The Florians

by Brian Stableford

  “I disapprove,” I confirmed dully.

  “You have to be realistic,” he said, his voice becoming normal again after the brief moment of nakedness. “Don’t you?” This addition was aimed at Karen.

  “Maybe,” she said, with a marked lack of certainty.

  In the silence that followed, the tension which had flared slowly ebbed away. It was a good time to change the subject.

  “What’s Jason’s next move?” I wondered aloud. “He didn’t stay to hear the end of what I had to say. As soon as he knew I wasn’t cooperating he was off. Where to?”

  “He has only two choices,” said Nathan, who seemed ready enough to talk about something else and heal the breach, superficially. “Either he stays with the Planners...or he changes sides.”

  “And?” I prompted.

  Nathan shrugged. “In his present mood, I think he’ll change sides. I suspect he already has. It’s the wrong decision, of course. But he’s tried to play the game his own way, to force things into his predetermined pattern. They wouldn’t go. He lost...and now he’s angry. He won’t be content to do the simple thing, which is to patch things up, sit back and wait, keeping hold of what he already has. He’ll feel a compulsion to act—to react against the failure of his naïve little schemes. He needs to hit out, to show off the fact that he really is the kingpin and that fate can’t treat him thus and get away with it. At least, that’s how I read the situation.”

  It sounded all too terribly plausible. Jason, his temper flaring, would go to Ellerich and Vulgan. If he couldn’t run things from the island in the way he thought he could...then he would try to run them from the mainland, at the head of the rebellion.

  He would hit out....

  And he still had Mariel. And no one seemed to be doing a damned thing about it. Sit and wait, never act. Talk and think. It was Nathan’s way, and it was the Planners’ way. But to the Planners—and perhaps to Nathan as well—Mariel was something remote, just another piece on the board, to be moved or taken as the game demanded.

  I got up from the chair quickly. I moved toward the door, saying, “Come on, Karen.”

  “Where do you think you’re going?” said Nathan, moving to try to block my path.

  “To the radio,” I said. “We have to call the ship, to find out what’s going on. Even if Jason isn’t handing out any ultimatums yet, Rolving is supposed to be monitoring communications on the mainland. Maybe be can tell us what’s happening.”

  Nathan hesitated, then nodded.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s go and find out what’s going on.”

  We went out into the corridor and began making our way to the fifth floor of the western side of the building. The corridors seemed as dimly lighted by day as they had by night...the daylight streaming through the thin windows was wan and cool. The day was overcast and somber.

  We passed a number of people in the corridors—mostly young people, presumably students in training for the elite. They watched us as we passed, alertly but incuriously. We must have been the dominant topic of conversation among them for days.

  There were more people in the radio room. In fact, there was quite a crowd there. One of them moved to cut off the doorway as we approached, but big though be was be couldn’t block the view. His action had been reflexive in any case, for as we peered past him he thought better of it, and moved aside.

  The people within were picking through the wreckage.

  To the man who had attempted to block our way, I said, “Who did it?”

  “Jason, Lucas...perhaps a dozen others.” He was hesitant, but his hesitancy was born of anxiety rather than any reluctance to let us in on the secret. He seemed almost glad we were there, as if it were a relief to have someone with whom to share the responsibility for the discovery. Presumably, the authority he would normally have notified of any untoward incident was Jason, or Lucas...or any of the others in the administrative group. When you find that the law has committed a crime, where do you turn?

  “Where are they now?” I asked, taking advantage of the fact that answers were easy to come by, for once.

  “They went to the mainland,” said the giant. “They took all the boats but two...and the others are damaged, sinking in the harbor.”

  “It seems,” said Nathan, still monumentally unperturbed by the whole chain of events, “that Jason is not a man to do things by halves. He’s done a comprehensive job of cutting us off from the mainland. He appears to have won himself time, if nothing else.”

  “Time to do what?” I demanded.

  But he ignored the question. Instead, he asked the Florian whether the Planners had been informed. The idea of interrupting the Planners in the course of their affairs was obviously not a welcome one so far as the young man was concerned. Among the acolytes in the aristocracy presumptive, if nowhere else, the Planners preserved their status as demigods.

  “You’d better make sure they’re informed,” said Nathan gently.

  As he turned away, I said, “What do we do?”

  “We go back to my room,” he said, “and we wait. I know you don’t like it, but there’s nothing we can do. I think the Planners will tell us what’s going on in due course, and perhaps invite us into their council. In the meantime, we take things easy.”

  There was, as he said, nothing we could do. What I found offensive, however, was not his insistence on making this clear but his apparent contentment with it.

  The sensation of being completely helpless is—at least so far as I am concerned—one of the most painful in the range of human experience. It is one with which, perhaps, I was always overfamiliar. Those who allow themselves to perceive the everyday tragedies that occur perpetually in the world around them live in a constant state of excited awareness, and when the wheel of chance brings such tragedies so close as to make personal contact the fury of impotence can become overwhelming.

  That afternoon and evening, I could not help envying Nathan his detachment—his lack of emotional involvement even with events happening to him and around him. I could not help, also, a degree of insight into the way Arne Jason had been pricked into hasty—and perhaps violent—action by the conspiracy of circumstances. He was not angry because he had lost anything real, but he had lost his pretensions, his illusions, the cloak of pretense which had kept him isolated from the impact of feeling his own impotence to control and direct the pattern of events. As Nathan had said, the Planners were aware of him, were manipulating him even while he believed himself to be manipulating them: a tissue of ambivalence maintained by mutual consent. And now...we had denied him. And all of a sudden, he was at the head of a revolution.

  How, I wondered, were the Planners to cope with the rebellion? How could they possibly suppress it? If Jason and his new allies were to take control of the colony by force—as, perhaps, they already had—what could the Planners do? There was no question of their fighting back...for that was precisely what they stood implacably against. On a world where violence has been banished, what conceivable defense is there against it?

  I not only felt personally helpless, but conceived of us all as being helpless. So far as I could see, we were at the mercy of Jason’s injured pride. I recalled the day when my son’s mother had been killed, in a random traffic accident that was part of a great pattern of random accidents extending across all the roads of the world and all the hours of the day and night. I had not even been in the same country when it happened, and though she lived a while in the hospital there was no way I could have traveled fast enough to reach her before she died. But if there had been—if there had been a device like the Daedalus, to translocate me in space-time with negligible delay—I could have done nothing save wait for her to die, at the whim of a pattern of events without sense or order.

  In my head, I live in an ordered universe of cause and effect and the eternal, immutable principles of natural law. But real events in the real world are not subject to the same constraints as the universe of thought inside any man’s h
ead, and we are all at the mercy of the unpredictable.

  Even Mariel, to whom no lies could be told.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I lay in my bed, having abandoned the attempt to sleep. My eyes were open but I could see nothing. A heavy curtain cut out such light as might have crept in through the window, and the corridor outside, with the nearest stairwell some distance away, was too dark to make a rim of light around the ill-fitting door.

  I heard the door open and close again, but though I was fully conscious I did not react. I waited, while whoever had entered moved across the carpet to my side. I was conscious of the presence only a foot or two away from my face, but still I waited.

  A hand groped for my shoulder, and a voice whispered, “Mr. Alexander.”

  I was surprised to hear my name given thus. I had assumed, though without any real reason, that the invader was either Karen or Nathan. I was so prepared to hear one of their voices, in fact, that I couldn’t put a name to the voice I did hear. I knew that I knew it, but I couldn’t place it.

  I felt the hand gripping my shoulder and stirring me gently. It was a large hand.

  “Wake up, Mr. Alexander,” said the voice.

  And then I recognized it.

  I sat bolt upright with a suddenness that must have startled him.

  “Rondo?”

  “Quietly, Mr. Alexander,” he said. “I’ll turn on the light.” After a pause, the light came on. It was, indeed, the youngest of the Planners. The devil’s advocate.

  “What do you want?” I demanded harshly. But I kept my voice low.

  He came swiftly back to the bedside, and knelt down. “You know that I had to question you this afternoon,” he said. “It is my function. There was nothing personal. Perhaps your colleague told you that I was, myself, disposed to be sympathetic?”

  “So?” I said.

  “I want your help, Mr. Alexander,” he said.

  “What kind of help?”

  “I want to go to the mainland. Tonight.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just stared at him, completely out of my depth.

  “You have a boat, Mr. Alexander,” he said. “The one you used in order to get here. You have hidden it somewhere on the island. I think you have probably contemplated using it yourself.”

  “It had crossed my mind,” I admitted. “But there’s a moratorium on bull-in-a-china-shop tactics. And I have blisters on my hands.”

  He smiled. He didn’t look like a Planner. He was younger than Jason, but built along the same lines. Immensely strong...it was hard to imagine him as a die-hard pacifist.

  “I’ll row,” he said.

  “You want me to go with you?”

  He nodded. “I need your help,” he said again.

  I looked briefly at the door. “Very quiet help,” I said, with slight sarcasm.

  “Very quiet,” he agreed.

  There were a hundred questions, chief among which was, “What the hell are you playing at?”—but I didn’t ask them. I got out of bed. Whatever he wanted to do, it was action, and I felt the need for action in every muscle of my body. I’d had a rough time, and I’d gone distinctly short of sleep these last few days, but I needed little urging. The compulsion to do something—anything except wait in silent helplessness—was irresistible.

  He seemed slightly amused by my readiness, but he was also pleased. When I was dressed, he turned out the light and opened the door. I followed him, on tiptoe, as he led me through the maze of passages to a small door on the inland side of the building. Once outside, he brought forth a small lantern—not an electric torch but a candle mounted in a glass case. It seemed oddly out of place here, at the very heart of Florian technological expertise. But there are no such things as levels of technology: only matters of convenience and priority.

  “Where’s the boat?” he asked.

  “At the foot of the cliff,” I said. “We’d better take the long way around.”

  He shook his head. “I know a safe path.”

  I wasn’t sure. The light cast by the sheltered candle was too faint to light our way adequately. But I followed him, and took great care to tread exactly where he trod. He preceded me, so that if I did slip I would have to fall past him.

  It took no more than ten minutes to get down to the pebbled shore, and only five minutes more to find the boat under the ledge where I’d left it.

  We pulled it out, and maneuvered it into the water. Rondo took both oars in a single massive fist, and held the boat steady while I stepped in. He was about to follow me when the sound of footsteps on the loose stones made us both look back.

  It was, inevitably, Karen Karelia. We’d passed her room in the corridor. She had, it seemed, been no more asleep than I. She seemed surprised and alarmed to recognize Rondo. She had known, obviously, that it was a Florian I was with, but this must have been the first opportunity for her to see his face. He, however, seemed both unsurprised and unperturbed by her arrival.

  “What’s going on?” she asked—of me.

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “He’s in charge.”

  “Get in the boat,” said Rondo calmly.

  She got in the boat. Rondo pushed us away from the shore and then began to put the oars into the rowlocks. We took up a position in the stern, facing him as he began to pull us around in a semicircle, and then, with a few casual strokes of the oars, sent us shooting away from the island.

  “The others aren’t going to like it when they find out,” I commented.

  “I think,” he said, “that this is one of those times when it’s better to act first and discuss the matter later.”

  “I’m astonished to find one of the Planners believing that there ever could be such a time,” I said.

  “Where are we going?” asked Karen. “And why?”

  “I know Arne Jason,” said Rondo smoothly. “I know him better, perhaps, than anyone else. The others, you see, are all older than he. When they knew him as a boy, they were already adult. When I knew him as a boy, I was his junior. That can be a very different viewpoint. The others think that Jason is unimportant, dispensable. They look down upon him from their lofty place and they only see that in the long run he can achieve very little. They have toyed with him too long. They’re right, of course, about the long run. But in a more immediate sense, Jason is a dangerous man.”

  It came as a blessed relief to know that someone had noticed.

  “So what do you intend to do about him?” I asked.

  “Find him,” replied the Planner. “Stay with him, if I can. And try to prevent him from doing any real harm.”

  “By force?” asked Karen.

  The candle was on the floor of the boat, and we could not see his face by its light. I could not guess what kind of expression he might be wearing. But his voice, when he answered, was nothing like the voice he might have used to react to such a question in his capacity as the spokesman for the Planners.

  He simply said, “Not by force.”

  “I don’t see what you think you can achieve,” she said bluntly.

  “We’ll see,” he said, in neutral tones.

  “Why bring us?” I asked. “You wanted me along, and you didn’t send Karen back. But if you’re so afraid of the consequences our actions may have—pollution of your cultural values, or however you want to put it—why invite us to the party? You didn’t just volunteer to bring me so that I’d show you where the boat was.”

  “I want you to guide me to your ship,” he said. “And I want you to come to an agreement with Jason.”

  “A deal?”

  “If you like.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  “An honest deal, Mr. Alexander. You have to make him see the kind of sense which you threw at us this afternoon. You have to make him realize that there are things more important than his personal ambitions.”

  “Sweet reason?” I said, without conviction. “What makes you think he’ll listen? What makes you think he’ll care?”

&nb
sp; “He’s a Florian,” said Rondo. “The son of a colonial culture.”

  “He didn’t stay to listen today,” I pointed out. “He isn’t in a mood to believe the truth. He might not be ready to see reason; in fact, I’d say he’s almost ready to react against it. He’s a desperate man.”

  “In that case,” said Rondo, again with quiet confidence, “then we must show him up for what he is. We must let those he commands—and those with whom he has allied himself—see him for what he is.”

  I could still hear Nathan’s mocking advice ringing in my ears. Be realistic, he had said. And I had rejected, inwardly, his brand of realism. But how realistic was Rondo’s belief that force could be opposed without force? How realistic was the conviction that Jason, Vulgan, and men like them could be turned aside from their objective with nothing more than words? They were, as Rondo had said, colonists and the sons of colonists. Men of Floria, who must, in their hearts, feel something of the ideals that had motivated their forefathers. But how much? To what extent had that idealism been eroded and repressed by the kind of cynical detachment which came so easy to us, the invaders from Earth? How powerful, I wondered, are time and circumstance?

  There was no way of knowing. We were at the mercy of the unpredictable, with only Rondo’s faith to guide us. Faith, I knew, can be a very unsatisfactory guide. Ask any of its victims.

  “For some time,” said Rondo, “we have anticipated this moment of rebellion. We had not expected it so soon; perhaps, unconsciously, we hoped that it would never come, or believed that we could hold it at bay forever. Now that it is here, we are afraid, anxious, hesitant. We are not really attuned to the acceptance of new information—we live on the assumption of our virtual omniscience. What you have tried to make us see is something we are, for the most part, reluctant to confront. We are confused. I don’t know how you think of us, but you must make allowances. You must try to realize the extent of the effect your coming here has had. It has been a shock.”