by David Nabhan
“Clinton Rittener has no rank on Borealis. He is a private citizen.”
It took a while for the words to sink in. Zari flared his nostrils and furrowed his brow, outwardly dumbfounded. He needed confirmation. “A citizen? Him? You’re saying he’s not going anywhere? He’s not simply passing through, like me?”
Nerissa repeated. “Provisional, for specificity.”
Zarathustra exploded.
“Oh, that’s it! It’s all over! Where’s the panic button to push? Is it that emerald-encrusted switch, or the pure white gold one over there?” He was full-fledged drunk and everything he said was almost screamed and entirely slurred.
With one hand he waved his absurd scepter in Rittener’s direction, while the other held the swaying spoonful of flux he’d been brandishing for some time.
“Don’t you know who that fellow is?” He gave Nerissa some time to think it over, finally putting the chartreuse concoction in his mouth.
“Jupiter’s beard!” He spit it back, leaned over his bowl and bathed his tongue with nectar, gurgling and cursing.
Nerissa handed him another goblet of Borelian mead, filled to the brim. “Here, let’s replace that. No harm done.” She didn’t say “speak up” but Rittener could plainly see she certainly intended it. When he caught his breath Zari went on.
“He’s one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Where ever he rides he leaves a trail of skeletons behind.” He turned to Rittener and tried to soften it a bit. “Not literally, that’s speaking metaphorically.”
His head wavered back to Nerissa. “When I first saw him here, I knew it, just like that.” He tried snapping his fingers and failed completely. “Hasn’t any one of you stopped to ask yourselves what he’s doing here? Or to ask . . . him?”
Those had been Nerissa’s first words to Rittener, on the pilots’ pad, before the race.
“Look, I’m going to perform tomorrow,” he elucidated drunkenly, “fly out of here with more credits than I could ever spend in ten lifetimes, and I’m sure I’ll never be back.” He straightened up, shrugged his shoulders as if to prove he was still thinking correctly, and said it. “Who ever plays Borealis . . . twice?”
Nerissa was agreeing with him. “Not many, Zarathustra. Not many.”
“That’s right.” He put his finger up; she should listen to this. “You see, I just passed through five long AUs of space from the Old Man to Borealis and have heard nothing but . . .” he lowered his voice, “. . . whispers.” Too much emotion had taken hold of the artiste. He had to stand. He wobbled back and forth, using randomly selected and stunned Borelian shoulders for support. “And now I arrive to find the right hand man of the grim reaper here?” The dam broke. It was too much. Zarathustra wept openly, his priceless mascara turning back to mud and running down his cheeks.
“I told myself I hadn’t cared, that it wasn’t my concern, but that was before I’d seen this place with my own eyes. By the plumes of Io, nothing can happen to this place. It’s too beautiful. It’s just too awful to think of this all being destroyed.”
Nerissa was in complete charge, calmly taking Zari by the hand and leading him back to his seat. “There now,” she comforted, “nothing terrible is going to befall Borealis. Tell him, Clinton Rittener.”
A long, long silence followed, uncomfortable enough that every unfortunate lecturer blindsided by this particular duty took the opportunity to avail themselves of exits in every direction. This highly unusual tour was over. “Won’t you tell him that?” The three of them were alone now, seated at a table soiled with spilled nectar and spit-up flux. “Won’t you tell me that?”
Rittener had been sitting quietly, stone-faced, allowing all the slights and horrific comparisons to pass unchallenged, his only reaction to fidget with the ring on his right hand. Zarathustra sported earrings, a necklace, several bracelets, and had rings on every finger, two on some. This was the only jewelry Clinton wore. Nerissa had spotted the token from the first time she’d laid eyes on him.
“Does that, the ring, mean something?” she asked.
“It was my father’s.” He at least answered that.
“A great man, your father.” Zari had composed himself, wiping away all the smudges. Zarathustra emptied his cup as if in his honor. “He always played fairly with the Galilean Moons. The ambassador was well-respected there.”
Rittener nodded his thanks for the kind words. Zarathustra reached across the table and took Clinton’s hand. He said the next like no drunken fool ever had.
“If you know something, brother, or are able to act in some way, now is the time to speak up, Clinton Rittener.”
The vestibule abruptly filled with the sounds of Zari’s first great mega-hit, as the schedule had provided, an homage to Borealis’ famous guest. The gaffe didn’t surprise Clinton. This tour was running itself now on auto-pilot; all the conductors had leapt off the train. Zarathustra gave a shrill, hooting cry of glee, jumped to his feet and began dancing to it, shambling from one side of the reception hall to the other, leaving Nerissa and Clinton alone. They shared some candid observations.
“You could just as simply have asked me, you know, straight out,” Rittener said sharply to Nerissa. “Put all the ridiculousness to the side and simply asked me.”
“I’ve been asking you,” she countered back, just as sharply. “You have a tendency to answer things in ways that make them more confused after all.”
“You Borelians have a way of confusing things yourselves, you can trust that.”
“You Borelians? Shouldn’t that be we Borelians, citizen?”
“Provisional,” he corrected her. “For specificity.”
“That changes tomorrow,” she reminded him. “My uncle, Dr. Stanislaus, asked me to deliver his request that you present yourself in his offices before you take the oath. He’ll be the one to inscribe you as pilot—if he decides you’re made for it—so I suggest you leave the double entendres and sophistry at home tomorrow. He’s a man who expects and appreciates very direct language.”
Rittener widened his eyes in mock surprise. “There’s someone here, one, at least, like that?”
ZARATHUSTRA SLID BACK TO their table, his foot-long black braided beard swaying from his chin, out of breath but ready for more.
“Dance with me, Nerissa of Borealis. I’d give up a year of my life for a dance with you,” Zari begged. His beard was plaited with more than copper wires gracefully wrapped around fine Ganymedan diamantes. There were also beads of the chartreuse appetizer, splashed with glistening amber honey mead.
“Keep the year,” she said, gracefully rising to her feet, not taking her eyes off Rittener. “I accept.”
“You, too, brother,” Zari invited Rittener. “Let’s dance, the three of us.”
Nerissa unbuttoned her Borelian caraco-cloak, letting it fall to the marble while she reached back and took the needle pearl Madeau clip out of her shiny obsidian black hair. It exploded over her shoulders and down her back. A slight downward positioning of her face gave the seductive impression that she was unsure how to do this, a look so practiced and expertly effected, sufficient to shred through any male flesh as easily and surely as gamma ray bursts through tissue paper.
“Yes, brother, dance with us?” She used Zari’s phrase.
“I admire that you’d do anything for your country,” Clinton said to her, making his point by sending a disapproving frown in Zarathustra’s direction, “but I’ll decline.” He’d been taking incoming flak all day while holding his fire but now would discharge the final fusillade, the one that counted, and he’d do it in his language of choice for serious combat. “Homo qui saltat, aut inebrius aut insanus est.”
She had a “What, that again?” look on her face, so he translated for her. “A man found dancing must either be drunk or insane.” He picked up her cloak and laid it folded on the table. “That’s Cicero or Cato, one of those two.”
She quickly put the proverb to the test. “That makes your opinion of me clear,
but which does that say about him?”
Zarathustra was talking to himself. “But I’m right here, why should I be a ‘him’?”
“Him?” Clinton gave a look that said there were things, men too, through which even gamma rays must struggle to pierce, turning on his heel and walking out.
“Both,” Clinton answered in disgust.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CITIZEN OF BOREALIS
THE COUNCIL CHAMBERS OF Borealis were not as one would expect. As glittering and beautiful and rich as the exterior of the city was, the original Old City was left just as it had been. The Borelian Council sat in a man-made cavern, nothing more, the rock-hewn walls left rough, the utility pipes, shafts, vents and electrical conduits unabashedly on display. The ambiance was more that of a grand meeting place of some lost Mesolithic tribe from Earth’s distant Stone Age. This was the seat of the unusual democracy that ruled Borealis.
The eleven councilors were the cabinet, supreme court, and legislators of Borealis. They wielded absolute power, yet could be replaced quite easily, almost at the whim of the citizens. Politics was a never-ending affair on Borealis and most of the current councilors had been elected, dismissed, and re-elected again—many, many times. Statecraft here was like sailing a ship in the raging waters around Cape Horn at the tip of South America. More often than not a councilor was pushed back twice as far as whatever headway he could make, and sooner or later his entire ship must capsize. Only freshmen councilors could boast of never having been defeated; they hadn’t served long enough.
Every 180 days every citizen on Borealis voted. It was a simple matter. Each civilian just had a brief chat with his or her amanuensis, as if one were talking to a fellow resident over coffee about the important affairs of the city. The amalgamated opinions were collated, set against an algorithm which took into account a wide range of each councilor’s statistics, the current needs of the city, and then juxtaposed them with the names of potential opposition candidates of whom mention was made during the “voting.” Presto, the election results were then declared—Borelian style. Such fluidity in government should have produced chaos, yet it didn’t. There was a core group of leaders who more or less took turns at the helm, sometimes in power when their ideas were in the ascendant with the population, sometimes out when their initiatives weren’t. Terra said the place was run like a buccaneers’ town, its Council “part-time pirates,” but Borelians wouldn’t have it any other way.
Opinion rebounding so quickly and constantly infused Borelian government with fast-acting flexibility. One of the unusual effects of such a tumultuous system was that councilors were always just a few months away from going back to the status of private citizen, and so their professions were maintained. Everyone had a job on Borealis, of course, meaning that generals elected to the Council didn’t surrender their commands, nor professors their tenure, nor any councilor anything else. The Council didn’t have the time then, or the inclination, to sit and bang gavels. It convened regularly though, to make the executive decisions that weren’t already taken care of by the quite efficient bureaucracy—and did so in rapid-fire fashion. So there was no king, nor president, nor chief councilor on Borealis, but Stanislaus was the closest thing to it. He had been elected and confirmed to his seat forty-two times, while suffering defeat and losing his councillorship in twelve other sessions. When people on Earth, or Terra, or Mars or anywhere else thought about Borealis, his face was likelier than not to be one of the first images conjured.
Stanislaus came from a long line of physicians and was the Surgeon General of Borealis. His family emigrated from the Protectorate of Bohemia centuries ago when the Czech Republic was dissolved. In fact, his family—the Navrakovas—were one of the founding families. All prior Surgeon Generals had been charged with the health and safety of the citizenry. Stanislaus—on the Council for twenty-one of the last twenty-eight years—had expanded his bailiwick greatly.
Borealis’ water, he’d made clear over many years as the heart of his policy, was its most important resource. He’d taken recycling to almost ridiculous levels, refusing to allow the city to part with scant drops for even the most seemingly necessary procedures. If water were irretrievably converted, in any process which would leave it at end outside the boundaries of the potable supply, he was against it—and vociferously. That worked to his advantage every 180 days when people could say anything they liked about him to their amanuensis yet always end it with, “though he sure does look after the water, you know?” Borealis’ Central System Amanuensis, “Diana,” would plug in quite a bit of electoral weight behind those accumulated opinions, because as everyone knew and understood, Borelians had a primal fear of running out of water.
Stanislaus had his hands in many other places, too. His powerful voice could be heard in current reproductive laws, in the genetic engineering that was and wasn’t practiced in the Garden, to promulgating sports and exercises that conformed with and yet counteracted the long-term effects of the weakened lunar gravity. He was the quintessential physician: sixty-two, fit, salt and pepper hair and beard, both the same length and neat and trimmed. He wore a smock almost everywhere, an expensive impeccably tailored medical smock, but really only an unpretentious tunic. He was never to be seen though, anywhere, ever, without his gold Surgeon General’s caduceus clasped on his collar. The flamboyant insignia was the only nod the doctor made toward ostentation and it wasn’t too much to ask. Stanislaus was much more proud to be the Surgeon General of Borealis than to sit on its Council, as hard as that might be to believe.
CLINTON RITTENER AND STANISLAUS had never met, but each knew quite a bit about the other before they shook hands for the first time in the councilor’s private office, a rather airy but austere space directly adjacent to the Council Chamber itself. Here was the man Stanislaus had recently voted to grace with honorary Borelian citizenship. Clasping hands, Stanislaus felt immediately that he’d voted wisely.
Rittener’s mutiny was the spark that ignited a firestorm of resistance to Terra’s recent imperial tactics. Flotillas of “pirates” coalesced as fighting groups. These weren’t freebooters, as Terran propaganda led on, but were instead a united armed militia of the many states of the Asteroid Belt. They did exact a percentage of the metals trade as tribute for protection, but even these buccaneers blushed at the staggering theft of 50 percent which Terra was trying to grab. When a few other Terran “privateers” followed orders that Rittener’s conscience refused, annihilating mining colonies across the Asteroid Belt, this confederate fleet went into action. They went after the purloined shipments of metals, vaporizing every last gram of booty en route to Terra, from friend or foe, and starving Terra like no boycott ever had.
Terra stuck to her guns even as Borealis weighed in. Borealis dispatched her fleet to the “disputed arena” ostensibly on a peace-keeping mission “to disengage the warring parties.” Borealis’ next punch she delivered with the gloves off: helium-3 shipments were suspended to all parties involved in the dispute. Borealis could not, in good conscience, provide the means for this brutal war of annihilation on humanity’s frontier. That was a blow that caused energy-addicted Terra to cave in, but in a way that boded ill for the future. Terra saw every power in the Solar System, from the alliances on Earth to the combined confederation of the states of the Outer System, now buttressed by Borealis too, all ranged against her.
Stanislaus had committed to memory every glowering expression, all the subtle tones of menace that Dante Michelson had presented to the Borelian Council during the peace negotiations. “I want the Peerless back—immediately! Along with her crew.” Michelson paused so that his next words might be weighed separately. “And we demand that Borealis surrender to Terra the stateless pirate known as Clinton Rittener.” Rittener had already been tried—and convicted in absentia—and the Terran Ring only had to iron out the last little detail of putting the miscreant to death. Unfortunately, Borealis wouldn’t be able to comply.
Daiyu, Borealis’ Man
darin-born councilor and foreign minister, poetess laureate and honorary citizen herself, delivered the bad news. As was her custom, she spoke the simple words with the same dignity that infused her Gongfu tea ceremony conversations about art and humanity.
“Your classification of Clinton Rittener as ‘stateless’ is in error, Archon. He has been granted Borelian citizenship.” She allowed a brief silence, long enough for her to answer the next question even before it was posed. “By spontaneous public acclamation,” she declared, and with the appropriate solemnity. That was that. If Mephistopheles had shown up with a warrant for Rittener, or any other citizen, signed by Lucifer himself, the answer would be the same. No Borelian citizen had ever been surrendered, to anyone, ever, for anything, in the entire history of Borealis.
Daiyu was speaking truthfully. The citizens of Borealis went absolutely wild with admiration for this earthy European who cavalierly bet his life, counting on the honor and nobility of Borealis to vouchsafe it. Within the lacerating scorn Borelians heaped upon anyone or anything from Earth, there were to be found hints of a strange and grudging respect nonetheless. Rittener’s exploits touched an ancient familial nerve. They didn’t go chatting with their amanuenses about him, they screamed it, so stridently and repeatedly that it echoed to Diana, who informed the Council. It was possible to ignore a spontaneous public acclamation, but it was also stupid, and rarely, rarely done. The Council affirmed it unanimously.
The Terran Ring got her ship back, along with Lieutenant Andrews and two other crewmen who had refused to go along with the rebellion and survived by sitting out the mutiny in Peerless’ brig. The throw-away crew that the Terran Archonate had hand-picked for the mission to Valerian-3, with its lackluster history and predisposition for acquiescence to questionable orders, turned out to be a double-edged weapon. They had acquiesced alright, to the formidable will of their mutinous captain, who stunned everyone by revealing something no one had assumed he had: a conscience. Ensign Gutierrez and the rest of the crew, who also found theirs, hit an amazingly rare jackpot, and were given indefinite resident alien status on Borealis, a boon denied previously to a Prince of Wales. And now, this was Clinton Rittener’s big day, the day he’d take the oath of citizenship. The gavel for Council proceeding today, by luck of the draw, fell to Stanislaus, who’d summoned Rittener to his office just minutes before the ceremony.