The Grapple
Page 16
They simply couldn’t figure it out. They were Leaguers. They didn’t understand this world at all. They could barely speak the language. Nothing was going the way they’d expected.
They thought that the people they’d liberated from Sanchez would organize themselves. That all they had to do was kick out the Yellow Rats, and the people would be grateful and all would work out on its own. That’s what the Leaguers did. Drop a bunch of them off in empty space, and they would hold a meeting, choose a mayor, appoint a sheriff, select a judge, pull out a Book of Law… Things would just get built, from the ground up.
The details would vary by member. The Havenites and the Israelis had the same Book, but they disagreed as to the exact details of its Law. The Spartans had a different Book, and the Belters had another. The Spartans had nobles, the Havenites had dynastic rabbis and tribal chiefs, the Israelis elected everyone in theory, but in practice the candidates always ended up coming from the same few families, and the Belters had their Corporation, and its two tiers of hereditary Shareholders.
But the ultimate mentality behind their systems was basically the same. They accreted from the bottom upward, with a national Tradition as the skeleton. The people obeyed their nobles not out of fear, but out of a sense that there was a compact. For those talented enough and smart enough, there was always an open ladder upward to the top. It might take a generation or two to climb, but it was always there. “Your father was a shopkeeper” was no insult among the Leaguers. Sometimes, it could even be a compliment. They all glorified the Creative Genius, the Energetic Striver and the Self-Made Man. They all believed that success quite literally bred success. The successful upstart had good blood and good luck. Good blood and good luck were to be sought, not rejected.
That’s why the League had ultimately worked out in the first place. For all their differences, they all possessed the same basic ideas of how to go about making rules and enforcing order, what was right and what was wrong, how authority was derived and delegated, what the individual owed the group and what the group, in turn, owed the individual.
When the Empire had thrown them all together in common defense, they simply sat down and agreed to disagree on the details. Their shared general principles had been enough. They’d cobbled together the skeleton of a compromise Common Code and hammered out a Treaty. When the haggling was over, the Havenite had remarked, only half in jest, that the bride might be an ugly bitch but they had to sign the ketubah anyway, before the bandits next door ran off with the dowry. The others had chuckled in wry agreement, and signed after him. And the rest was history.
But that’s not how things worked on this planet, thought Patty. Her degree in Golden Age Philosophy wasn’t as useless as it had appeared at first glance. Yosi might be an expert at bashing in heads and Leo might be a real-life prince, but this was her home turf. It was political philosophy that she’d studied. Paradise was her world now. She understood these people.
There was a reason why Don Alonzo de Nùnez-u-Vega had been forced to show up at Delta Triangulae without an invitation, alongside the ambassador from Berten, the envoy from Novaya Zemlya and the squabbling clutches of Jagobarans and Iceholers. There was a reason why the Baron of Miranda had walked away from the conference table without signing the Treaty, and why none of the Uninvited Delegates had signed onto the Associate status they’d been offered. The differences were too great. The organizing principles didn’t match. The cultures didn’t fit together.
Paradise had always been organized from the top down. No one had ever elected anyone, until Palmer’s overthrow. The ones on top stuffed their pockets and kept down the ones on the bottom. The ones on the bottom waged revolution to get to the top, so they could stuff their own pockets and keep others down in turn. No one had ever believed in voting, except with guns, and no one had ever trusted in it. The League had fought five major wars over the past two centuries, four victorious and one a stalemate. Paradise had had six revolutions, three failed and three successful. The League had grown, and evolved. On Paradise, nothing of substance had changed.
The Revolution of 3735 had been no different from all the rest. As far as the average Paradisiano was concerned, Palmer’s fault was not that he was a dictator, but that he’d squandered the treasury on a losing war, buried half the Army on Miranda, and brought a massive economic crisis that had rendered the planet bankrupt. Klaus Weinberger might have talked about democracy and social justice, but those who’d followed his Revolutionary Progressivist Vanguard heard the promise of a full stomach paid for with public money. The dictator didn’t fall in the name of freedom. He’d fallen the way he’d risen, in the name of cheap bread, subsidized housing, and an ever-full welfare troth.
Afterwards, they’d voted for the Provincial Assemblies and for the Cortes, but everyone else had been appointed. The Cortes had elected the President. The President had appointed the ministers and the regional governors. Regional governors had appointed the provincial governors. Provincial governors had appointed the district governors, and district governors had appointed the mayors. Federal and provincial police had their own hierarchies. Municipal police were for big cities, and they ran on their own too, regardless of who’d been appointed mayor this year.
In their wildest dreams, nobody would’ve thought of choosing their own government here, even before Sanchez’s thugs had shot anyone who even looked at them funny while they robbed every house and raped all the women in town. What they did do, after the Yellow Rats got massacred, was grab whatever they could grab, and fight among themselves.
The hacendados were all little kings in their castles. It’d been bad enough before the war. This far out in the boonies, things had always been conservative. But now it was wall-to-wall Monarchists and Palmerists and religious nutcases. They’d been the ones with the guns. Sitting out here, in the middle of nowhere, on their umpteen-times-great-granddaddy’s land, clinging to God and Sword, waiting for Revolution or Restoration or Resurrection or Second Coming or whatever. Their awaited Apocalypse had come. Just not the way they’d expected.
The only thing that kept the hacendados cooperative was fear of ending up like Rodrigo Diaz. But they’d turn in a heartbeat, if they had the chance. Sanchez was a bastard working for a bunch of alien invaders, but at least he was a herdeiro. The thought of obeying a foreigner just plain grated on their nerves. And Sanchez would buy their cooperation, not just terrorize them into it.
The villagers were worse. All a bunch of inbred, stupid hicks. The average villager’s family tree out here was a damned straight line. First cousins marrying first cousins all the way back to Hernan the Great. Room-temperature IQs. Never been outside the municipality in their lives, never mind the district. Anything past the village limit was no concern of theirs. They’d obey anyone who had the upper hand, until they stabbed him in the back. Yosi might have saved them from Sanchez’s thugs, but he was a trombalheio Christ-killer, and that was that.
The towns were worst of all. At least the villages had cohesion. The head honcho was a patriarch. Everyone in the village was related to him by blood or marriage, and generally both. He got listened to, and he could enforce his will. A village, left alone, could sort out most of its own problems. But in the towns it was plain chaos.
They didn’t like foreigners one bit in the towns, either, but they hated the chaos more. The other week Leo had taken a platoon to Layos to look for supplies, and the townsfolk outright asked him to judge. He was a foreigner, but he was a prince, and an officer with three dozen armed men at his back. Whom else would they find to give them order? They respected titles out here. They respected epaulets.
They’d asked him to judge, so he’d judged. He’d never judged on his own before, but he’d been out on circuits with his relatives. He’d watched his uncle judge, and his cousins. They had a customary law, up in Suomi Ledonia where his mother had been born. Jäänmaassa Koodi, the Code of the Land of Ice. They still used it to resolve civil cases up there, and even misdemeanors,
by agreement. The League Common Code permitted customary justice by arbiters, and so did the Spartan King.
It was a harsh thing, that Ice Code, as brutal as the land that had given it birth. But it was a fair thing, when impartially applied. It required neither prisons nor currency. It resolved disputes on the spot and applied punishments immediately. It was a law for free yeomen who farmed pine nuts and kept muravik mounds, or herded reindeer, shaggy horse and musk ox, or fished the icy sea, until the Duke raised up his banner and called upon them to turn out with their bows and their shaskas and their halberds and their pikes, to defend what belonged to them and him. The kind of men who were their own police, and who didn’t blanch one bit at the prospect of shedding blood.
Leo had hung the murderer. He’d given the rapist a chance to beg on his knees. When the victim had refused to marry, he’d hung the rapist, too. He’d had the thieves whipped within an inch of their lives. The two men with the property dispute had resolved it in bare-handed matched combat, with Bosun Jarvinen serving as referee. One man he’d let go, as not guilty. But he’d whipped the false accuser in his stead.
This time last year, the townsfolk’s eyes would have popped right out of their heads at such justice. But now the response had been surprisingly positive.
They’d seen a court. They’d seen evidence examined, and witnesses questioned. They’d seen the accuser accuse, and they’d seen the accused speak in his own defense. They’d seen the verdict reached, and they’d seen the judgment applied on the spot.
No one had to watch, but it was all public. It was consistent. It was impartial. It was order. It was the one thing they craved most of all.
They’d never expected a Spartan prince to be soft, and no one who’d survived the past eleven months was a blushing violet. The word coming out of Layos was that the thing had been rough, but it was a needful thing. Hard Law, for hard times. An iron hand on the reins, to put an end to the chaos.
A request had just arrived, before the storm set in. The townsfolk of Casabuenos wanted a visit from His Excellency. Someone had to give them order. Someone had to hold the reins with an iron hand.
The problem was, it was a foreign order, based upon a foreign law. It was a foreign iron hand.
They could translate Leo’s Ice Code into Paradisian. They could set up circuit judges and a local militia, just like Yosi’s guerrilla doctrine called for. But the only thing behind it all would be fear. It would work, for a bit. You could rise high upon bayonets. But it wouldn’t last. You couldn’t sit upon bayonets for long. Just ask General Palmer.
No, what they needed was legitimacy. A right to rule.
By what right did the FPA whip a thief? By what right did the FPA hang a murderer? What stood behind the FPA?
She’d anticipated this problem, thought Patty, when she’d first written the FPA Oath. Give credit to instinct, she had anticipated. There was at least an implication in the words that behind the Army there stood a Movement. But it was just an implication. The new recruits outside this cave might believe it now. The townsmen might believe it for a while. But the plain and awful truth was, behind the Army there was nothing. Just three men and two women in a cave, and a clutch of alien guns.
By what right did the FPA exist? By what right did it rule these woods?
“God dammit!” cursed Patty under her breath. “God damn it all to Hell!”
How she hated this world! How she hated this body!
The Movement needed a Leader. A proper Leader. Like Arnaldo Palmer. Like the House of Nùnez before him. A herdeiro. Someone who looked like half his ancestors had signed the Refuge Compact, who sounded like his people had ruled towns and owned haciendas from time immemorial. Someone whom they would obey. Someone who belonged.
But the FPA had no one. No one. What the FPA had was an Israeli colonel who wasn’t really a colonel, and a Spartan prince, and the son of an Imperial juren, and two blancas, one of whom hadn’t even made it out of high school when the bombs had fallen and the other was known universally as…
Yeah, that.
All right, maybe not universally. She did have friends. Some were still alive, probably. And not all of her former lovers had thought that of her. But it changed nothing.
A blanco could not rule. A blanco couldn’t hold power in his own right. A blanco was a foreigner. Klaus Weinberger might be an exception, but he was the exception that proved the rule.
He was Klaus Weinberger, for Heaven’s sake! He was Lucir. He was The Man Who Overthrew Palmer. Go ahead, find another like him! And still he’d had to serve as the deputy head of the Committee For National Reform. And still, in the new Government, he wasn’t President, but merely Minister of Infrastructure.
The men outside this cave obeyed her only because she was the Spartan Prince’s Woman. They respected Mirabelle only because she was the Israeli Colonel’s Woman. Take away the prince and the colonel tomorrow, and they’d both be rapemeat by week’s end.
The Palmerists would at least accept her right to exist, in theory. Arnaldo Palmer had been a meritocrat, on paper. Half the monarchists out there would rather see every blanco on the planet slaughtered. Pragaliva. The blancos were their misfortune. But without the Palmerists and the Monarchists, the FPA would get precisely nowhere.
The movement needed a herdeiro Leader, thought Patty, but it couldn’t have one. It didn’t have one. And so it would all fall apart.
She could sound like one. She could use the right words. She already did, instinctively, most of the time. The boarding schools had done their job. As long as they didn’t lay eyes on her, it all worked like a charm. But when the leader of the rabble at Guaicui had seen her face to face, the first question out of his mouth had been whether he could take the single cargo truck now, like The Señora had promised to let him. He’d picked the poorest-quality, smallest one. His people would barely fit.
That dimwit had never even considered the possibility that she might be The Señora. The thought would never cross his mind. She didn’t even have to open her mouth and give him a voice to compare. Things simply didn’t work like that.
People like The Señora didn’t have white skin and blond hair. People like The Señora owned people like that. A blanca didn’t have money and power of her own. A blanca was working for someone.
It had all made perfect sense to him at a glance. He was just a jailbird petty thief from the barrio. Even in the Yellow Rats he didn’t rate anything more than a lance corporal’s stripe. The likes of The Señora didn’t talk to the likes of him.
Of course there’d be a blanca giving orders to the men who searched him, and another blanca carrying a medical bag and translating for the foreign officer with a colonel’s three wreathed stars on his epaulets who would’ve actually carried out the impaling on the stakes and the skinning alive and the sticking of heads up on spikes and all the other lovely things The Señora had promised to have done to the garrison if they dared to disobey her orders. That’s what people like The Señora had blancos for.
They had a blanco to keep their books and they had a blanco to manage their property, they had a blanco to represent them in court and a blanco to treat them when they were sick, they had a blanca governess to tutor their kids, and The Señor would bend the blanca governess over the desk in his study every once in a while, for variety, along with his blanco accountant’s teenage daughter, and some peasant ninny from among the household maids… And people like him would mow the lawn and take out the trash and do whatever else the Señor and Señora’s blancos told them to do.
That’s how things had worked on this planet since forever, and that’s how they properly had to work in that fool’s one-braincell barrio trash mind. The Señora had gone to war, and she’d gone to war the same way she did business.
People like The Señora didn’t dirty their hands with actual work. They gave orders, and Little People like him jumped to obey. And if The Señora had a thorny problem that her Paradisian Little People couldn’t resolve for her, sh
e’d snap her fingers at her blanco accountant, and out would come a suitcase or two full of thousand-peso bills, and along would come some expert foreigner with a funny face and a funny name, to solve The Señora’s problem for her.
Like, say, the thorny problem of a bunch of pesky alien cats who’d shown up out of the blue and taken over The Señora’s planet without asking permission. And the associated not-so-thorny but annoying problem of a bunch of gutter trash like himself forgetting their proper place in the grand scheme of things.
And yes, of course The Señora had an Israeli colonel commanding her army. Even one-braincell barrio trash went to elementary school, and if they didn’t, there were still historical action immersies.
Where did Hernan the Great find the man to build him an army fit to massacre millions on his behalf and conquer this world for the House of Nùnez once and for all? What was that man’s name? What planet did he come from?
There was a reason why Paradisian officers had six-pointed stars on their epaulets. And that man, too, had worn three wreathed ones.
What was good enough for King Hernan, was good enough for The Señora. Nothing had changed on this planet but the decorations, in the intervening three hundred and seventy-odd years.
She could sound like The Señora, thought Patty. As long as no face was seen, she could create the illusion. She didn’t just dance flamenco and play the guitar. Before Golden Age political philosophy, her first love had always been theater. The problem was, she could put no face to the voice.
“But wait!” flashed through Patty’s mind. “Wait! Wait a minute! Why does there have to be a face?”
There was a damned war on. There was an alien occupation. The Señora had to hide. Had to communicate remotely. Had to send out messages. Had to use proxies. Proxies whom she knew. Proxies whom she’d always known. Proxies who could be trusted to keep secrets, because they had always kept secrets.