Ground opened up the circuit.
‘Thanks a lot,’ I said. ‘This is the Hooded Swan again.’
‘I know who it is,’ said the deep voice. ‘What do you want now?’
‘You know bloody well what we want,’ I said. ‘The White Fire just went down.’
‘That’s our problem,’ he said.
I knew that Charlot wanted to take over, so I peeled the hood off and waved him to go ahead.
‘Identify yourself,’ demanded Charlot. ‘Give your rank and name.’
‘This is Lieutenant Delgado of the Zodiac crew,’ came the reply.
‘Well, you listen to me, Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘This is Titus Charlot of New Alexandria, and you’d better find me someone with a whole lot more authority to talk to. If you don’t know what my name means I suggest that you check with the embassy from New Rome. I want the captain, but if you can’t get him in a hurry get me whoever you can. I want to talk to someone now who can get something done. And when you’ve got him, get the New Rome authority and someone from the families as well. This is something you can’t handle and you’d better believe that.’
That’s the sort of approach which almost invariably works when dealing with military types. The Lieutenant wasn’t real military, of course, but rank is rank and the Zodiac crew still functioned like a crew.
‘The proper authorities have been informed,’ said Delgado serenely. ‘Representatives from New Rome are being consulted. You will be informed in due course of the decision which has been taken.’
‘Now just you wait a minute, Delgado,’ said Charlot, drawing a deep breath.
‘Careful, Titus,’ I murmured. ‘Your humanity is showing.’
He ignored me. ‘You are toying with the future of your people,’ he said to Delgado. It seemed a bit strong to me, but Charlot was pulling all the stops out. Half measures weren’t going to get a look-in. He was determined to carry this one by simple bluster. ‘If you don’t know that a kidnapper using your planet as a refuge spells big trouble then you have no right to be at the other end of this circuit,’ he said. ‘You have refused us permission to apprehend a known criminal, and you have failed to do so yourselves. The White Fire will lift inside five minutes, and that makes you the accessory to a crime. With your co-operation we could have ended this whole affair, but you’ve contrived to turn it into a diplomatic incident. We demand your co-operation now in tracking down the kidnapper and the victim. Now get off this circuit and give me someone who’s empowered to give me that co-operation.’
Strong stuff.
A new voice issued from the speaker.
‘This is Commander Hawke of the Zodiac,’ it said. ‘Your official request is noted. We have no evidence that any crime has been committed. We had not, and have not, any grounds for apprehending the White Fire. The ship had no permission to land, but that is entirely our affair and we intend taking no action. When we have been approached by the proper authorities we will consider your request for assistance in this matter. Permission to land is refused.’
Sock it to ’em, son, I thought. Don’t be railroaded. Stick up for your rights. I didn’t say a word out loud lest my loyalties be questioned.
‘This is Titus Charlot of New Alexandria,’ said Charlot. ‘I am the administrator of the Anacaon colony on New Alexandria. The security of that colony is my sole responsibility. I have the legal right to demand that you give me all possible assistance in carrying out my responsibilities toward the members of that colony. One of them has been kidnapped and the kidnapper is currently at large on your world. This situation is due entirely to your lack of co-operation. If you do not immediately review your position and give us all the help we need I will request official intervention by the Law Enforcement Agencies of New Rome.’
As he stopped, he glanced at me, and I could see the glitter in his eye. He thought he was winning.
I thought he was winning, too, unless Hawke could come back just as strong.
But Hawke had faltered. He was thinking instead of holding fast.
‘Can you give us proof of what you say?’ he demanded.
‘It can be proven,’ said Charlot.
‘Then prove it.’
‘We are in possession of a warrant for the arrest of the Anacaon woman known as Lenah, late of the New Alexandrian colony.’
‘The warrant comes from New Rome?’ Hawke queried, knowing damn well it didn’t.
‘The warrant was issued in full accordance with the Law of New Rome,’ said Charlot firmly.
There was another pregnant pause. ‘The woman will be arrested,’ said Hawke finally.
‘When?’
‘As soon as possible.’
‘That’s not good enough. A girl has been kidnapped. A child. We demand the immediate mounting of a search party, and we further demand that our personnel should accompany that party. We demand that all possible resources be brought to bear.’
‘They will be,’ said Hawke, offhandedly. ‘But we cannot accede to your request to land.’
‘You’d better,’ said Charlot, unpleasantly and succinctly, ‘or I’ll have a New Roman cruiser here with six hundred troops.’
That was a big lie, and I knew it. But did Hawke? And what would the New Roman Embassy have to say about the magnitude of such a threat, coming, as it did, from an administrator of the Library?
‘You’ll have to wait,’ said Hawke sharply.
‘How long?’ said Charlot, reluctant to let it go.
‘You’ll have your answer within the hour,’ he said.
‘Make it twenty minutes,’ said Charlot.
‘One hour,’ said Hawke. ‘You are ordered to wait.’ He put a faint but definite stress on the word ‘ordered.’
The circuit snapped shut.
‘I don’t think you handled that very well,’ I told Charlot
‘I don’t care what you think,’ he replied. He was still mad.
‘I could have done it better myself,’ I remarked, trying to needle him. I’d probably never have another opportunity.
But he shut up tight. The long wait began again.
I was tired.
Better not lean on him, counselled the wind. All kinds of things might happen yet. If this doesn’t come off, the last thing you want is for him to blame you.
He can’t blame me, I said.
Just don’t give him the chance, he said. Remember just who has to look after Charlot’s end on the planet, if you ever do get down. He won’t be doing any legwork in the jungle himself, no matter how important this issue is to him.
That, of course, was true.
Ah, I said, we’ll never get down there. They aren’t going to fall for the gunboat threat.
They don’t know any better, he said.
And he was right about that, too.
I continued to talk to him, to while away the time, but we didn’t have anything of vital importance to discuss. I was just trying to keep my attention alive against the declining effect of my last stimshot. I didn’t know whether I ought to take another or not. Whether we landed within the hour or were condemned to stay up forever, the chances of getting to sleep soon looked reasonably good.
The conversation drifted away from the issue at hand to other less memorable and less relevant affairs. The conversation was not unpleasant, but it is perhaps more important to record that it was not purposeful. It was idle chatter, nothing more. That’s some measure of the bonhomie which we’d cultivated of late. The constant stress and strife of the caves of Rhapsody had been left behind in those caves, along with the infernal darkness. It no longer seemed to matter quite so much that the wind was by no means impotent in physical terms. It had seemed a matter of tremendous importance while we’d been in the caves, but it didn’t seem tremendous now. I was coming round to measuring him by what he said and what he did rather than by what he was potentially capable of doing. I was reasonably sure that he posed no meaningful threat to my beloved egocentricity and independence of spirit. There has
to come a time when you stop fighting things and learn to live with them. It was getting to be that way with the wind. The transition from one attitude to the other had not been abrupt, but it had been considerable. I was forming the opinion that if the wind was changing me at all, then he was changing me for the better. The wind, of course, had told me so all along, but he was too polite to remind me now.
At the end of the hour, Commander Hawke came back on to the circuit and told us we could land. He also told us that we could have the full co-operation of the Zodiac crew in following up the matter of the illegal landing of the White Fire and its human cargo.
On one condition.
Even that was better than we had expected, from Charlot’s point of view. Instead of only one of us being able to join the search, they would accept two of us. I stress that this was better from Charlot’s point of view. Not from mine. Charlot nominated Eve, and—of course—me.
Captain Eve. And Crewman Grainger.
I knew it was going to be a bad trip.
CHAPTER SIX
If either of us thought that Commander Hawke’s capitulation meant that things were destined to go our way, then we were quickly disillusioned. Under pressure, the children of the Zodiac permitted us to land. Under pressure, they agreed to mount a search for the people landed by the White Fire (the ship itself, of course, had taken off again, and I never expected to hear from her—it’s easy enough to change a name and get new papers). Under pressure, they let us join in. All very nice. We appreciated it. Until we found out what their idea of a full-scale search was.
There were two of us. There were also two of them. They were called Max and Linda. They hated each other. Linda was a member of the Zodiac crew. She was nominally our liaison officer—to help us in our dealings with the Anacaona. She was supposed to be an anthropologist. She was a nice person, and about as useful as Eve, which wasn’t very.
Max was a Family man—he bore the name of two of the most influential of the Zodiac’s twelve eugenic units. He was what passed for the Law on Chao Phrya. He wasn’t really a policeman—more a kind of fake Texas ranger. His function seemed to be more concerned with making sure that we weren’t about to indulge in any subversive activities while we were treading on the sacred soil than rendering us any effective assistance.
We didn’t meet Max and Linda until we’d been taken a safe distance away from the port. They didn’t want us complaining to Charlot. We weren’t allowed our own medical supplies. The Chao Phryans were bent on turning the whole thing into a farce. Charlot’s threats had made them shift their ground, all right. But all the bluster had confirmed their absolute determination to make things as difficult as humanly possible while still yielding to our perfectly legal demands.
I was dead sure that I didn’t want to go walking around in any jungles under the conditions which the Zodiac people were insistent upon, but there was damn little I could do. Eve handled the protests which we distributed liberally almost every minute of the first day we were down, but she got absolutely no change at all. They were doing all they could, and they were doing all we had asked them to do. Take it or leave it.
I would have left it. Eve took it. She thought it was best to try, no matter how poor they insisted on making our chances. I had to take the orders. I knew I could look after myself, and probably after Eve as well, but I wouldn’t have bet good money on our chances of success.
Oddly enough, I don’t think either of our two indigenous compatriots was in on the big joke. They seemed to take it one hundred percent seriously. They didn’t like us, but they were willing to get along with us, and they were honestly optimistic about our chances.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Linda. ‘It’s only a matter of time. These people can’t hide from the Anacaona, wherever they are. The forest people will find them.’
The theory was all very fine. But could we count on the help of the Anacaona? After all, both of the people we were looking for were Anacaona. Why would the forest people give them up to us?
But Linda was most definite about that. ‘You don’t know the Anacaona,’ she told me. ‘We can be absolutely sure of their co-operation.’
‘How come?’ I wanted to know.
‘The Anacaona always co-operate,’ she told us. She didn’t know why, and she couldn’t explain it. But she was sure.
Linda Petrosian was about twenty-eight standard years, with dyed silver hair and strong, well-shaped features. She was very handsome, as befitted someone descended from a population which had been eugenically controlled for nineteen generations. She was a devout believer in the Promised Land. She was devoted to the soil and the air and everything that grew or walked on Chao Phrya. She loved it all, because it was hers. Charlot had led me to believe that the crew might be a step back from the ultimate possessiveness of the Families, simply by virtue of the fact that they had a tradition of control over the Zodiac story. But Linda’s commitment, at least; was no less for that. If anything, she was more fanatical—or prejudiced, since she wasn’t violent about it—than I would have expected after a full century plus of life on the surface. She was certainly more dedicated than Max Volta-Tartaglia. Perhaps it was because the crew had the tradition of organisation and responsibility that they clung harder to the prop of faith.
Linda was supposed to be an expert on the Anacaona, but well before the time I set eyes on my first native I knew that she was a very inexpert expert. She loved the Anacaona, honestly and genuinely, but any concept of the Anacaona as a self-contained and self-ordained cultural species was quite beyond her. The Anacaona, so far as she was concerned, were a part of the Promised Land. They had properties and characteristics. She knew a lot about them, but it was all descriptive. She knew no why or how. All her knowledge of the Anacaona wasn’t worth a damn, so far as I could see. She was perfectly happy to see them freed from slavery, but she had no conception whatsoever of why New Rome had insisted so urgently that they should be freed. She thought it was because slavery was cruel. She thought that the Anacaona ought to be educated and allowed to take a proper place in the culture of the Promised Land. Human culture. In her own way, she was just as bent on cultural genocide as the landfall generation had been. Only she was killing them with kindness. Her most treasured ambition was to turn the Anacaona into fake human beings with an appropriate depth of devotion and love for the Promised Land.
I could almost like and admire Linda Petrosian, except for the fact that she was not sane.
I could never have liked Max Volta-Tartaglia, any more than he could ever have liked me. He was a practical man. He knew that the universe was a lot bigger than any miserable plot of Promised Land. He knew that the stars weren’t just lights in the sky and that they couldn’t be treated as such. He hated New Rome and New Alexandria and all outworlders, but he knew that someday his world was going to have to come to terms with them, and he saw no point in remaining wilfully blind to the fact. He didn’t want to open the planet, but he did favour an end to vain stupidity and diplomatic farce. He wanted to deal with realities. If only his attitude to the selfsame realities hadn’t been so ludicrously and implacably hostile he might have made a lot of sense. As it was, he was a great big pain in the neck. He was amenable to argument and rationality, but he wore the chip on his shoulder as if it was a medal, and he was an out-and-out bastard.
Eve compared him to me a couple of tunes. She could have been just a little bit right, in some respects, but not in the important ones. I am, above all else, a capable man.
Max wasn’t.
Time passed very quickly on Chao Phrya. The days were only seventeen hours long. But we were forced to waste so much of that time that my patience was very badly frayed before we had even started on our search.
I found out all of what I’ve set down so far concerning Max and Linda in a very short space of time. Eve and I were forced to live virtually in their pockets, and they hardly stopped talking for the first three days. They took great pains to explain themselves, and greater pain
s to explain that they were in no way apologising for themselves or for the attitude that their superiors were taking in handling our problem. They had a genuine desire for us to understand their part in the scheme of things. But they didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry to get on with the scheme of things.
Nobody seemed to give any consideration at all to the fact that a little girl had been abducted. Nobody considered that there might be any urgency. The Zodiac people were concerned only about us, not at all about the purpose of our mission.
To tell the truth, I found time to wonder about what kind of trouble, if any, the girl might be in. It was very difficult to make any kind of sense out of this supposed crime. It must have taken a great deal of money to set up, and there seemed to be no obvious profit in it for the woman concerned. Baby-snatching is an old crime, of course, but this was a very big baby, and the mechanics of the thing were all wrong. The escape from New Alexandria had been carefully planned. Otherwise, it could never have succeeded.
We began our journey from the port in a jeep. We had only a packsack apiece, so little had we been allowed to bring with us from the Swan. We transferred from the jeep to a train, which took us to the capital. I expected to be transferred to some faster form of transport there, so as to get us to the theatre of operations with all due speed, but that was far too optimistic.
For a start, there was no faster form of transport available. The Chao Phryans had only short-range planes, and they were all operational at the frontier of Zodiac civilisation. A long way away.
On top of that, the Zodiac people had no intention of letting us begin our long journey at once. There were formalities. Lots of them. The only time I was ever glad that Eve was along was while we were kicking our heels in the capital. She had to handle the formalities. They must have threatened even her placid temper.
The capital city had been established, naturally enough, on the spot where the Zodiac came down. It was one great big showplace. We saw the Zodiac and a lot more. We weren’t allowed to miss out. The last thing we wanted to be doing was sightseeing, so that was the first thing they made us do. All the while they assured us that there was no trouble, that they were only trying to make things easier, that matters in the forest were well under control, that we could rely on the Anacaona.
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