Robber Baron

by Wil C. Fry

  I was just enjoying myself, while she was seeing our next score in her mind. She did join in from time to time, asking a quick question, or wanting to try a certain move. She learned a lot faster than I did, and Jason said women were like that.

  "The woman is the highest animal on the food chain," he said to me once, when Destiny wasn't there. "It's the highest mark that human evolution has ever achieved."

  "How do you mean?" I asked.

  "They're smarter, faster, stronger. They can stand more pain or gravity than you or me. That's why most fighter pilots are women now. In fact, most space ship pilots are women. Also, they have tricks that you and I will never have. You know what I mean, Philipp. I've seen you stare into Destiny's eyes, and in those moments, you'd jump off a cliff if you thought that's what she really wanted you to do. "

  I nodded, understanding. "But you said they're stronger, Jason. That's one thing I don't get."

  "I mean by weight, pound for pound. And by capability. If you ever run into a woman who weighs what you do, and has been trained exactly the same as you, the odds are ten to one that she can lift more than you. And probably run farther, too. Of course, I'm speaking of averages here; there are exceptions to every rule. I'm just saying: In combat, never underestimate the power of a woman. My instructor on Yurple was a woman."

  I changed the subject a little, or so I thought. "So, why did you ever leave a great planet like Yurple to come out here?"

  "I fell in love with my instructor," he laughed, showing the wrinkles around his eyes.

  "We got found out. On Yurple, although many of the laws are liberal, militia members are not allowed to be involved with each other. We got dishonorable discharges from the Militia, and life was never the same after that. She went to Wederr, and I came here."

  I fell into silence then, thinking about the power of a woman. I couldn't imagine my Destiny ever being the cause of my life's ruin. Later, I remembered how devastated I had been when she left me the first time, for Billy Donovan. I reflected that if Billy had not been an idiot, he would probably still have her today.

  *

  It caused a little stir at the high school when I took Destiny Dester to my senior prom; she was by far the most beautiful girl in the room, although Norman's girl-of-the-day wasn't too bad either. More than one student approached her for a dance; she politely turned all of them down. That was one of the happiest nights of my life: I had Destiny, I was the Governor's son, I was part of the first crop of true Persiphone students, and I was secretly very, very rich.

  *

  When I graduated from high school, early in the summer of 2487, Norman Dester and I, along with a few other students, received special honors. We were the first people ever to graduate from a Persiphone public school, after having completed every grade in a Persiphone public school. All the students before us had attended at least one year of school on some other planet. I had started school immediately after arriving there, as had Norman and a few others. It was a sign that our planet's population was putting down roots, becoming an established world.

  The high school band played some special songs for us, commemorating our "achievement," and Governor Howard Wingate Bates III (my adopted father) made a short but regal speech about the historical sense of it all. He also mentioned that in a few years, there would be students graduating who had been born on Persiphone, true natives of the New World. He said that's when a planet is no longer a new world, a colony world, but a fully developed world - when there are adult citizens living there, who can claim that planet as a birthplace.

  There were tears in several eyes; I know I cried. There, in the middle of the graduation ceremony, I felt my father's hand on my shoulder, and my mother's arm around my waist. I was glad they had decided to come to Persiphone. If I had stayed on Tuf, my graduation would have been just another ceremony.

  *

  The very next day after graduation, I was promoted to "head dry goods clerk" at the store, which meant I was in charge of all the stockers at Mike's, during the daytime hours. And I was second only to the Dry Goods Manager, who worked pretty much whatever hours he wanted. I made 2.7 newdollars per hour, and worked about fifty hours a week, all that summer, even helping Mike to open his second store, in Midway. That meant I was making about 150nd per week, most of which went back into my savings account (the one I had opened with only ccl00, accompanied by Destiny, all those years ago.)

  Destiny worked her way up in New Planet Spacelines, which also ran a shuttle service to the other cities on the planet.

  While Destiny entered her fourth year of college, I kept working for Mike - on the very location where my parents had died; I guess in away, it made me feel close to them - and training with Jason.

  Jason said there was definitely a war coming on; since negotiations with the Sleebb people weren't coming along well. He said that both human and Trayak historians were now in agreement that the Sleebbs were indeed the ones that had attacked and sacked both races' planets, around five centuries ago, and that it called for retribution.

  I didn't really see the point. I knew they had sacked Old Home Terra - that's what history says, I wasn't there. And I knew that they had supposedly bombed Tuf until the Trayaks had been forced underground. But that had all been five hundred years ago. So much had happened since then, and we had grown so much. In fact, we should be thanking them for forcing us off the planet.

  For those of you who are not up to date on your ancient history, let me fill you in. According to Millal Ba - the great and legendary leader who had rescued a few million people from Terra -in his autobiography, Terra had been attacked by unknown aliens a few years before the Exodus. The Forces Under Zarcon had fought them off - barely. In the few years before the next attack, the wreckage of one of the alien ships had been studied by FUZ scientists. Soon, the secret of the aliens' star drive had been discovered, and new hyperdrive units had been installed in every FUZ ship. That had been shortly after the end of the 20th century.

  Then, the aliens had returned, en masse. They had devastatingly bombed and effectively destroyed the surface of Terra. Because of the foresight and brilliant leadership of Millal Ba - which he denied in his book, a few million humans were rescued, and escaped the system. It took ninety years of war with the Trayaks, Grangers, and Strangers to figure out that we were fighting races who had also been devastated by invading aliens. I guess you could say that humanity's main goal for the last five hundred years has been to find out who those aliens were, and where they came from.

  If those aliens had not attacked us at all, we would not have the hyperdrive that makes our space travel so easy now. Humans would still be mostly confined to the crowded, polluted and used-up surface of Terra. Of course, FUZ had sent out a few interstellar ships, powered by a primitive form of the gravitic drive we use now, but those ships would have taken a few dozen years to cover the mighty distance between even the closest stars.

  And if the aliens had not attacked the second time, completely wrecking the corrupt governments of Old Home Terra, the almost Utopian societies in which we now lived would have never existed.

  Surely, five hundred years is long enough for a race to get over a grudge.

  *

  "Are they going to draft me, like they drafted those kids back during the Ninety Year War?" I asked Jason.

  "Oh, I doubt it, Phil," he answered, looking into the sky. "Back then, there weren't enough humans to hold down all the planets we occupied, and we were fighting for our lives, although a lot of it was based on a misunderstanding. But now, there are ten billion humans, a billion each of the Trayaks, Grangers and Strangers, and almost two billion Kelvods, all somewhat warlike races, in their own way, and two of which claim direct contact with the Sleebbs."

  He hefted the sniper rifle in his arms lovingly. "With the humans and the Trayaks leading the way, and the Strangers acting as a medical corps, and supply lines from the Grangers and Kelvods - at least that's the way I'd set it up - we would probably
win fairly easily. Especially since the Sleebbs don't know how many planets we occupy now. We got the hyperdrive from them, you know. From one of their abandoned ships in Terra's solar system.

  "To answer your question, I think there would be enough volunteers to win. I know I'll volunteer. You could too, you know, and have your pick of assignments, with what I've taught you."

  I decided that I might participate, but only because the Sleebbs had attacked the scout ship McRay, not because of some centuries-old feeling of needing revenge. But I didn't really want to. The Sleebbs weren't attacking our worlds, now, were they?

  *

  After that discussion, Jason kept training me in all kinds of fighting tactics, along with new things he remembered from his training on Yurple. I learned how to make several different kinds of wilderness shelters, fashion weapons from primitive materials, make a bulletproof vest from items found in clothing and hardware stores, and properly kill, clean and cook a lot of small animals and fish.

  One day I said to him, "If you know all this stuff, you could probably colonize a planet by yourself. You wouldn't need anyone's help, or any big shipments from some home base."

  He laughed, and it quickly turned into a guffaw. He slapped me on the back, pretty hard. "Well, yeah, except for one thing. There's one thing I really don't know how to do."

  When I looked at him with a big question mark on my face, he laughed heartily again. "Philipp, you have to have women to colonize a planet. The one thing I don't know how to do is have descendants by myself. That's one thing you have to have women for. I told you, they're better than we are. And it's the women who usually want the cities, and restaurants, and video, and all that stuff, at least at first. I'd be happy on a planet with just a few guys like us, who know how to shoot, and take care of ourselves. But when we died, it would all be over. We wouldn't have any descendants to pass our knowledge on to."

  He looked me straight in the eye then. "You hang on to that jewel of a woman you've got there, Phil. You'll go places with her. She's smarter than most women, harder working than most men, and a better fighter than most people I know. Besides that, when you wake up in the morning, you'll have something pretty to look at. That's important, too. Yeah, you hang on to that one."

  I looked at him, straight back in the eye. "I have every intention of hanging onto her."

  *

  In the early part of 2488 (Galactic Standard), I turned 18, and Harry reluctantly gave me all my papers. He had my birth certificate, colonization records, immunization records, and others. He said I could stay on with him, if I wanted to, until I found something better. I did stay there a little while.

  Then Destiny turned 21, and graduated from Tarkin University with a degree in business. That degree gave her a significant raise with New Planet, and she began to have offers to transfer out to a bigger office on a more populated planet.

  I talked about these offers with her, since I was reluctant to leave Persiphone. She disagreed.

  "Philipp, you knucklehead," she chided me. "How are we supposed to rob more banks, if we're stuck on this planet? We'll have to move somewhere, eventually, if we're going to spend any of it, you know. Too many people know us here. If we're on a planet where no one knows who we are, we can buy a nice house, nice cars, expensive clothes, or whatever we want. We could even get that farm, on an empty planet, that you keep talking about."

  Again, I had to agree that she was right - I was just too slow. I guess I'm one of those men who will never figure anything on his own. When it comes to the nuts and bolts of some particular thing, I can be a genius. I can plan a perfect bank robbery, build an a-grav unit from scratch, or run a business with the ledger books in the black. I think they call that "tactical thinking." What I can't do is see the "big picture," sometimes. I get locked into one mode of thinking and stay there. Destiny can't build - or even repair - an a-grav unit, or run a business without help, but she can see how the businesses, the bank robberies, the a-grav machines, and everything else fits together, in one giant economic plan.

  When Destiny thinks of the Sleebbs, for instance, she doesn't see them as the race that attacked the McRay, or the beings who sacked Terra five hundred years ago. She wonders about their culture, their political organizations, and their level of technological development.

  In fact, she should be the one writing this account. I could just give her the facts of my life before I met her, and some dates and places, and she could wrap it all up. I see my life as a series of events, while she sees my whole life as one thread in the giant fabric of space time.

  At least, I think so. All I know is that she sees more than I do when she looks at something. That's how she beats me at chess, almost every time.

  *

  Norman Dester shipped out to join his father and older brothers. Mrs. Dester went with him, since some of the living quarters had been finished on the new space city, Habdes I, and she didn't like the idea of living without her husband for such a long period of time. That left Destiny alone with her house and small plot.

  With Mr. Dester's permission, I moved in with Destiny that summer. Even though he was a very religious and moral man, he was still understanding. I think he knew that Destiny and I had been sleeping together, although the subject was never mentioned. He had never had a bad word to say to me, and in fact had written quite a nice letter of reference to Mike, when I first started working at the supermarket. Destiny and I were both working full time, we kept the house clean, and we tended to the garden. Occasionally we invited Harry and his fiancee (Marianne Waters, the mayor of Helmston) over for dinner. About once a week, Jason Quivers visited us, with Deneen, the girl he was dating - one of Destiny's classmates from Tarkin U.

  Jason, Deneen, Destiny and I continued to spar, to hunt, and to speak philosophically about war, colonization, women, and other things. The four of us went of a few double dates and a few camp-outs in Persiphone's wild country. Deneen was a quiet young woman who obviously loved Jason very much. I think he was finally starting to get over his last lost love. I hoped so - I was starting to know too many people who couldn't make their relationships work. Harry: divorced twice. Jason: never married, but separated from his lover on Yurple. Mike (my boss): still married, but not happily.

  It was good to see some of them hitting a streak of good luck for once.

  *

  One day, when Destiny and I were lying in bed in the cool of the evening, letting the night's breeze ruffle the curtains, she brought up the subject we had left alone for nearly two years. "Remember when you talked about marriage, Phil?" Her head was nestled comfortably on my shoulder, and I could feel her eyelashes move when she blinked.

  "Yes, my dear. I remember. You said that when you graduated, and I was eighteen, if I still thought it was the right thing to do, you would marry me."

  "Well, you're eighteen now, and I've graduated."

  "So you're asking if I still want to get married?" I looked down at her beautiful green eyes, looking up at me.

  "No. I'm proposing. Will you marry me, Philipp Kaplan Bates? Because I want to."

  Very gently, I moved enough so that I could kiss her softly on the lips. "Yes. You have always been my Destiny, my Fate, and I will follow where you lead. When?"

  "Ah. Not now. Not here. I mean after we leave Persiphone."

  "Still 'yes', dear. When are we leaving?"

  Yes, I still wanted to stay on Persiphone. I wasn't sure I could adjust to any other world. But I decided that I could put up with frigid winters or desert summers, high gravity or no gravity, hundred-hour days or ten-hour days, crowded city or empty planet - or any other conceivable condition, if it meant that Destiny would be by my side.

  We stayed on Persiphone for the rest of the summer, long enough to be best man and bridesmaid at Jason and Deneen's wedding. We would have attended Harry and Marianne's wedding, but they had decided to put that off for a while, since they were both still in office, in different cities. I turned down Mike's offer of promot
ion (he needed a new Dry Goods manager, since his present one went to manage his third store, in Batesville), telling him I'd look him up if I ever came back. I also reminded him that my parents had died somewhere between register 4 and register 7, near the kids' candy stand. I made him promise never to forget.

  Mike shook my hand, looking a little misty-eyed, for once. "Well, Philipp," he said, "if I can't lure you into staying with a promotion, then I guess I can't lure you at all. But I know you'll do well wherever you go. And if you ever need a reference, look me up. Thanks for all your hard work."

  I just nodded, a little emotional myself.

  Destiny accepted a promotion from New Planet Spacelines, to go to Junxle, one of the seven oldest worlds. We sent a letter to her parents a few minutes before we boarded our ship, all of our hoarded money and weapons in her bags.

  *

  Even though Junxle is one of the oldest colonized worlds, her rotational period was nearly sixty hours, so she had never been heavily colonized, although the climate was fair to tropical. The fact that Junxle was so old meant that Junxle's government was stricter than those I was used to (Persiphone and Justine) were. The fact that she was not too heavily populated meant that she was not nearly as strict as those of Tuf or Turner's Planet - somewhere on the middle ground, as governments go. I had to have a passport (I had never had an ID before, except my birth certificate, from Tuf), but that was just for the sake of customs. Upon arriving, after two Jumps, my bags were run through a scanner, but not opened. Destiny's bags were not checked at all. The man at the Customs Desk asked merely, "Do you have anything to declare?" after looking casually at my passport.