We Open on Venus - Starship Troupers 2

by Christopher Stasheff

  “Backer’s Didn’t He Ramble—a classic from the midtwentieth century.”

  Seeholder stared. “Not the one that takes place in a converted whorehouse!”

  “Yes, that’s the one,” Barry sighed.

  Seeholder shook his head. “If you don’t have anything better than that to offer, you can just go right back to that trash heap you call Manhattan!”

  From the look on his face, I could see that Barry was sorely tempted—but he must have done his mental arithmetic and realized just how much of his brother’s money he would have wasted, because he said, “Perhaps you could indicate the kind of content you would find acceptable. For example, what kind of plays does your Drama Club produce?”

  “Drama Club?” Seeholder stared. “You don’t think we’d waste money on frills like that, do you? This is a frontier planet, mister—we can’t waste time or cash on extras like that!”

  Barry stared. “Don’t you have any arts program at all?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure! We’ve got the best marching band on the planet! Even the academy can’t touch ’em!” Seeholder glowed with pride.

  “Yes, the academy,” Barry mused. “I’ve heard that mentioned before. Exactly what is the academy?”

  Seeholder made a dismissive gesture. “The fancy private school where the managers send their kids. Costs an arm and a leg, I can tell you. Ten years I’ve been saving, and I’ll just barely be ready next year, when my boy starts going there.”

  “Your son?” I stared. “You mean you’re not even sending your own son to your own high school?”

  “Of course not! Be very bad for him, attending the same school his father runs! Besides, I want to make sure he can get into any college on Terra that he wants.”

  “But doesn’t this high school prepare its graduates for college?”

  “Oh, sure! They get out with a high school diploma, after all.”

  “You don’t feel your son would be adequately prepared here, though?”

  “Look,” Seeholder said impatiently, “only a handful of the students here even want to go to college. Most of ’em don’t even wanna be here, and it’s all we can do to keep them in through tenth grade. The ones with really great grades, or really great athletic records, get to stay on to graduate, but that’s only ten percent.”

  Barry frowned. “Then those first two years must be very difficult for the few who really do want to learn. They must find it devilishly hard to concentrate on their classes, when they’re in there with so many students who are threatening them and sneering at them.”

  “Intimidation and threats are against the rules!” Seeholder snapped.

  “I see.” Barry rubbed his nose. “But how do the teachers know when students have been making threatening remarks?”

  “Why, the students who have been threatened come and tell them!”

  “Doesn’t that open them to reprisals from the bullies?” Barry asked.

  “I told you—fighting is strictly against the rules! We catch ’em at it, we suspend ’em!”

  “I had in mind beatings that might happen on the way home,” Barry said slowly.

  “Well, of course,” Seeholder said, “we can’t be responsible for things that happen off school property. Besides, if a kid can’t take care of himself, he’s got it coming, if you ask “But it certainly must make it difficult for him to concentrate on his studies,” Barry said.

  “We haven’t noticed the problem.”

  “No,” I said slowly, “I don’t suppose you have.” Seeholder flushed. “Anyway, it hardly ever happens.”

  “But couldn’t you prevent it by having separate classes for those who really do want to learn?” Barry asked. “Even a whole sequence of classes—a real college-preparatory curriculum?”

  “Hell, no!” Seeholder scoffed. “That’s old-fashioned.” Old-fashioned? My mind reeled with a sudden vision of schools run according to the dictates of fashion. Did the educators read the teachers’ journals in hopes of spotting the new trend? How high was mathematics going to be worn this year? Would literature have a peplum, or a scalloped border? I realized a sudden gold mine of possibilities in the notion of high school principals constantly alert to the fashion news, straining to be the first on their planet with the new fad. The ideas was fraught with possibilities, and all of them made me shudder.

  “But students who have the potential for college work need special advising, special methods of teaching,” Barry argued.

  “What are you, an elitist?” Seeholder glared at him suspiciously.

  “No, only an interested bystander.” Barry capitulated with a sigh. “And I take it you have no arts program.”

  “Like I told you, we don’t have time for frills.”

  I ached to correct his grammar, but I managed to keep my lips closed.

  “But there must be something you can recommend as an indication of the kind of content you approve,” Barry said. “What are your students studying in literature class?”

  “Well.” Seeholder leaned back in his chair. “Now that you mention it, the juniors are studying Shakespeare this year. All year—the teachers have to explain all the strange words, of course.”

  “Of course,” Barry murmured, with a look of trepidation. “May I ask which play they are studying?”

  “Macbeth. ”

  “Why, what an amazing coincidence,” Barry breathed, through parched lips.

  14

  So it was to be Macbeth. Barry was generous when he presented the issue to the Star Company—he tried to make the government’s logic clear. That was rather difficult, since the government didn’t have much logic, but Barry tried to infer as much as he could from Seeholder’s curt comments.

  Of course, his fellow artists didn’t let him explain anything before they reacted; their motto might have been, “Never in accuracy, but always in haste.” The announcement was barely made before they felt the need to comment.

  “But I thought you said we weren’t going to do Mac— the Scottish play, after all!” Mamie snapped.

  “No, I merely postponed rehearsal,” Barry said wearily. “It would seem that my reasons for wishing to present it were more accurate than I knew.”

  “But why do we have to?” Larry demanded.

  “Because the Committee for Cultural Affairs, represented by Director of Schools Seeholder, has politely banned all the other plays in our repertory.”

  “I wouldn’t have said ‘politely,’ ” I amended.

  “But that’s censorship!” Lacey sputtered.

  “Absolute and total,” I assured her. “If you think the Company’s management exceeds its rights, you are welcome to appeal to the government and file suit.”

  “But the Company is the government! The whole planet is just one big company town!”

  “Makes the enforcement of civil liberties difficult, doesn’t it?” I tried to look sympathetic.

  “Be generous, people,” Barry sighed. “No one ever does anything without a reason, though they may not always know what that reason is.”

  “And that reason is frequently a bad reason, and the action resulting from it, evil,” Winston reminded him.

  “Not in their own minds, Winston. In their own minds, they merely have goals that conflict with ours.”

  “Only conflicting goals?” Merlo demanded, pop-eyed. “You can explain something as evil as censorship in terms of nothing but conflicting goals?”

  “I can, I’m afraid; it doesn’t seem evil to them, any more than the Catholic church thought it was evil to try to prevent the Bible from being published in English, or the women’s rights movement saw anything wrong in their campaign against pornography. In fact, as I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that nearly every special-interest group has some literature that it discourages and thinks should not be published.”

  “ ‘Nearly’?” Susanne frowned. “Which groups don’t have something they want to ban?”

  “The Civil Liberties Union,” Barry said. “They merely think
that some books should not be read. They wouldn’t dream of attempting to stop their being published, of course.”

  “Oh, come now, Barry!” Ogden huffed. “You can’t mean that these silly provincial managers actually have good and moral reasons for forbidding us to present such excellent plays to their workers!”

  “Unfortunately, morality does seem to be their main concern,” Barry lamented.

  “At least, so they claim,” I qualified. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t stronger and wronger reasons underlying the ones they acknowledge.”

  “But who are these managers?” Mamie demanded. “Did they talk to you themselves?”

  “At first, yes,” Barry said, “in the communal persona of the Committee for Cultural Affairs.”

  “Though they didn’t go into the specifics,” I amended. “They left that to Director of Schools Seeholder.”

  Larry frowned. “Why?”

  “Oh, really, Mr. Rash!” Mamie said, exasperated. “Why does any committee let an underling act as its mouthpiece?”

  “Oh. Of course,” Larry said slowly, though he obviously didn’t understand at all.

  “A committee,” Winston explained, “is a group of people gathered together to avoid responsibility. In this case, they have allotted that commodity to an officeholder, so that they will not have to be tarred with the brush of censorship.”

  Ramou frowned. “Then he’s a fool to take it!”

  “Not if he is ambitious, and needs their favor,” Winston replied. “Also, he may enjoy the additional power thus gained, and feel the responsibility is a small price to pay. Indeed, as director of schools, he must be quite accustomed to complaints and accusations.”

  “Oh, be fair, Winston,” Barry said irritably. “They may be sincere. Misguided, but sincere.” He turned to the company at large again. “It is not management alone who opposes us, but the leaders of the people themselves, according to Publius. He conjectures that the good folk of New Venus, as represented by their covert union, have no use for the silliness of a musical comedy. For our part, we can say with certainty that the managers of the Company won’t hear of anything so blatantly immoral as Didn’t He Ramble.”

  “Immoral?” Marty stared. “What’s immoral?”

  “It takes place in a converted bordello,” Barry said, looking very weary, “and it’s made quite clear that Bonnie is sleeping with a man to whom she is not married.”

  “A man who just happens to be the boss.” Lacey frowned. “You don’t suppose that hits a little too close to home for them, do you, Mr. Tallendar?”

  Barry looked up in surprise. “Yes, quite possibly, Ms. Lark. An excellent insight.”

  Lacey didn’t say anything in reply, but she seemed to glow. Mamie frowned at her, looking quite annoyed; I suspect she understood neither the reference, nor Lacey’s manner of inference.

  “But,” Winston said, “it then follows that the managers would see themselves as analogous to the older brother, and the laborers the younger.”

  Barry held himself still, but a smile glowed on his face. “My thought exactly, Winston. Yes, I think they were aware of the parallel.”

  “But the boss wins!” Ramou objected.

  “Exactly,” Barry agreed. “The boss wins—but the subordinate did rebel. New Venus’s good managers do not wish to see even that much illicit activity.”

  “But surely it is the right of the people to see into the governmental process,” Charlie Publican objected.

  “Perhaps—but labor doesn’t have a right to question management.” Mamie had finally caught the drift of the conversation. She turned a gimlet glare on Barry. “At least, in the opinion of management.”

  Barry let it slide right by him. “And on New Venus, management is the government—so Didn’t He Ramble is out.”

  “And the Scottish play is in?” Marty stared. “An earl kills a king, and the king’s son pulls some dissatisfied nobleman together to mount a rebellion, and the people flock to his banner, and that’s not revolutionary?”

  “No, it’s a classic.”

  Charlie Publican looked up at Marty, interested. “A novel interpretation, young man.”

  “And one which has hopefully eluded the good managers of Amalgamated Petroleum,” Barry said. “It is taught in the schools, it is Literature with a captial ‘L,’ so it must necessarily be a harmless and boring cultural artifact. Therefore they will allow us to perform it.”

  “Well.” Mamie stood, gathering the aura of charisma around her like a pet cobra coiling to strike. “Let us see if we can keep it from being boring, shall we?”

  The company answered with a shout of approval.

  It had taken an hour to go through customs to get back to the ship, and it took another hour the next morning, when Susanne and I ushered Ogden through to see that doctor.

  “No excuses this time, Mr. Wellesley,” Susanne told him firmly. “You have to see that doctor, and you really should have seen him as soon as we landed, yesterday!”

  “I couldn’t have, even then,” Ogden grumbled. “Not without waiting two hours to go through customs. Really, this is insupportable! Surely you are not going to drag me through that interminable delay just to have a flesh-and-blood doctor tell me exactly the same thing that the robo-doc said.”

  Susanne turned on the charm. “But you know we can’t have you going about without your floater unless a real doctor says so, Mr. Wellesley, and we do so need you for the performance—no one else could possibly be as effective a King Duncan as you, and I’d be most horribly upset if anything happened to you from overexerting yourself, and …”

  “Enough, enough, my dear!” Ogden held up a hand. “Flattery will get you … well, cooperation, at least. But really, if we’re concerned about my heart, can’t this customs agent expedite us at all? The frustration is elevating my blood pressure!”

  “I’ll try.” Susanne turned and advanced on the customs agent, all girlish charm and undulating rhythms. “I’m sorry to seem impatient, sir, but Mr. Wellesley had a heart attack during lift-off, and we’ve made an appointment at the clinic, and they’re so overloaded* that it’s absolutely vital that we be there on time, and ..

  She went on, and the customs agent gave her a look that was slowly turning into euphoria until he glanced over her shoulder and saw me, with my hands in my jacket pockets, grinning like a shark that’s waiting for somebody to fall overboard. The smile vanished; he cleared his throat as he looked down at his papers, said, “Yeah, that’s all right,” hit them with the stamp, and handed them back to Ogden, glancing nervously at me.

  “Oh, that was so good of you!” Susanne gushed.

  He looked surprised, the smile came back, and he was about to ask her for a date when he noticed me grinning again. The smile disappeared like a thief hit with a searchlight; he cleared his throat nervously and nodded toward the gate. “Glad to help, lady. You can go on through, now.”

  At least Ogden waited until we were twenty feet past the gate before he began grumbling, “Insupportable indeed! Absolutely insupportable!”

  Susanne just smiled and held the outer door for him.

  If Ogden thought customs was insupportable, he should have thought about himself. It took me and a husky orderly, both, to get him off that floater and onto the examination table. “Dratted floater,” he muttered as he settled down, with Susanne cushioning his descent. “Completely lost muscle tone; no exercise, not even from walking …”

  Never mind that most of the exercise he usually got was bending his elbow.

  The doctor said as much, and it was definitely not what Ogden wanted to hear. “You were very fortunate, Mr. Wellesley,” he said as he handed him the hard copy from the physical analyzers. “Lift-off from a gravity well as deep as Terra’s could have killed you—but you only sustained a mild shock. I’m not quite sure how, but I do know that if you don’t get some exercise and stop drinking, the next one will kill you—or the one after that.”

  “Stop drinking?” Ogden b
leated. “Doctor, you can’t be serious!” But you could see in his eyes that he’d been expecting it.

  “I’ve never been more serious in your life,” the doctor assured him, “a life which won’t be long, if you keep it marinated with alcohol.”

  “I am not sure,” Ogden groaned, “that a life without alcohol is a life worth living.”

  “It’s either that, or stay on New Venus and stop traveling and playing in your shows.” There was a hint of contempt in the last phrase.

  Ogden frowned. “That, of course, is not even open to consideration, doctor. For me to give up the theater would be to give up life.”

  “Which is exactly what you will do, if you don’t stop drinking,” the doctor said with finality.

  Ogden grumbled about it all the way back to the spaceport, all the way through customs, and all the way back to the ship. I think the agent may have passed us through a little faster, just to be rid of his griping. By the time we escorted him back through the air lock, even Susanne’s monumental patience was wearing thin.

  We stopped by his cabin door. “In you go, Mr. Wellesley,” Susanne said. “You might want to rest now.”

  “Yes, that was a rather strenuous excursion,” Ogden agreed. “No, my dear, you don’t need to come in. The good doctor—though what’s good about him, I can’t guess!—has not only certified me as being fit enough to walk, but has even commanded it, under the guise of mandating exercise. I can clamber into my bunk by myself, now.”

  “If you say so.” Susanne’s brow wrinkled with concern.

  “But please be careful. We do want you to stay with us awhile longer, Mr. Wellesley.”

  “If it were not for your own gentle presence, I am not at all certain that I should wish to, without strong drink,” Ogden said.

  “You don’t mean that,” Susanne stated flatly. “If you did, you wouldn’t let me go to all this trouble trying to lengthen your stay.”

  Ogden looked up, startled, then frowned. “I’m sorry if you find me troublesome, my dear.”

  Susanne melted—not that she’d been all that much frozen to begin with. She touched his cheek gently and said, “I’d go to twice the amount of trouble without batting an eye, for an old dear like you, Mr. Wellesley—so please don’t drink, eh?”