But things had moved swiftly in these last days, and he would need as much information as he could get. In the time since his arrival, Henry had recruited nearly sixty former Soldiers of God and made a working unit out of them while the trip was being arranged and Dahno sent ahead.
Bleys looked through a small window just beside the port, and at the ground below. Their descent had slowed until they were settling surfaceward more gently than a bubble—down to the spaceport pad. Even with the softness of that parking surface, however, the slow descent was necessary, for the mass of the ship could crush its underside like an eggshell if it came down too fast.
Its outer shell was strong, but only strong enough to face the winds of atmosphere. Otherwise, the mass of the ship was far out of prudent proportion for surface landings in planetary gravity—New Earth’s was a little less than that of Association, a little more than that of Old Earth. If the “Other” organization Bleys and Dahno controlled had not been a majority owner in the vessel and demanded a surface landing, Favored of God would have discharged its passengers to shuttle-craft beyond the atmosphere.
Outside, now, Bleys saw a row of black limousines lined up, waiting. They had been driven out here in the landing area itself in special exception to all ordinary Customs and transportation procedures. The rest of the passengers who were not members of his party would have to take a surface-bus to the nearest underground departure point. But that would be after his group had left first; and he, first of all.
At that moment, the spaceship grounded itself with hardly a jar. The port swung open heavily before him, and at the crewwoman’s gesture, Henry’s advance party trotted down the landing stair, to spread out watchfully on the field. Bleys walked down onto the yielding surface of the landing area, a whiff of cool air—different, but invigorating—filling his lungs. The spring sunlight of Sirius, so yellowishly different from the white light of Epsilon Eridani over Association and Harmony, dazzled him briefly out of a beautiful sapphire-blue sky as he set foot outside into what was obviously a hot summer day.
He stood aside so that the rest of his people, who had been waiting just behind him, could come off. Henry and Toni were among the first few the Soldiers allowed to follow. Henry led Toni directly back to the fourth limousine in the row. Some of the Soldiers were already getting into the first three black magnetic-lift limousines with their dark one-way windows.
Bleys stood waiting at the foot of the ramp in the remarkable sky and the different sunlight, feeling unusually satisfied and elated. He could think of no particular reason for this. Then it struck him—of course, he was finally in action, committed to what he had planned to do—all time for doubt was over—
Henry’s voice beside him interrupted his thoughts.
“I’ve put Toni in the fourth vehicle,” Henry was saying. “You go in the second one with the local Others’ Headperson—Ana Wasserlied?”
“She came to meet us, then?” said Bleys, absently. “Dahno thought she’d be at the hotel.”
“She’s here and wants to ride with you. I’ll have Dahno ride fifth, in that limousine,” said Henry. “I’ll be up front in your limousine.”
“No, why don’t you ride with Toni?” Bleys murmured back. Henry looked at him for a moment.
“All right,” he said.
He led Bleys to a limousine. Bleys stooped and got in.
Ana Wasserlied, in one of the two individual chairs of the back seat, was a capable-looking, tall, blond, rather angular woman. She was in her late twenties, wearing a three-quarter-length semi-formal dress of some silky blue-green material. Already seated in the car on the far side, she smiled a somewhat weary-looking greeting as he joined her and the door was closed upon them.
“It’s good to meet you at last,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to thank you in person for appointing me last year to be Head of the Others’ branch, here.”
“Thank Dahno,” said Bleys. “He runs the organization, you know. I’m just a sort of roving philosopher, although he lets me advise from time to time.”
“Oh, I will thank him,” said Ana. The tone of her voice clearly refused to give lip service to the idea that Bleys was nothing more than a roving philosopher. A foolishly unreasonable small point to impress on Bleys himself in particular, Bleys noted absently. “But I wanted to thank you as well.”
“That’s very good of you,” said Bleys. “Did you bring that recording spindle I messaged for? The one with the latest information on our membership here, with a breakdown into those in training, and those we think able to hold a high administrative position?”
“I have it right here,” said Ana, producing it. Her voice was a rather pleasant soprano; which, however, developed a slightly metallic edge when she became brisk. She handed it to him.
He reached for one of the personal readers that was hanging against the back of the front seat, below the window there that shut him off from the driver and the Soldier who had stepped in to sit beside the driver a moment since. Bleys put the reader on. It was like a dark rectangular mask, with insert plugs for his ears and an elastic band behind to hold it on his head. Out of long practice, he put on the mask with one hand and slid the spindle into its slot below the viewing area of the mask with his other.
“Before you start,” said Ana’s voice, hastily if distantly, now that the plugs were in his ears, “I wanted to tell you: you’ve got an invitation by the local CEO Club for dinner tonight with some of their most important members. You remember that the CEO and the Guildmasters are the two important organizations on this world? CEO stands for Chief Executive Officers, of course—although these men you’ll be meeting are much more than that. They’re the heads of multiple corporations.”
“I see,” said Bleys. “We’ll talk about that more when we get to the hotel.”
Ana fell silent. Unobtrusively, Bleys touched the controls on his wristpad. The page of names that had filled his mask a second before disappeared; and the screen filled instead with a one-way connection to the intercom between his car and the one that held Henry and Toni.
While Bleys and Ana had been speaking, the limousines had all been filled and had already started to leave. The one Bleys and Ana were in plunged downward into a tunnel; and, as the picture of Toni and Henry in theirs came up, their voices began to sound in his ears. Bleys’s limousine came out of the tunnel on to a magnetic roadway, almost certainly the direct route into New Earth City.
“…Does your Soldier need to keep watching the driver like that?” he heard Toni saying.
In the screen, she seemed to be looking directly at Bleys, from which he assumed that she was looking instead into the front of the limousine through the window that sealed off that part of the vehicle from the seats in back; and made the conversation of the passengers back there private unless an intercom connection like this was opened up.
“…The driver’s an Other, isn’t he?” she was going on.
Henry nodded.
“We hope he’s trustworthy, but we play safe,” he said.
“Your people seem to like doing that,” she said. Bleys knew that she had had little to do with the Soldiers until the trip.
There was a momentary look of pain on Henry’s face. Then he was himself again.
“All of them have learned to be aware, all the time, whether on Harmony, Association or any other world,” he said. “You’re a woman of Association, yourself. You should know what being a Soldier of God means.”
She nodded. “I do.”
Her own temple—the temple she had gone to in her childhood—had, she remembered, once been embroiled in a battle with another religious body; and Soldiers of God, volunteer fighters from other churches, had come to help on both sides.
“I saw some once when I was twelve,” she said. “But most of them weren’t like this.”
There was a pause before Henry answered. “These are all afflicted. Not with a physical affliction. The affliction of a sin. I have that sin, too.”
She stared at him, obviously hesitating. But surely, thought Bleys, watching, she and Henry were close enough now so that she would venture on the personal question that had plainly and instantly come to her mind.
“What sin is that, Henry?” she asked, gently.
Henry turned his head slowly to look at her. Without warning his face had become implacable. Suddenly, he looked deadly—as deadly as he had the one time Bleys had seen him so before. It was the time when Henry had rescued Bleys from the anger of a mob of their fellow church members; the time when Bleys had been forced to leave Henry’s farm for Dahno and Ecumeny.
“What it is,” he said slowly, “is something I myself have told only my family; and I believe these men would want an equal privacy. You’ll have to do without an answer, I’m afraid.”
He looked at her steadily until she nodded. Then he looked away from her again and directly forward at the front seat; so that, in the reader screen, he now seemed to look directly at Bleys.
Toni stared at his profile for a moment. To Bleys—and he thought also to her—it must have seemed that Henry’s attention had gone a long way away from her, from everyone. But then the expression on his face faded. He turned back and offered her his brief quirk of a smile. She smiled forgivingly in return; and they both sat back in silence.
Bleys touched his wrist control pad and went back to the names, figures and other data in the recording spindle.
Memorizing these and turning over various plans in his head kept his mind occupied for the twenty minutes or so at the six hundred kilometers an hour with which the motorcade approached their hotel. Once arrived, they were shown to quarters that were, if anything, more luxurious than those they had occupied back on Association.
“As soon as everyone’s unpacked and ready,” Bleys said to Toni, Dahno, Henry and Ana in the entry lounge of the Master Suite, “we’ll gather in my private lounge here for a talk. Say, in twenty minutes, standard time. You can wait here for us if you want, Ana.”
A little later, the private lounge saw them seated around a conference table not only long enough to accommodate all of them comfortably, but also two individuals who had since joined Ana. Both of these were wearing a padded single-garment type of business suit which disguised whether they were men or women, and there were two blue blurs of light where their heads ordinarily would have been seen.
Bleys sat at one end of the table, Ana at the other, facing him with one of the two disguised persons on each side of her. There seemed to be emotional brittleness to the atmosphere in the room, like a miniature rotary storm system with its locus in the air above Ana’s end of the table. But it was not greatly disturbing. Bleys decided to ignore it for the moment.
“All right,” he said, once they were settled, “Ana, want to bring us up to date on the situation here?”
‘The whole world knew you were coming,” said Ana. Here at the conference table, her strong soprano voice was surprisingly pleasant, in a way that went far to cancel out her somewhat rawboned, overdressed appearance.
“That couldn’t be helped,” said Bleys, pleasantly. “I can’t control any but a few of the ships that leave Association and later call at New Earth. Also, now I’m part of the Government on Association, as one of the Speakers in the Chamber there—even if I do have a deputy holding down my seat regularly—the Chamber has to be notified if I go off-planet. That means it was no secret on Association about my going to New Earth; so it could hardly be kept a secret here.”
“Well, in any case,” said Ana, “the general population of this world knew almost as soon as we did; and that includes the CEO Clubs and the Guildmasters. By the way, let me introduce these two on either side of me.”
She pointed to the faceless figure seated on her right.
“We’ll call this person Jack,” she said. “Jack is an Other who’s graduated from our ordinary training. He’s also a member of the CEO Clubs.”
Her finger moved to indicate the figure on her left.
“And this will be Jill,” she added. “Jill is another graduate Other, and in her case she’s a Guild member. Both are fairly high in the hierarchy of their”—she paused a brief moment—“secondary organizations.”
“Honored to meet you,” said Jill.
“Honored to be here,” said Jack.
There was practically no difference between their voices, each of which could be the voice of a man or a woman behind the filter being used to distort it.
“I commend their caution,” said Bleys, smiling at each of them in turn.
“I trust you all, myself,” said Ana—though she looked hard for a moment at Toni as she said it—“but these two are literally risking their lives. Both the CEOs and the Guilds have a death penalty for any one of their people who belongs to any other organization. That rule was originally made to keep the spies of one out of the councils of the other.”
“But in spite of that, I’d guess there are still CEO spies in the Guild ranks and Guild spies among the CEOs, aren’t there?” said Dahno.
“Of course,” answered Ana, “and spies from other groups beside ours as well, in both organizations. None from either in ours, in case you were thinking of asking. We have ways to check that neither the CEOs nor the Guilds could risk using. However, the point is, Jack and Jill are here now to answer any questions you might like to put directly about those two organizations, themselves.”
“All right,” said Bleys, “both of you, then, what’s the general attitude of the CEO Clubs and the Guild Leadership to my speaking tour here? I assume they’re familiar with recordings of the speeches I’ve made for Harmony and Association, before?”
“Your tapes are very popular with the ordinary people—the jobholders—the rank and file, I suppose you’d call them,” said Jack. “We call them jobholders as opposed to the job-givers, the executives of the CEOs. Both want to see you for their own reasons.” He paused. “Wouldn’t you say so?”
There was an uncomfortable pause in the conversation.
“I’m sorry!” Jack’s voice burst out again suddenly. “I keep forgetting you can’t see my face. I was looking at you, Jill, to answer for the Guild.”
“The Guild—” The filter made Jill’s voice so anonymously similar to Jack’s that it was almost as if Jack answered again. She hesitated. “I could say exactly the same things. You see—I’m sorry, I’m looking at you now, Great Teacher—until now, the CEOs and the Guildmasters have completely controlled the jobholders; and the Guild worries about you getting a separate influence over them. It’s a matter of survival, you see—”
“Perhaps I’d better explain that part of it,” Ana broke in. “Bleys, the fact is—”
“No need,” said Bleys. “I think I already know that, and it’s part of a much larger picture. See if I’m right—New Earth is essentially a manufacturing world, buying new technical information from Cassida and selling its products and manufactory knowledge to all the other New Worlds. But what Cassida sells are developments of technologies derived by them from the basic free research going on upon Newton. This chain of connections will only go on working as long as your jobholders are willing to produce what’s considered most profitable by their CEO or Guild leaders, the Cassidan leadership and the Newtonian researchers. Correct?”
“Of course it is,” Ana said. “All right. You ask the questions.”
“I want specifics,” said Bleys. “Tell me—any and all of the three of you—what actions, if any, have the Guild and the CEOs in mind to take about me? What are they planning to do, or try to do?”
“I don’t think they’ve made definite plans yet—Jack?” said Ana. “Jill?”
“No,” said the two similar voices. Jack went on. “They know they can pick you up anywhere, anytime, anyplace on our world. So they’re both waiting to size you up.”
“One thing’s certain,” said Ana. “The CEOs control the management of everything but the smallest business establishments in this world; the Guilds control the people who wor
k in those establishments. Together, if they want to crack down on you, you won’t be able to move, let alone speak. For one thing, you could be out of here and in the street with one call by the CEOs to the hotel manager; and theoretically at least, no commercial vehicle, not even an autotaxi, would stop to pick any of you up.”
“Would they do that now, in the face of public interest in me, if what I was just told about the jobholders was correct?” Bleys asked.
“Not right away, at least,” said Ana, almost grudgingly. “Maybe Jack or Jill can tell you more.”
“I think—” Jill began, then hesitated. “Jack, do you want to answer that, first?”
“If you like,” said Jack. “The CEOs, anyway, are going to begin by smiling at you. In fact, as Jill knows, Great Teacher, because we were talking a bit about it before the rest of you joined us, you’re invited to dinner with the top CEO people of the New Earth City Club, tonight—”
“I told him that on the way here from the spaceport, since the invitation was passed through me,” Ana said, sharply.
“Sorry,” said Jack, “I didn’t know—”
“Well, the point is, the Great Teacher did know. Go ahead,” said Ana.
“Well, then, with my apologies to you, Ana Wasserlied, and to you, Great Teacher,” said Jack, his anonymous voice masking any embarrassment. “The people you’ll meet tonight if you go—and it would probably be wisest to go, if you want my opinion—are going to be the most powerful in the world. They’re sort of an unofficial governing body for the actions of the Clubs in general; or, to put it another way, there they lead, the other Clubs and their members always follow.”
“What do they hope for, by seeing me at a dinner?” asked Bleys.
“To impress you with their power,” Jack answered, “and to size you up, to see if you’ll do what they want.”
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