She ran to hug him when we stepped off the ramp.
"All okay." Smiling into his face, she looked fit enough and trimly attractive. "It was a great adventure, really. We were cutting a road across the flood plain to the Styx."
That was the great river than drained half the rainy lowlands.
"Kiff McCall." He introduced me. "A runaway rebel, in flight from the wrath of Cleon III."
"From old Earth?" She appraised me with clear green eyes, smiled, and gave me a strong handshake. "I want to hear all about it."
"I want to hear about the jungle."
"They call it hell, but I had a great year there!" Flushed with the excitement of the moment, she was beautiful. "We got all the way to the river. Set up a sawmill. Cut lumber to build a little boat with a sawmill engine. The first steamer on the Styx."
I stood stupidly silent, longing for her to like me and thinking how she would hate me when she learned what I was.
"Kiff will be our guest," Bart told her. "If you can find him a room.
"I certainly can."
She wanted to carry my bag. It held things I didn't want to show, a gun, my long-range radio, electronic gear to record and encode my reports to the admiral. I clung to it, and followed her through the store. Flushed with pride in Bart and his daring voyages, she showed me tables stacked with goods he had brought in: books and holo sets, watches, radios, computers.
"Things we don't make yet," she said. "But we're learning fast."
Uneasy with her, thinking of the painful lessons the admiral would soon be teaching, I followed her through the tables loaded with local goods. Shoes and clothing, hardware, flour, dried meats, native fruits and nuts with names strange to me.
A clerk was filling an order, punching prices into a barter card. As eager as a child with a birthday, she showed me a hunting rifle she wanted to buy with her savings from the service year. It was the work of a native craftsman, beautifully finished, the stock inlaid with silver, but useless to stop the admiral's battlecraft.
The family lived at the back of the single-story building. We left my bag in a clean little room with white-plastered walls and a comfortable bed, and she took me to meet her father. We found him at a desk facing a big window that looked out across the wide green valley to that old volcano in the south.
A heavy man with a withered leg, he gripped the edges of the desk to haul himself upright and shake my hand. I saw patches of dead-white scar tissue on his face and hands, saw his grimace of pain. Yet his grasp was strong. He smiled warmly at me and then at Laurel, when she came to put her arm around him.
"Relics of the hell country." He raised his hands to show the scars. "I spent my service year there, back before we discovered angel wood. Laurel was luckier."
"Kiff's a freedom fighter," she told him. "In flight from Cleon III"
"Welcome, sir!" He shook my hand again. "They'll never touch you here."
Sitting again, he listened to my cover story with a shrewd intentness that left me afraid he might see through the lies.
"We'll keep you safe." Laurel's eyes were shining. "You'll like it here."
She took me out see the town, a cluster of low stone buildings along a single cobblestone street. There were no motor vehicles, but I saw people on huge ungainly native creatures she called camels, larger than the Terran sort and able to carry half a ton of weight.
"I rode them down into the rain country," she told me. "They have evil tempers, but they're addicted to the silvernuts that grow there. When one gets unruly, a handful of nuts will make him kneel and beg."
She pointed to wires strung from poles along the street.
"Something my grandfather brought us. He found a junkyard of wrecked landing craft down in the desert where they used to unload the convicts, and salvaged parts to rebuild one that got him off the planet. He got aboard an old prison transport that had been lost in orbit when mutineers killed the officers.
"He taught himself skip navigation from the texts and tools he found aboard. The first skip took him nowhere, but a few more got him out to the home planet of our ancestors. He found kinsmen, made Free Space friends—and spent a dozen years on Earth learning everything he could. He'd abandoned the old transport, but he finally got home in a modern ship, with a cargo that changed life here."
I hated to think how Gilliyar would change it again.
"Electricity!" Her voice had risen. "Lights. Telephones. Radio. We've found no oil or coal to burn for power, but now we have windmill generators up in mountain gaps where the trade winds are steady. I wish we could get nuclear power."
I thought of the fusion engines on the admiral's battlecraft.
* * *
That uneasy awareness of my mission kept me troubled and silent that evening at dinner. Laurel's mother, Martha, had grown most of the food in her own kitchen garden. A genial, generous woman, she kept piling my plate with servings too large and seemed troubled that I had no better appetite.
In spite of such a welcome, the passing days left me no happier. I was there for months, waiting for Gilliyar's armada to arrive in orbit and preparing to tell him that the outlaws had no defenses worth concern. Laurel arranged a barter card for me. In return, I agreed to teach classes or tutor students in what they wanted to know about the outside worlds.
She became my first student. My cover story made me a romantic figure in her mind, the lone survivor of a heroic rebellion crushed by ruthless Terran power. Her face used to light when she saw me, in a way that wrenched my heart. I knew the truth would come out, knew it would destroy me.
I longed to reveal myself and beg for her forgiveness. Yet I was still a Terran soldier, bound by my oath of allegiance and a lifetime of loyal emotion, hopelessly trapped by all the lies I had told. Keeping silent because I had to, I let her enjoy the days that brought a tortured joy to me. She became an eager guide to her world: the lofty ridge that sliced like a blade between the jungle and the desert. She had seen enough of the jungle, but she took me on a camel down a winding mountain trail to an oasis on the high desert. A long day of clinging to a clumsy wooden seat on the back of the lurching beast left me sun-blistered and aching.
The torrid sun was low before we could dismount at the edge of a tiny lake at the end of a dry stream that ran down from the highlands in the monsoon season. It was on a stony plateau, the low desert and the vast salt marshes on the coast still a full mile farther down, but even after sunset the heat was stifling. Laurel used her barter card to pay for our rooms and meals at a lodge where her brother had worked through his social service year.
She gave me a little handful of bright green beans.
"The seed of the angel tree," she said. "A shrub from down along the coast. It's a natural drug for hell fever. We're trying to grow it here.
I chewed one of the seeds. Its sharp astringency burned my mouth, bitter as my own predicament.
"It's better than it tastes." She laughed at the face I made. "It saved my father's life."
Radiant at breakfast next morning, she wanted to show me the rows of young angel trees her brother had planted, and took me through a little museum that held the relics of a tragic chapter in the planet's history. A shipload of Free Space convicts had been left at the oasis with no supplies. Nearly half of them died. Gunter Greenlaw led the team that opened the road and got the survivors to the Vale.
"We earned our liberty," she told me.
* * *
Later, we rode south to ski on the slopes of that dead volcano. The road ran beside the Avalon through gardens, fruit orchards, grain fields, green meadows where spotted cattle grazed the slopes above us. Laurel spoke proudly of the pioneers who had tamed a hostile wilderness, dammed mountain streams for water, cleared land for crops and cattle, built their new society.
The beast's lurching gait kept bumping us together on the high wooden seat. Tormented by her body warmth, breathing her haunting scent, listening to her easy laugh, I tried to contain tides of wild desire and bitter despai
r.
At the lodge I offered my card and asked for two rooms.
"One will do," she told the clerk, and turned to grin at me. "I love you, Kiff. You do like me, don't you?"
Trapped in a tangle of emotions, I stammered that I did.
"Do you think we must be married?" The clerk stared, and she laughed at me. "You've talked about your government and how it limits all you do. We have more freedom here."
The clerk punched my card for just one room, but I needed time to sort my tangled feelings out. I said I felt hungry. We had dinner and a bottle of wine, out on a terrace below the snows. She admired the view and asked if we had snow sports on Earth. I found little to say.
"Kiff, you are hard to understand." She pushed her glass aside and leaned to stare into my face. "Even when I know how different your old world was. Are you unhappy here? Is there someone you love back outside?"
Honestly, I told her there was no one. Still I couldn't tell her what I felt, but the wine had begun to dull my reservations. When it was gone, we went to bed together. She was passionate. I half forgot my mission. Honestly, I told her I loved her, but all I couldn't say choked me with bitter shame.
* * *
We spent three days there. There were no lifts, but a big windmill drove an endless cable that pulled us to the top. The sun was bright, the slope great fun. Laurel was more intoxicating than the wine. She seemed radiant, imagining our future together.
"My brother has Free Space friends," she told me. "They say the star worlds have to change. He hopes we can make some kind of peaceful contact with them. Do you think a time will come when I can go with you back to the stars?"
"That would be wonderful," I told her. "If it could happen."
I knew it was impossible.
* * *
My radio stayed dead until the night when I found a green light flashing. Admiral Gilliyar was overhead, on a geosynchronous orbit that kept his armada over the highland ridge. I spent the rest of the night transmitting my recorded notes and pictures.
The sonic boom of an emerging skip craft pealed out of the sky while we were at breakfast a few mornings later. Jets roared overhead. A clerk rushed in, shouting that a Terran lander was down on the pad. A sleek little craft, it carried the Terran flag painted on its armored flank. Black-muzzled guns jutted out of the top turret.
Nobody got off. It sat there nearly an hour, while uneasy citizens gathered around it. A door dropped at last to make a ramp. I heard a roll of martial music. A flagman led a squad of riflemen down the ramp. A cameraman followed, set up a tripod, and shot Admiral Gilliyar marching out of the air lock in dress blue and gold, medals flashing on his breast.
Moving with the music, he took the flag and stabbed the sharpened staff into the ground. He turned, found me standing with my hosts in the watching crowd, and called my name. I stood there a moment, caught in confusion and bleak regret, before I stumbled toward him. Laurel ran to overtake me and threw her arms around me.
"Kiff!" she whispered. "I've always been afraid they'd come after you. Can't we help?"
I stood there an endless time trembling in her arms, too sick to speak. Breathing at last, I muttered that I was sorry, terribly sorry. I kissed her. Sobbing, she clung to me.
"I never meant—never meant to hurt you." The words stuck in my throat. "But I'm a spy. In the service of Cleon III and the Terran Republic."
She gripped my arms and stared at me, her wide eyes strange with shock. Blind with my own sudden tears I pulled out of her grasp, blundered on toward the admiral, and stopped to give him a stiff salute. Smiling, he returned the salute and came on to shake my hand. The little crowd had fallen silent, waiting till he turned and spoke.
"I am Terran Space Admiral Acton Gilliyar."
He paused for a moment before he went on, his mellow eloquence echoing off the long stone wall. He came in peace, to bring President Cleon Stawhawke's most cordial greetings and a heartfelt welcome into the Republic. I hardly heard the booming words. I was watching Laurel.
Her face white and stiff at first, she flushed pink. Her small fists clenched. Glaring at me with a look that changed from shock to scornful contempt, she spat on the ground.
"The President regrets your long neglect," his polished voice rolled on. "I understand that you are trying to survive here in a stare of lawless anarchy. I have come to bring you the law and order of Terran civilization. President Starhawke has appointed me the first governor of the planet Lucifer."
Muttering, people stared at one another and back at him.
"Sir!" Laurel's voice rang loud, heated perhaps by her anger at me. "We want none of your Republic." She looked around at those beside her, saw them nodding with agreement. "We need none of you!"
"Madam." He raised his voice, his tone grown harder. "With all due respect, I must inform you that your planet has belonged to the Terran Republic since the discoverers landed here and raised our flag."
"Non—nonsense, sir!" She caught her breath and lifted her quivering voice. "You threw us out of your wicked empire, and left us here to die. We've earned our freedom and we'll die to keep it."
"You may die. You'll never keep it."
"We'll never give it up."
"I must warn you, madam, that your words are a reckless incitement to treason." His voice slow and grimly solemn, he looked around at the little crowd and fixed his eyes on her. "If you want to die, the choice is yours. In modern times, suspected traitors are no longer merely exiled. The penalty now is death."
I heard a stifled outcry from her mother, a furious oath from her father. Friends gathered around them in a muttering group. The admiral turned to lift his hand at nose of the lander. The martial music rose again. He ordered his rifle squad back to the ramp. Laurel darted past them to the flag, pulled the staff out of the ground, and hurled it against the side of the lander. She stood staring at him and then at me, breathing hard.
"We witnessed that outrageous act of open treason!" he shouted at her. "What is your name?"
"Laurel Greenlaw." She tossed her head. "What is yours?"
"Acton Gilliyar." He grinned at her bleakly. "We'll be meeting again."
He beckoned to me. I followed him and the riflemen aboard. A warning siren screeched. Looking down from the control turret, I saw people scattering. Laurel stood closer, shaking here fist, dwindling to a defiant doll as we lifted.
* * *
The admiral landed us at half a dozen towns up and down the Avalon, at the ski lodge below the volcano, the oasis down on the desert, at a lumber camp on the headwaters of the Styx. At each stop he went off with his rifle squad to read his proclamations. A few people hooted. Nobody cheered.
We climbed back to the geosynchronous point. He broadcast an ultimatum demanding unconditional submission. The colonists must accept the rule of the democratic Terran Republic, swear allegiance to President Cleon III, welcome Terran landing forces, pay Terran taxes, obey orders from him as their newly appointed governor. Unless he received a signal of surrender within three days, he would be forced, however unwillingly, to take whatever measures the situation might require.
"There will be no signal," I warned him. "There is no government, nobody with authority to surrender."
"I expected opposition from the like of that Greenlaw woman." He shook his head, his jaw set hard. "These people were condemned and sent here as outlaw enemies of the state. They are enemies and outlaws still. If they want a lesson in Terran power, I'll give them a lesson."
Waiting three days in orbit, he received no signal of surrender. His lesson was a volley of guided missiles.
"I'm remaining on the flagship," he told me. "It will be my official residence. Captain Crendock is going down as my executive secretary with orders to secure the planet and establish administrative control."
He was startled when I wanted to go back to Benspost.
"Why?" He gave me a hard look. "You won't find friends there."
Uncomfortably, I tried to explain my own torn
feelings.
"I'm still loyal," I told him, "bound by my duty to the Republic. But I did make friends there. People were generous to me. I was fascinated with their history. I want to write it for the whole Republic."
"Forget your pet traitors," he advised me. "That Greenlaw woman is no friend now."
"Yet she is making history. History worth recording."
"Better get back to Terra while you can." He gave me a stiff half-smile. "You were warned to expect no public recognition, but we will surely find something for you."
He called me a fool when I shook my head.
I had to go back to find Laurel, to try to explain what I had done, to beg her to understand. I didn't tell him that, but in the end, he replaced my lost radio and holo camera and let me go back down to Benspost with Crendock. A missile had struck there, and little remained of old Ben Greenlaw's trading post.
Yet life went on. I saw camels loaded with lumber and tile to repair shattered buildings. Bart was back again from some Terran planet with another illicit cargo. We found his skipcraft undamaged, standing on the pad near the ashes and fallen walls.
"Leave him alone," Gilliyar had ordered. "I hope to legalize the trade and impose excise taxes.
Camels were tethered around his ship, the drivers loading them with goods he had brought. His crew was loading it again with exports: nuts and dried fruit from the desert lowlands, rare hardwoods and balls of raw rubber from the rain forest.
His parents had set up a new barter center in a tent on a vacant lot. His mother burst into tears when she saw me, and ran back into the tent. His father sat in his wheelchair behind a rough table, surrounded with whatever his clerks had been able to salvage. I thought he seemed sick, the splotches of his old jungle fever infection livid and swollen.
He looked up at me with an enigmatic expression.
"Well, sir?" He shook his head. "I never expected to see you again."
"I'm a historian," I said. "I came back to write the history of the colony. And I want to see your daughter."
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