The Winds of Altair

by Ben Bova

  Dr. Carbo's face slid into his view. "Are you okay?"

  Jeff blinked. His eyes felt gummy. "Sure . . ."

  Amanda came up, smiling, and started to unbuckle his cuffs. "You must be tired. You've had a couple of big days "

  "A couple? Oh, yeah, of course." Jeff felt somebody—Dr. Carbo, of course—lifting the helmet off his head. His scalp itched . . . no, tingled.

  "Wait a minute," Amanda said softly. "Don't try to sit up yet."

  She disappeared from his view for a moment. I wonder what Crown's doing without me?

  Amanda came back with a plastic cup filled with an orange-colored liquid. "Here, drink this," she said. "It'll bring your strength back. Hard work, lying on that couch for two days."

  "Two days . . . right." Jeff sipped at the drink. It tasted cold and sweet.

  "Go on, finish it. Won't spoil your dinner."

  Jeff sat up and swung his legs over the side of the couch. Amanda stood right beside him, smiling, her hand on his shoulder.

  "What time is it?" he asked.

  Amanda glanced at her wrist. "Five after six."

  Nearly sundown.

  "I'll walk you back to your dorm," Amanda said.

  "I can make it myself," Jeff replied, but not very strongly.

  "You've been flat on your back for more than thirty hours. We've had the vibrators stimulating your muscles, but you might still be a little woozy."

  Jeff tried standing up and was glad that she was there to lean on. "Yeah," he admitted. "I see what you mean."

  "Come on, I'll make dinner for you. You've had enough liquid nourishment. How about some real food?"

  With a grin, Jeff nodded. "I'm starving," he realized.

  Amanda laughed. "Next stop, Amanda's gourmet kitchen."

  Carbo stood by the instrument panel, watching them wordlessly as Amanda walked Jeff out of the laboratory, her arm around his shoulders.

  For long moments he stared at the door after it closed behind them. Then with a tight-lipped scowl on his swarthy face, he went back to reviewing the data from the day's work.

  CHAPTER 6

  Jeff had never seen the quarters of a member of the technical staff. They were all housed in a dome on the opposite side of the Village from the domes of the students.

  Amanda's apartment started with a spacious living room, furnished with big viewscreens and comfortable sofas, carpets scattered across the plastic flooring and tapestries hung on the walls, all in the slashing bold yellows and ochres and rich browns of her native Congo.

  Then there was the kitchen, not much bigger than a short, wide aisle crammed with gadgetry on either side. But it was all for her and her alone. No one shared it. And just the dining area between the kitchen and the living room was almost as big as Jeff's dorm room.

  "Bathroom's down the hall," Amanda said with a wave of her hand.

  Jeff took the hint and went off to wash up. He passed the open door of her bedroom and saw that it was dominated by a large bed, rumpled and unmade, a zebra patterned coverlet lying carelessly halfway over a corner of it, halfway on the floor.

  Jeff hesitated a moment at the bedroom doorway, his mind suddenly filled with pictures of Amanda on that bed, her dark skin shining against the white sheets.

  He shook his head to drive such thoughts from his mind and stepped resolutely into the bathroom. He splashed plenty of cold water on his face before returning to the kitchen.

  "The place is in a mess, I'm sorry," Amanda was saying as she pulled foil-covered trays from racks built into the kitchen wall and popped them into the microwave oven. "You've been keeping us pretty busy, you know."

  Jeff did not answer. He watched her, noticing for the first time how her white medical uniform both concealed and revealed her trim feminine figure.

  The wall phone buzzed.

  "Answer phone," Amanda sang out.

  The ten-centimeter picture screen above the phone's speaker grill fluttered momentarily, then formed an image of Bishop Foy. He looked even grimmer than usual.

  "Dr. Kolwezi, is Jeffrey Holman there with you?"

  Amanda's eyes darted toward Jeff, then back to the screen. "Yes, he is," she answered. A little guiltily, Jeff thought.

  "I want to see you both in my office," Foy said, in his scratchy thin voice. "At once!"

  "But Bishop Foy . . ."

  "At once!" The screen went blank.

  Amanda carefully pressed the phone's OFF button, making certain that neither sound nor picture could be transmitted, before she muttered, "Someday I'm going to spit in that man's face."

  Jeff felt shocked. Foy was a pain, of course, but he was a Bishop. He wielded authority, and a Believer never argued against authority, no matter how he felt inwardly.

  Still muttering angrily to herself, Amanda flicked the switch that turned off the oven and headed for the door, not even glancing behind her to see if Jeff was following.

  Amanda Kolwezi was the only black woman in the class of one hundred fifty-four at the University of London. She was the only black and the only woman to receive both an M.D. and Ph.D. simultaneously. But the day of her graduation was not a happy one. She had received an official telegram the evening before, from the government in Congo, that her brother had been killed by government troops in an anti-guerrilla battle in some obscure dusty little town in the nation's southernmost, poorest province.

  Amanda went through the long, tedious graduation ceremony alone. Her fellow students, many of them the closest friends she had in the world, thought that she looked very haughty and aloof on graduation day.

  "Has it finally gone to Amanda's head?" they wondered. "Has she finally realized that she's the most brilliant one of us all?"

  After the long speeches, and the awarding of diplomas, after the processional march and the hymns and the congratulations, Amanda left the others to celebrate with their families. She raced back to her tiny flat, hiking up the skirts of her maroon graduation gown in both hands as her long legs carried her down the shower-glistening narrow streets of London.

  Keno Jumyata was already in her flat when she got there.

  Amanda felt no surprise. She hadn't expected Keno consciously, but now that she saw him lolling on her shabby, sagging bed, she realized that she had been waiting for him to show up for the past several days.

  She closed her door and heard its lock click. No need to ask Keno how he got into her room; he could charm, bully, or infiltrate his way anywhere, she knew.

  He was handsome, with the strong graceful body of a black lion and a disarming smile that made Amanda's heart flutter even now, even though she knew that he used it as deliberately as a soldier uses a gun.

  "I heard about your brother," Keno said, without preamble.

  "Were you there with him?" she asked, her voice flat and hard. She knew he hadn't been.

  "No. I was in the capital. I flew here to you at once."

  Amanda pulled the graduation gown over her head and let it drop to the floor, alongside the pile of books she no longer needed.

  "You flew to me at once," she said. "To console me?"

  "To bring you back to your people."

  She looked at Keno for a long, desperate moment and almost, in her weakness, flew to him to bury herself in his strong arms and cry out her grief and anger and despair.

  But instead she stood where she was, tall and proud, and said simply, "I'm not going back."

  That made his eyes go wide. "What do you mean?"

  "I'm not going back to Congo," Amanda repeated. "Not now. Not ever."

  He swung his long, lithe legs off the bed and sat up. "Of course you are. You're going back with me. Tonight. I have the tickets in my valise."

  "I am not going," she said, folding her arms stubbornly across her chest.

  Keno gave a heavy, grunting sigh, then slowly got to his feet. He must have flown all night without any sleep, Amanda realized. He stood, tall and massive, dominating the tiny, shabby room.

  "You are a princess of the Kolw
ezi," he said, in a deep, strong voice that resonated with authority. "Your people call out to you. They need you. It is your duty to return to your homeland and help to lead your people against the tyranny that rules the land."

  "My duty?" Amanda asked. "As it was my brother's duty?"

  "Yes," Keno said.

  "And what did his duty gain him? Was he killed by bullets or a grenade? Or did they use gas this time? Or fire bombs from their airplanes?"

  Keno's head sank down on his chest.

  Advancing a step toward him, Amanda asked, "What good did your revolution do for my brother? Will you build a statue to him once you have won? Have you collected a few cells from his dead body so that you can clone him and make him over again in twenty years?"

  "It is not my revolution," Keno said. "It is the people's revolution."

  "Really? The people?"

  "All the people of our land . . . including the Kolwezi."

  She nodded bitterly. "Which is why you needed my brother, to make the Kolwezi follow you. Which is why you need me now."

  Keno reached out and took her shoulders in his strong hands. "I have always needed you, Amanda. Come with me now, return to your people. Help me to fight the tyrants . . ."

  "So that you can take their place," she said.

  "I will lead our nation to greatness! With you at my side."

  "As your queen?"

  He shook his head vehemently. "We will have no royal titles. I will be President, you will be the First Lady of the land."

  Wordlessly, Amanda pulled away from him and went to the closet next to her empty dresser. She slid the screen back and took up the travel bag that she had packed the night before.

  Keno's eyes lit up. "You're coming with me!"

  "No," Amanda said, tossing the bag on the bed and heading for the alcove where the sink and shower stood. "I am going to St. Louis, in America."

  "What?"

  "I have signed up for a star mission. I am leaving this Earth far behind me."

  "You can't be serious!"

  "I have signed the contract. My plane leaves in three hours."

  "You're upset. Your brother's death . . ."

  "I had nothing to do with it!" she shouted. Tossing her few toiletry articles onto the bed beside the travel bag, Amanda said, "I signed up for the star mission a month ago. I want nothing of your revolution."

  "But you must!" Keno insisted, his voice suddenly going high, pleading. "It is your duty."

  "No. Not my duty. My brother saw it as his duty and what did it earn him? Martyrdom. He'll be more useful to you dead than alive, won't he, Keno?"

  The tall black man said nothing.

  "Someday you will be President of Congo. I fully believe it. You will be President whether I am with you or not, because being President is all you want out of life. You don't need me to help you."

  "I will be President because the people need me!"

  "You will be a tyrant, just like the tyrants you seek to overthrow."

  "No! Never!"

  Amanda almost smiled at him. "Keno, you are so naive about yourself. You truly believe that you will lead our people to greatness. How? With what? The few natural resources we possess are almost worthless, now that the world gets its raw materials from the asteroids. The land is poor. The people are ignorant, hungry, and diseased. What greatness can they achieve? Only the building of more splendid palaces for their leaders. You will make a great president for them; you will have the most splendid palace of them all. Be sure to put my brother's statue out front, where the village farmers can see it when they come to visit their President."

  He scowled in anger for a moment, but fought to control himself.

  "You are running away," he said.

  "Yes. I admit it."

  "And you call me naive."

  "I am running away to a new world, a clean world, where we can start afresh, where ignorance and poverty will never exist because we will build this world right, from the beginning."

  Keno shook his head. "You are a fool."

  "Am I? Millions of people will be settled on this new world, once we have prepared it for colonization. And those of us who go there first, who do the work of preparing it, will own that world. We will be landlords of whole continents, Keno. Not the princess of a few thousand fly-infested villagers—I will be the queen of a new land."

  "The world government would never . . ."

  Amanda stuffed her last remaining items into the bag's side zipper pocket. "Not a queen literally, of course. I will not rule the people. I will merely lease them the land they farm. I will become very, very rich. I will be free to do as I choose, without even the obligations of a queen to tie me down."

  "So you think."

  "So I know!" she flashed.

  Grasping her wrist to force her to look at him, Keno said, "Don't you understand what the world government is doing?"

  "Colonizing the stars," she said.

  "Yes, but how? By enticing the strongest and brightest men and women of our generation to leave Earth and go out into space."

  "What's wrong with that?"

  "They are getting rid of our generation's natural leaders," he bellowed. "They are buying you, and all the others like you, with promises of doing good for the poor while at the same time stuffing your own pockets with gold."

  "No . . ."

  "Yes!" Keno insisted. "Don't you think that the tyrants your brother and I struggled against are not part of this monstrous scheme? They want strong young leaders such as you to leave the Earth . . . leave it to them, the old, corrupt tyranny of the old, corrupt generation."

  For half a minute Amanda stared into Keno's blazing eyes. Finally she disengaged her wrist from his hand, bent down and zippered the travel bag shut.

  "Even if what you say is true, I am still going to the stars. I never want to see Congo again. I never want to see the land, the people, who have killed my father, my mother, and my only brother."

  "You don't want to avenge their deaths?"

  She shook her head. "I leave vengeance to you, Keno. I only hope that you will not be as unforgiving a ruler as I think you will be."

  She left him in the shabby little flat, standing there beside the unmade bed with his fists clenched at his sides. She did not even bother shutting the door behind her. She went to Gatwick Airport, boarded the hypersonic rocketplane and arrived in steaming, muggy St. Louis half an hour later. She was met at the plane by a representative of the Church of Nirvan, a smiling, well-scrubbed young American woman. That was Amanda's first inkling that the star mission she had been assigned to was to be run by the international Church.

  When Amanda and Jeff got to Bishop Foy's office, he was sitting hunched behind his long black desk like a troll glowering from beneath his bridge. Seated in front of the desk, looking uncomfortable, were Dr. Carbo and two other scientists: Harvey Peterson, chief of the anthropology group, and Louisa Ferris, the Village's ethicist.

  Foy did not bother with introductions. He gestured Jeff and Amanda to the two vacant chairs before him.

  "You let that animal kill a creature we have never observed before," the Bishop said to Jeff as he sat down.

  Jeff almost laughed, he felt so relieved. All through their hurried walk from Amanda's apartment to the administration dome, he had been terrified that he was in trouble with the Church for allowing himself to be in Amanda's apartment with her without even a security camera to watch him.

  "Well?" Foy demanded.

  "He had to eat, sir," Jeff said simply.

  Looking over at Carbo, Foy snapped, "Wasn't he given orders not to harm the ape?"

  Before Dr. Carbo could answer, Jeff replied, "The ape was almost dead anyway. The scavengers would have been tearing it to pieces in another few minutes."

  Dr. Peterson, the anthropologist, was gray-haired, lean, tall, with kindly blue eyes and a wrinkled, sun-browned face that looked as craggy as a weathered rock. He said softly to Jeff, "But it's a new species, you see. It might be th
e Altair equivalent of a pre-hominid ape."

  "There must be others," Jeff said.

  Bishop Foy shook his head angrily. "That's not the point! What I want to know, Dr. Carbo, is whether you gave this student an order or not, and if you did, why he disobeyed that order."

  For the first time, Jeff noticed that Dr. Carbo looked very tired. There were pouches under his eyes. His round shoulders slumped even more than usual.

  "There was no time to give an order," Carbo said.

  "No time? How can that be?" Foy demanded.

  "Sir, have you ever seen a hungry wolfcat?" Jeff asked.

  "Certainly not!"

  "Well, when you starve a wolfcat for two days and then put him in front of a few tons of meat . . ." Jeff was slightly shocked to hear himself speaking so informally to a Bishop, but he went on, "well, just don't get in his way."

  Bishop Foy glared at him. The others in the office stirred uncomfortably.

  "Dr. Carbo told the truth," Jeff went on. "There was no time to give an order, and Crown wouldn't have obeyed an order to ignore that food."

  "Food?" shrilled the ethicist. "That was a primate ape! It might even have been intelligent!"

  Dr. Louisa Ferris was round-faced, round-bodied, a ruddy-cheeked gray-haired lady who reminded Jeff of his favorite aunt. She was the only person in the entire Village who was not responsible to Bishop Foy. Dr. Ferris represented the world government, and reported directly to the Bureau of Colonization, at the world capital in Messina. Her assignment was to make certain that Bishop Foy and his staff followed the laws laid down by the world government. If she found those laws were not being obeyed, her reports could terminate the work at Altair VI, dissolve the contract between the world government and the Church of Nirvan, and send Foy and the entire staff of scientists and students back to Earth in penniless disgrace.

  "Intelligent or not," Jeff insisted, "the animal was dead meat."

  She recoiled in horror.

  "It could not have been intelligent," Bishop Foy said, suddenly on Jeff's side. "We've scanned the planet thoroughly. There is no sign of artificial habitats, no villages, no artifacts of any sort."