Prisoners of Tomorrow

by James P. Hogan

  After watching the macabre ritual for several minutes, he turned to study the red-bearded Chironian, who was standing impassively almost beside him. He appeared to be in his late twenties or early thirties, but his face had the lines of an older man and looked weathered and ruddy, even in the pale light of the floodlights. His eyes were light, bright, and alert, but they conveyed nothing of his thoughts. “How did it happen?” Colman murmured in a low voice, moving a pace nearer.

  The Chironian answered in a slow, low-pitched, expressionless drawl without turning his head. “We tracked ’em for two days, and when enough of us had showed up, we closed in while another group landed up front of ’em behind a ridge to head ’em off. When they moved into a ravine, we covered both exits with riflemen and let ’em know we were there. Gave ’em every chance . . . said if they came on out quiet, all we’d do was turn ’em in.” The Chironian inclined his head briefly and sighed. “Guess some people never learn when to quit.”

  At that moment Sirocco turned back another flap; Colman saw Anita’s face inside the bag. It was white, like marble, and waxy. He swallowed and stared woodenly. The Chironian’s eyes flickered briefly across his face. “Someone you knew?”

  Colman nodded tightly. “A while back now, but . . .”

  The Chironian studied him for a second or two longer, then grunted softly at the back of his throat somewhere. “We didn’t do that,” he said. “After we told ’em they were cooped up, some of ’em started shooting. Five of ’em tried making a break, holding a white shirt up to tell us they wanted out. We held back, but a couple of the others gunned ’em down from behind while they were running. She was one of those five.” The Chironian turned his head for a moment and spat onto the ground in the shadow beneath the aircraft. “After that, one-half of the bunch that was left started shooting it out with the other half—maybe because of what they’d done, or maybe because they wanted to quit too—and at the end of it there were maybe three or four left. We hadn’t done a thing. Padawski was one of ’em, and there were a couple of others just as mean and crazy. Didn’t leave us with too much of a problem.”

  Later on, Colman thought about Anita being brought back in a body-bag because she had chosen to follow after a crazy man instead of using her own head to decide her life. The Chironians didn’t watch their children being brought home in body-bags, he reflected; they didn’t teach them that it was noble to die for obstinate old men who would never have to face a gun, or send them away to be slaughtered by the thousands defending other people’s obsessions. The Chironians didn’t fight that way.

  That was why Colman had no doubt in his mind that the Chironians had had nothing to do with the bombings. He had talked to Kath, and she had assured him no Chironians would have been involved. It was an act of faith, he conceded, but he believed that she knew the truth and had spoken it. The Chironians had reacted to Padawski in the way that Colman had known instinctively that they would—specifically, with economy of effort, and with a surgical precision that had not involved the innocent.

  For that was how they fought. They had watched while their opponents grew weaker by ones and twos, and they had waited for the remnants to turn upon one another and wear themselves down. Then the Chironians had moved.

  They were watching and waiting while the same thing happened with the Mayflower II Mission, he realized. When and how would they move? And, he wondered, when they did, which side would he be on?

  PART THREE

  PHOENIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Chironians’ handling of the Padawski incident and the absence of any organized reaction among them to the initial Terran hysteria led to a widespread inclination among the Terrans privately to absolve the Chironians of blame over the bombings, but the Terrans avoided thinking about the obvious question which that implied. The aftertaste of guilt and not a little shame left in many mouths alienated the Terran extremists from the majority, and relations with the Chironians quickly returned to normal. Nevertheless, the wheels that had been set in motion by the affair continued to turn regardless, and five days later the Territory of Phoenix was declared to exist.

  Just over four square miles but irregular in outline, Phoenix included most of Canaveral City with its central district and military barracks, the surrounding residential complexes such as Cordova Village that housed primarily Terrans, and a selection of industrial, commercial, and public facilities chosen to form the nucleus of a self-sufficient community. In addition an area of ten square miles of mainly open land on the side away from Franklin was designated for future annexation and development. Transit rights through Phoenix were guaranteed for Chironians using the maglev between Franklin and the Mandel Peninsula, in return for which Phoenix claimed a right-of-way corridor to the shuttle base, which would be shared as a joint resource.

  Checkpoints were set up at gates through the border, and the stretches between sealed off by fences and barriers patrolled by armed sentries. Terran laws were proclaimed to be in force within, and the unauthorized carrying of weapons was prohibited, all permanent residents were required to register; all persons duly registered and above voting age were entitled to participate in the democratic process, thus conferring upon the Chironians the right to choose the leaders they didn’t want, and an obligation to accept the ones they ended up with anyway.

  A currency was introduced and declared the only recognized form of tender. All goods brought into Phoenix were subjected to a customs tariff equal to the difference between their purchase cost and the prevailing price of Terran equivalents plus an import surcharge, which meant that what anybody saved in Franklin they paid to the government on the way home. Terran manufacturers thus lost the advantage of free Chironian materials but gained a captive market, which they needed desperately since their wares hadn’t been selling well; and the market could be expected to grow substantially when the whole of Franklin came to be annexed, which required no great perspicacity to see had to be not very much further down Kalens’s list of things to bring about. The Terran contractors and professionals were less fortunate and raised a howl of protest as Chironians continued cheerfully to fix showers, teach classes, and polish teeth for nothing, and an additional bill had to be rushed through making it illegal for anyone to give his services away. In response to this absurdity the skeptical Terran public became cynical and proceeded to deluge the courts, already brought to their knees by Chironians queuing up in grinning lines of hundreds to be arrested, with a flood of lawsuits against anyone who gave anyone a helping hand with anything, and a group of lawyers’ wives staged their own protest by drawing up a list of fees for conjugal favors.

  Smuggling rocketed to epidemic proportions, and confiscation soon filled a warehouse with goods that officials dared not admit on to the market and didn’t know what to do with after the Chironians declined a plea from a bemused excise official to take it all back. The Chironians outside Phoenix continued to satisfy every order or request for anything readily; Terran builders who had commenced work on a new residential complex were found to be using Chironian labor with no references appearing in their books; every business became convinced that its competitors were cheating, and before long every session of both houses of Congress had degenerated into a bedlam of accusations and counteraccusations of illegal profiteering, back-door dealing, scabbing, and every form of skullduggery imaginable.

  Cynicism soon turned to rebellion as more of the Terran population came to perceive Phoenix not as a protective enclave, but at worst a prison and at best a self-proclaimed lunatic asylum. Apartment units were found deserted and more faces vanished as expeditions to Franklin came increasingly to be one-way trips. Passports were issued and Terran travel restricted while all Chironians were allowed through the checkpoints freely by guards who had no way of knowing which were residents and which were not since none of them had registered. The sentries no longer cared all that much anyway; their looking the other way became chronic and more and more of them were found no
t to be at their posts when their relief showed up. An order was posted assigning at least one SD to every guard detail. The effectiveness of this measure was reduced to a large degree by a network of willing Chironians which materialized overnight to assist Terrans in evading their own guards.

  Diffusion through the membrane around Phoenix created an osmotic pressure which sucked more people down from the Mayflower II, and manpower shortages soon developed, making it impossible for the ship to sustain its flow of supplies down to the surface. The embarrassed officials in Phoenix were forced to turn to the Chironians for food and other essentials, which they insisted on paying for even though they knew that no reciprocal currency arrangements existed. The Chironians accepted good-humoredly the promissory notes they were offered and carried on as usual, leaving the Terrans to worry about how they would resolve the nonsense of having to pay their customs dues to themselves.

  Nobody talked any more about annexing Franklin. Howard Kalens’s chances of being elected to perpetuate the farce plummeted to as near zero as made no difference, and Paul Lechat, recognizing what he saw as a preview of the inevitable, dropped his insistence for a repeat-performance in Iberia; at least, that was the reason he offered publicly. Ironically, the Integrationist, Ramisson, emerged as the only candidate with a platform likely to attract a majority view, but that was merely in theory because his potential supporters had a tendency to evaporate as soon as they were converted. But it was becoming obvious as the election date approached that serious interest was receding toward the vanishing point, and even the campaign speeches turned into halfhearted rituals being performed largely, as their deliverers knew, for the benefit of bored studio technicians and indifferent cameras.

  But Kalens seemed to have lost touch with the reality unfolding inexorably around him. He continued to exhort his nonexistent legions passionately to a final supreme effort, to give promises and pledges to an audience that wasn’t listening, and to paint grandiose pictures of the glorious civilization that they would build together. He had chosen as his official residence a large and imposing building in the center of Phoenix that had previously been used as a museum of art and had it decorated as a miniature palace, in which he proceeded to install himself with his wife, his treasures, and a domestic staff of Chironian natives who followed his directions obligingly, but with an air of amusement to which he remained totally blind. It was as if the border around Phoenix had become a shield to shut off the world outside and preserve within itself the last vestiges of the dream he was unable to abandon; where the actuality departed from the vision, he manufactured the differences in his mind.

  He still retained some staunch adherents, mainly among those who had nowhere else to turn and had drawn together for protection. Among them were a sizable segment of the commercial and financial fraternity who were unable to come to terms with an acceptance that their way of life was finished; the Mayflower II’s bishop, presiding over a flock of faithful who recoiled from abandoning themselves to the evil ways of Chiron; many from every sector of society whose natures would keep them hanging on to the end regardless. Above all there remained Borftein, who had nowhere else to attach a loyalty that his life had made compulsive. Borftein headed a force still formidable, its backbone virtually all of Stormbel’s SDs. Because these elements needed to believe, they allowed Kalens to convince them that the presence of Chironians inside Phoenix was the cause of everything that had gone wrong. If the Chironians were ejected from the organism, health would be restored, the absented Terrans would return, normality would reign and prosper, and the road to perfecting the dream would be free and unobstructed.

  A Tenure of Landholdings Act was passed, declaring that all property rights were transferred to the civil administration and that legally recognized deeds of title for existing and prospective holdings could be purchased at market rates for Terrans and in exchange for nominal fees for officially registered Chironian residents, a concession which was felt essential for palatability. Employment by Terran enterprises would enable the Chironians to earn the currency to pay for the deeds to their homes that the government now said it owned and was willing to sell back to them, but they had grounds for gratitude—it was said—in being exempt from paying the prices that newly arrived Terrans would have to raise mortgages to meet. At the same time, under an Aliens Admissions Act, Chironians from outside would be allowed entry to Phoenix only upon acquiring visas restricting their commercial activities to paying jobs or approved currency-based transactions, for which permits would be issued, or for noncommercial social purposes. Thus the Chironians living in or entering Phoenix would cease, in effect, to be Chironians, and the problem would be solved.

  Violators of visa privileges would face permanent exclusion. Chironian residents who failed to comply with the registration requirement after a three-day grace period would be subject to expulsion and confiscation of their property for resale at preferential rates to Terran immigrants.

  Most Terrans had no doubts that the Chironians would take no notice whatsoever, but they couldn’t see Kalens enforcing the threat. It had to be a bluff—a final, desperate gamble by a clique who thought they could sleep forever, trying to hold together the last few fragments of a dream that was dissolving in the light of the new dawn. “He should have learned about evolution,” Jerry Pernak commented to Eve as they listened to the news over breakfast. “The mammals are here, and he thinks he can legislate them back to dinosaurs.”

  Bernard Fallows leaned alongside the sliding glass door in the living room and stared out at the lawn behind the apartment while he wondered to himself when he would be free to begin his new career at Port Norday. He had broached the subject to Kath, as he now knew she had guessed he would, and she had told him simply that the people there who had met him were looking forward to working with him. But he had agreed with Pernak and Lechat that a nucleus of people capable of taking rational control of events would have to remain available until the last possibility of extreme threats to the Chironians went away, and that Ramisson’s Integrationist platform, to which Lechat had now allied himself, needed support to allow the old order to extinguish itself via its own processes.

  Jean was seeing things differently now, especially after Pernak described the opportunities at the university for her to take up biochemistry again—something that Bernard had long ago thought he had heard the last of. He turned his head to look into the room at where she was sitting on the sofa below the wall screen, introducing Marie to the mysteries of protein transcription—diagrams courtesy of Jeeves—and grinned to himself; she was becoming even more impatient than he was. Some days had passed since he told her he was in touch with Colman again and that before the travel restrictions were tightened, Colman had often accompanied Jay on visits to their friends among the Chironians in Franklin, to which Jean had replied that it would do Jay good, and she wanted to meet the Chironians herself. Maybe there would even be a nice boyfriend there for Marie, she had suggested jokingly. “A nice one,” she had added in response to Bernard’s astonished look. “Not one of those teenage Casanovas they’ve got running around. The line stays right there.”

  Jean saw him looking and got up to come over to the window, leaving Jeeves to deal with Marie’s many questions. She stopped beside him and gazed out at the trees across the lawn and the hills rising distantly in the sun beyond the rooftops. “It’s going to be such a beautiful world,” she said. “I’m not sure I can stand much more of this waiting around. Surely it has to be as good as over.”

  Bernard looked out again and shook his head. “Not until that ship up there is disarmed somehow.” After a pause he turned to face her again. “So it doesn’t scare you anymore, huh?”

  “I don’t think it ever did. What I was afraid of was in my own head. None of it was out there.” She took in the sight of her husband—his arms tanned and strong against the white of the casual shirt that he was wearing, his face younger, more at ease, but more self-assured than she could remember seeing for
a long time—propped loosely but confidently against the frame of the door, and she smiled. “Kalens may have to hide himself away in a shell,” she said. “I don’t need mine anymore.”

  “So you’re happy you can handle it,” Bernard said.

  “We can handle anything that comes,” she told him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Celia Kalens straightened the kimono-styled black-silk top over her gold lamé evening dress, then sat back while a white-jacketed steward cleared the dinner dishes from the table. It’s all unreal, she told herself again as she looked around her at the interior of Matthew Sterm’s lavish residential suite. Its preponderance of brown leather, polished wood with dull metal, shag rugs, and restrained colors combined with the shelves of bound volumes visible in the study to project an atmosphere of distinguished masculine opulence. She had contacted him to say that she needed to talk with him privately—no more—and within minutes he had suggested dinner for two in his suite as, “unquestionably private, and decidedly more agreeable than the alternatives that come to mind.” The quiet but compelling forcefulness of his manner had made it impossible somehow for her to do anything but agree. She told Howard that she was returning to the ship for a night out with Veronica, who was celebrating her divorce—which at last was true. Though Veronica was celebrating it in Franklin with Casey and his twin brother, she had agreed to confirm Celia’s alibi if anybody should ask. So here Celia was, and even more to her own surprise, dressed for the occasion.