“But he’s entitled to a jury trial—that’s League law.”
“League law means nothing here, though there’ll be a sham trial for publicity. I wonder about you sometimes, Rivera. You’re bright and you’re bold, but you’re not always in touch with the real world. You read too much about others.”
Terry was tempted to tell the truth. He couldn’t keep it to himself forever, he thought, and Darrow was a good friend. But would he believe? He didn’t want to risk losing the captain’s respect.
“I’m in close enough touch to know I need your help,” he stated. “They may not investigate the texts on Elrond’s chip, but if they were to find another like it, they surely would. I once told you I might want to get into the cargo business, and you talked me out of it. I’d thought I might use the text pickups as a cover—but now it’s the other way around. If I’m caught I’ll need evidence of involvement with cargo smuggling to distract attention from my other activities. So give me a contact with your suppliers, and let them know I’m to be trusted.”
“By God, you’re a tough one,” Darrow said. “You’re going right on with what you’ve been doing when Elrond’s gone, knowing they may trap you the same way?”
“I’m sure as hell not going to stop,” Terry said firmly.
“In that case,” Darrow said thoughtfully, “I’ll set you up with a supplier who’s honest, and I’ll buy what you bring me—the more cargo I handle, the safer I am from the government. But there’s something I want in return.”
“If I can get it for you, I will.”
“The stuff on the chips goes someplace where people can read it,” Darrow declared, “and since you and your people are risking yourselves to put it there, I’ll wager the rest of it’s as interesting as what I’ve seen. Well, I don’t want money for bringing it in anymore, beyond what you’re paying the source. I do want access.”
Terry nodded. With excitement he grasped what this meant. If Darrow, a practical man more knowledgeable about illicit cargo trading than forbidden literature, was personally interested in the texts, it was possible that wider readership might have political impact. It might ultimately lead to a change in Ciencia’s policies.
“You said once you’d need authorization to tell me more, I assume from Elrond. Can you put me in touch with whoever’s giving it now?”
“That would be me,” Terry replied, realizing it was true. He was a more skilled hacker than Elrond and had been doing nearly all that work for weeks, as well as most of the pickups. No one would question it, despite his reputation for being somewhat eccentric. He was now the leader of the conspiracy.
~ 59 ~
When he got to work the next morning, Alison met him with a troubled frown. “Some of the links don’t work anymore,” she said. “I highlight them and nothing happens.”
“I know. They’re too dangerous right now to activate.” If he was the leader, then he was free to tell Alison, Terry realized. He wanted to tell her; he sensed that she would share his commitment to it, and it had been a long time since he’d been able to share such feelings with anyone.
“You once said you’d like to help spread these ideas,” he said. “Did you mean you’d be willing to get involved in something risky?”
“Yes. It’s important for people to see that science doesn’t know everything. That there’s a whole realm of thought that’s been withheld from us. Do you really have contact with whoever’s putting these texts on the Net?”
“Well, you see, I’m the guy who’s been doing it,” he confessed. “One of them—and the other one has just been arrested, so I guess I’m in charge from now on.”
She was not as surprised as he’d expected her to be, once she got over the first shock; she knew he had exceptional computer skills. What disturbed her more was the revelation that he himself picked up texts from the ship captains. He downplayed the risk of arrest, but Alison was not fooled. “It’s not that I don’t think it’s worth it,” she said, “and I admire you, Terry. But I don’t know if I can get used to your being in danger.”
“It’s something we’ll have to get used to, if we care about making a difference in the world,” he said. “I’m mad, Alison! I was only half awake for a long time, shutting out something that hurt too much to think about; but now I’m worked up over what’s going on here. I have to do more than just make information available. We’ve got to have a goal, a plan for getting enough people involved to change the laws.”
“Is that possible?”
“In principle, yes. Darrow said most of the elected officials aren’t corrupt—it’s the bureaucrats who’re running the smuggling racket and it’s in their interests to prevent public contact with the outside. We’d need to convince the voters to demand reform.”
“Most people wouldn’t stand for censorship if they knew so much is being kept from them,” Alison agreed. “It’s contrary to human nature.”
With rising confidence, Terry realized that this was true. The colony’s founders had been fanatic about eliminating unscientific ideas and had not objected to the suppression of them. Later generations had had no say in it and had not known what was missing. But according to what he had read, individual human beings vary in the balance they prefer between rational and metaphorical forms of thought—so as the population increased, the proportion who were less one-sided than the founders must have grown.
“Right now we have no idea how many people are reading secretly,” he pointed out. “We have to unify them and attract more. I don’t know how yet, but there’s got to be a way.”
During the next few weeks he waited, tense with worry, to see if there were any repercussions from the discovery of the chip Elrond had carried. There were none. Either its content hadn’t raised suspicion of more extensive violations, or Elrond had managed to dispose of it somehow.
Miserably, Terry realized that Elrond, who according to Nina didn’t know about the government’s involvement in smuggling, would assume that he was the one who had inserted the evidence against him in the bank records. What else could he think? It would have been an obvious way to save himself from suspicion, and he was the only person in the group capable of hacking at that level. Elrond had never fully trusted him in any case. But Nina did, so he asked her to intercede when she visited Elrond in jail. “You can’t explain what really happened if the guards are listening,” he said. “Just tell him I didn’t betray him. And tell him to ask Guroff why he smuggles.”
The authorities wasted no time in putting Guroff on trial. Elrond refused to testify against him despite his knowledge that he was indeed a smuggler; the man had been obliging in his dealings with him, and in any case it wouldn’t be wise to risk revenge on the other couriers or make the rest of the captains think they couldn’t trust them. He told Nina that he had been offered a plea bargain and had turned it down. The outcome of his own trial was therefore a foregone conclusion, and he was sentenced to five years. Guroff, who had visited a starship—in itself a serious crime even apart from the smuggling of cargo—got life in prison.
Darrow greeted the news with grim resignation, aware that the same could happen to him if he failed to earn enough from smuggling to satisfy the bureaucrats who were supervising him—either that or be forced to deal in drugs, which Guroff had evidently been thought incapable of getting a sufficient price for. Guroff had been a hardworking asteroid miner when, with pride in having saved up the money, he bought his ship, Darrow said. He hadn’t wanted to be a smuggler and had pursued it half-heartedly, with tragic results. Terry, who by this time had made contact with a supplier of electronic parts and was delivering them to Darrow when he made pickups of text chips, tried not to think about the agents he knew were watching them both.
He had restored the easter eggs he’d deactivated the night of the arrest and had been trying to devise a way to spread awareness of the illicit net’s existence without endangering the people who used it. The reading material available wasn’t organized; there was simply a maze o
f hidden links that could be followed haphazardly by anyone interested in where they led. That wouldn’t do if he wanted to form a political movement. Trusted individuals would need access to longer texts than could be found by mere surfers, which meant authorizing it on an individual basis and maintaining an encrypted password file. It was becoming a much larger and more perilous undertaking than he had envisioned when he first started to hack—and far riskier than when he’d hacked during his high school days. Then, he could have quit if things had gotten too hot. Now he could not quit. Now other people were involved whose safety depended on his expertise.
He did not know the people who had hung out with Elrond and Nina well. Elrond had thought it wisest to keep their true identities confidential, as his own had been kept from them; and because he was viewed as an oddball none of them had tried to get close. Now he had to contact them personally and make them aware of his plans. This he could do only through Nina, and for his frequent contacts with her to seem natural, it had to look as if they were dating. Nina was only too glad to go along with this but Terry deeply regretted it, for it was obvious that she wanted something he was not prepared to give. He liked her well enough, but after Kathryn he was never going to be attracted to anyone else. Since he couldn’t explain this, she was puzzled and evidently hurt; but she kept hoping.
It was more comfortable to be with Alison, with whom he could relax. She was becoming the closest friend Terry had ever had—not counting Kathryn or the mentors, of course. They saw eye to eye on things. They shared thoughts about contraband ebooks that they both enjoyed. Moreover, she had a deep interest in the universe and was fascinated by what she read of other worlds in the official knowledgebase, which did, of course, contain astronomical information and basic facts about Earth and its colonies. He longed to tell her what it was like to visit them and to explore new planets, for he knew she would understand his pain at being barred from space. She too would like to travel between the stars, he thought ruefully, though it had not yet occurred to her that Ciencia’s isolationist laws should be challenged.
They continued to work together with neurofeedback clients, Terry taking on some sessions alone while Alison conducted psychotherapy in her office. He had a gift for it, she said, as of course he did; his telepathic powers were active on the unconscious level not only with her, but with the clients. Someday, he thought, he would explain this to her. But the time was not yet right.
Since Alison didn’t mind his taking time off unexpectedly, he decided to phase out the rest of the data couriers except for rarely-needed backup. The fewer people who had even indirect contact with the starships, the safer everyone would be. Most of the data was now brought by Darrow, who wasn’t charging anything for carrying it, and soon it all would be, though Terry had not dared to drop the other captains immediately in case the lack of meetings with them was seen to be connected with Elrond’s arrest. Only when he delivered cargo did he meet Darrow at the spaceport, for he now openly socialized with him at other locations in the city.
Picking up cargo from the supplier was a chore, but not especially dangerous. He was, after all, performing a service needed by the government racketeers, and as long as they thought it was his only illegal activity, he wouldn’t be discouraged from it. He had found it necessary to buy a groundcar with his savings, but the income from sale to Darrow—who paid well because he knew his records were examined—soon made up for it. “If I underpaid you the examiners would smell a rat,” he explained. “They’d assume I was keeping the difference instead of adding it to their percentage. And anyway, I’d rather the money was in your hands than theirs.”
Terry lived frugally and saved nearly all his income, he was not sure why. Used mining ships did sometimes come up for auction, and whereas reason told him that he did not want to be enslaved by owning one, in the back of his mind was the thought that his hope of changing the law might be realized before he got too old to fly.
His friendship with Darrow had, of course, made him think that an opportunity to get off the ground had arrived; on realizing that the captain wouldn’t doubt that he was innocent of the theft charge, he had spent three nights in happy excitement. But when Bonanza next landed and he sounded Darrow out about it, he was brought down to earth with painful finality. “We can’t take the chance,” Darrow had pointed out. “I couldn’t be sure of hiding you—we’re watched, and I can’t trust all the miners I carry. If you were caught visiting a starship you’d go to prison, and then what would happen to your scheme for spreading the word?”
“But if I went just to the asteroids, not the starship? I’d be willing to work as a miner for a while.”
“What for? You’re too important where you are to think like a spacestruck kid. I know how it feels—I was like that myself. Anything to get above the clouds and see what the sky looks like! But you’re grown up now. And besides,” he added, “if I hired you as a miner I’d have to scan your ID for the log and register your real name.”
Darrow, of course, did not know that he was a pilot and had once been a starship captain who now ached at the thought that the freedom of space was behind him. Yet that was all the more reason why he couldn’t endanger himself merely for his own pleasure, he thought sadly. Not if he was serious about wanting to further the conspiracy and keep its members safe.
Since Terry was doing all the hacking, the sole function of members would be recruiting newcomers to recruit still more. After giving considerable thought to the problem of secrecy, he decided on a modified clandestine cell structure to replace Elrond’s informal arrangement. The people entrusted with distributing passwords to newcomers would in some cases be acquainted, as some of the existing members already were, but would not know the identities or screennames of each other’s recruits. None of them would know his identity, or he theirs, except those with whom he had had personal contact. The exposure of any given individual would thus be limited, but by no means eliminated. If someone he didn’t know was caught reading forbidden material, the secret of where it had come from and how it was stored would be protected. As far as those he did know were concerned, he would have to rely on their ability to resist pressure—but that had always been true.
There remained the question of who was going to collect the money to pay the source. “I’m not going to coerce anybody to contribute,” Terry said. “We’ll have a treasurer, but membership isn’t going to depend on donations.”
“Who are you to decide that?” protested one of Elrond’s friends. “We all contributed before.”
“Yes, but we’re going to grow, and we need support more than we need funds. If we excluded those who can’t or won’t pay, we couldn’t spread our ideas far enough.”
“What need is there to give the privilege of reading more than can be found through the easter eggs to people who haven’t paid for it? It’s not fair to those of us who have.”
“Well,” said Terry, “that depends on what you’re paying for. It’s not just for your own benefit. It’s to work toward a time when the laws of this world can be changed.”
“This is the first I’ve heard of it. You make it sound like a political cause.”
“That’s exactly what it is,” Terry declared. “If you don’t want to take part, it’s up to you, but personally that’s why I’m risking my neck. And unless someone else wants to take over the hacking, that’s how we’re going to operate.”
It wasn’t until he sensed the surprise in their minds that he realized he’d been expecting them to say “Yes, sir,” as if he were their captain—and that he’d risen out of his long depression to the extent of acting as if he were.
~ 60 ~
Since Ciencia had no contact with other worlds except through the government, it had no public chronometer showing standard Earth time and its days were, of course, out of phase with days on Maclairn; so Terry could not have kept track of the passage of time there if he hadn’t found an atomic clock on the Net. As it was, he knew the week when his son was due
to be born. Oh, God, he thought, he could never be sure that Kathryn and the child were all right . . . if only telepathy could reach that far. . . .
It did reach Alison, who knew immediately that he was more troubled than usual. They were sensitive to each others’ moods now, and he knew that she was hurt by his failure to confide in her. “Terry, if something’s gone wrong and we’re in danger, I have the right to know,” she insisted.
“It’s not like that. Just something from . . . the past. Something I shouldn’t worry about because it’s not my concern anymore, but I can’t help remembering.”
“I wish you’d tell me about your past. It’s a mistake to hold pain in, talking can lessen it—”
“You know nothing about pain!” he burst out, and then, at her look, he was overcome by remorse. She was a psychotherapist, and it was her business to help people who were hurting. “I’m sorry, Alison,” he said. “I know I’m not the only person who’s lost a lot. Right now is a bad time for me, that’s all. I’ll be okay as soon as I put my mind on working.”
“We have a new client coming this morning,” Alison said, resigned for the time being to his reticence. “Marcia Jordan was injured in an accident some time ago. She’s had good medical care, but the pain in her back hasn’t gone away. I think neurofeedback may help her, though of course it can’t do anything more than teach her to relax. Since this is her first session I’ll supervise, but I’ll let you conduct it; you seem to get better results.”
The moment Marcia came into the neurofeedback room Terry sensed her agony. As a full telepath he felt it literally in his own body. Quickly, trying not to let it throw him, he settled her in the chair and attached the scalp sensors. He began guiding her into the usual process of relaxation, encouraged by her response to the feedback display. But there was more wrong than tenseness; he could feel nerve pain—there had been damage the doctors couldn’t repair. He was ashamed at having complained about emotional pain when there were people who had physical pain that wouldn’t end . . . yet it could be ended by anyone fortunate enough to be taught by a mentor. It was intolerable to think mentors could never come here!
The Rising Flame: Box Set: Defender of the Flame + Herald of the Flame Page 36