hands flew up. “Too few,” Jiao said. More lifted, and more. “Four hundred is the minimum I judge we require. If we have less, all we can do is go back to Alison and wait for the troopships.” More hands fluttered aloft. The hesitancy was greater for each second that slipped by. Meteors darted overhead. Their numbers are a wonder of Bellegarde, but tonight they were like scribbled interrogation marks. “Have we failed? ... Aah, no, we’ve gotten our number now.” And immediately another thirty or forty joined in.
Those who stood refusant glared uneasily about. Where they saw ones like themselves, they sidled toward each other, until the gathering was spotted with knots of denial. Deledda and his wife were almost alone in looking radiant. For most, whatever the decision was, it came hard. You do not easily cut the ties of decades, whether they be to the Fleet or to your comrades in it.
Torskov trod forward. “We’re going!” he rejoiced. “Those who choose to stay behind—you’ll keep silence, I’m sure, till we’re well away.”
“Will they?” My lieutenant thrust himself to the forefront. His image on the screen cast glances right, left, rearward. “Can they? If they do, they’ll be co-conspirators.”
“Nobody has to know they were here tonight,” Vosmaer said. He flung his appeal out: “You understand us, don’t you? That’s why you came. You elected not to join us, as is your right, but you won’t betray our trust.”
I saw the major’s lips pinch together.
“When do we start?” sounded from the mass, and “When?
Yes, when, when?”
“As soon as possible,” Torskov answered. “This same night. The auxiliaries will ferry us to the ship.”
“No, now, wait a minute,” the lieutenant said.
Murmurs around him strengthened to a babble, a shouting match. Of course this was too sudden. Aiming my audio, I caught several of the demurrals. The lieutenant had a girl back in Alison, she was not handicapped and hence not among the malcontents, but he had to see her one last time, didn’t he? Somebody else had a debt to pay or a debt to collect. Everyone had small possessions to fetch. And ... let’s not be reckless about this, we’re being rushed, let’s think about it a little more ... We shouldn’t submit ourselves to Brigadier Jiao, we should elect our own officers ... Yes, the Human Republic of Procrustes ... Need we all be on the damned planet? I know about minerals in the asteroids.
“Order! Attention!” Jiao called.
“Screw you.”
“Hoy, wait, you can’t say that to your commander.”
“Who says he’s my commander? We’re going to be free.”
“Quiet, quiet,” Torskov pleaded. “If we don’t cooperate, we’re done for. Trust your leaders.”
“Trust—” Jiao’s eyes narrowed. Abruptly his finger stabbed at me. “We do have an outsider observing.”
Deledda heard from the ground. “Hold on, sir,” he dared object. “You know what she is. And she agreed we could keep her with us till—uh—”
Projected on the screen, the confrontation on the dais drew vision and minds to itself. Stillness descended layer by layer. I felt the night breeze crawl across my skin.
“This is ridiculous,” Vosmaer snapped. Hesitation came upon him. “Although—we do have nothing but her word—”
Torskov approached me. “Let’s dispose of the matter quickly,” he urged. Low: “That should help soothe them, show them we’re competent. Else they’ll squabble till dawn and settle nothing.”
“I’m afraid they will regardless,” Vosmaer said unhappily. Torskov addressed me: “I’m sorry, milady Monier. We’ve got to go through with this.” Aloud, while a smile creased his face: “So you are covering our story.”
The stares from the ground were like a physical force pressing in on me. I nodded. “By your permission,” I said. “I want to document and present the truth about you and what you do.”
“We could use that. I assume it will be the truth.”
I fashioned a smile. “Well, give me my in-depth interviews. “
“Maybe later. Who are you working for? The News League? The Guild?”
“Myself. I’m a free-lance.”
“And hope to sell what you produce to a big distributor. I see. How did you hear about us?”
“Why, your arrival was news everywhere on Bellegarde. I scented a story and came to Alison on the track of it.”
“Really? I shouldn’t think it’d be mentioned outside this planet. A very minor item, at most. And aren’t you from off-planet?”
“No, no,” Vosmaer said. “Milady told me she’s from Westland.”
Torskov raised his brows. “Oh? Where, may I ask?”
“Why, why—” M
y smile tightened. “No fixed abode. I’m a roamer.”
“Surely you were born and raised somewhere,” Torskov purred. “What’s your hometown? I may well know it.”
The silence and the staring thickened. “Wanwater!” I cast at him.
He stood for a moment before he shook his head and murmured, “Wanwater, eh? Strange. You don’t talk like a person from there—or anyplace else on Westland—or on all Bellegarde. What about that, milady?”
I took a step backward. Vosmaer’s black visage congealed.
He sprang behind me and pinioned my arms. My omnigraph thumped on the stage.
The sound from the crowd reminded me of arctic pack ice grinding together.
By a gesture, Jiao took over. “We must investigate this,” he said. “Will a woman please come conduct a body search?”
“I was in the MPs,” said she who joined us.
The frisking was deft and brief. My transmitter was inside the locket at my throat. She cast it down and crushed it under her heel.
“I haven’t used it.” My voice was thin in my ears. “It was only for emergency. To bring help in case ... matters got out of hand—”
“Yah, sure,” said Vosmaer. Sarcasm poisoned his tone. “You have recorded us,” Jiao said. “In your mind as well as your instrument. They will know exactly who intended exactly what.”
“Wait, you can’t hurt her!” Deledda bawled.
“Certainly not,” Torskov said. “We’re no lynch mob.”
That lowered the outcries of wrath. He turned wry. “But you present us with a problem, my lady.”
“Who are you spying for?” Vosmaer grated.
“The, the Council,” I stammered. “They suspected—”
“And engaged a ... free-lance detective.” Torskov donned calmness. “Where are you from, really, Monier?”
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