by John Barnes
"It does indeed," Carruthers said, coming up behind us. From the way Thorwald started, I could see that his career as a blasphemer would be developing slowly; he seemed to be reacting as if what he had said a minute ago was hanging around in the air like old flatulence.
There was a tense little pause, and then Carruthers added, "And I don't think that's entirely a bad thing. Giraut, you would not be familiar with it, I think, since you've only begun to study Reason, but in fact there are just under one hundred forbidden theorems in our mathematical theology, all of which are demonstrations that one axiom can be brought into conflict with another. It's part of the basic creed that somehow those contradictions are resolved within the Mind of God, and in fact the forbidden theorems, at least until recently, were one of the major causes of ministers electing to leave the pastorate. Well, nearly every significant one—forbidden theorems eight, twelve, thirteen, thirty, and forty-two, if memory serves—involves exactly the problem of rational pursuit of irrational pleasure."
"And by 'significant' you mean—?"
"Significant as a source of dissension and heresy. A question the Church has historically not had a good answer for." He smiled at all of us. "My, the things that cross one's lips once one embarks on a course of dissent, however unwillingly."
Thorwald flushed but I don't think Carruthers noticed.
The old minister went on. "So if I were placing a wager, it would be that if the General Consultancy loosens up on the issue of irrational pleasures it will actually just shift the grounds of controversy, rather than trigger a wholesale overthrow." His eyes twinkled. "And a good thing, too, because I'd certainly hate to have to learn a whole new theology at my age." With a final warm smile—I was finding it harder and harder to reconcile Carruthers now, not only with Aimeric's account of him years ago, but even with the way I had seen him when I had first arrived—he wandered off to talk to Shan, who seemed to be enjoying some sort of elaborate story Prescott Diligence was telling.
"The world is getting inexplicable," Aimeric said, with a sigh. "So you're going, Paul?"
"Yap. For one thing I'm the promoter—all those specialized cats are leased to me, and I have to make sure property I'm responsible for doesn't get damaged. For another, well, I already said I'd just like to see the other side of the hill. I wouldn't think you or Giraut would have trouble understanding that."
Aimeric ignored the teasing and asked, very seriously and pointedly, "You aren't worried about what might happen while you're gone?"
Paul shrugged. "I'm in business. My interest in liberty is in making money off it, or in enjoying it for myself. I get into politics only when I'm shoved in." It was almost funny—it seemed almost a parody of a few hardshelled Caledon capitalists I'd met at receptions and while out doing interviews to get data for Aimeric—and yet it wasn't, because I saw as he said it that he didn't just believe it to be true, he regarded it as part of himself like his eye color or his height. I was looking at a man not yet twenty who knew exactly who and what he was, and what that implied about his course through life— and it occurred to me that I had seldom seen a man, or a grown person, not yet twenty. Certainly I had never been one. While the rest of us looked for who we were, Paul had found it and gotten started.
The twinge of jealousy I felt was inexcusable, so I forced my attention back into the conversation. Paul was being, I thought, unnecessarily apologetic for the narrowness of his focus, but he seemed to need to say it, so we all listened as he wound down, and then Aimeric turned to Thorwald and said, "So, will you be going?"
He didn't hesitate. "I've got to stay."
I was not sure what Aimeric was interested in, but he seemed very intent on something. He glanced at Margaret, and she said, "I want to go. I'll have to think about whether or not I can afford to do it."
There was a long silence before Aimeric said, "Giraut?"
"Companhon, I'm not sure why you are taking this little poll, but you know me well enough to know that if time and duty permit I'd be delighted to have the chance—the notion of crossing so many kilometers of virgin territory, especially land that has truly gone wild since no one has planned the wildlife for it ... I would regret not going very much. But it also occurs to me that I am not really here as a tourist, there is duty to be considered both to all of you, and to the Council of Humanity, and that must determine my answer. Now, Aimeric, would you mind telling us why this question is so urgent for you? Are you hoping to get a cheap seat at the last minute for the trip?"
He smiled a bit at the joke, but when he spoke his face was still serious. "Companho, m'es vis we may have been had. There was really no reason why Saltini could not have simply declared that all those petitions on our behalf amounted to a prima facie case that there was a mass epidemic of irrationality. Then he could have simply declared martial law and thrown everyone in jail except Giraut, me, and Bieris. So I started thinking about what Saltini and his merry band could be up to in granting this request."
"There's a way it could hurt us?" Thorwald asked. He seemed to have trouble believing it.
"Maybe. It all depends on how smart they are, and how lucky. But we shouldn't forget that at least at present they have a good deal of control over their luck, because they're the ones who set the timetables—so far we're mostly just reacting to what they do. So, if they are smart enough, they can make themselves lucky."
All around us the party still swirled in a confusion of happy chatter, clinking glasses, and bursts of music; yet now the room seemed cooler and smaller, and everyone in the celebrating crowd seemed far away, as if an icy fog had crept out of the stones and filled the room, muffling the sounds, killing the smells of food and wine, and dulling the colors.
Our little cluster of people had fallen silent, and after a long breath or two Aimeric said, "I seem to have killed our party. And it's possible that I'm wrong. Can we all sneak off to a side room, perhaps to the private kitchen, for a quick conference? If I'm wrong and you convince me I am, we'll have that much more to celebrate; if I'm right we should probably decide what to do about it."
There wasn't really any such thing as sneaking to the private kitchen, because somehow or other the five of us had become known as "The Committee"—of what or for what wasn't clear to me at all—and there was some kind of belief among all of them that whatever The Committee did was always something vital, so the fact that we were all disappearing together convinced a third of them that some new crisis was in the offing, another third that we were about to go make the next set of plans for the revolution—and when had there gotten to be this belief that there was going to be one, let alone that our little group was planning it? I only hoped feat the rumors didn't get all of us jailed—and the last third that we were headed off to a somehow better private party (as if someplace in the Center we had an entirely different set of friends who were somehow superior and that no one had ever met). So as we left, nodding politely to everyone, we triggered a buzz of conversation that rose to a roar as I closed the door behind us. Margaret rolled her eyes at me, and I gave her a quick, one-armed hug; we had both gotten tired of the rumors that began flying every time me and my three Caledon employees got together to discuss the problem of cleaning some of the big sleeping areas, or what should be served at a party, or whether or not there was enough enthusiasm for Occitan Social Dance to add another section of it.
She and I followed the others, hand in hand. It seemed to me strange that a few weeks before I had believed the Center could function without someone like her—or for that matter that I could.
The silly attention focused on "The Committee" had a positive side. People were afraid to interrupt us whenever we all went to the private kitchen; they seemed to think it was the Top Secret Conference Room, when in fact it was simply a place with enough chairs, lots of sunlight in the mornings, and cocoa and coffee available.
We closed the doors, got comfortable, and all looked at Aimeric. Without prelude or warmup, he began:
"The whole
key to it, if I'm right, is to try to look at it from the viewpoint of the peeps. Suppose they don't allow the expedition to the west coast. Then, in the first place, they keep the opposition going by letting us organize around an issue that the General Consultancy has already declared to be rational, and in the second place they let us keep winning rulings that will be useful in future cases. They look increasingly unreasonable, because it really is a small request, and finally it all happens right here in Utilitopia; the Center is the most noticeable building in the waterfront area, and every Utilitopian who passes through this part of town is going to be reminded of the issue. So the longer they keep it alive, the worse for them.
"Now, suppose they let us make the trip. First of all, it cools off the hottest issue we have, and companho, you are surely aware that it will take us considerable time to find another one and build it up. Moreover, at exactly the time when we need to be launching the new campaigns, some of our key people will be on the other side of the continent. And that brings me to the second point, the important one, which is that they've now given themselves a twenty-day window—more than twenty-three standays—in which they can do something without our being able to react effectively. Especially because our more prominent members—prominent in the media, I mean— will be exactly the ones on the expedition. That opportunity for sowing confusion in our ranks is, well, exactly why I think they agreed to it. In fact, I would bet that the reason why they resisted so much was merely to set the hook; now we've fought so long and so much for this peripheral issue that the expedition can't not go. We're stuck—they know exactly when they can do something big and we won't be able to give them much of an effective fight—and so, to repeat, companho, m'es vis, we've been had." He leaned back in his chair and looked around the room, pausing to make eye contact with each of us, "Now will someone please talk me out of that suspicion?"
Thorwald cleared his throat; he was drawing some invisible picture with his finger on the table, and did not look up as he spoke. How had such a young man gotten to look so mature so quickly? He looked too old to be a jovent, back home ... come to think of it, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and so did I. He cleared his throat again, seemed about to speak, then sighed. "Well, it's an obvious point, but I can think of most of the answers to it very easily. After all, the expedition will be taking along full media facilities—in fact there will be two paid staff positions operating cameras, recording equipment, and the uplink to the satellites. So it should be perfectly possible for anyone on the expedition to make an immediate statement. The problem, obviously, is that since Saltini can physically seize control of the media and com links to the expedition, he can keep the people on the expedition from knowing anything that's going on, and he can keep the media from putting out statements from anyone on the expedition. Someone here in Utilitopia can always go over to the Bazaar, and start handing out leaflets or set up a podium and make a speech, but anyone on that expedition is completely dependent on Saltini's tolerance to be able to communicate."
Aimeric made a face. "And for that matter, one way to divert attention from events in Utilitopia would be to keep the expedition from knowing anything about them, and devote a lot of media time, including both the volume of headlines in the surface channels and the length of pieces in the depth channels, to 'happy news' from the expedition. That way even if they've got the whole movement in Utilitopia locked up incommunicado without bail, to the average viewer it would appear that civil liberties are still in force."
"Well, then," Margaret said calmly, "we've really only got two little problems to solve; it's not that big a matter, Aimeric, even though it's important"
One of his eyebrows crept upward, but he gestured for her to go ahead.
"Well, look, we need two things. We need a private way, that Saltini doesn't control, to com the expedition, with some kind of 'dead man' arrangement so that if everyone here is jailed the expedition will know something is up. And we need some way for the expedition to get a public statement back to Utilitopia so that the peeps can't get away with the things Aimeric is talking about. Solve those two problems and we not only don't have to worry about the PPP—we may even have the advantage of surprise and be able to hit them with something they aren't expecting."
Aimeric looked a little more hopeful, but he held up his hands as if balancing weights in them. "You're right, and it might be a major opportunity ... but it would have to work."
"That applies to anything," Paul pointed out. "And as you say, we're going to have to go through with this expedition anyway. At least I feel better knowing we might have a couple of cards up our sleeves, to match the ones Saltini's got."
There was a knock at the door. I got up, opened it, and Ambassador Shan and Reverend Carruthers came in. Now the rumors would really start, I supposed, but then for once there was a gram or two of truth in them. As I closed the door, Carruthers said, "I think we have something important to discuss, friends."
Aimeric sighed. "Seems to be the night for it. You tell us your ideas, we'll tell you ours, and then we can all be depressed together."
Shan seemed to allow himself a trace of a smile. "Oh, I don't think you'll be depressed by this news. Rather the contrary. May I sit?"
Embarrassed, we all said yes at once; Caledons never asked, and neither did Occitans, the former because it would be irrational for anyone else to have a preference about the matter and the latter because that sort of petty concern for others' feelings was quite possibly effeminate and in any case ne gens. I've since learned that makes both cultures rude by the standards of most others.
"To give you a brief explanation of why I haven't been able to speak of or do anything about this before," Shan said, once he'd settled in and accepted a cup of cocoa from Thorwald, "I should probably tell you a bit about the relations between the Council of Humanity, its Ambassadors, and the Thousand Cultures generally. Understand first of all that the inner sphere of worlds—Earth itself, Dunant and Passy in the Centauri system, and Cremer, Ducommun, and Gobat—have almost ninety percent of the actual human population and about four hundred of its cultures. That's just six out of thirty-one planets, and if any of them were to rupture with the Council, we'd be deeply in trouble. Now, unfortunately, it happens that they had more than their share of peculiar founding cultures, and although they interbred more than the other Thousand Cultures, they had far more contact with each other as well, and unlike the situation out here in the frontier—I know you've been peaceably settled for almost as long as the core worlds, and you are quite as advanced and urbanized, but from the Council's viewpoint you are a frontier world in that you are far away and have low populations—well, I've delayed saying it as long as I can. There are a very large number of potentially explosive traditional hatreds in the inner sphere. That was one reason why priority was placed on getting springer contact with the Aurigan frontier worlds—the chain of isolated systems leading out to Theta Ursa Major—before we turned our efforts to getting springer contact out here, on the Bootes-Hercules frontier. It so happened that Thorburg was in the Pollux system, Chaka Home on Theta Ursa Major itself, and New Parris Island in the Capella system, and we needed to make sure that the military cultures were available to the Council to keep order if need be. Especially since, to put it bluntly, you had so many of the more offensive religious and cultural groups out here.
"Now, the way we were able to get a Council with enough teeth to prevent internecine warfare among the Thousand Cultures was that we did some classic deal-making, some of which we knew we'd regret later. So in addition to the cultures themselves, there are representatives from the most heavily inhabited worlds who hold permanent cabinet seats on the Council and who—just like the old UN system, I'm afraid—also have veto powers. And their biggest concern is that no matter how much trouble is happening out on the frontier, local cultural rights not be trampled on, because that might create a precedent for other cultures to try to get the Council to endorse their traditional positions, a
nd perhaps even to force unwanted things onto their neighbors. So I've had to operate under very strict regulations in what I can and can't do here.
"Opposing that has been the fact that we also cannot allow a culture, once it has made contact, to drift out of our influence and control—for exactly the same reasons we can't trample on their rights. So when it has been possible to do so, we have been perfectly willing to treat a culture's original charter as a binding contract, and to enforce upon then various things they did not wish to do, in order to prevent their becoming an isolated pariah among the Thousand Cultures.
"Now, it so happens that I have been petitioning the Council of Humanity, ever since I got some idea of the situation here, to allow me a certain latitude in interpreting the original charter of Caledony, and in enforcing it. This has been because, to put it bluntly, the traditional Caledon culture was very likely to be painfully annoying to many of the Thousand Cultures, and given its obnoxiousness, it seemed best if it were severely weakened at home. Thus if liberalizing tendencies were encouraged in it, it might become easier to deal with for everyone concerned. I stress, because I think honesty is most likely to get the response I want, that the Council does not really care about civil liberties here—there are plenty of cultures that are far more oppressive that we leave alone. What we do care about is the need for every culture to have a basic tolerance of the other cultures, and that no culture be likely to turn messianic or millennial. In short, we don't want the Saltini regime to fall because they are a repressive dictatorship, but because they are a gang of stubborn bigots of the kind likely to ignite conflict elsewhere."
He looked around the room and saw that everyone was nodding and no one seemed to be terribly upset. "Oddly enough, I tell you these harsh, blunt truths because I like all of you. I want to make sure that you do not think the Council of Humanity is about to solve your problems for you; we will be intervening on your side in the next few days, but we will not necessarily always do that, even though there may be times in the future when morally the case might be far stronger. So do not count on any such thing to happen more than just this one time, and do not plan on any backing beyond what I'm about to tell you.