"Terry, no one anywhere on Hope can make twelve hundred fifty dekas for less than a hundred hours' work. You could buy a half a year of Hallanson-Albermayer treatments for that. It's a bleeding fortune!"
"But what you two can do is unique, isn't it? They can't exactly put out a Request For Bids on it."
"That's what he said."
"Mandeville?"
Armand nodded.
It's that nothing-for-nothing work ethic of his. I should know all about it by now. It nearly cost me my shot at him.
"Armand," she said, "there's no way to put a price on something there's no market for, and you can't make a market out of something that no one can make or do. Unique is unique. Would you have been this worried if he'd offered you four hundred a month?"
"I don't know."
"Six? Eight?"
He grimaced. "I see what you're getting at." He rose and writhed to stretch the muscles in his back. "I guess I'll just have to try it out and see. Want to head up to class?"
She stood and hugged him. "We're going to be conspicuous, walking in this late."
He grinned crookedly at her, eyes twinkling. "I'm always conspicuous. I got used to it young. Come on."
***
"They'll do it." Mandeville swept his gaze rapidly back and forth over the faces of the
Inner Circle magnates. Charles Petrus sighed explosively, closed his eyes, and let his chin fall onto his chest. Einar Magnusson's face went slack, and his huge body began to quiver. From Dmitri Ianushkevich there came no reaction, until a single tear painted a track down his face.
"Thank you, Ethan," the parapsychologist said. He threw a glance over his shoulder at the banks of displays, and Mandeville followed it. Tellus was crouched in a corner of his bedroom, huddled into a ball behind his thin, trembling arms. "Have you composed a schedule for the initial sessions yet?"
"No, sir. I imagine we'll begin immediately after they return from the spring break. Unless you'd like me to press them to start right away?"
Ianushkevich smiled faintly. "No, send them home, by all means. There's no point in alarming them at this stage. Also, I'll be having a visitor the day after tomorrow, and it would be better if his grandson were somewhere else."
Magnusson grimaced. Petrus looked away.
"Are there any other preparations we should be making at this stage, Dr. Ianushkevich? Before the conditioning program actually begins, I mean."
The parapsychologist's smile was relaxed. He had plainly shed a huge burden of care in the two minutes just past. "Please, Ethan, call me Dmitri. You're
Inner Circle now, quite as much as the rest of us. No, the ground has already been prepared. The program hasn't changed in twelve hundred years. We've never dared. Just bring us our candidates, and we'll do the rest." Mandeville looked around the little monitoring chamber. It was the first time he'd been admitted to that holy of holies. The rough-hewn granite walls gleamed with veins of galena and cuprite. They made a striking contrast with the banks of displays, the racks of electronics and the thick bundles of cables that connected them. The images of Tellus's gorgeous residential suite, a plush prison designed to pamper and confine the one creature on whom all Hope's Earth-derived life depended, shone forth from the displays in perfect clarity. The image of Tellus himself, a faint shadow of a man sunk into irremediable madness, reminded the graduate student of the price that either Armand or Victoria would have to pay to ransom a hundred million other lives.
He rose from his seat. "I will...Dmitri."
Magnusson opened the chamber door and held it for him as he exited.
***
She sat perfectly still in her back-row seat. Her eyes pointed forward, and there was a pen clutched in her hand, but not one word of the lecture on comparative botany registered on Victoria Peterson's consciousness. She was only dimly aware of her surroundings, and spared no thought for them at all. Her brain was spinning with plans of infiltration, division and conquest.
She would be together with Armand for eighty hours a month. The little blonde bitch who'd gotten her claws into Victoria's rightful property would soon be irrelevant. It wouldn't matter where she was, as long as it was somewhere else.
One month, and Armand would be dating Victoria as often as Teresza. Two months, and he'd be creating excuses to give Teresza, to make more time for Victoria. Six months, and he'd be explaining to Teresza that their backgrounds were too different, that his family had precise expectations for whoever he decided to keep company with, and that he couldn't imagine fitting her to them. A year, and he'd ask Victoria to marry him.
Her mother's notions about withholding herself from him physically had been right on target up to now, but the time was coming to set them aside. She would use her body according to a tactically exact schedule. She had studied the arts of flirtation and courtship, had practiced them when she could, and was confident that she could muster an overwhelming attack upon his lusts.
She would lure him forward without letting him know that he was being lured, draw him into committing himself to her before he could realize that there was no way back. When he was irreversibly hers, she would give him pleasure beyond anything he'd ever imagined, leave him wondering how he could possibly live without her. Boundless fleshly pleasure was a ring in the nose few men could resist.
The corners of her mouth quirked upward. She could have asked for no better opportunity. She would use it to the hilt. This time it would all go as planned. She, her mother, and her brother would be Morelons at last. There would be no more want and no more fear. There would be security, comfort, and innumerable pleasures. When the time came, there would be Hallanson-Albermayer treatments to freeze her metabolic balance and lock her physiology into a condition of mature beauty and health. It could all go on forever.
Her mother would cease to trouble her. She would be able to do as she pleased.
Armand wasn't the only star in the sky. She'd denied herself for years, but once he'd broken her maidenhead, she'd no longer need to restrain her appetites.
Her loins tingled and grew warm with anticipation.
Chapter 10
"And now, ladies and gentlemen," Arne Stromberg boomed, "comes the segment you've all been waiting for, held over by popular demand for its two hundredth smash season: the one on the Hopeless." He paused to beam out over the two hundred students that thronged the lecture hall. Armand, seated in back as usual, leaned forward without realizing it.
"Any questions?" Stromberg asked. Without waiting for a reply, he said, "Good! Enjoy your spring break." He swept up his materials and made a great show of striding offstage to his left. The class produced an uncertain titter. Stromberg stopped and panned the rows of seats.
"What?" the lecturer said. "Still here? But I've told you everything we know about their social structures. I must have missed a raised hand in the back." He trudged back to the lectern and plopped his books down upon it once again. "All right, what would you like to talk about?"
A girl in the front raised her hand. Stromberg acknowledged her.
"Sir, don't we have any data on them?"
Stromberg shook his head. "Not a chipped bit, Miss Malmstrom. There is no intercourse between the Hopeless enclave and the rest of Hope society. Our data net doesn't extend there. We doubt that they have a net of their own. We watch the land bridge, of course, but for more than six hundred years no one has crossed it going south."
A boy to Armand's right raised his hand.
"Yes, Mr. Currie?"
"Could you tell us how the colony got started, sir?"
The lecturer nodded. "That much I can do. In the middle of the second century A.H., a group of six clans disputed the randomicity of the Spacehawks' selection procedures. Probably by coincidence, that group was geographically concentrated north of Tuckerdale, about where Norsland is today. They had two complaints. First, they claimed that their young men were being selected for Spacehawks service with disproportionate frequency. Second, they claimed that, after b
eing selected, their family members tended to be passed over for the much sought after command and administrative positions. They demanded audit after audit of both sets of selection procedures, and were never satisfied that all was as it should be.
"After the wrangle had gone on for a decade or so, the unsatisfied clans petitioned the Judiciary for an Opinion that would exempt them from Spacehawks duty for a century or so. The Judiciary rejected the petition without a hearing, and things flared up much worse. The complainants decided that they would no longer accept being tapped for defense contributions, either for money or for personal service. They ceased to contribute to power-cable maintenance as well, and their neighbors grew incensed. Border incidents and altercations in the market became too frequent to ignore.
"Eventually, a condition of ostracism grew up around those six clans. Word went around that they were too venal and untrustworthy to bother with. Soon they found that no one would trade with them on any basis. They couldn't buy anything, not even a hearing before a circuit judge. The only arbitrations they participated in were ones where some other clan was suing them. Even their youngest were snubbed whenever they ventured into a common area.
"At that time, there were already about two hundred ostrakons living north of the land bridge: petty criminals and embezzlers, people who'd lost the trust of their neighbors and wouldn't do what it took to earn it back. When the six dissident clans joined them, the size of the colony up there swelled to about seven hundred. Shortly thereafter, they closed themselves off completely from the rest of the continent and came to be known as 'the Hopeless.'"
Stromberg paused to leaf through a notebook. "The most recent estimate of the Hopeless population was about eighteen thousand. Their living standard is unknown, but it's probably quite low. Crop cultivation north of the land bridge is very difficult, so they probably eat a lot of fish and not much else. The power cables don't go over the bridge, so if they have electricity, it's locally generated. They have no imports or exports. Beyond that, we know nothing about them. If anyone among them ever ventures among us or contributes to the defense fund, it's anonymously."
A thoughtful silence settled over the class. Presently a young woman three seats away from Armand raised her hand.
"Yes, Miss Gottlieb?"
"Sir, isn't there anything we can do to make them toe the line?"
A nervous murmur passed through the room, then faded quickly away. Armand's chest became tight, as if he'd perceived the approach of a physical threat. Stromberg said quietly, "Do you grasp the implications of what you just said, Miss Gottlieb?"
The girl started to respond, then thought better of it. After a few seconds' silence, Stromberg nodded, a strange, pained expression on his face.
"You're not the first to ask the question, Miss Gottlieb. You won't be the last. But the question itself is far more important than any answer you might get from anyone. Not for its content, which you now realize is offensive -- you do realize that, don't you?"
The girl nodded, her face a deep red.
"Good. Not for its content, but for the ease with which it rose to your lips. Even we of Hope are not above thinking such things. But let's defer the examination of that aspect of it for a moment. Mr. Morelon?"
Armand straightened in his seat. "Uh, yes, sir?"
"Can you tell the class what the budgetary condition of the Spacehawks is this year? As the scion of a major clan, it strikes me as a good bet that you would know."
Armand thought for a moment. "I know they have a big surplus. My grandfather brought them a gift last fall and was told to keep it."
The crowd murmured again. "And what about available personnel, Mr. Morelon? Inadequate, adequate, or more than adequate?"
"Uh, more than adequate, sir. I wanted to intern at the Jacksonville battery last summer, and they had no room for me. I don't know about the other batteries, though."
Stromberg nodded. "They're much the same, you have my word on it. So pure voluntarism and public spirit suffice to keep the Spacehawks well manned and funded."
The lecturer shoved his hands into his pockets and strolled aimlessly about the dais, looking at nothing.
"A long time ago, when I was much younger than any of you, my father took me aside and told me about the Spooner Federation of Earth. It wasn't the first time I'd heard about them. I'd been through a few Sacrifice Day celebrations, and I knew the story of the Great Sacrifice and the Hegira. But my father made it a bit more personal for me than it had ever been. I won't go into details. Suffice it to say that he made me feel the fear and panic of an animal being hunted by remorseless killers, with no way to fight back and nowhere to flee. It was the first time in my life that I was ever afraid. He gave me a taste of what it felt like to be unfree."
Stromberg stopped walking and stared off into the corner of the room.
"It's been four hundred years, and I can still remember it down to the smallest detail. I remember the sense of being squeezed in a vise so tight that I couldn't draw a breath. I remember the fear of stepping without warning into a trap that had swallowed me whole. I remember the need to run, as far and as fast as I could, and to hide my face where no one would see it ever again. And I'd bet my last deka that a healthy majority of your fathers put you through a wringer that was much the same.
"The Great Sacrifice was about freedom. Not the freedom of those who died, of course, but the freedom of those they saved, and their descendants into the unforeseeable future. Half a million men gave their lives so that a handful of others could be free, and their children after them. That's one measure of how precious they held freedom to be. The other, the one my father made more immediate for me that summer day four centuries ago, is the sense of being pursued by a hunter determined to kill or enslave you."
Stromberg returned to his lectern. His eyes settled on the class once more.
"Freedom brings peace. The combination of those things with a little enterprise has made us a rich people. We're so rich that we can devote less than one percent of our resources to our defenses, yet they're so formidable that no conceivable invader could penetrate them. We can squander the power that sustains them, giving it away for free to anyone who wants it, and still have far more than enough. We can rely upon the public spirit of our people to man those defenses so generously that there's a waiting list years long for deep-radar and laser-gunnery training. At the cost of a few hundred hours of service per century from each of us, and a mere crumb of our material wealth, we keep our peace and freedom well defended. We make it possible for there to be a Hopeless colony in the first place.
"So why does it irritate us so much that a handful of people, who are generally substandard by our norms, hangers-on at the edge of our society, should fail to contribute? Don't they have the same rights as the rest of us do? Why are we so ready to contemplate coercing them?"
The class was silent. Stromberg rested his forearms on the lectern and leaned over it.
"Ask yourselves, each of you. You're good people, responsible, self-reliant, ready to rise to any need. By Spooner's lights, you're patriots, even though we have no States to command obedience, no flags to follow into battle, and, for the moment, no enemies to battle against. There are millions more like you, on both continents of Hope. The result is a well-manned, well-funded defense, an equally well-funded Judiciary, and a degree of peace and plenty no other human society has ever known. Yet ninety-nine out of every hundred of us has felt that urge to impose one's will on others by force, despite the absence of an objective need, and the rationale is always the same: they're not doing their fair share."
He paused and turned to Marsha Gottlieb. "Thank you for asking your question, Miss Gottlieb. Someone has to ask it each year, and be embarrassed for doing so, just as someone has to suffer through my demonstration of the State. You've done your classmates a service they might not yet recognize." He turned back to address the larger class. "I suggest that all of you spend a few moments during your spring break pondering the envi
ous impulse that leads to unpleasant ideas such as that one. I'll see you all in two weeks."
As the class dispersed, Armand made his way to where Marsha Gottlieb sat. The young woman was slow to rise, and slow to notice his attention.
"Hey, don't be upset," he murmured. "That's his style. He likes to put people on the spot and force them to think about what they're saying. I noticed it in the first couple of classes."
The expression in her brown eyes was curious and a little bruised. "Do you think that's why he calls on you so much?"
"Huh?"
"You're Armand Morelon, right?" There was no missing the emphasis. "Half the people here, he hasn't called on since the beginning of the semester, but he calls on you once or twice in every class. Didn't you notice?"
"Uh, well, yes, I guess I did, but --"
"Is he trying to put you on the spot?"
Armand's eyes darted to the front of the room. Stromberg was shoving books and papers into his old briefcase.
"I don't know, Miss. Maybe I'll ask him. Enjoy your break."
He threaded his way through the crowd and reached the dais just as Stromberg was about to make his exit.
"Professor?"
"Yes, Mr. Morelon?"
"Do you have a few minutes to talk to me?"
The old sociologist's eyes sharpened and a slight, mysterious smile curved his mouth. "Certainly, lad. Come join me in my office."
They went upstairs to Stromberg's modest office in the sociology wing. The little room was filled with books and scholarly journals, a profusion of printed matter that all but precluded human occupancy. The desk's surface was crammed with papers that threatened to slide off at all four edges. Stromberg had to shift a pile of journals from the guest chair to the floor to make room for Armand to sit.
"What was on your mind, Mr. Morelon?"
Armand squirmed in his seat. Marsha Gottlieb's notion had become a subject he was embarrassed to introduce.
"Uh, well, sir, it's just that one of the other students, ah, --"
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