Revolt on War World c-3

by Jerry Pournelle

  This sort of thing happened in the best of families. They used to shut the strange ones up in attic rooms, or let them rove about the big old country houses. Now, of course, there were drugs and rest homes.

  She wondered what excuse would be found when whatever was planned actually happened. Because no threats had been made, no protection orders could be issued. "They don' mean squat!" one of the women in the Dorchester Project had assured her about such orders.

  It had been a mistake to inquire about her students, now long vanished. She knew that her inquiry had been reported where it would do her the most harm, in those carefully lavish offices where her brother and his aides compiled a dossier on Professor and Doctor Winthrop Baker and her troubled state of mind. Did she seem. . composed when she pressed her police call button? Did she perform her duties in a satisfactory manner upon her return? Would you call Professor Bakers involvement in the Literacy Programs on the Welfare Islands characteristic behavior? Did you notice any. . uh, behavioral quirks when she was arrested on charges of civil disobedience?

  Even her housekeeper had been questioned: Does Professor Baker appear cheerful? Does she keep irregular hours? Has she ever said. .? The poor woman had reported the questions and her answers to Wyn. When she realized how her answers might be used, she had broken down in tears, and Wyn had to dose her with her best brandy.

  She suspected they would use her as another example of how professors shouldn't interfere in business, much less politics. Probably the excuse would be the usual one for a woman and an intellectual. She was working too hard, poor thing. And then she started poking into business and wasn't up to the stress. What could you expect?

  Actually, she figured her brother would try to prove her incompetent. That meant a rest home-a country club with guards for wealthy, neurasthenic, or otherwise inconvenient people. She hoped the one they'd probably park her in would have a decent library. Maybe the tranquilizers wouldn't be too strong, or she could spit them out.

  Well, the rest home could just wait. She had one last lecture to give.

  Wyn climbed the platform, arranged notes she knew she would not use, and looked out at the students waiting for her to speak. Faces pink and assured, with the familiar chin- or browlines of distant cousins, come to hear lecture or scandal as they absorbed the academic airs and graces suitable for the heirs of rulers.

  There were ghosts in the room, too. Floating above empty seats at the back (which were the places they would probably have chosen) were other faces, the olive skin and dark eyes of the students who had vanished because they were Citizens, to be engulfed by BuReloc. What would they have made of Sanders Theatre and this university Wyn had called home for most of her life? Could they see it for the tainted thing it had become?

  Her voice rang out over the room with its pine- and sun-scented echoes. Aristocrat speaking with aristocrats, she could invoke references and languages that would have lost and shamed her LAU students. "We have been reared," she told them, "to admire Realpolitik. Consider, for example, the ways of Thomas Hobbes and his Leviathan. But must life, as he formulated it, be 'nasty, brutish, and short' to be considered 'real'? I find it interesting. ."

  There, she had used first person; that ought to bring her students' heads up. They must know: she would be detained today, taken away, whatever euphemisms they chose. No wonder Sanders had filled the way it did when elder professors were retiring.

  ". . that Hobbes chose to translate Thucydides's Peloponnesian War, which contains Pericles' funeral oration. That speech is perhaps one of the most moving formulations of belief in an ideal code that we have from the ancient world, and the Melian Dialogue. . Book Five, which is a debate between such an ideal code and a rather cynical realpolitik.

  "I cannot quote Hobbes to you at this point. The book is out of print and I. ." Wyn paused to let the irony sink in. . "lost my copy in California last year. It is strange, however, how one recalls phrases in and out of context. For me, the most chilling phrase from Book Five comes not from Hobbes but from another translation. For all I can recollect, it may have been one of my own, done many years ago. 'For the strong do what they will, while the weak suffer what they must.' "

  She could see the smiles, evoked by her mention of the California riot that had brought her back prematurely to the East Coast, altering to nods of approval. "We are used to agreeing wisely with such statements. To disagree, these days, marks us as naive, foolish, sentimental, especially those of us who plan to enter the more active fields of law and commerce. And yet, to have these words spoken by a people who had earlier declared that they honored the law and they honored the law that was above the law is to hear a chilling moral progression. Or, as I see it, a moral deterioration.

  "As students, we are not just entitled to make such judgments." She paused.

  "We are required." Shock on those scrubbed, smug faces. Had she ever looked so sure, so jolted out of her composure? Memory shocked her: the day before the riot.

  Disappointed at hearing ethics when they had hoped for scandal, her class was glazing out again. Perhaps only a riot outside the windows would convince them of what she had seen. But no such riot would taint the Yard if she could help it. More than enough blood had been shed on any campus.

  "Why, you goin' back there if you knows they gonna take you?" Her brother had been very, very right. Social work, settlement house work hadn't been the answer. But students in Harvard's "adopted" schools in the Dorchester and Mattapan Welfare Projects had received her. First, because they had no choice. No Citizens turned down help from a Baker from Harvard. Then once the newsgrids had shut up and the Welfare rumor mills had a chance to spread the word, they had bothered to listen. Warily at first: like all the people who came into the Projects when anyone in her right mind knew the only thing to do was get out as fast as you could, this professor had to be crazy. But maybe, just maybe, she was their kind of crazy.

  And maybe, just maybe, she was theirs.

  It had been strange at first to teach basic reading rather than Linear B or Homer. It had been stranger yet to make home visits to grandmothers younger than herself but pregnant once again. And strangest of all to find herself learning more from them than they could from her.

  Abandoning generations of "keep it in the family," she had asked their advice; and they had warned her. "They'd never do that!" she had protested to faces, black, white, and brown, old and young, all wizened from the same street wisdom and the street fights that erupted when that wisdom failed.

  Was she expecting trouble? What kind? Given tough licensing laws and the penalties for illegal weapons, she'd better not pack a weapon. So her bookbag held books and papers, nothing more dangerous. A first-aid kit rode in one pocket. She had even sewn some simple jewelry and coins into the seams of her bag. With luck, the nurses in whatever rest home she was bound for could be bribed.

  "You're pushing it, Wyn. I'm warning you." Sure enough, Wyn could hear the minatory singsong in her brother's voice. For years, it had been second nature in the family to yield to him when his face turned red, and he waved his finger at her as no teacher beyond the elementary grades had the ill-grace to do.

  She had held the statement out to him, the statement of her holdings and the records she had found. Saying nothing. Letting the record speak for itself.

  "So, you're mowing the whistle? Do you want to disgrace us all?"

  "This illegality has done that already," she had retorted. Tactical blunder. She should at least have looked as if she were ready to deal.

  She had tried to hire a lawyer the next day-not a Family member. The lawyer had sweated, hedged, gabbled of consequences that made him sweat through his shirt until even the silk of his tie hung limp. Ultimately, however, Baker money-even after it was besmirched by old Put amp; Call-convinced him to accept a retainer. And her instructions. She wondered if he'd stand tough if. . when. . she disappeared.

  Subpoenas were delivered; the newswires went ghoulish with "need to know" and the impli
cation of famous prey. But "you haven't heard the last!" her brother had promised. The elaborate contra-dance of bail, hearings, and indictments began.

  So did the careful, cautious "it's for her own good" of her brother's people's investigation.

  Carry money and small valuables. Wyn's Welfare Project friends warned her. Don't stick to fixed habits. Watch yourself.

  But what about her life?

  "Lucky if you keep it." She had herself seen the boy who had been set on fire when he refused to run borloi; the woman whose boyfriend had slashed her face; the ex-gangmember whose brothers stayed with him, as if on guard-and those were the lucky ones, who got to go on living.

  "You stay here. We hide you."

  She assured them she was protected, that she played a game circumscribed by law.

  "You think? You step on his turf; he get you. You stay here."

  She hadn't listened. And she hadn't run. She had no great faith in her ability to hide, in any case. And some bravura notion of being arrested at her work, taken from her classroom had pushed her back from the Welfare Projects to Cambridge and this final lecture.

  After all, it was her students in California who had vanished quite literally off the face of the Earth, bound-as she knew now-for interstellar Devil's Islands like Tanith or Haven. They couldn't afford the luxury of grandstanding: she could.

  He sayin' you crazy, her friends from Welfare, her students there, had told her. Gonna put you away. Even after two girls had dressed up like cleaning crew and raided the dumpster behind her brother's lawyers' office for shredded transcripts, Wyn had found it hard to believe that he would turn on her.

  You turn on him!

  She never had persuaded them of the difference between crime and revenge, had she? But, assuming he said she was crazy and tried to have her committed, she was hardly the first overprivileged woman to be punished that way for the crime of disagreeing with her family. How bad could a rest home be, after all? She had always meant to ask her aunt Dorothea, who had spent twenty years of her life in and out of them. Old now, and lucid on the days she bothered to stop drinking and dress to come downstairs, Dorothea had watched her as ironically as the women in Mattapan.

  No point in thinking of that now. What's done is done.

  Where was she in this lecture? That was right. Shake them up a bit with their own weakness. They only think they're safe, prosperous: what if someone stronger comes along and decides to take what they have?

  ". . It is a sign of our own deterioration that we need to ask 'who are the weak?' Are they those who live in Welfare Islands, those who have turned their back upon our nation and our world for the dubious loyalties of the CoDominium? Or are they those who do not ask? The unexamined life, Socrates said, is not living. And we have failed to examine our own lives.

  "It is thus we who are the weak. ." Wyn let the statement drop gently into the sunny, civilized theatre.

  ". . For we have forgotten. And we have forgotten to ask."

  She had not forgotten, she protested as she moved into the final section of the class. A century or so ago, there had been a great classicist, a Jew, who had fled Germany. He came to a checkpoint and was stopped by a young soldier who searched his baggage. With the instincts of the hunted, the scholar knew that the soldier recognized him, knew him for a Jew and a fugitive. He waited for the man to lay his hand upon his arm and shout the words that would herald the start of his arrest and death. The soldier indeed spoke. "You have a copy of Horace in your bags, Herr Professor."

  And so the professor had spoken of Horace, had lectured, risen on the wings of fear and eloquence till he taught as he had never taught before. And when his mouth dried, his voice broke, and his throat almost closed with weariness, the soldier spoke again. "Danke sch?n, Herr Professor," he said. And stamped his papers and sent him on his way to freedom and to life.

  Heads turned to stare out the blurred glass of the theatre's windows. Wyn's head went up. Again, the copper spoor of blood dimmed the air.

  "Prowl car," muttered one student to his seatmate. His ruddy face paling. "It's white."

  Psicops? No security but Harvard's own ever set foot in the yard. Were they going to make her out to be a dangerous lunatic?

  Wyn's belly chilled, and her mouth dried. Her voice went hoarse, but she forced breath up from her diaphragm, and her voice rang out with a strength that surprised her. Could she turn back? she wondered. Even at the last, Antigone had been offered a choice: recant, retreat. She had not-and she had died. Too rigid, people called Antigone these days.

  Like Antigone, Wyn had a brother who had betrayed his family. That had to be set right as best she could.

  Perhaps Wyn should have been more discreet. She could not have been less foolish. Not when she knew. And she knew other things too: that there was always a payment for knowledge.

  Now, she spoke to the kids who would never see this overcivilized room. The faces that she saw only in her imagination-the blackened eyes and bloodied mouths-seemed to relax as she spoke, then fade as if they were ghosts she had assuaged. Then, to faces leached by unaccustomed fear of their confidence, she spoke of the students they would never meet.

  "They were dispossessed, you see, being weak; being only Citizens. You say that you are safe, being Taxpayers? Taxpayers you are; Taxpayers we are; and yet I tell you, when a government like that of Athens turns first upon its principles and then upon the people who still espouse them-as if ashamed before them-anyone can become the weak. And in that situation, one may only hope one has the strength to endure. If you take one thing from today's class, I suggest it be this: the Gedankenexperiment. . Einstein's term, which translates as thought experiment. . Assume that you have become 'the weak.' What will you do now?"

  Pause to draw a long, much-needed breath and meet the eyes that challenged hers.

  "You're quite right, of course. The question cuts both ways. What would I do?"

  She looked down into those faces and nodded, a minute bow of conclusion.

  "I should hope to be equal to the ordeal."

  For a moment, she stood, catching her breath, assembling her papers and stowing them in her bookbag. To her astonishment, the students cheered her as if she were Lilith. Their red, opened mouths reminded her of students in the first riot she had seen and how their mouths bled as they fell.

  She forced a smile and a rueful, modest headshake. Then, with a last look around the wooden vaults of the old theater, she slipped out a side door. Memories died as quickly as the echoes of old applause. She wondered who would forget first: her students or the kids from the Welfare Districts.

  It took all the strength she had to leave Mem Hall and begin her usual leisurely stroll toward the Yard and her study in Widener Library.

  "Professor Baker?" Outsiders, then, not to use a social title. They didn't call her "doctor" either: that would be reserved for medical types. So it was the rest home, was it? And so soon! She turned and eyed the two men and one woman as she might size up freshmen. Their tailoring was good enough to let them pass for Taxpayers, yet loose enough to let them move freely. She wondered if she could outrun them; she was certain it wasn't worth trying.

  She inclined her head, then continued on her way.

  "Could we talk with you?"

  "I have office hours in the Library."

  "We would prefer someplace more private."

  She kept on walking. Quick steps sounded behind her and someone laid a hand on her arm. Wyn spun around, the arm holding her bookbag coming up in pathetic defense.

  Two students strolled past. More emerged from the iron and brick gates that opened into the yard. Could she appeal to them?

  The woman in the group had a hand in her breast pocket. Wyn wondered if she would produce sedatives or a weapon.

  "Not here," she said. "And not in front of them." She gestured with her chin at her students.

  They nodded, relaxing visibly that she was proving reasonable. That should be in her favor at a sanity hearing. />
  "This way," said the man in the lead. His voice held the deliberately soothing tones of a psychiatrist, though Wyn had never met a shrink who moved as if he did katas every morning. He took her arm-just a friendly meeting, wasn't this; and smile for the innocent kids, why don't you?

  Past the Science Center. Past Mem Hall again. Past the dreadful ersatz Georgian of the Fire Station and onto the street. A white van, bare of logo, idled. Psicops indeed, Wyn thought. As well announce in the Freshman Union that she had run mad. The door was opened for her.

  "I suppose," she said cautiously, "there is no point in talking you out of this?"

  "Please get in."

  No students were on the street. Wyn spun on her heel, preparing to run into the street, to shout; but the hand was on her arm again, urging her toward the car. And a lifetime of civility, of restraint blunted her willingness to make the scene that might have saved her. We are the weak.

  The door whined shut. There was no release mechanism on her side of the vehicle. The car rose on its hoverpads and sped down Cambridge Street, out of the city, beyond Boston into the manicured exurbs where only the wealthiest Taxpayers lived. No one spoke to her.

  "Damn!" the exclamation forced a grunt of surprise from the man who sat beside her as lights and sirens erupted behind them.

  "Why dint y'stay inna the speed limit?" he slurred as he hit his chin on the plexiglass dividing driver from passengers.

  "I did!" protested the driver.

  "Keep on going."

  "You keep going, Taxpayer," the driver snapped. "It's not your license they'll lift; and then what do I have? A quick trip to a Welfare District?" He pulled over.

  A prowl car pulled up. "You have custody of Professor Winthrop Baker? This warrant authorizes us to demand her release."

  A flood of warmth, of gratitude, washed over her. Bless her lawyer and his timing!

  "That's not a good idea," replied the psychiatrist. "She needs medical intervention. ." His voice, so assured when dealing with Wyn, trailed off as he saw the sonic shockers that the newcomers held. Now he was "the weak." She wondered what punishment he would face.