Caroline J. Cherryh Downbelow Station
BOOK ONE
Chapter One
Earth and Outward: 2005-2352
The stars, like all man’s other ventures, were an obvious impracticality, as rash and improbable an ambition as the first venture of man onto Earth’s own great oceans, or into the air, or into space. Sol Station had existed profitably for some years; there were the beginnings of mines, the manufacturies, the power installations in space which were beginning to pay. Earth took them for granted as quickly as it did all its other comforts. Missions from the station explored the system, a program far from public understanding, but it met no strong opposition, since it did not disturb the comfort of Earth.
So quietly, very matter of factly, that first probe went out to the two nearest stars, unmanned, to gather data and return, a task in itself of considerable complexity. The launch from station drew some public interest, but years was a long time to wait for a result, and it passed out of media interest as quickly as it did out of the solar system. It drew a great deal more attention on its return, nostalgia on the part of those who recalled its launch more than a decade before, curiosity on the part of the young who had known little of its beginning and wondered what it was all about. It was a scientific success, bringing back data enough to keep the analysts busy for years… but there was no glib, slick way to explain the full meaning of its observations in layman’s terms. In public relations the mission was a failure; the public, seeking to understand on their own terms, looked for material benefit, treasure, riches, dramatic findings.
What the probe had found was a star with reasonable possibilities for encouraging life; a belt of debris, including particles, planetoids, irregular chunks somewhat under planet size with interesting implications for systemic formation, and a planetary companion with its own system of debris and moons… a planet desolate, baked, forbidding. It was no Eden, no second Earth, no better than what existed in the sun’s own system, and it was a far journey to have gone to find that out. The press grappled with questions it could not easily grasp itself, sought after something to give the viewers, lost interest quickly. If anything, there were questions raised about cost, vague and desperate comparisons offered to Columbus, and the press hared off quickly onto a political crisis in the Mediterranean, much more comprehensible and far bloodier.
The scientific establishment on Sol Station breathed a sigh of relief and with equal quiet caution invested a portion of its budget in a modest manned expedition, to voyage in what amounted to a traveling miniature of Sol Station itself, and to stay a time making observations in orbit about that world.
And very quietly, to further imitate Sol Station, to test manufacturing techniques which had built Earth’s great second satellite… in stranger conditions. Sol Corporation supplied a generous grant, having a certain curiosity, a certain understanding of stations and what profits could be looked for from their development
That was the beginning.
The same principles which had made Sol Station practical made the first star-station viable. It needed a bare minimum of supply in biostuffs from Earth… mostly luxuries to make life more pleasant for the increasing number of techs and scientists and families stationed there. It mined; and as its own needs diminished, would send back the surplus of its ores… so the first link in the chain was made. No need, no need at all, that first colony had proven, that a star have a world friendly to humans, no need even for a moderate sun-type star… just the solar wind and the usual accompanying debris of metals and rock and ice. One station built, a station module could be hauled to the next star, whatever it was. Scientific bases, manufacture: bases from which the next hopeful star could be reached; and the next and the next and the next. Earth’s outward exploration developed in one narrow vector, one little fan which grew at its broader end.
Sol Corporation, swollen beyond its original purpose and holding more stations than Sol itself, became what the star-stationers called it: the Earth Company. It wielded power… certainly over the stations which it directed long-distance, years removed in space; and power on Earth too, where its increasing supply of ores, medical items, and its possession of several patents were enormously profitable. Slow as the system was in starting, the steady arrival of goods and new ideas, however long ago launched, was profit for the Company and consequent power on Earth. The Company sent merchant carriers in greater and greater numbers: that was all it needed to do now. The crews which manned those ships on the long flights grew into an inward-turned and unique way of life, demanding nothing but improvement of equipment which they had come to think of as their own; station in turn supported station, each shifting Earth’s goods a step further on to its nearest neighbor, and the whole circular exchange ending up back on Sol Station where the bulk of it was drained off in high rates charged for biostuffs and such goods as only Earth produced.
Those were the great good days for those who sold this wealth: fortunes rose and fell; governments did; corporations took on more and more power, and the Earth Company in its many guises reaped immense profits and moved the affairs of nations. It was an age of restlessness. Newly industrialized populations and the discontents of every nation set out on that long, long track in search of jobs, wealth, private dreams of freedom, the old lure of the New World, human patterns recapitulated across a new and wider ocean, to stranger lands.
Sol Station became a stepping-off place, no longer exotic, but safe and known. The Earth Company flourished, drinking in the wealth of the star-stations, another comfort which those who received it began to take for granted.
And the star-stations clung to the memory of that lively, diverse world which had sent them, Mother Earth in a new and emotion-fraught connotation, she who sent out precious stuffs to comfort them; comforts which in a desert universe reminded them there was at least one living mote. The Earth Company ships were the lifeline… and the Earth Company probes were the romance of their existence, the light, swift exploration ships which let them grow more selective about next steps. It was the age of the Great Circle, no circle at all, but the course which the Earth Company freighters ran in constant travel, the beginning and end of which was Mother Earth.
Star after star after star… nine of them — until Pell, which proved to have a livable world, and life.
That was the thing which cancelled all bets, upset the balance, forever.
Pell’s Star, and Pell’s World, named for a probe captain who had located it — finding not alone a world, but indigenes, natives.
It took a long time for word to travel the Great Circle back to Earth; less for word of the find to get to the nearer star-stations… and more than scientists came flocking to Pell’s World. Local station companies who knew the economics of the matter came rushing to the star, not to be left behind; population came, and two of the stations orbiting less interesting stars nearby were dangerously depleted, ultimately to collapse altogether. In the burst of growth and the upheaval of building a station at Pell, ambitious people were already casting eyes toward two farther stars, beyond Pell, calculating with cold foresight, for Pell was itself a source of Earthlike goods, luxuries — a potential disturbance in the directions of trade and supply.
For Earth, as word rode in with arriving freighters… a frantic haste to ignore Pell. Alien life. It sent shock waves through the Company, touched off moral debates and policy debates in spite of the fact that the news was almost two decades old — as if they could set hand now to whatever decisions were being made out there in the Beyond. It was all out of control. Other life. It disrupted man’s dearly held ideas of cosmic reality. It raised philosophical and religious questions, presented realities some committed suicide rather than face. Cults sprang up. But, other arriving ships reported, the aliens of Pell’s World were not outstandingly intelligent, nor violent, built nothing, and looked more like lower primates than not, brown-furred and naked and with large, bewildered eyes.
Ah, earthbound man sighed. The human-centered, Earth-centered universe in which Earth had always believed had been shaken, but quickly righted itself. The isolationists who opposed the Company gathered influence and numbers in reaction to the scare — and to a sudden and marked drop in trade.
The Company was in chaos. It took long to send instructions, and Pell grew, out of the Company’s control. New stations unauthorized by the Earth Company sprang into existence at farther stars, stations called Mariner and Viking; and they spawned Russell’s and Esperance. By the time Company instructions arrived down the line, bidding now-stripped nearer stations take this and that action to stabilize trade, the orders were patent nonsense.
In fact, a new pattern of trade had already developed. Pell had the necessary biostuffs. It was closer to most of the star-stations; and star-station companies which had once seen Earth as beloved Mother now saw new opportunities, and seized them. Still other stations formed. The Great Circle was broken. Some Earth Company ships kited off to trade with the New Beyond, and there was no way to stop them. Trade continued, never what it had been. The value of Earth’s goods fell, and consequently it cost Earth more and more to obtain the one-time bounty of the colonies.
A second shock struck. Another world lay Beyond, discovered by an enterprising merchanter… Cyteen. Further stations developed — Fargone and Paradise and Wyatt’s, and the Great Circle stretched farther still.
The Earth Company took a new decision: a payback program, a tax of goods, which would make up recent losses. They argued to the stations of the Community of Man, the Moral Debt, and the burden of gratitude.
Some stations and merchanters paid the tax. Some refused it, particularly those stations beyond Pell, and Cyteen. The Company, they maintained, had had no part in their development and had no claim on them. There was a system of papers and visas instituted, and inspections called for, bitterly resented by the merchants, who viewed their ships as their own.
More, the probes were pulled back, tacit statement that the Company was putting an official damper on further growth of the Beyond. They were armed, the swift exploration ships, which they had always been, venturing as they did into the unknown; but now they were used in a new way, to visit stations and pull them into line. That was bitterest of all, that the crews of the probe ships, who had been the heroes of the Beyond, became the Company enforcers.
Merchanters armed in retaliation, freighters never built for combat, incapable of tight turns. But there were skirmishes between the converted probe ships and rebel merchanters, although most merchanters declared their reluctant consent to the tax. The rebels retreated to the outermost colonies, least convenient for enforcement.
It became war without anyone calling it war… armed Company probes against the rebel merchanters, who served the farther stars, a circumstance possible because there was Cyteen, and even Pell was not indispensible.
So the line was drawn. The Great Circle resumed, exclusive of the stars beyond Fargone, but never so profitable as it had been. Trade continued across the line after strange fashion, for tax-paying merchanters could go where they would, and rebel merchanters could not, but stamps could be faked, and were. The war was leisurely, a matter of shots fired when a rebel was clearly available as a target. The Company ships could not resurrect the stations immediately Earthward of Pell; they were no longer viable. The populations drifted to Pell and Russell’s and Mariner and Viking, and to Fargone and farther still.
Ships were built, as stations had been, in the Beyond. The technology was there, and merchanters proliferated. Then jump arrived — a theory originated in the New Beyond, at Cyteen, quickly seized upon by shipbuilders at Mariner on the Company side of the line.
And that was the third great blow to Earth. The old lightbound way of figuring was obsolete. Jump freighters skipped along in short transits into the between; but the time it took from star to star went from years to periods of months and days. Technology improved. Trade became a new kind of game and strategy in the long war changed… stations knit closer together.
Suddenly, out of this, there was an organization among the rebels farthest Beyond. It started as a coalition of Fargone and its mines; it swept to Cyteen, gathered to itself Paradise and Wyatt’s, and reached for other stars and the merchanters who served them. There were rumors… of vast population increases going on for years unreported, technology once suggested on the Company side of the line, when the need was for men, for human lives to fill up the vast dark nothingness, to work and to build. Cyteen had been doing it. This organization, this Union , as it called itself, bred and multiplied geometrically, using installations already in operation, birth-labs. Union grew. It had, in the course of two decades, increased enormously in territory and in population density, it offered a single, unswerving ideology of growth and colonization, a focused direction to what had been a disorganized rebellion. It silenced dissent, mobilized, organized, pushed hard at the Company.
And in final, outraged public demand for results in the deteriorating situation, the Earth Company back on Sol Station gave up the tax, diverted that fund to the building of a great Fleet, all jumpships, engines of destruction, Europe and America and all their deadly kindred.
So was Union building, developing specialized warships, changing style as it changed technology. Rebel captains who had fought long years for their own reasons were charged with softness at the first excuse; ships were put into the hands of commanders with the right ideology, with more ruthlessness.
Company successes grew harder. The great Fleet, outnumbered and with an immense territory to cover, did not bring an end to the war in a year or in five years. And Earth grew vexed with what had become an inglorious, exasperating conflict. Cut all the starships, the cry was now in the financing corporations. Pull back our ships and let the bastards starve.
It was of course the Company Fleet which starved; Union did not, but Earth seemed incapable of understanding that, that it was no longer a question of fragile colonies in rebellion but of a forming power, well-fed, well-armed. The same myopic policies, the same tug-of-war between isolationists and Company which had alienated the colonies in the first place drew harder and harder lines as trade diminished; they lost the war not in the Beyond, but in the senate chambers and the boardrooms on Earth and Sol Station, going for mining within Earth’s own system, which was profitable, and devil take the exploratory missions in any direction at all, which were not.
No matter that they had jump now and that the stars were near. Their minds were geared to the old problems and to their own problems and their own politics. Earth banned further emigration, seeing the flight of its best minds. It weltered in economic chaos, and the drain of Earth’s natural resources by the stations was an easy focus of discontent. No more war, they said; peace suddenly became good politics. The Company Fleet, deprived of funds in a war in which it was engaged on a wide front, obtained supplies where and as it could.
At the end, they were patchwork, fifteen carriers out of the once proud fifty, cobbled together at the stations still open to them. Mazian’s Fleet, they called it, in the tradition of the Beyond, where ships were so few at first that enemies knew each other by name and reputation… a recognition less common now, but some names were known. Conrad Mazian of Europe was a name Union knew to its regret; and Tom Edger of Australia was another; and Mika Kreshov of Atlantic, and Signy Mallory of Norway ; and all the rest of the Company captains, down to those of the rider-ships. They still served Earth and the Company, with less and less love of either. None of this generation was Earthborn; they received few replacements, none from Earth, none from the stations in their territory either, for the stations feared obsessively for their neutrality in the war. Merchanters were their source of skilled crew and of troops, most of them unwilling.
The Beyond had once begun with the stars nearest Earth and now it started with Pell, for the oldest stations were shut down as Earthward trade phased out and the pre-jump style of trade passed forever. The Hinder Stars were all forgotten, unvisited.
There were worlds beyond Pell, beyond Cyteen, and Union had them all now, real worlds, of the far-between stars which jump could reach; where Union used the birth labs still to expand populations, giving them workers and soldiers. Union wanted all the Beyond, to direct what would be the course of the future of man. Union had the Beyond, all but the thin arc of stations which Mazian’s Fleet still thanklessly held for Earth and the Company, because they had once been set to do that, because they saw nothing they could do but that. At their backs was only Pell… and the mothballed stations of the Hinder Stars. Remoter still, isolate… sat Earth, locked in its inner contemplations and its complex, fragmented politics.
No trade of substance came out of Sol now, or to it. In the insanity which was the War, free merchanters plied Unionside and Company Stars alike, crossed the battle lines at will, although Union discouraged that traffic by subtle harassments, seeking to cut Company supply.
Union expanded and the Company Fleet just held on, worldless but for Pell which fed them, and Earth which ignored them. On Unionside, stations were no longer built on the old scale. They were mere depots for worlds now, and probes sought still further stars. They were generations which had never seen Earth… humans to whom Europe and Atlantic were creatures of metal and terror, generations whose way of life was stars, infinities, unlimited growth, and time which looked to forever. Earth did not understand them.
But neither did the stations which remained with the Company or the free merchanters who carried on that strange crosslines trade.
Chapter Two
i
In Approach to Pell: 5/2/52
The convoy winked in, the carrier Norway first, and then the ten freighters — more, as Norway loosed her four riders and the protective formation spread itself wide in its approach to Pell’s Star.
Here was refuge, one secure place the war had never yet reached, but it was the lapping of the tide. The worlds of the far Beyond were winning, and certainties were changing, on both sides of the line.
On the bridge of the ECS 5, the jump-carrier Norway, there was rapid activity, the four auxiliary command boards monitoring the riders, the long aisle of com operations and that of scan and that of their own command. Norway was in constant com link with the ten freighters, and the reports passed back and forth on those channels were terse, ships’ operations only. Norway was too busy for human disasters.
No ambushes. The station at Pell’s World received signal and gave reluctant welcome. Relief whispered from post to post of the carrier, private, not carried on intership com. Signy Mallory, Norway’s captain, relaxed muscles she had not known were tense and ordered armscomp downgraded to standby.
She held command over this flock, third captain in seniority of the fifteen of Mazian’s Fleet. She was forty-nine. The Beyonder Rebellion was far older than that; and she had been freighter pilot, rider captain, the whole gamut, all in the Earth Company’s service. Her face was still young. Her hair was silver gray. The rejuv treatments which caused the gray kept the rest of her at somewhere near biological thirty-six; and considering what she shepherded in and what it portended, she felt aged beyond the forty-nine.
She leaned back in her cushion which looked over the upcurving, narrow aisles of the bridge, punched in on her arm console to check operations, stared out over the active stations and the screens which showed what vid picked up and what scan had Safe. She lived by never quite believing such estimations.
And by adapting. They all did, all of them who fought this war. Norway was like her crew, varied salvage: of Brazil and Italia and Wasp and jinxed Miriam B, parts of her dating all the way back to the days of the freighter war. They took what they could, gave up as little as possible… as from the refugee ships she guided, under her protection. There had been in decades before, a time of chivalry in the war, of quixotic gestures, of enemy rescuing enemy and parting under truce. They were human and the Deep was wide,and they all had known it. No more. From among these civilians, neutrals, she had extracted the useful ones for herself, a handful who might adapt. There would be protests at Pell. It would do them no good. No protests would, on this or other matters. The war had taken another turn, and they were out of painless choices.
They moved slowly, at the crawl which was the best the freighters could manage in realspace, distance Norway or the riders, unencumbered, could cross pushing light. They had come in dangerously close to the mass of Pell’s Star, out of plane with the system, risking jump accident and collisions. It was the only way these freighters could make haste… and lives rode on making time.
“Receiving approach instructions from Pell,” com told her.
“Graff,” she said to her lieutenant, “take her in.” And punching in another channel: “Di, put all troops on standby, full arms and gear.” She switched back to com: “Advise Pell it had better evacuate a section and seal it. Tell the convoy if anyone breaks formation during approach we’ll blow them. Make them believe it.”
“Got it,” com senior said; and in due time: “Stationmaster’s on in person.”
The stationmaster protested. She had expected so.
“You do it,” she told him — Angelo Konstantin, of the Konstantins of Pell. “You clear that section or we do. You start now, strip out everything of value or hazard, down to the walls; and you put those doors on lock and weld the access panels shut. You don’t know what we’re bringing you. And if you delay us, I may have a shipload dead: Hansford’s life support is going. You do it, Mr. Konstantin, or I send the troops in. And you don’t do it right, Mr. Konstantin, and you have refugees scattered like vermin all over your station, with no id’s and ugly-desperate. Forgive my bluntness. I have people dying in their own filth. We number seven thousand frightened civs on these ships, what left Mariner and Russell’s Star. They’re out of choices and out of time. You’re not going to tell me no, sir.”
There was a pause, distance, and more than enough delay for distance. “We’ve sounded the evacuation for sections of yellow and orange dock. Captain Mallory. Medical services will be available, all that we can spare. Emergency crews are moving. We copy regarding sealing of the affected areas. Security plans will be set in motion at once. We hope that your concern is as great for our citizens. This station will not permit the military to interfere in our internal-security operations or to jeopardize our neutrality, but assistance under our command will be appreciated. Over.”
Signy relaxed slowly, wiped sweat from her face, drew an easier breath. “Assistance will be given, sir. Estimated docking… four hours, if I delay this convoy all I can. I can give you that much time to get ready. Has news about Mariner gotten to you yet? It was blown, sir, sabotage. Over.”
“We copy four hours. We appreciate the measures you urge us to take and we are taking them in earnest. We are distressed to hear about the Mariner disaster. Request detailed briefing. Further advise you we have a Company team here at the moment It’s highly distressed at these proceedings.”
She breathed an obscenity into the com.
“… and they’re demanding to have all of you turned down for some other station. My staff is attempting to explain to them the condition of the ships and the hazard to life aboard them, but they’re putting pressure on us. They consider Pell’s neutrality threatened. Kindly appreciate that in your approach and bear in mind that the Company agents have requested contact with you in person. Over.”
She repeated the obscenity, expelled a breath. The Fleet avoided such meetings when possible, rare as they were in the last decade. “Tell them I’ll be busy. Keep them off the docks and out of our area. Do they need pictures of starving colonists to take back with them? Bad press, Mr. Konstantin. Keep them out of our way. Over.”
“They’re armed with government papers. Security Council. That kind of Company team. They have rank to use and they’re demanding transport deeper Beyond. Over.”
She chose a second obscenity and swallowed it. “Thank you, Mr. Konstantin. I’ll capsule you my recommendations on procedures with the refugees; they’ve been worked out in detail. You can, of course, ignore them, but I’d advise against it. We can’t even guarantee you that what we’re disembarking on Pell isn’t armed. We can’t get among them to find out. Armed troops can’t get in there, you understand? That’s what we’re giving you. I’d advise you keep the Company boys out of our docking area entirely before we have hostages to deal with. Copy? End transmission.”
“We copy. Thank you, captain. End transmission.”
She slumped in place, glared at the screens and shot an order to com to capsule the instructions to station command.
Company men. And refugees from lost stations. Information kept coming steadily from stricken Hansford, with a calm on the part of its crew she admired. Strictly procedures. They were dying over there. Crew was sealed into command and armed, refusing to abandon ship, refusing to let a rider take Hansford in tow. It was their ship. They stayed by it and did what they could for those aboard, by remote. They had no thanks from the passengers, who were tearing the ship apart — or had been doing so, until the air fouled and the systems began to break down.
Four hours.
ii
Norway . Russell’s had met disaster, and Mariner. Rumor ran through the station corridors, aboil with the confusion and anger of residents and companies that had been turned out with all their property. Volunteers and native workers aided in the evacuation; dock crews used the loading machinery to move personal belongings out of the area selected for quarantine, tagging items and trying not to confuse them or allow pilferage. Com echoed with announcements.
“Residents of yellow one through one nineteen are asked to send a representative to the emergency housing desk. There is a lost child at the aid station, May Terner. Will a relative please come at once to the aid station?… Latest estimates from station central indicate housing available in guest residency, one thousand units. All nonresidents are being removed in favor of permanent station residents, priority to be determined by lottery. Apartments available by condensation of occupied units: ninety-two. Compartments available for emergency conversion to residential space, two thousand, including public meeting areas and some mainday/alterday rotation of occupancy. The station council urges any person with personal arrangements possible through lodging with relatives or friends to secure same and to key this information to comp at the earliest possible; housing on private initiative will be compensated to the home resident at a rate equivalent to per capita expense for other housing. We are five hundred units deficient and this will require barracks-style housing for on-station residency, or transfer on a temporary basis for Downbelow residency, unless this deficiency can be made up by volunteering of housing or willingness of individuals to share assigned living space. Plans are to be considered immediately for residential use of section blue, which should free five hundred units within the next one hundred eighty days… Thank you… Will a security team please report to eight yellow?…”
It was a nightmare. Damon Konstantin stared at the flow of printout and intermittently paced the matted floors of dock command blue sector, above the area of the docks where techs tried to cope with the logistics of evacuation. Two hours left. He could see from the series of windows the chaos all along the docks where personal belongings had been piled under police guard. Everyone and every installation in yellow and orange sectors’ ninth through fifth levels had been displaced: dockside shops, homes, four thousand people crowded elsewhere. The influx spilled past blue, around the rim to green and white, the big main-residence sectors. Crowds milled about, bewildered and distraught. They understood the need: they moved — everyone on station was subject to such transfers of residence, for repairs, for reorganizations… but never on this kind of notice and never on this scale, and never without knowing where they were to be assigned. Plans were cancelled, four thousand lives upset. Merchanters of the two score freighters which happened to be in dock had been rudely ousted from sleepover accommodations and security did not want them on the docks or near the ships. His wife, Elene, was down there in a knot of them, a slim figure in pale green. Liaison with the merchanters… that was Elene’s job, and he was at her office fretting about it. He nervously watched the manner of the merchanters, which was angry, and meditated sending station police down there for Elene’s protection; but Elene seemed to be matching them shout for shout, all lost in the soundproofing and the general buzz of voices and machine noise which faintly penetrated the elevated command post. Suddenly there were shrugs, and hands offered all round, as if there had been no quarrel at all. Some matter was either settled or postponed, and, Elene walked away and the merchanters strode off trough the dispossessed crowds, though with shakes of their heads and no happiness evident. Elene had disappeared beneath the slanted windows… to the lift, to come up here, Damon hoped. Off in green section his own office was dealing with an angry-resident protest; and there was the Company delegation fretting in station central making demands of its own on his father.
“Will a medical team please report to section eight yellow?” com asked silkily. Someone was in trouble, off in the evacuated sections.
The lift doors opened into the command center. Elene joined him, her face still flushed from argument
“Central’s gone stark mad,” she said. “The merchanters were moved out of hospice and told they had to lodge on their ships; and now they’ve got station police between them and their ships. They’re wanting to cast off from station. They don’t want their ships mobbed in some sudden evacuation. Read it that they’d just as soon be out of Pell’s vicinity entirely at the moment. Mallory’s been known to recruit merchanters at gunpoint.”
“What did you tell them?”
“To stand fast and figure there are going to be some contracts handed out for supplies to take care of this influx; but they won’t go to any ship that bolts the dock, or that tangles with our police. And that has the lid on them, at least for a while.”
Elene was afraid. It was clear behind the brittle, busy calm. They were all afraid. He slipped his arm about her; hers fitted his waist and she leaned there, saying nothing. Merchanter, Elene Quen, off the freighter Estelle, which had gone its way to Russell’s, and to Mariner. She had missed that run for him, to consider tying herself to a station for good, for his sake; and now she ended up trying to reason with angry crews who were probably right and sensible in her eyes, with the military in their laps. He viewed matters in a cold, quiet panic, stationer’s fashion. Things which went wrong onstation went wrong sitting still, by quadrants and by sections, and there was a certain fatalism bred of it: if one was in a safe zone, one stayed there; if one had a job which could help, one did it; and if it was one’s own area in trouble, one still sat fixed — it was the only heroism possible. A station could not shoot, could not run, could only suffer damage and repair it if there was time. Merchanters had other philosophies and different reflexes in time of trouble.
“It’s all right,” he said, tightening his arm briefly. He felt her answering pressure. “It’s not coming here. They’re just putting civilians far behind the lines. They’ll stay here till the crisis is over and then go back. If not, we’ve had big influxes before, when they shut down the last of the Hinder Stars. We added sections. We’ll do it again. We just get larger.”
Elene said nothing. There were dire rumors drifting through com and down the corridors regarding the extent of the disaster at Mariner, and Estelle was not one of the incoming freighters. They knew that now for certain. She had hoped, when they had gotten the first news of the arrival; and feared, because there was damage reported on those ships out there, moving at freighters’ slow pace, jammed with passengers they were never designed to handle, in the series of small jumps a freighter’s limited range made necessary. It added up to days and days in realspace as far as they had come in, and living hell on those vessels. There was some rumor they had not had sufficient drugs to get them through jump, that some had made it without. He tried to imagine it — reckoned Elene’s worry. Estelle’s absence from that convoy was good news and bad. Likely she had shied off her declared course, catching wind of trouble, and gone elsewhere in a hurry… still cause for anxiety, with the war heating up out on the edge. A station… gone, blown. Russell’s, evacuating personnel. The safe edge was suddenly much too close, much too fast.
“It’s likely,” he said, wishing that he could save the news for another day, but she had to know, “that we’ll be moved to blue, into maybe cramped quarters. The clean-clearance personnel are the ones that can be transferred to that section. Well have to be among the ones to go.”
She shrugged. “That’s all right. It’s arranged?”
“It will be.”
A second time she shrugged; they lost their home and she shrugged, staring at the windows onto the docks below, and the crowds, and the merchanter ships.
“It’s not coming here,” he insisted, trying to believe it, for Pell was his home, in a way no merchanter was likely to understand. Konstantins had built this place, from the days of its beginning. “Whatever the Company losses — not Pell.”
And a moment later, moved by conscience if not by courage: “I’ve got to get over there, onto the quarantine docks.”
iii
Norway eased in ahead of the others, with the hubbed, unsightly torus of Pell a gleaming sprawl in her vid screens. The riders were fanned out, fending off the freighters for the moment. The merchanter crews in command of those refugee ships wisely held the line, giving her no trouble. The pale crescent of Pell’s World… Downbelow, in Pell’s matter-of-fact nomenclature… hung beyond the station, swirled with storms. They matched up with Pell Station’s signal, drawing even with the flashing lights on the area designated for their docking. The cone which would receive their nose probe glowed blue with the come-aheads. section orange, the distorted letters read on vid, beside a tangle of solar vanes and panels. Signy punched in scan, saw things where they ought to be on Pell’s borrowed image. Constant chatter flowed from Pell central and the ship channels, keeping a dozen techs busy at com.
They entered final approach, lost gee gently as Norway ’s rotating inner cylinder, slung gutwise in its frame, slowed and locked to docking position, all personnel decks on the star tion’s up and down. They felt other stresses magnified for a time, a series of reorientations. The cone loomed, easy dock, and they met the grapple, a dragging confirmation of the last slam of gee — opened accesses for Pell dock crews, stable now, and solidly part of Pell’s rotation.
“I’m getting an all-quiet on dockside,” Graff said. “The stationmaster’s police are all over the place.”
“Message,” com said. “Pell stationmaster to Norway : request military cooperation with desks set up to facilitate processing as per your instructions. All procedures are as you requested, with the stationmaster’s compliments, captain.”
“Reply: Hansford coming in immediately with crisis in lifesupport and possible riot conditions. Stay back of our lines. Endit. — Graff, take over operations. Di, get me those troops out on that dock doubletime.”
She left matters there, rose and strode back through the narrow bowed aisles of the bridge to the small compartment which served her as office and oftentimes sleeping quarters. She opened the locker there and slipped on a jacket, slipped a pistol into her pocket. It was not a uniform. No one in the Fleet, perhaps, possessed a full-regulation uniform. Supply had been that bad, that long. Her captain’s circle on her collar was her only distinction from a merchanter. The troops were no better uniformed, but armored: that, they kept in condition, at all costs. She hastened down via the lift into the lower corridor, proceeding amid the rush of troops Di Janz had ordered to the dock, combat-rigged, through the access tube and out into the chill wide spaces.
The whole dock was theirs, vast, upward-curving perspective, section arches curtained by ceiling as the station rim curve swept leftward toward gradual horizon; on the right a section seal was in use, stopping the eye there. The place was vacant of all but the dock crews and their gantries; and station security and the processing desks, and those were well back of Norway ’s area. There were no native workers, not here, not in this situation. Debris lay scattered across the wide dock, papers, bits of clothing, evidencing a hasty withdrawal. The dockside shops and offices were empty; the niner corridor midway of the dock showed likewise vacant and littered. Di Janz’s deep bellow echoed in the metal girders overhead as he ordered troops deployed about the area where Hansford was coming in.
Pell dockers moved up. Signy watched and gnawed her lip nervously, glanced aside as a civ came up to her, youngish, darkly aquiline, bearing a tablet and looking like business in his neat blue suit. The plug she had in one ear kept advising her of Hansford’s status, a constant clamor of bad news. “What are you?” she asked
“Damon Konstantin, captain, from Legal Affairs.”
She spared a second look. A Konstantin. He could be that. Angelo had had two boys before his wife’s accident. “Legal Affairs,” she said with distaste.
“I’m here if you need anything… or if they do. I’ve got a com link with central.”
There was a crash. Hansford made a bad dock, grated down the guidance cone and shuddered into place.
“Get her hooked up and get out!” Di roared at the dock crews: no com for him.
Graff was ordering matters from Norway ’s command. Hansford’s crew would stay sealed on their bridge, working debarcation by remote. “Tell them walk out,” she heard relayed from Graff. “Any rush at troops will be met with fire.”
The hookups were complete. The ramp went into place.
“Move!” Di bellowed. Dockers pelted behind the lines of troops; rifles were levelled. The hatch opened, a crash up the access tube.
A stench rolled out onto the chill of the dock. Inner hatches opened and a living wave surged out, trampling each other, falling. They screamed and shouted and rushed out like madmen, staggered as a burst of fire went over their heads.
“Hold it!” Di shouted. “Sit down where you are and put your hands on your heads.”
Some were sitting down already, out of weakness; others sank down and complied. A few seemed too dazed to understand, but came no farther. The wave had stopped. At Signy’s elbow Damon Konstantin breathed a curse and shook his head. No word of laws from him; sweat stood visibly on his akin. His station stared riot in the face… collapse of systems, Hansford’s death ten thousandfold. There were a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty living, crouched on the dock by the umbilical gantry. The ship’s stench spread. A pump labored, flushing air through Hansford’s systems under pressure. There were a thousand on that ship.
“We’re going to have to go in there,” Signy muttered, sick at the prospect. Di was moving the others one at a time, passing them under guns into a curtained area where they were to be stripped, searched, scrubbed, passed on to the desks or to the medics. Baggage there was none, not with this group, nor papers worth anything.
“Need a security team suited up for a contamination area,” she told young Konstantin. “And stretchers. Get us a disposal area prepared. We’re going to vent the dead; it’s all we can do. Have them ID’ed as best you can, fingerprints, photos, whatever. Every corpse passed out of here unidentified is future trouble for your security.”
Konstantin looked ill. That was well enough. So did some of her troops. She tried to ignore her own stomach.
A few more survivors had made their way to the opening of the access, very weak, almost unable to get down the ramp. A handful, a scant handful.
Lila was coming in, her approach begun in her crew’s panic, defying instructions and riders’ threats. She heard Graffs voice reporting it, activated her own mike. “Stall them off. Clip a vane off them if you have to. We’ve got our hands full. Get me a suit out here.”
They found seventy-eight more living, lying among the decomposing dead. The rest was cleanup, and no more threat. Signy passed decontamination, stripped off the suit, sat down on the bare dock and fought a heaving stomach. A civ aid worker chose a bad time to offer her a sandwich. She pushed it away, took the local herbal coffee and caught her breath in the last of the processing of Hansford’s living. The place stank now of antispetic fogging.
A carpet of bodies in the corridors, blood, dead. Hansford’s emergency seals had gone into place during a fire. Some of the dead had been cut in two. Some of the living had broken bones from being trampled in the panic. Urine. Vomit. Blood. Decay. They had had closed systems, had not had to breathe it. The Hansford survivors had had nothing at the last but the emergency oxygen, and that had possibly been a cause of murder. Most of the living had been sealed into areas where the air had held out less fouled than the badly ventilated storage holds where most of the refugees had been crammed.
“Message from the stationmaster,” com said into her ear, “requesting the captain’s presence in station offices at the earliest.”
“No,” she sent back shortly. They were bringing Hansford’s dead out; there was some manner of religious service, assembly-line fashion, some amenity for the dead before venting them. Caught in Downbelow’s gravity well, they would drift in that direction, eventually. She wondered vaguely whether bodies burned in falling: likely, she thought. She had not much to do with worlds. She was not sure whether anyone had ever cared to find out.
Lila’s folk were exiting in better order. They pushed and shoved at the first, but they stopped it when they saw the armed troops facing them. Konstantin intervened with useful service over the portable loudspeaker, talking to the terrified civs in stationers’ terms and throwing stationers’ logic in their faces, the threat of damage to fragile balances, the kind of drill and horror story they must have heard all their confined lives. Signy put herself on her feet again during the performance, still holding the coffee cup, watched with a calmer stomach as the procedures she had outlined began to function smoothly, those with papers to one area and those without to another, for photographing and ID by statement. The handsome lad from Legal Affairs proved to have other uses, a voice of ringing authority when it regarded disputed paper or confused station staff.
“ Griffin ’s moving up on docking,” Graffs voice advised her. “Station advises us they’re wanting back five hundred units of confiscated housing based on Hansford’s casualties.”
“Negative,” she said flatly. “My respects to station command, but out of the question. What’s the status on Griffin ?”
“Panicky. We’ve warned them.”
“How many others are coming apart?”
“It’s tense everywhere. Don’t trust it. They could bolt, any one of them. Maureen was one dead, coronary, another ill. I’m routing her in next. Stationmaster asks whether you’ll be available for conference in an hour. I pick up that the Company boys are making demands to get into this area.”
“Keep stalling.” She finished the coffee, walked along the lines in front of Griffin ’s dock, the whole operation moving down a berth, for there was nothing left at Hansford’s berth worth guarding. There was quiet from the processed refugees. They had the matter of locating their lodgings to occupy them, and the station’s secure environment to comfort them. A suited crew stood by to move Hansford out; they had only four berths at this dock. Signy measured with her eye the space the station had allotted them, five levels of two sections and the two docks. Crowded, but they would manage for a while. Barracks could solve some of it… temporarily. Things would get tighter. No luxuries, that was certain.
They were not the only refugees adrift; they were simply the first. And upon that knowledge she kept her mouth shut.
It was Dinah that broke the peace; a man caught with weapons in scan, a friend who turned ugly on his arrest: two dead, then, and sobbing, hysterical passengers afterward. Signy watched it, simply tired, shook her head and ordered the bodies vented with the rest, while Konstantin approached her with angry arguments. “Martial law,” she said, ending all discussion, and walk away.
Sita, Pearl , Little Bear, Winifred. They came in with agonizing slowness, unloaded refugees and property, and the processing inches its way along.
Signy left the dock then, went back aboard Norway and took a bath. She scrubbed three times all over before she began to feel that the smell and the sights had left her.
Station had entered alterday; complaints and demands had fallen silent at least for a few hours.
Or if there were any, Norway ’s alterday command fended them off her.
There was comfort for the night, company of sorts, a leave-taking. He was another item of salvage from Russell’s and Mariner… not for transport on the other ships. They would have torn him apart. He knew this, and appreciated matters. He had no taste for the crew either, and understood his situation.
“You’re getting off here,” she told him, staring at him, who lay beside her. The name did not matter. It confused itself in her memory with others, and sometimes she called him hy the wrong one, late, when she was half asleep. He showed no emotion at that statement, only blinked, indication that he had absorbed the fact. The face intrigued her: innocence, perhaps. Contrasts intrigued her. Beauty did. “You’re lucky,” she said. He reacted to that the same way, as he reacted to most things. He simply stared, vacant and beautiful; they had played with his mind on Russell’s. There was a sordidness in her sometimes, a need to deal wounds… limited murder, to blot out the greater ones. To deal little terrors, to forget the horror outside. She had sometime nights with Graff, with Di, with whoever took her fancy. She never showed this face to those she valued, to friends, to crew. Only sometimes there were voyages like this one, when her mood was black. It was a common disease, in the Fleet, in the sealed worlds of ships without discharge, among those in absolute power. “Do you care?” she asked; he did not, and that was, perhaps, his survival.
Norway remained, her troops visibly on duty on the dock-side, the last ship berthed in quarantine. On the dock, the lights were still at bright noon, over lines which moved only slowly, under the presence of the guns.
i
The convoy winked in, the carrier Norway first, and then the ten freighters — more, as Norway loosed her four riders and the protective formation spread itself wide in its approach to Pell’s Star.
Here was refuge, one secure place the war had never yet reached, but it was the lapping of the tide. The worlds of the far Beyond were winning, and certainties were changing, on both sides of the line.
On the bridge of the ECS 5, the jump-carrier Norway, there was rapid activity, the four auxiliary command boards monitoring the riders, the long aisle of com operations and that of scan and that of their own command. Norway was in constant com link with the ten freighters, and the reports passed back and forth on those channels were terse, ships’ operations only. Norway was too busy for human disasters.
No ambushes. The station at Pell’s World received signal and gave reluctant welcome. Relief whispered from post to post of the carrier, private, not carried on intership com. Signy Mallory, Norway’s captain, relaxed muscles she had not known were tense and ordered armscomp downgraded to standby.
She held command over this flock, third captain in seniority of the fifteen of Mazian’s Fleet. She was forty-nine. The Beyonder Rebellion was far older than that; and she had been freighter pilot, rider captain, the whole gamut, all in the Earth Company’s service. Her face was still young. Her hair was silver gray. The rejuv treatments which caused the gray kept the rest of her at somewhere near biological thirty-six; and considering what she shepherded in and what it portended, she felt aged beyond the forty-nine.
She leaned back in her cushion which looked over the upcurving, narrow aisles of the bridge, punched in on her arm console to check operations, stared out over the active stations and the screens which showed what vid picked up and what scan had Safe. She lived by never quite believing such estimations.
And by adapting. They all did, all of them who fought this war. Norway was like her crew, varied salvage: of Brazil and Italia and Wasp and jinxed Miriam B, parts of her dating all the way back to the days of the freighter war. They took what they could, gave up as little as possible… as from the refugee ships she guided, under her protection. There had been in decades before, a time of chivalry in the war, of quixotic gestures, of enemy rescuing enemy and parting under truce. They were human and the Deep was wide,and they all had known it. No more. From among these civilians, neutrals, she had extracted the useful ones for herself, a handful who might adapt. There would be protests at Pell. It would do them no good. No protests would, on this or other matters. The war had taken another turn, and they were out of painless choices.
They moved slowly, at the crawl which was the best the freighters could manage in realspace, distance Norway or the riders, unencumbered, could cross pushing light. They had come in dangerously close to the mass of Pell’s Star, out of plane with the system, risking jump accident and collisions. It was the only way these freighters could make haste… and lives rode on making time.
“Receiving approach instructions from Pell,” com told her.
“Graff,” she said to her lieutenant, “take her in.” And punching in another channel: “Di, put all troops on standby, full arms and gear.” She switched back to com: “Advise Pell it had better evacuate a section and seal it. Tell the convoy if anyone breaks formation during approach we’ll blow them. Make them believe it.”
“Got it,” com senior said; and in due time: “Stationmaster’s on in person.”
The stationmaster protested. She had expected so.
“You do it,” she told him — Angelo Konstantin, of the Konstantins of Pell. “You clear that section or we do. You start now, strip out everything of value or hazard, down to the walls; and you put those doors on lock and weld the access panels shut. You don’t know what we’re bringing you. And if you delay us, I may have a shipload dead: Hansford’s life support is going. You do it, Mr. Konstantin, or I send the troops in. And you don’t do it right, Mr. Konstantin, and you have refugees scattered like vermin all over your station, with no id’s and ugly-desperate. Forgive my bluntness. I have people dying in their own filth. We number seven thousand frightened civs on these ships, what left Mariner and Russell’s Star. They’re out of choices and out of time. You’re not going to tell me no, sir.”
There was a pause, distance, and more than enough delay for distance. “We’ve sounded the evacuation for sections of yellow and orange dock. Captain Mallory. Medical services will be available, all that we can spare. Emergency crews are moving. We copy regarding sealing of the affected areas. Security plans will be set in motion at once. We hope that your concern is as great for our citizens. This station will not permit the military to interfere in our internal-security operations or to jeopardize our neutrality, but assistance under our command will be appreciated. Over.”
Signy relaxed slowly, wiped sweat from her face, drew an easier breath. “Assistance will be given, sir. Estimated docking… four hours, if I delay this convoy all I can. I can give you that much time to get ready. Has news about Mariner gotten to you yet? It was blown, sir, sabotage. Over.”
“We copy four hours. We appreciate the measures you urge us to take and we are taking them in earnest. We are distressed to hear about the Mariner disaster. Request detailed briefing. Further advise you we have a Company team here at the moment It’s highly distressed at these proceedings.”
She breathed an obscenity into the com.
“… and they’re demanding to have all of you turned down for some other station. My staff is attempting to explain to them the condition of the ships and the hazard to life aboard them, but they’re putting pressure on us. They consider Pell’s neutrality threatened. Kindly appreciate that in your approach and bear in mind that the Company agents have requested contact with you in person. Over.”
She repeated the obscenity, expelled a breath. The Fleet avoided such meetings when possible, rare as they were in the last decade. “Tell them I’ll be busy. Keep them off the docks and out of our area. Do they need pictures of starving colonists to take back with them? Bad press, Mr. Konstantin. Keep them out of our way. Over.”
“They’re armed with government papers. Security Council. That kind of Company team. They have rank to use and they’re demanding transport deeper Beyond. Over.”
She chose a second obscenity and swallowed it. “Thank you, Mr. Konstantin. I’ll capsule you my recommendations on procedures with the refugees; they’ve been worked out in detail. You can, of course, ignore them, but I’d advise against it. We can’t even guarantee you that what we’re disembarking on Pell isn’t armed. We can’t get among them to find out. Armed troops can’t get in there, you understand? That’s what we’re giving you. I’d advise you keep the Company boys out of our docking area entirely before we have hostages to deal with. Copy? End transmission.”
“We copy. Thank you, captain. End transmission.”
She slumped in place, glared at the screens and shot an order to com to capsule the instructions to station command.
Company men. And refugees from lost stations. Information kept coming steadily from stricken Hansford, with a calm on the part of its crew she admired. Strictly procedures. They were dying over there. Crew was sealed into command and armed, refusing to abandon ship, refusing to let a rider take Hansford in tow. It was their ship. They stayed by it and did what they could for those aboard, by remote. They had no thanks from the passengers, who were tearing the ship apart — or had been doing so, until the air fouled and the systems began to break down.
Four hours.
ii
Norway . Russell’s had met disaster, and Mariner. Rumor ran through the station corridors, aboil with the confusion and anger of residents and companies that had been turned out with all their property. Volunteers and native workers aided in the evacuation; dock crews used the loading machinery to move personal belongings out of the area selected for quarantine, tagging items and trying not to confuse them or allow pilferage. Com echoed with announcements.
“Residents of yellow one through one nineteen are asked to send a representative to the emergency housing desk. There is a lost child at the aid station, May Terner. Will a relative please come at once to the aid station?… Latest estimates from station central indicate housing available in guest residency, one thousand units. All nonresidents are being removed in favor of permanent station residents, priority to be determined by lottery. Apartments available by condensation of occupied units: ninety-two. Compartments available for emergency conversion to residential space, two thousand, including public meeting areas and some mainday/alterday rotation of occupancy. The station council urges any person with personal arrangements possible through lodging with relatives or friends to secure same and to key this information to comp at the earliest possible; housing on private initiative will be compensated to the home resident at a rate equivalent to per capita expense for other housing. We are five hundred units deficient and this will require barracks-style housing for on-station residency, or transfer on a temporary basis for Downbelow residency, unless this deficiency can be made up by volunteering of housing or willingness of individuals to share assigned living space. Plans are to be considered immediately for residential use of section blue, which should free five hundred units within the next one hundred eighty days… Thank you… Will a security team please report to eight yellow?…”
It was a nightmare. Damon Konstantin stared at the flow of printout and intermittently paced the matted floors of dock command blue sector, above the area of the docks where techs tried to cope with the logistics of evacuation. Two hours left. He could see from the series of windows the chaos all along the docks where personal belongings had been piled under police guard. Everyone and every installation in yellow and orange sectors’ ninth through fifth levels had been displaced: dockside shops, homes, four thousand people crowded elsewhere. The influx spilled past blue, around the rim to green and white, the big main-residence sectors. Crowds milled about, bewildered and distraught. They understood the need: they moved — everyone on station was subject to such transfers of residence, for repairs, for reorganizations… but never on this kind of notice and never on this scale, and never without knowing where they were to be assigned. Plans were cancelled, four thousand lives upset. Merchanters of the two score freighters which happened to be in dock had been rudely ousted from sleepover accommodations and security did not want them on the docks or near the ships. His wife, Elene, was down there in a knot of them, a slim figure in pale green. Liaison with the merchanters… that was Elene’s job, and he was at her office fretting about it. He nervously watched the manner of the merchanters, which was angry, and meditated sending station police down there for Elene’s protection; but Elene seemed to be matching them shout for shout, all lost in the soundproofing and the general buzz of voices and machine noise which faintly penetrated the elevated command post. Suddenly there were shrugs, and hands offered all round, as if there had been no quarrel at all. Some matter was either settled or postponed, and, Elene walked away and the merchanters strode off trough the dispossessed crowds, though with shakes of their heads and no happiness evident. Elene had disappeared beneath the slanted windows… to the lift, to come up here, Damon hoped. Off in green section his own office was dealing with an angry-resident protest; and there was the Company delegation fretting in station central making demands of its own on his father.
“Will a medical team please report to section eight yellow?” com asked silkily. Someone was in trouble, off in the evacuated sections.
The lift doors opened into the command center. Elene joined him, her face still flushed from argument
“Central’s gone stark mad,” she said. “The merchanters were moved out of hospice and told they had to lodge on their ships; and now they’ve got station police between them and their ships. They’re wanting to cast off from station. They don’t want their ships mobbed in some sudden evacuation. Read it that they’d just as soon be out of Pell’s vicinity entirely at the moment. Mallory’s been known to recruit merchanters at gunpoint.”
“What did you tell them?”
“To stand fast and figure there are going to be some contracts handed out for supplies to take care of this influx; but they won’t go to any ship that bolts the dock, or that tangles with our police. And that has the lid on them, at least for a while.”
Elene was afraid. It was clear behind the brittle, busy calm. They were all afraid. He slipped his arm about her; hers fitted his waist and she leaned there, saying nothing. Merchanter, Elene Quen, off the freighter Estelle, which had gone its way to Russell’s, and to Mariner. She had missed that run for him, to consider tying herself to a station for good, for his sake; and now she ended up trying to reason with angry crews who were probably right and sensible in her eyes, with the military in their laps. He viewed matters in a cold, quiet panic, stationer’s fashion. Things which went wrong onstation went wrong sitting still, by quadrants and by sections, and there was a certain fatalism bred of it: if one was in a safe zone, one stayed there; if one had a job which could help, one did it; and if it was one’s own area in trouble, one still sat fixed — it was the only heroism possible. A station could not shoot, could not run, could only suffer damage and repair it if there was time. Merchanters had other philosophies and different reflexes in time of trouble.
“It’s all right,” he said, tightening his arm briefly. He felt her answering pressure. “It’s not coming here. They’re just putting civilians far behind the lines. They’ll stay here till the crisis is over and then go back. If not, we’ve had big influxes before, when they shut down the last of the Hinder Stars. We added sections. We’ll do it again. We just get larger.”
Elene said nothing. There were dire rumors drifting through com and down the corridors regarding the extent of the disaster at Mariner, and Estelle was not one of the incoming freighters. They knew that now for certain. She had hoped, when they had gotten the first news of the arrival; and feared, because there was damage reported on those ships out there, moving at freighters’ slow pace, jammed with passengers they were never designed to handle, in the series of small jumps a freighter’s limited range made necessary. It added up to days and days in realspace as far as they had come in, and living hell on those vessels. There was some rumor they had not had sufficient drugs to get them through jump, that some had made it without. He tried to imagine it — reckoned Elene’s worry. Estelle’s absence from that convoy was good news and bad. Likely she had shied off her declared course, catching wind of trouble, and gone elsewhere in a hurry… still cause for anxiety, with the war heating up out on the edge. A station… gone, blown. Russell’s, evacuating personnel. The safe edge was suddenly much too close, much too fast.
“It’s likely,” he said, wishing that he could save the news for another day, but she had to know, “that we’ll be moved to blue, into maybe cramped quarters. The clean-clearance personnel are the ones that can be transferred to that section. Well have to be among the ones to go.”
She shrugged. “That’s all right. It’s arranged?”
“It will be.”
A second time she shrugged; they lost their home and she shrugged, staring at the windows onto the docks below, and the crowds, and the merchanter ships.
“It’s not coming here,” he insisted, trying to believe it, for Pell was his home, in a way no merchanter was likely to understand. Konstantins had built this place, from the days of its beginning. “Whatever the Company losses — not Pell.”
And a moment later, moved by conscience if not by courage: “I’ve got to get over there, onto the quarantine docks.”
iii
Norway eased in ahead of the others, with the hubbed, unsightly torus of Pell a gleaming sprawl in her vid screens. The riders were fanned out, fending off the freighters for the moment. The merchanter crews in command of those refugee ships wisely held the line, giving her no trouble. The pale crescent of Pell’s World… Downbelow, in Pell’s matter-of-fact nomenclature… hung beyond the station, swirled with storms. They matched up with Pell Station’s signal, drawing even with the flashing lights on the area designated for their docking. The cone which would receive their nose probe glowed blue with the come-aheads. section orange, the distorted letters read on vid, beside a tangle of solar vanes and panels. Signy punched in scan, saw things where they ought to be on Pell’s borrowed image. Constant chatter flowed from Pell central and the ship channels, keeping a dozen techs busy at com.
They entered final approach, lost gee gently as Norway ’s rotating inner cylinder, slung gutwise in its frame, slowed and locked to docking position, all personnel decks on the star tion’s up and down. They felt other stresses magnified for a time, a series of reorientations. The cone loomed, easy dock, and they met the grapple, a dragging confirmation of the last slam of gee — opened accesses for Pell dock crews, stable now, and solidly part of Pell’s rotation.
“I’m getting an all-quiet on dockside,” Graff said. “The stationmaster’s police are all over the place.”
“Message,” com said. “Pell stationmaster to Norway : request military cooperation with desks set up to facilitate processing as per your instructions. All procedures are as you requested, with the stationmaster’s compliments, captain.”
“Reply: Hansford coming in immediately with crisis in lifesupport and possible riot conditions. Stay back of our lines. Endit. — Graff, take over operations. Di, get me those troops out on that dock doubletime.”
She left matters there, rose and strode back through the narrow bowed aisles of the bridge to the small compartment which served her as office and oftentimes sleeping quarters. She opened the locker there and slipped on a jacket, slipped a pistol into her pocket. It was not a uniform. No one in the Fleet, perhaps, possessed a full-regulation uniform. Supply had been that bad, that long. Her captain’s circle on her collar was her only distinction from a merchanter. The troops were no better uniformed, but armored: that, they kept in condition, at all costs. She hastened down via the lift into the lower corridor, proceeding amid the rush of troops Di Janz had ordered to the dock, combat-rigged, through the access tube and out into the chill wide spaces.
The whole dock was theirs, vast, upward-curving perspective, section arches curtained by ceiling as the station rim curve swept leftward toward gradual horizon; on the right a section seal was in use, stopping the eye there. The place was vacant of all but the dock crews and their gantries; and station security and the processing desks, and those were well back of Norway ’s area. There were no native workers, not here, not in this situation. Debris lay scattered across the wide dock, papers, bits of clothing, evidencing a hasty withdrawal. The dockside shops and offices were empty; the niner corridor midway of the dock showed likewise vacant and littered. Di Janz’s deep bellow echoed in the metal girders overhead as he ordered troops deployed about the area where Hansford was coming in.
Pell dockers moved up. Signy watched and gnawed her lip nervously, glanced aside as a civ came up to her, youngish, darkly aquiline, bearing a tablet and looking like business in his neat blue suit. The plug she had in one ear kept advising her of Hansford’s status, a constant clamor of bad news. “What are you?” she asked
“Damon Konstantin, captain, from Legal Affairs.”
She spared a second look. A Konstantin. He could be that. Angelo had had two boys before his wife’s accident. “Legal Affairs,” she said with distaste.
“I’m here if you need anything… or if they do. I’ve got a com link with central.”
There was a crash. Hansford made a bad dock, grated down the guidance cone and shuddered into place.
“Get her hooked up and get out!” Di roared at the dock crews: no com for him.
Graff was ordering matters from Norway ’s command. Hansford’s crew would stay sealed on their bridge, working debarcation by remote. “Tell them walk out,” she heard relayed from Graff. “Any rush at troops will be met with fire.”
The hookups were complete. The ramp went into place.
“Move!” Di bellowed. Dockers pelted behind the lines of troops; rifles were levelled. The hatch opened, a crash up the access tube.
A stench rolled out onto the chill of the dock. Inner hatches opened and a living wave surged out, trampling each other, falling. They screamed and shouted and rushed out like madmen, staggered as a burst of fire went over their heads.
“Hold it!” Di shouted. “Sit down where you are and put your hands on your heads.”
Some were sitting down already, out of weakness; others sank down and complied. A few seemed too dazed to understand, but came no farther. The wave had stopped. At Signy’s elbow Damon Konstantin breathed a curse and shook his head. No word of laws from him; sweat stood visibly on his akin. His station stared riot in the face… collapse of systems, Hansford’s death ten thousandfold. There were a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty living, crouched on the dock by the umbilical gantry. The ship’s stench spread. A pump labored, flushing air through Hansford’s systems under pressure. There were a thousand on that ship.
“We’re going to have to go in there,” Signy muttered, sick at the prospect. Di was moving the others one at a time, passing them under guns into a curtained area where they were to be stripped, searched, scrubbed, passed on to the desks or to the medics. Baggage there was none, not with this group, nor papers worth anything.
“Need a security team suited up for a contamination area,” she told young Konstantin. “And stretchers. Get us a disposal area prepared. We’re going to vent the dead; it’s all we can do. Have them ID’ed as best you can, fingerprints, photos, whatever. Every corpse passed out of here unidentified is future trouble for your security.”
Konstantin looked ill. That was well enough. So did some of her troops. She tried to ignore her own stomach.
A few more survivors had made their way to the opening of the access, very weak, almost unable to get down the ramp. A handful, a scant handful.
Lila was coming in, her approach begun in her crew’s panic, defying instructions and riders’ threats. She heard Graffs voice reporting it, activated her own mike. “Stall them off. Clip a vane off them if you have to. We’ve got our hands full. Get me a suit out here.”
They found seventy-eight more living, lying among the decomposing dead. The rest was cleanup, and no more threat. Signy passed decontamination, stripped off the suit, sat down on the bare dock and fought a heaving stomach. A civ aid worker chose a bad time to offer her a sandwich. She pushed it away, took the local herbal coffee and caught her breath in the last of the processing of Hansford’s living. The place stank now of antispetic fogging.
A carpet of bodies in the corridors, blood, dead. Hansford’s emergency seals had gone into place during a fire. Some of the dead had been cut in two. Some of the living had broken bones from being trampled in the panic. Urine. Vomit. Blood. Decay. They had had closed systems, had not had to breathe it. The Hansford survivors had had nothing at the last but the emergency oxygen, and that had possibly been a cause of murder. Most of the living had been sealed into areas where the air had held out less fouled than the badly ventilated storage holds where most of the refugees had been crammed.
“Message from the stationmaster,” com said into her ear, “requesting the captain’s presence in station offices at the earliest.”
“No,” she sent back shortly. They were bringing Hansford’s dead out; there was some manner of religious service, assembly-line fashion, some amenity for the dead before venting them. Caught in Downbelow’s gravity well, they would drift in that direction, eventually. She wondered vaguely whether bodies burned in falling: likely, she thought. She had not much to do with worlds. She was not sure whether anyone had ever cared to find out.
Lila’s folk were exiting in better order. They pushed and shoved at the first, but they stopped it when they saw the armed troops facing them. Konstantin intervened with useful service over the portable loudspeaker, talking to the terrified civs in stationers’ terms and throwing stationers’ logic in their faces, the threat of damage to fragile balances, the kind of drill and horror story they must have heard all their confined lives. Signy put herself on her feet again during the performance, still holding the coffee cup, watched with a calmer stomach as the procedures she had outlined began to function smoothly, those with papers to one area and those without to another, for photographing and ID by statement. The handsome lad from Legal Affairs proved to have other uses, a voice of ringing authority when it regarded disputed paper or confused station staff.
“ Griffin ’s moving up on docking,” Graffs voice advised her. “Station advises us they’re wanting back five hundred units of confiscated housing based on Hansford’s casualties.”
“Negative,” she said flatly. “My respects to station command, but out of the question. What’s the status on Griffin ?”
“Panicky. We’ve warned them.”
“How many others are coming apart?”
“It’s tense everywhere. Don’t trust it. They could bolt, any one of them. Maureen was one dead, coronary, another ill. I’m routing her in next. Stationmaster asks whether you’ll be available for conference in an hour. I pick up that the Company boys are making demands to get into this area.”
“Keep stalling.” She finished the coffee, walked along the lines in front of Griffin ’s dock, the whole operation moving down a berth, for there was nothing left at Hansford’s berth worth guarding. There was quiet from the processed refugees. They had the matter of locating their lodgings to occupy them, and the station’s secure environment to comfort them. A suited crew stood by to move Hansford out; they had only four berths at this dock. Signy measured with her eye the space the station had allotted them, five levels of two sections and the two docks. Crowded, but they would manage for a while. Barracks could solve some of it… temporarily. Things would get tighter. No luxuries, that was certain.
They were not the only refugees adrift; they were simply the first. And upon that knowledge she kept her mouth shut.
It was Dinah that broke the peace; a man caught with weapons in scan, a friend who turned ugly on his arrest: two dead, then, and sobbing, hysterical passengers afterward. Signy watched it, simply tired, shook her head and ordered the bodies vented with the rest, while Konstantin approached her with angry arguments. “Martial law,” she said, ending all discussion, and walk away.
Sita, Pearl , Little Bear, Winifred. They came in with agonizing slowness, unloaded refugees and property, and the processing inches its way along.
Signy left the dock then, went back aboard Norway and took a bath. She scrubbed three times all over before she began to feel that the smell and the sights had left her.
Station had entered alterday; complaints and demands had fallen silent at least for a few hours.
Or if there were any, Norway ’s alterday command fended them off her.
There was comfort for the night, company of sorts, a leave-taking. He was another item of salvage from Russell’s and Mariner… not for transport on the other ships. They would have torn him apart. He knew this, and appreciated matters. He had no taste for the crew either, and understood his situation.
“You’re getting off here,” she told him, staring at him, who lay beside her. The name did not matter. It confused itself in her memory with others, and sometimes she called him hy the wrong one, late, when she was half asleep. He showed no emotion at that statement, only blinked, indication that he had absorbed the fact. The face intrigued her: innocence, perhaps. Contrasts intrigued her. Beauty did. “You’re lucky,” she said. He reacted to that the same way, as he reacted to most things. He simply stared, vacant and beautiful; they had played with his mind on Russell’s. There was a sordidness in her sometimes, a need to deal wounds… limited murder, to blot out the greater ones. To deal little terrors, to forget the horror outside. She had sometime nights with Graff, with Di, with whoever took her fancy. She never showed this face to those she valued, to friends, to crew. Only sometimes there were voyages like this one, when her mood was black. It was a common disease, in the Fleet, in the sealed worlds of ships without discharge, among those in absolute power. “Do you care?” she asked; he did not, and that was, perhaps, his survival.
Norway remained, her troops visibly on duty on the dock-side, the last ship berthed in quarantine. On the dock, the lights were still at bright noon, over lines which moved only slowly, under the presence of the guns.
Chapter Three
i
Pell: 5/2a[1]/52
Too many sights, too much of such things. Damon Konstantin took a cup of coffee from one of the aid workers who passed the desk and leaned on his arm, stared out across the docks and tried to rub the ache from his eyes. The coffee tasted of disinfectant, as everything here smelled of it, as it was in their pores, their noses, everywhere. The troops stayed on guard, keeping this little area of the dock safe. Someone had been knifed in Barracks A. No one could explain the weapon. They thought that it had come from the kitchen of one of the abandoned restaurants on dockside, a piece of cutlery unthinkingly left behind, by someone who had never realized the situation. He found himself exhausted beyond sense. He had no answers; station police could not find the offender, in the lines of refugees which still wended their way out there across the docks, inching along to housing desks.
A touch descended on his shoulder. He turned an aching neck, blinked up at his brother. Emilio settled in the vacant chair next to him, hand still on his shoulder. Elder brother. Emilio was in alterday central command. It -was alterday now, Damon realized muzzily. The wake-sleep worlds in which they two seldom met on duty had gotten lapped in the confusion.
“Go home,” Emilio said gently. “My turn, if one of us has to be here. I promised Elene I’d send you home. She sounded upset.”
“All right,” he agreed, but he failed to move, lacking the volition or the energy. Emilio’s hand tightened, fell away.
“I saw the monitors,” Emilio said. “I know what we’ve got here.”
Damon tightened his lips against a sudden rush of nausea, staring straight before him, not at refugees, but at infinity, at the future, at the undoing of what had always been stable and certain. Pell. Theirs, his and Elene’s, his and Emilio’s. The Fleet took license on itself to do this to them and there was nothing they could do to stop it, because the refugees were poured in too suddenly, and they had no alternatives ready. “I’ve seen people shot down,” he said. “I didn’t do anything. I couldn’t. Couldn’t fight the military. Dissent… would have caused a riot. It would have taken all of us under. But they shot people for breaking a line.”
“Damon, get out of here. It’s my concern now. We’ll work something out.”
“We haven’t any recourse. Only the Company agents; and we don’t need them involved. Don’t let them into this.”
“We’ll handle it,” Emilio said. “There are limits; even the Fleet understands them. They can’t jeopardize Pell and survive. Whatever else they do, they won’t risk us.”
“They have,” Damon said, focused his eyes on the lines across the docks, turned a glance then on his brother, on a face the image of his own plus five years. “We’ve gotten something I’m not sure we can ever digest.”
“So when they shut down the Hinder Stars. We managed.”
“Two stations… six thousand people reach us out of what, fifty, sixty thousand?”
“In Union hands, I’d surmise,” Emilio muttered. “Or dead with Mariner; no knowing what casualties there. Or maybe some got out in other freighters, went elsewhere.” He leaned back in the chair, his face settled into morose lines. “Father’s probably asleep. Mother too, I hope. I stopped by the apartment before I came. Father says it was crazy for you to come here; I said I was crazy too and I could probably clean up what you didn’t get to. He didn’t say anything. But he’s worried — Get on back to Elene. She’s been working the other side of this chaos, passing papers on the refugee merchanters. She’s been asking questions of her own. Damon, I think you ought to get home.”
“Estelle.” Apprehension hit through to him. “She’s hunting rumors.”
“She went home. She was tired or upset; I don’t know. She just said she wanted you to get home when you could.”
“Something’s come in.” He pushed himself to his feet, gathered up his papers, realized what he was doing, pushed them at Emilio and left in haste, past the guardpoint, into the chaos of the dock on the other side of the passage which divided main station from quarantine. Native labor scurried out of his way, furred, skulking forms more alien by reason of the breather-masks they wore outside their maintenance tunnels; they were moving equipage and cargo and belongings in frantic haste… shrieked and shouted among themselves in insane counterpoint to the commands of human overseers.
He took the lift over to green, walked the corridor into their own residence area, and even this was littered with displaced belongings in boxes, a security guard dozing at his post among them. They were all overshift, particularly security. Damon passed him, turned a face to a belated and embarrassed challenge, walked to the door of the apartment.
He keyed it open, saw with relief the lights on, heard the familiar rattle of plastic in the kitchen.
“Elaine?” He walked in. She was watching the oven, her back to him. She did not turn. He stopped, sensing disaster, another world amiss.
The timer went off. She removed the plate from the oven, set it on the counter, turned, managed composure to look at him. He waited, hurting for her, and after a moment came and took her in his arms. She gave a short sigh. “They’re gone,” she said. And a moment later another short gasp and a release. “Blown with Mariner. Estelle’s gone, with everyone aboard. No possible survivors. Sita saw her go; they couldn’t get undocked… all those people trying to get aboard. Fire broke out. And that part of the station went, that’s all. Exploded, blew the nose shell off.”
Fifty-six aboard. Father, mother, cousins, remoter relatives. A world unto itself, Estelle. He had his own, however damaged. He had a family. Hers was dead.
She said nothing more, no word of grief for her loss or of relief to have been spared, to have stayed behind from the voyage. She gave a few more convulsive breaths, hugged him, turned, dry-eyed, to put a second dinner in the microwave.
She sat down, ate, went through all the normal motions. He forced his own meal down, still with a disinfectant taint in his mouth, reckoning it clung all about him. He succeeded finally in catching her eyes looking at him. They were as stark as those of the refugees. He found nothing to say. He got up, walked around the table and hugged her from behind.
Her hands covered his. “I’m all right”
“I wish you’d called me.”
She let go his hands and stood up, touched his arm, a weary gesture. Looked at him suddenly, directly, with that same dark tiredness. “There’s one of us left,” she said. He blinked, perplexed, realized then that she meant the Quens. Estelle’s folk. Merchanters owned names as stationers had a home. She was Quen; that meant something he knew he did not understand, in the months they had been together. Revenge was a merchanter commodity; he knew that… among folk where name alone was a property and reputation went with it
“I want a child,” she said.
He stared at her, struck with the darkness in her eyes. He loved her. She had walked into his life off a merchanter ship and decided to try station life, though she still spoke of her ship. Four months. For the first time in their being together he had no desire for her, not with that look and Estelle’s death and her reasons for revenge. He said nothing. They had agreed there would be no children until she knew for certain whether she could bear to stay. What she offered him might be that agreement. It might be something else. It was not the time to talk about it, not now, with insanity all about them.
He simply gathered her against him, walked with her to the bedroom, held her through the long dark hours. She made no demands and he asked no questions.
ii
“No,” the man at the operations desk said, without looking this time at the printout; and then with a weary impulse toward humanity: “Wait. I’ll do another search. Maybe it wasn’t posted with that spelling.”
Vasilly Kressich waited, sick with terror, as despair hung all about this last, forlorn gathering of refugees which refused to leave the desks on dockside: families and parts of families, who hunted relatives, who waited on word. There were twenty-seven of them on the benches near the desk, counting children; he had counted. They had gone from station main-day into alterday, and another shift of operators at the desk which was station’s one extension of humanity toward them, and there was nothing more coming out of comp but what had been there before.
He waited. The operator keyed through time after time. There was nothing; he knew that there was nothing, by the look the man turned toward him. Of a sudden he was sorry for the operator too, who had to sit out here obtaining nothing, knowing there was no hope, surrounded by grieving relatives, with armed guards stationed near the desk in case. Kressich sat down again, next to the family who had lost a son in the confusion.
It was the same tale for each. They had loaded in panic, the guards more concerned for getting themselves onto the ships than for keeping order and getting others on. It was their own fault; he could not deny that The mob had hit the docks, men forcing their way aboard who had no passes allotted to those critical personnel meant for evacuation. The guards had fired in panic, unsure of attackers and legitimate passengers. Russell’s Station had died in riot. Those in the process of loading had been hurried aboard the nearest ship at the last, doors had been sealed as soon as the counters reached capacity. Jen and Romy should have been aboard before him. He had stayed, trying to keep order at his assigned post. Most of the ships had gotten sealed in time. It was Hansford the mob had gotten wide open, Hansford where the drugs had run out, where the pressure of lives more than the systems could bear had broken everything down and a shock-crazed mob had run riot. Griffin had been bad enough; he had gotten aboard well before the wave the guards had had to cut down. And he had trusted that Jen and Romy had made it into Lila. The passenger list had said that they were on Lila, at least what printout they had finally gotten in the confusion after launch.
But neither of them had gotten off at Pell; they had not come off the ship. No one of those critical enough to be taken to station hospital matched their descriptions. They could not be impressed by Mallory: Jen had no skills Mallory would need, and Romy — somewhere the records were wrong. He had believed the passenger list, had had to believe it, because there were too many of them that ship’s com could pass direct messages. They had voyaged in silence. Jen and Romy had not gotten off Lila. Had never been there.
“They were wrong to throw them out in space,” the woman nearest him moaned. “They didn’t identify them. He’s gone, he’s gone, he must have been on the Hansford”.
Another man was at the desk again, attempting to check, insisting that Mallory’s id of impressed civilians was a lie; and the operator was patiently running another search, comparing descriptions, negative again.
“He was there,” the man shouted at the operator. “He was on the list and he didn’t get off, and he was there.” The man was crying. Kressich sat numb.
On Griffin, they had read out the passenger list and asked for id’s. Few had had them. People had answered to names which could not possibly be theirs. Some answered to two, to get the rations, if they were not caught at it. He had been afraid then, with a deep and sickly fear; but a lot of people were on the wrong ships, and one of them had then realized the situation on Hansford. He had been sure they were aboard.
Unless they had gotten worried and gotten off to go look for him. Unless they had done something so miserably, horribly stupid, out of fear, for love.
Tears started down his face. It was not the likes of Jen and Romy who could have gotten onto Hansford, who could have forced their way among men armed with guns and knives and lengths of pipe. He did not reckon them among the dead of that ship. It was rather that they were still on Russell’s Station, where Union ruled now. And he was here; and there was no way back.
He rose finally, and accepted it He was the first to leave. He went to the quarters which were assigned him, the barracks for single men, who were many of them young, and probably many of them under false id’s, and not the techs and other personnel they were supposed to be. He found a cot unoccupied and gathered up the kit the supervisor provided each man. He bathed a second time… no bathing seemed enough… and walked back among the rows of sleeping, exhausted men, and lay down.
There was mindwipe for those prisoners who had been high enough to be valuable and opinionated. Jen, he thought, O Jen, and their son, if he were alive… to be reared by a shadow of Jen, who thought the approved thoughts and disputed nothing, liable to Adjustment because she had been his wife. It was not even certain that they would let her keep Romy. There were state nurseries, which turned out Union’s soldiers and workers.
He thought of suicide. Some had chosen that rather than board the ships for some strange place, a station which was not theirs. That solution was not in his nature. He lay still and stared at the metal ceiling, in the near dark, and survived, which he had done so far, middle-aged and alone and utterly empty.
i
Too many sights, too much of such things. Damon Konstantin took a cup of coffee from one of the aid workers who passed the desk and leaned on his arm, stared out across the docks and tried to rub the ache from his eyes. The coffee tasted of disinfectant, as everything here smelled of it, as it was in their pores, their noses, everywhere. The troops stayed on guard, keeping this little area of the dock safe. Someone had been knifed in Barracks A. No one could explain the weapon. They thought that it had come from the kitchen of one of the abandoned restaurants on dockside, a piece of cutlery unthinkingly left behind, by someone who had never realized the situation. He found himself exhausted beyond sense. He had no answers; station police could not find the offender, in the lines of refugees which still wended their way out there across the docks, inching along to housing desks.
A touch descended on his shoulder. He turned an aching neck, blinked up at his brother. Emilio settled in the vacant chair next to him, hand still on his shoulder. Elder brother. Emilio was in alterday central command. It -was alterday now, Damon realized muzzily. The wake-sleep worlds in which they two seldom met on duty had gotten lapped in the confusion.
“Go home,” Emilio said gently. “My turn, if one of us has to be here. I promised Elene I’d send you home. She sounded upset.”
“All right,” he agreed, but he failed to move, lacking the volition or the energy. Emilio’s hand tightened, fell away.
“I saw the monitors,” Emilio said. “I know what we’ve got here.”
Damon tightened his lips against a sudden rush of nausea, staring straight before him, not at refugees, but at infinity, at the future, at the undoing of what had always been stable and certain. Pell. Theirs, his and Elene’s, his and Emilio’s. The Fleet took license on itself to do this to them and there was nothing they could do to stop it, because the refugees were poured in too suddenly, and they had no alternatives ready. “I’ve seen people shot down,” he said. “I didn’t do anything. I couldn’t. Couldn’t fight the military. Dissent… would have caused a riot. It would have taken all of us under. But they shot people for breaking a line.”
“Damon, get out of here. It’s my concern now. We’ll work something out.”
“We haven’t any recourse. Only the Company agents; and we don’t need them involved. Don’t let them into this.”
“We’ll handle it,” Emilio said. “There are limits; even the Fleet understands them. They can’t jeopardize Pell and survive. Whatever else they do, they won’t risk us.”
“They have,” Damon said, focused his eyes on the lines across the docks, turned a glance then on his brother, on a face the image of his own plus five years. “We’ve gotten something I’m not sure we can ever digest.”
“So when they shut down the Hinder Stars. We managed.”
“Two stations… six thousand people reach us out of what, fifty, sixty thousand?”
“In Union hands, I’d surmise,” Emilio muttered. “Or dead with Mariner; no knowing what casualties there. Or maybe some got out in other freighters, went elsewhere.” He leaned back in the chair, his face settled into morose lines. “Father’s probably asleep. Mother too, I hope. I stopped by the apartment before I came. Father says it was crazy for you to come here; I said I was crazy too and I could probably clean up what you didn’t get to. He didn’t say anything. But he’s worried — Get on back to Elene. She’s been working the other side of this chaos, passing papers on the refugee merchanters. She’s been asking questions of her own. Damon, I think you ought to get home.”
“Estelle.” Apprehension hit through to him. “She’s hunting rumors.”
“She went home. She was tired or upset; I don’t know. She just said she wanted you to get home when you could.”
“Something’s come in.” He pushed himself to his feet, gathered up his papers, realized what he was doing, pushed them at Emilio and left in haste, past the guardpoint, into the chaos of the dock on the other side of the passage which divided main station from quarantine. Native labor scurried out of his way, furred, skulking forms more alien by reason of the breather-masks they wore outside their maintenance tunnels; they were moving equipage and cargo and belongings in frantic haste… shrieked and shouted among themselves in insane counterpoint to the commands of human overseers.
He took the lift over to green, walked the corridor into their own residence area, and even this was littered with displaced belongings in boxes, a security guard dozing at his post among them. They were all overshift, particularly security. Damon passed him, turned a face to a belated and embarrassed challenge, walked to the door of the apartment.
He keyed it open, saw with relief the lights on, heard the familiar rattle of plastic in the kitchen.
“Elaine?” He walked in. She was watching the oven, her back to him. She did not turn. He stopped, sensing disaster, another world amiss.
The timer went off. She removed the plate from the oven, set it on the counter, turned, managed composure to look at him. He waited, hurting for her, and after a moment came and took her in his arms. She gave a short sigh. “They’re gone,” she said. And a moment later another short gasp and a release. “Blown with Mariner. Estelle’s gone, with everyone aboard. No possible survivors. Sita saw her go; they couldn’t get undocked… all those people trying to get aboard. Fire broke out. And that part of the station went, that’s all. Exploded, blew the nose shell off.”
Fifty-six aboard. Father, mother, cousins, remoter relatives. A world unto itself, Estelle. He had his own, however damaged. He had a family. Hers was dead.
She said nothing more, no word of grief for her loss or of relief to have been spared, to have stayed behind from the voyage. She gave a few more convulsive breaths, hugged him, turned, dry-eyed, to put a second dinner in the microwave.
She sat down, ate, went through all the normal motions. He forced his own meal down, still with a disinfectant taint in his mouth, reckoning it clung all about him. He succeeded finally in catching her eyes looking at him. They were as stark as those of the refugees. He found nothing to say. He got up, walked around the table and hugged her from behind.
Her hands covered his. “I’m all right”
“I wish you’d called me.”
She let go his hands and stood up, touched his arm, a weary gesture. Looked at him suddenly, directly, with that same dark tiredness. “There’s one of us left,” she said. He blinked, perplexed, realized then that she meant the Quens. Estelle’s folk. Merchanters owned names as stationers had a home. She was Quen; that meant something he knew he did not understand, in the months they had been together. Revenge was a merchanter commodity; he knew that… among folk where name alone was a property and reputation went with it
“I want a child,” she said.
He stared at her, struck with the darkness in her eyes. He loved her. She had walked into his life off a merchanter ship and decided to try station life, though she still spoke of her ship. Four months. For the first time in their being together he had no desire for her, not with that look and Estelle’s death and her reasons for revenge. He said nothing. They had agreed there would be no children until she knew for certain whether she could bear to stay. What she offered him might be that agreement. It might be something else. It was not the time to talk about it, not now, with insanity all about them.
He simply gathered her against him, walked with her to the bedroom, held her through the long dark hours. She made no demands and he asked no questions.
ii
“No,” the man at the operations desk said, without looking this time at the printout; and then with a weary impulse toward humanity: “Wait. I’ll do another search. Maybe it wasn’t posted with that spelling.”
Vasilly Kressich waited, sick with terror, as despair hung all about this last, forlorn gathering of refugees which refused to leave the desks on dockside: families and parts of families, who hunted relatives, who waited on word. There were twenty-seven of them on the benches near the desk, counting children; he had counted. They had gone from station main-day into alterday, and another shift of operators at the desk which was station’s one extension of humanity toward them, and there was nothing more coming out of comp but what had been there before.
He waited. The operator keyed through time after time. There was nothing; he knew that there was nothing, by the look the man turned toward him. Of a sudden he was sorry for the operator too, who had to sit out here obtaining nothing, knowing there was no hope, surrounded by grieving relatives, with armed guards stationed near the desk in case. Kressich sat down again, next to the family who had lost a son in the confusion.
It was the same tale for each. They had loaded in panic, the guards more concerned for getting themselves onto the ships than for keeping order and getting others on. It was their own fault; he could not deny that The mob had hit the docks, men forcing their way aboard who had no passes allotted to those critical personnel meant for evacuation. The guards had fired in panic, unsure of attackers and legitimate passengers. Russell’s Station had died in riot. Those in the process of loading had been hurried aboard the nearest ship at the last, doors had been sealed as soon as the counters reached capacity. Jen and Romy should have been aboard before him. He had stayed, trying to keep order at his assigned post. Most of the ships had gotten sealed in time. It was Hansford the mob had gotten wide open, Hansford where the drugs had run out, where the pressure of lives more than the systems could bear had broken everything down and a shock-crazed mob had run riot. Griffin had been bad enough; he had gotten aboard well before the wave the guards had had to cut down. And he had trusted that Jen and Romy had made it into Lila. The passenger list had said that they were on Lila, at least what printout they had finally gotten in the confusion after launch.
But neither of them had gotten off at Pell; they had not come off the ship. No one of those critical enough to be taken to station hospital matched their descriptions. They could not be impressed by Mallory: Jen had no skills Mallory would need, and Romy — somewhere the records were wrong. He had believed the passenger list, had had to believe it, because there were too many of them that ship’s com could pass direct messages. They had voyaged in silence. Jen and Romy had not gotten off Lila. Had never been there.
“They were wrong to throw them out in space,” the woman nearest him moaned. “They didn’t identify them. He’s gone, he’s gone, he must have been on the Hansford”.
Another man was at the desk again, attempting to check, insisting that Mallory’s id of impressed civilians was a lie; and the operator was patiently running another search, comparing descriptions, negative again.
“He was there,” the man shouted at the operator. “He was on the list and he didn’t get off, and he was there.” The man was crying. Kressich sat numb.
On Griffin, they had read out the passenger list and asked for id’s. Few had had them. People had answered to names which could not possibly be theirs. Some answered to two, to get the rations, if they were not caught at it. He had been afraid then, with a deep and sickly fear; but a lot of people were on the wrong ships, and one of them had then realized the situation on Hansford. He had been sure they were aboard.
Unless they had gotten worried and gotten off to go look for him. Unless they had done something so miserably, horribly stupid, out of fear, for love.
Tears started down his face. It was not the likes of Jen and Romy who could have gotten onto Hansford, who could have forced their way among men armed with guns and knives and lengths of pipe. He did not reckon them among the dead of that ship. It was rather that they were still on Russell’s Station, where Union ruled now. And he was here; and there was no way back.
He rose finally, and accepted it He was the first to leave. He went to the quarters which were assigned him, the barracks for single men, who were many of them young, and probably many of them under false id’s, and not the techs and other personnel they were supposed to be. He found a cot unoccupied and gathered up the kit the supervisor provided each man. He bathed a second time… no bathing seemed enough… and walked back among the rows of sleeping, exhausted men, and lay down.
There was mindwipe for those prisoners who had been high enough to be valuable and opinionated. Jen, he thought, O Jen, and their son, if he were alive… to be reared by a shadow of Jen, who thought the approved thoughts and disputed nothing, liable to Adjustment because she had been his wife. It was not even certain that they would let her keep Romy. There were state nurseries, which turned out Union’s soldiers and workers.
He thought of suicide. Some had chosen that rather than board the ships for some strange place, a station which was not theirs. That solution was not in his nature. He lay still and stared at the metal ceiling, in the near dark, and survived, which he had done so far, middle-aged and alone and utterly empty.
Chapter Four
Pell: 5/3/52
The tension set in at the beginning of mainday, the first numb stirrings-forth by the refugees to the emergency kitchens set up on the dock, the first tentative efforts of those with papers and those without to meet with station representatives at the desks and to establish rights of residency, the first awakening to the realities of quarantine.
“We should have pulled out last shift,” Graff said, reviewing dawn’s messages, “while it was all still quiet.”
“Would now,” Signy said, “but we can’t risk Pell. If they can’t hold it down, we have to. Call station council and tell them I’m ready to meet with them now. I’ll go to them. It’s safer than bringing them out on the docks.”
“Take a shuttle round the rim,” Graff suggested, his broad face set in habitual worry. “Don’t risk your neck out there with less than a full squad. They’re less controlled now. All it takes is something to set them off.”
The proposal had merits. She considered how that timidity would look to Pell, shook her head. She went back to her quarters and put on what passed for dress uniform, the proper dark blue at least. When she went it was with Di Janz and a guard of six armored troopers, and they walked right across the dock to the quarantine checkpoint, a door and passage beside the huge intersection seals. No one tried to approach her, although there were some who looked as if they might want to try it, hesitating at the armed troops. She made the door unhindered and was passed through, up the ramp and to another guarded door, then down into the main part of the station.
After that it was as simple as taking a lift through the varied levels and into the administrative section, blue upper corridor. It was a sudden change of worlds, from the barren steel of the docks and the stripped quarantine area, into a hall tightly controlled by station security, into a glass-walled foyer with sound-deadening matting underfoot, where bizarre wooden sculptures met them with the aspect of a cluster of amazed citizenry. Art. Signy blinked and stared, bemused at this reminder of luxuries and civilization. Forgotten things, rumored things. Leisure to make and create what had no function but itself, as man had done, but himself. She had lived her whole life insulated from such things, only knowing at a distance that civilization existed, and that rich stations maintained luxury at their secret hearts.
Only they were not human faces which stared out from curious squat globes, among wooden spires, but faces round-eyed and strange: Downbelow faces, patient work in wood. Humans would have used plastics or metal.
There were indeed more than humans here: that fact was evident in the neat braided matting, in the bright painting which marched in alien geometries and overlays about the walls, more of the spires, more of the wooden globes with the faces and huge eyes all about them, faces repeated in the carved furniture and even in the doors, staring out from a gnarled and tiny detail, as if all those eyes were to remind humans that Downbelow was always with them.
It affected them all. Di swore softly before they walked up to the last doors and officious civs let them in, walked with them into the council hall.
Human faces stared at them this time, in six tiers of chairs on a side, an oval table in the pit between, their expressions and those of the alien carvings remarkably alike in that first impression.
The white-haired man at the end of the table stood up, made a gesture offering them the room into which they had already come. Angelo Konstantin. Others remained seated.
And beside the table were six chairs which were not part of the permanent arrangement; and six, male and female, who were not, by their style of dress, part of the station council or even of the Beyond.
Company men. Signy might have dismissed the troops to the outer chamber in courtesy to the council, rid herself of the threat of rifles and the remainder of force. She stood where she was, unresponsive to Konstantin smiles.
“This can be short,” she said. “Your quarantine zone is set up and functioning. I’d advise you to guard it heavily. I’ll warn you now that other freighters jumped without our clearance and made no part of our convoy. If you’re wise, you’ll follow the recommendations I made and board any incoming merchanter with security before letting it in near you. You’ve had a look at Russell’s disaster here. I’ll be pulling out in short order; it’s your problem now.”
There was a panicked muttering in the room. One of the Company men stood up. “You’ve behaved very high-handedly, Captain Mallory. Is that the custom out here?”
The custom is, sir, that those who know a situation handle it and those who don’t watch and learn, or get out of the way.“
The Company man’s thin face flushed visibly. “It seems we’re constrained to bear with that kind of attitude… temporarily. We need transport up to whatever exists as a border. Norway is available.”
She drew a sharp breath and drew herself up. “No, sir, you’re not constrained, because Norway isn’t available to civ passengers, and I’m not taking any on. As for the border, the border is wherever the fleet sits at the moment, and nobody but the ships involved knows where that is. There aren’t borders. Hire a freighter.”
There was dead silence in the hall.
“I dislike, captain, to use the word court-martial.”
She laughed, a mere breath. “If you Company people want to tour the war, I’m tempted to take you in. Maybe you’d benefit by it. Maybe you could widen Mother Earth’s sight; maybe we could get a few more ships.”
“You’re not in a position to make requisitions and we don’t take them. We’re not here to see only what it’s determined we should see. We’ll be looking at everything, captain, whether or not it suits you.”
She set her hands on her hips and surveyed the lot of them. “Your name, sir.”
“Segust Ayres, of the Security Council, second secretary.”
“Second secretary. Well, we’ll see what space we come up with. No baggage beyond a duffle. You understand that. No frills. You go where Norway goes. I don’t take my orders from anyone but Mazian.”
“Captain,” another put forth, “your cooperation is earnestly requested.”
“You have what I’ll give and not a step further.”
There was silence, a slow murmuring from the tiers. The man Ayres’s face reddened further, his precise dignity that instinctively galled her now further and further ruffled. “You’re an extension of the Company, captain, and you hold your commission from it. Have you forgotten that?”
“Third captain of the Fleet, Mr. Second Secretary, which is military and you’re not. But if you intend to come, be ready within the hour.”
“No, captain,” Ayres declared firmly. “We’ll take your suggestion about freighter transport. It got us here from Sol. They’ll go where they’re hired to go.”
“Within reason, I don’t doubt.” Good. That problem was shed. She could reckon Mazian’s consternation at that in the midst of them. She looked beyond Ayres, at Angelo Konstantin. “I’ve done my service here. I’m leaving. Any message will be relayed.”
“Captain.” Angelo Konstantin left the head of the table and walked forward, offered his hand, an unusual courtesy and the stranger considering what she had done to them, leaving the refugees. She took the firm handclasp, met the man’s anxious eyes. They knew each other, remotely; had met in years past. Six generations a Beyonder, Angelo Konstantin; like the young man who had come down to help on the dock, a seventh. The Konstantins had built Pell; were scientists and miners, builders and holders. With this man and the others she felt a manner of bond, for all their other differences. This kind of man the Fleet had for its charge, the best of them.
“Good luck,” she wished them, and turned and left, taking Di and the troopers with her.
She returned the way she had come, through the beginning establishment of Q zone, and back into the familiar environs of Norway, among friends, where law was as she laid it down and things were as she knew. There were a few last details to work out, a few matters still to be arranged, a few last gifts to bestow on station; her own security’s dredgings — reports, recommendations, a live body, and what salvaged reports came with it.
She put Norway on ready then, and the siren went and what military presence Pell had for its protection slipped free and left them.
She went to follow a sequence of courses which was in her head, and of which Graff knew, her second. It was not the only evacuation in progress; the Pan-Paris station was under Kreshov’s management; Sung of Pacific had moved in on Esperance. By now other convoys were on their way toward Pell, and she had only set up the framework.
The push was coming. Other stations had died, beyond their reach, beyond any salvage. They moved what they could, making Union work for what they took. But in her private estimate they were themselves doomed, and the present maneuver was one from which most of them would not return. They were the remnant of a Fleet, against a widespread power which had inexhaustible lives, and supply, and worlds, and they did not.
After so long a struggle… her generation, the last of the Fleet, the last of Company power. She had watched it go; had fought to hold the two together, Earth and Union, humanity’s past — and future. Still fought, with what she had, but no longer hoped. At times, she even thought of bolting the Fleet, of doing what a few ships had done and going over to Union. It was supreme irony that Union had become the pro-space side of this war and the founding Company fought against; irony that they who most believed in the Beyond ended up fighting against what it was becoming, to die for a Company which had stopped caring. She was bitter; she had long ago stopped being politic in any discussion of Company policies.
There had been a time, years ago, when she had looked differently on things, when she had looked as an outsider on the great ships and the power of them, and when the dream of the old exploration ships had drawn her into this, a dream long revised to the realities the Company captain’s emblem had come to mean. Long ago she had realized there was no winning.
Perhaps, she thought, Angelo Konstantin knew the odds too. Maybe he had taken her meaning, answered it, behind the gesture of saying farewell — offered support in the face of Company pressure. For a moment it had seemed so. Maybe many of the stationers knew… but that was too much to expect of stationers.
She had three feints to make, which would take time; a small operation, and a jump afterward to a rendezvous with Mazian, on a certain date. If enough of their ships survived the initial operation. If Union responded as they hoped. It was madness.
The Fleet went it alone, without merchanter or stationer support, as they had gone it alone for years before this.
Chapter Five
Pell: 5/5/52
Angelo konstantin looked up sharply from the desk covered with notes and emergencies which wanted immediate attention. “Union?” he asked in dismay.
“A prisoner of war,” the security head told him, standing uncomfortably before the desk. “Part of the Russell’s evacuation. Turned over to our security separate of the others. A pickup from a capsule, minor ship, armscomper, confined at Russell’s. Norway carried him in… no turning him loose among the refugees. They’d kill him. Mallory added a note to his file: He’s your problem now. Her words, sir.”
Angelo opened the file, stared at a young face, a record of several pages of interrogation, Union id, and a scrap of notepaper with Mallory’s signature and a scrawl: Young and scared.
Joshua Halbraight Talley. Armscomper. Union fleet minor probe.
He had five hundred individuals and groups who had thought they were headed back to their original housing; warnings of further evacuations in the secret instructions Mallory had left, which was going to take at least most of orange and yellow sections, dislocating more offices; and six Company agents who thought they were headed beyond to inspect the war, with no merchanter who would agree to take Company scrip to take them aboard. He did not need problems from lower levels.
The boy’s face haunted him. He turned back to that page, leafed again through the interrogation report, scanned it, remembered the security chief still standing there. “So what are you doing with him?”
“Holding him in detention. None of the other offices agrees what to do with him.”
Pell had never had a prisoner of war. The war had never come here. Angelo thought it over and fretted the more for the situation. “Legal Affairs have a suggestion?”
“Suggested I get a decision here.”
“We’re not equipped for that kind of detention.”
“No, sir,” the security chief agreed. It was a hospital facility down there. The setup was for retraining, Adjustment… what rare times it had ever been needed.
“We can’t treat him.”
“Those cells aren’t set up for long stays, sir. Maybe we could rig up something more comfortable.”
“We’ve got people without lodgings as it is. How are we going to explain that?”
“We could set up something in detention itself. Take a panel out; at least get a bigger room.”
“Postpone that” Angelo ran a hand through his sparse hair. “I’ll consider policy on the case as soon as I get the emergency matters settled. Deal with him as best you can with what you have at hand. Ask the lower offices to apply some imagination to the case and send me the recommendations.”
“Yes, sir.” The security chief left. Angelo put the folder away for later use. A prisoner of that kind was not what they needed at the moment. What they did need was a means to secure housing and feed extra mouths and to cope with what was coming. They had trade goods which were suddenly going nowhere; those could be consumed on Pell and on Down-below at the base, and out in the mines. But they needed others. They had economics to worry about, markets which had collapsed, the value of any currency in doubt as far as merchanters were concerned. From a star-spanning economy, Pell had to be turned to feed itself, to self-sufficiency; and perhaps — to face other changes.
It was not the single Union prisoner they had in hand, identified, who had him worried. It was the likely number of Unionists and sympathizers who would grow in quarantine, folk for whom any change was going to look better than what they had. There were only some of the refugees with papers, and many of those had been discovered not to match the prints and photos attached to them.
“We need some sort of liaison with the quarantine zone residents,” he advised council at that afternoon’s meeting. “We’ll have to set up a government on the other side of the line, someone of their choosing, some manner of elections; and we’ll have to deal with what results.”
They accepted that, as they had accepted all else. It was the concerns of their own constituencies which had them distraught, the councillors from dislodged orange and yellow, from green and white which had gotten most of the influx of station residents. Red sector, untouched, abutting yellow from the other side, was anxious; the others were jealous. There was a deluge of complaints and protests and rumors of rumor. He made note of them. There was debate. It finally came to the necessary conclusion that they had to relieve pressure on the station itself.
“We do not authorize further construction here,” the man Ayres interposed, rising from his seat. Angelo simply stared at him, given heart to do so by Signy Mallory, who had called a bluff on the Company and made it good.
“I do,” Angelo said. “I have the resources to do it, and I will.”
There was a vote. It went the only sane way, with the Company observers sitting in silent anger, vetoing what was passed, which veto was simply ignored while plans proceeded.
The Company men left the meeting early. Security reported them later agitating on the docks, and trying to engage a freighter at inflated rates, with gold.
There was not a freighter moving, for anything except in-system hauling, ordinary runs to the mines. It did not surprise Angelo when he heard that. There was a cold wind blowing, and Pell felt it; everyone with instincts bred of the Beyond felt it.
Eventually perhaps the Company men did, at least two of them, for those two engaged a ship home, to Sol, the same which had brought them, a smallish and decrepit jump-freighter, the only merchanter with an ec designation which had docked at Pell in the better part of a decade, laden with Downbelow curios and delicacies for its return, as it had brought in goods from Earth, which sold high, for their curiosity. The four other Company representatives upped their offers, and boarded a freighter for an unguaranteed run on the freighter’s own schedule, to call at Viking and wherever else the uncertain times left safe. They accepted Mallory’s conditions from a merchanter captain, and paid for the privilege.
Chapter Six
i
Downbelow main base: 5/20/52
It was storm on Downbelow when the shuttle came down, and that was not uncommon, on a world of abundant cloud, when all the winter on the northern continent was wrapped in sea-spawned overcast, seldom cold enough to freeze, not warm enough for human comfort — never a clear sight of sun or stars for month on dreary month. The unloading of the passengers at the landing site was proceeding in a cold, pelting rain, a line of tired and angry people trudging over the hill from the shuttle, to be settled into various warehouse digs amid stacks of mats and musty sacks of prosh and fikli. “Move it over and stack it up,” the supervisors shouted when the crowding became evident; and the noise was considerable, cursing voices, the beating of rain in the inflated domes, the inevitable thump of compressors. The tired stationers sulked and finally began to do as they were told… young, most of them, construction workers and a few techs, virtually without baggage and no few of them frightened at their first experience of weather. They were station-born, wheezing at a kilo or so extra weight from Downbelow’s gravity, wincing at thunder and at lightning which chained across the roiling skies. No sleep for them until they could set up some manner of dormitory space; no rest for anyone, native or human, who labored to carry foodstuffs over the hill to lade the shuttle, or the crews trying to cope with the inevitable flooding in the domes.
Jon Lukas oversaw some of it, scowling, walked back to the main dome where the operations center was. He paced, listened to the rain, waited the better part of an hour, finally suited up again and masked to walk to the shuttle. “Goodbye, sir,” the com operator offered rising from his desk. Others stopped work, the few who were there. He shook hands, still frowning, and finally walked out the flimsy lock and up the wooden steps to the path, spattered again by the cold rain. His fiftyish overweight was unflattered by the bright yellow plastic. He had always been conscious of the indignity and hated it, hated walking in mud up to the ankles and feeling a chin which penetrated even the suit and the liner. Raingear and the necessary breathers turned all the humans at the base into yellow monsters, blurred in the downpour. Downers scurried about naked and enjoying it, the brown fur of their spindly limbs and lithe bodies dark with moisture and plastered to them, their faces, round-eyed and with mouths set in permanent o’s of surprise, watched and chattered together in their own language, a babble in the rain and the constant bass of thunder. He walked the direct trail to the landing site, not that which led on the other leg of the triangle, past the storage domes and barracks domes. This one had no traffic. No meetings. No good-byes. He looked across to fields which were aswim; the gray-green brush and the ribbon trees on the hills about the base showed through curtains of rain, and the river was a broad, overflowed sheet on the far-side bank, where a marsh tended to form, for all their attempts to drain it… disease among the native workers again, if any Downers had slipped in unvaccinated. It was no paradise, Downbelow base. He had no reluctance to leave it and the new staff and the Downers to each other. It was the manner of the recall which rankled.
“Sir.”
A last, parting nuisance came splashing after him on the trail. Bennett Jacint. Jon half turned, kept walking, made the man work to overtake him in the mud and the downpour,
“The mill dike,” Jacint gasped through the stops and hisses of the breather. “Need some human crews over there with heavy equipment and sandbags.”
“Not my problem now,” Jon said. “Get to it yourself. What are you good for? Put those coddled Downers to it. Take an extra crew of them. Or wait on the new supervisors, why don’t you? You can explain it all to my nephew.”
“Where are they?” Jacint asked. A skilled obstructionist, Bennett Jacint, always on the line with objections when it came to any measures for improvement. More than once Jacint had gone over his head to file a protest. One construction project he had outright gotten stopped, so that the road to the wells stayed a mired track. Jon smiled and pointed across the grounds, far across, back toward the warehouse domes.
“There’s not time.”
“That’s your problem.”
Bennett Jacint cursed him to his face and started to run it, then changed his mind and raced back again toward the mill. Jon laughed. Soaked stock in the mill. Good. Let the Konstantins solve it
He came over the hill, started down to the shuttle, which loomed alien and silver in the trampled meadow, its cargo hatch lowered, Downers toiling to and fro and a few yellow-suited humans among them. His trail joined that on which the Downers moved, churned mud; he walked on the grassy margin, cursed when a Downer with a load swayed too near him, and had the satisfaction at least that they cleared his path. He walked into the landing circle, nodded curtly to a human supervisor and climbed the cargo ramp into the shadowed steel interior. He stripped the wet rainsuit there in the cold, keeping the mask on. He ordered a Downer gang boss to clean up the muddied area, and walked on through the hold to the lift, rode it topside, into a steel, clean corridor, and a small passenger compartment with padded seats.
Downers were in it, two laborers making the shift to station. They looked uncertain when they saw him, touched each other. He sealed the passenger area and made the air-shift, so that he could discard his breather and they had to put theirs on. He sat down opposite them, stared through them in the windowless compartment. The air stank of wet Downer, a smell he had lived with for three years, a smell with which all Pell lived, if one had a sensitive nose, but Downbelow base worst of all: with dusty grain and distilleries and packing plants and walls and mud and muck and the smoke of the mills, latrines that flooded out, sump pools that grew scum, forest molds that could ruin a breather and kill a man who was caught without a spare — all of this and managing halfwitted Downer labor with their religious taboos and constant excuses. He was proud of his record, increased output, efficiency where there had been hands-folded complacency that Downers were Downers and could not comprehend schedules. They could, and did, and set records in production.
No thanks of it. Crisis hit the station and the Downbelow expansion which had limped along in and out of planning sessions for a decade was suddenly moving. Plants would get the additional facilities he had made possible, manned by workers whose supply and housing he had made possible, using Lukas Company funds and Lukas Company equipment.
Only a pair of Konstantins was sent down to supervise during that stage, without a thank you, Mr. Lukas, or a well done, Jon, thanks for leaving your own company offices and your own affairs, thanks for doing the job for three years. Emilio Konstantin and Miliko Dee appointed Downbelow supervisors; please arrange affairs and shuttle up at the earliest. His nephew Emilio. Young Emilio was going to ran things during construction. Konstantins were always in at the last stage, always there when the credit was about to be handed out. They had democracy in the council, but it was dynasty in the station offices. Always Konstantins. Lukases had arrived at Pell as early, sunk as much into its building, an important company back in the Hinder Stars; but Konstantins had maneuvered and gathered power at every opportunity. Now again, his equipment, his preparation, and Konstantins in charge when it reached a stage when the public might notice. Emilio: his sister Alicia’s son, and Angelo’s. People could be manipulated, if the Konstantin name was all they were ever allowed to hear; and Angelo was past master at that tactic.
It would have been courtesy to have met his nephew and his wife when they came in, to have stayed a few days to trade information, or at the least to have informed them of his immediate departure on the shuttle which had brought them down. It would also have been courtesy on their part to have come at once to the domes for an official greeting, some acknowledgment of his authority at the base — but they had not. Not even a com-sent hello, uncle, when they landed. He was in no mood for empty courtesies now, to stand in the rain shaking hands and mouthing amenities with a nephew with whom he seldom spoke. He had opposed his sister’s marriage; argued with her; it had not linked him in to the Konstantin family: with her attitude, it was rather a desertion. He and Alicia had not spoken since, save officially; not even that, in the last several years… her presence depressed him. And the boys looked like Angelo, as Angelo had been in his younger days; he avoided them, who probably hoped to get their hands on Lukas Company… at least a share of it, after him, as nearest kin. It was that hope, he was still persuaded, which had attracted Angelo to Alicia: Lukas Company was still the biggest independent on Pell. But he had maneuvered out of the trap, surprised them with an heir, not one to his taste, but a live body all the same. He had worked these years on Downbelow, reckoning at first it might be possible to expand Lukas Company down here, through construction. Angelo had seen it coming, had maneuvered the council to block that. Ecological concerns. Now came the final move.
He accepted the letter of his instruction to return, took it just as rudely as it was delivered, left without baggage or fanfare, like some offender ordered home in disgrace. Childish it might be, but it might also make a point with council… and if all the stock in the mill was soaked on the first day of the Konstantin administration here, so much the better. Let them feel shortages on station; let Angelo explain that to council. It would open a debate in which he would be present in council to participate, and ah, he wanted that.
He had deserved something more than this.
Engines finally activated, heralding lift. He got up, searched up a bottle and a glass from the locker. He received a query from the shuttle crew, declared he needed nothing. He settled in, belted, and the shuttle began lift. He poured himself a stiff drink, nerving himself for flight, which he always hated, drank, with the amber liquid quivering in the glass under the strain of his arm and the vibration of the ship. Across from him the Downers held each other and moaned.
ii
Pell Detention: red sector one: 5/20/52; 0900 hrs.
The prisoner sat still at the table with the three of them, stared at the guard supervisor in preference, his eyes seeming focused somewhere beyond. Damon laid the folder on the table again and studied the man, who was most of all trying not to look at him. Damon found himself intensely uncomfortable in this interview… different from the criminals he dealt with in Legal Affairs — this man, this face like an angel in a painting, this too-perfect humanity with blond hair and eyes that gazed through things. Beautiful, the word occurred to him. There were no flaws. The look was complete innocence. No thief, no brawler; but this man would kill… if such a man could kill… for politics. For duty, because he was Union and they were not. There was no hate involved. It was disturbing to hold the life or death of such a man in his hands. It gave him choices in turn, mirror-imaged choices — not for hate, but for duty, because he was not Union, and this man was.
We’re at war, Damon thought miserably. Because he’s come here, the war has.
An angel’s face.
“No trouble to you, is he?” Damon asked the supervisor.
“No.”
“I’ve heard he’s a good midge player.”
That got a flicker from both of them. There were illicit gamblings at the detention station, as in most slow posts during alterday. Damon offered a smile when the prisoner looked his way, the least shifting of the pale blue eyes… went sober again as the prisoner failed to react. “I’m Damon Konstantin, Mr. Talley, of the station legal office. You’ve given us no trouble and we appreciate that. We’re not your enemies; we’d dock a Union fleet as readily as a Company ship — in principle; but you don’t leave stations neutral any longer, not from what we hear, so our attitude has to change along with that. We just can’t take chances having you loose. Repatriation… no. We’re given other instructions. Our own security. You understand that.”
No response.
“Your counsel’s made the point that you’re suffering in this close confinement and that the cells were never meant for long-term detention. That there are people walking loose in Q who are far more a threat to this station; that there’s a vast difference between a saboteur and an armscomper in uniform who had the bad luck to be picked up by the wrong side. But having said all that, he still doesn’t recommend your release except to Q. We have an arrangement worked out. We can fake an id that would protect you, and still let us keep track of you over there. I don’t like the idea, but it seems workable.”
“What’s Q?” Talley asked, a soft, anxious voice, appealing to the supervisor and to his own counsel, the elder Jacoby, who sat at the end of the table. “What are you saying?”
“Quarantine. The sealed section of the station we’ve set apart for our own refugees.”
Talley’s eyes darted nervously from one to the other of them. “No. No. I don’t want to be put with them. I never asked him to set this up. I didn’t.”
Damon frowned uncomfortably. “We’ve got another convoy coming in, Mr. Talley, another group of refugees. We have arrangements underway to mix you with them with faked papers. Get you out of here. It would still be a kind of confinement, but with wider walls, room to walk where you want, live life… as it’s lived in Q. That’s a good part of the station over there. Not regimented — open. No cells. Mr. Jacoby’s right: you’re no more dangerous than some over there. Less, because we’d always know who you are.”
Talley cast another look at his counsel. Shook his head, pleading.
“You absolutely reject it?” Damon prodded him, vexed. All solutions and arrangements collapsed. “It’s not prison, you understand.”
“My face — is known there. Mallory said — ”
He lapsed into silence. Damon stared at him, marked the fevered anxiety, the sweat which stood on Talley’s face. “What did Mallory say?”
“That if I made trouble — she’d transfer me to one of the other ships. I think I know what you’re doing: you think if there are Unionists with them they’d contact me if you put me over there in your quarantine. Is that it? But I wouldn’t live that long. There are people who know me by sight. Station officials. Police. They’re the kind who got places on those ships, aren’t they? And they’d know me. I’ll be dead in an hour if you do that. I heard what those ships were like.”
“Mallory told you.”
“Mallory told me.”
“There are some, on the other hand,” Damon said bitterly, “who’d balk at boarding one of Mazian’s ships, stationers who’d swear an honest man’s survival wasn’t that likely. But I’d reckon you had a soft passage, didn’t you? Enough to eat and no worries about the air? The old spacer-stationer quarrel: leave the stationers to suffocate and keep her own deck spotless. But you rated differently. You got special treatment.”
“It wasn’t all that pleasant, Mr. Konstantin.”
“Not your choice either, was it?”
“No,” the answer came hoarsely. Damon suddenly repented his baiting, nagged by suspicions, evil rumor of the Fleet. He was ashamed of the role in which he was cast. In which Pell was. War and prisoners of war. He wanted no part of it.
“You refuse the solution we offer,” he said. “That’s your privilege. No one will force you. We don’t want to endanger your life, and that’s what it would be if things are what you say. So what do you do? I suppose you go on playing midge with the guards. It’s a very small confinement. Did they give you the tapes and player? You got that?”
“I would like — ” The words came out like an upwelling of nausea. “I want to ask for Adjustment.”
Jacoby looked down and shook his head. Damon sat still.
“If I were Adjusted I could get out of here,” the prisoner said. “Eventually do something. It’s my own request. A prisoner always has the option to have that, doesn’t he?”
“Your side uses that on prisoners,” Damon said. “We don’t.”
“I ask for it You have me locked up like a criminal. If I’d killed someone, wouldn’t I have a right to it? If I’d stolen or — ”
“I think you ought to have some psychiatric testing if you keep insisting on it.”
“Don’t they test — when they process for Adjustment?”
Damon looked at Jacoby.
“He’s been increasingly depressed,” Jacoby said. “He’s asked me over and over to lodge that request with station, and I haven’t.”
“We’ve never mandated Adjustment for a man who wasn’t convicted of a crime.”
“Have you ever,” the prisoner asked, “had a man in here who wasn’t?”
“Union uses it,” the supervisor said in a low voice, “without blinking. Those cells are small, Mr. Konstantin.”
“A man doesn’t ask for a thing like that,” Damon said.
“I ask,” Talley insisted. “I ask you. I want out of here.”
“It would solve the problem,” Jacoby said.
“I want to know why he wants it”
“I want out!”
Damon froze. Talley caught his breath, leaning against the table, and recovered his composure a little short of tears. Adjustment was not a punitive procedure, was never intended to be. It had double benefits… altered behavior for the violent and a little wiping of the slate for the troubled. It was the latter, he suspected, meeting Talley’s shadowed eyes. Suddenly he felt an overwelling pity for the man, who was sane, who seemed very, very sane. The station was in crisis. Events crowded in on them in which individuals could become lost, shoved aside. Cells in detention were urgently needed for real criminals, out of Q, which they had in abundance. There were worse fates than Adjustment. Being locked in a viewless eight-by-ten room for life was one.
“Pull the commitment papers out of comp,” he told the supervisor, and the supervisor passed the order via com. Jacoby fretted visibly, shuffling papers and not looking at any of them. “What I’m going to do,” Damon said to Talley, feeling as if it were some shared bad dream, “is put the papers in your hands. And you can study all the printout of explanation that goes with them. If that’s still what you want tomorrow, we’ll accept them signed. I want you also to write us a release and request in your own words, stating that this was your idea and your choice, that you’re not claustrophobic or suffering from any other disability — ”
“I was an armscomper,” Talley interjected scornfully. It was not the largest station on a ship.
“ — or condition which would cause you unusual duress. Don’t you have kin, relatives, someone who would try to talk you out of this if they heard about it?”
The eyes reacted to that, ever so slightly.
“Do you have someone?” Damon asked, hoping he had found a handhold, some reason to apply against this, “Who?”
“Dead,” Talley said.
“If this request is in reaction to that — ”
“A long time ago,” Talley said, cutting that off. Nothing more.
An angel’s face. Humanity without flaw. Birth labs? The thought came to him unbidden. It had always been abhorrent to him, Union’s engineered soldiers. His own possible prejudice worried at him. “I haven’t read your file in full,” he admitted. “This has been handled at other levels. They thought they had this settled. It bounced back to me. You had family, Mr. Talley?”
“Yes,” Talley said faintly, defiantly, making him ashamed of himself.
“Born where?”
“Cyteen.” The same small, flat voice, “I’ve given you all that. I had parents. I was born, Mr. Konstantin. Is that really pertinent?”
“I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. I want you to understand this: it’s not final. You can change your mind, right up to the moment the treatment begins. All you have to say is stop, I don’t want this. But after it goes so far, you’re not competent. You understand… you’re no longer able. You’ve seen Adjusted men?”
“They recover.”
“They do recover. I’ll follow the case, Mr. Talley… Lt Talley… so much as I can. You see to it,” he said to the supervisor, “that any time he sends a message, at any stage of the process, it gets to me on an emergency basis, day or night You see that the attendants understand that too, down to the orderlies. I don’t think he’ll abuse the privilege.” He looked at Jacoby. “Are you satisfied about your client?”
“It’s his right to do what he’s doing. I’m not pleased with it. But I’ll witness it. I’ll agree it solves things… maybe for the best.”
The comp printout arrived. Damon handed the papers to Jacoby for scrutiny. Jacoby marked the lines for signature and passed the folder to Talley. Talley folded it to him like something precious.
“Mr. Talley,” Damon said, rising, and on impulse offered his hand, against all the distaste he felt The young armscomper rose and took it, and the look of gratitude in his suddenly brimming eyes cancelled all certainties. “Is it possible,” Damon asked, “is it remotely possible that you have information you want wiped? That that’s why you’re doing this? I warn you it’s more likely to come out in the process than not. And we’re not interested in it, do you understand that? We have no military interests.”
That was not it. He much doubted that it could be. This was no high officer, no one like himself, who knew comp signals, access codes, the sort of thing an enemy must not have. No one had discovered the like in this man… nothing of value, not here, not at Russell’s.
“No,” Talley said. “I don’t know anything.”
Damon hesitated, still nagged by conscience, the feeling that Talley’s counsel, if no one else, ought to be protesting, doing something more vigorous, using all the delays of the law on Talley’s behalf. But that got him prison; got him… no hope. They were bringing Q outlaws into detention, far more dangerous; men who might know him, if Talley was right. Adjustment saved him, got him out of there; gave him the chance for a job, for freedom, a life. There was no one sane who would carry out revenge on someone after a mind-wipe. And the process was humane. It was always meant to be.
“Talley… have you complaint against Mallory or the personnel of Norway?”
“No.”
“Your counsel is present. It would be put on record… if you wanted to make such a complaint.”
“No.”
So that trick would not work. No delaying it for investigation. Damon nodded, walked out of the room, feeling unclean. It was a manner of murder he was doing, an assistance in suicide. They had an abundance of those too, over in Q.
iii
Pell: sector orange nine: 5/20/52; 1900 hrs.
Kressich winced at the crash of something down the hall, beyond the sealed door, tried not to show his terror. Something was burning, smoke reaching them through the ventilation system. That more frightened him, and the half hundred gathered with him in this section of hallway. Out on the docks the police and the rioters still fired at each other. The violence was subsiding. The few with him, the remainder of Russell’s own security police, a handful of elite stationers and a scattering of young people and old… they had held the hallway against the gangs.
“We’re afire,” someone muttered, on the edge of hysteria.
“Old rags or something,” he said; shut it up, he thought They did not need panic. In a major fire, station central would blow a section to put it out… death for all of them. They were not valuable to Pell. Some of them were out there shooting at Pell police with guns they had gotten off dead policemen. It had started with the knowledge that there was another convoy coming in, more ships, more desperate people to crowd into the little they had; had started with the simple word that this was about to happen… and a demand for faster processing of papers; then raids on barracks and gangs confiscating papers from those who did have them.
Burn all records, the cry had gone out through quarantine, in the logic that, recordless, they would all be admitted. Those who would not yield up their papers were beaten and robbed of them; of anything else of value. Barracks were ransacked. Gangs of the ruffians who had forced Griffin and Hansford gained membership among the desperate, the young, the leaderless and the panicked.
There was quiet for a time outside. The fans had stopped; the air began to go foul. Among those who had seen the worst of the voyage, there was panic, quietly contained; a good number were crying.
Then the lights brightened and a cool draft came through the ducts. The door whipped open. Kressich got to his feet and looked into the faces of station police, and the barrels of leveled rifles. Some of his own band had knives, sections of pipe and furniture, whatever weapons they had improvised. He had nothing… held up frantic hands.
“No,” he pleaded. No one moved, not the police, not his own. “Please. We weren’t in it. We only defended this section from them. None… none of these people were involved. They were the victims.”
The police leader, face haggard with weariness and soot and blood, motioned with his rifle toward the wall. “You have to line up,” Kressich explained to his ill-assorted companions, who were not the sort to understand such procedures, except only the ex-police. “Drop whatever weapons you have.” They lined up, even the old and the sick, and the two small children.
Kressich found himself shaking, while he was searched and after, left leaning against the corridor wall while the police muttered mysteriously among themselves. One seized him by the shoulder, faced him about. An officer with a slate walked from one to the other of them asking for id’s.
“They were stolen,” Kressich said. “That’s how it started. The gangs were stealing papers and burning them.”
“We know that,” the officer said. “Are you in charge? What’s your name and origin?”
“Vassily Kressich, Russell’s.”
“Others of you know him?”
Several confirmed it. “He was a councillor on Russell’s Station,” said a young man. “I served there in security.”
“Name.”
The young man gave it. Nino Coledy. Kressich tried to recall him and could not. One by one the questions were repeated, cross-examination of identifications, mutual identifications, no more reliable than the word of those who gave them. A man with a camera came into the hallway and photographed them all standing against the wall. They stood in a chaos of com-chatter and discussion.
“You can go,” the police leader said, and they began to file out; but when Kressich started to leave the officer caught his arm. “Vassily Kressich. I’ll be giving your name to headquarters.”
He was not sure whether that was good or bad; anything was a hope. Anything was better than what existed here in Q, with the station stalling and unable to place them or clear them out.
He walked out onto the dock itself, shaken by the sight of the wreckage that had been made here, with the dead still lying in their blood, piles of combustibles still smouldering, what furnishings and belongings had remained heaped up to burn. Station police were everywhere, armed with rifles, no light arms. He stayed on the docks, close to the police, afraid to go back into the corridors for fear of the terrorist gangs. It was impossible to hope the police had gotten them all. There were far too many.
Eventually the station set up an emergency dispensary for food and drink near the section line, for the water had been shut down during the emergency, the kitchens vandalized, everything turned to weapons. Com had been vandalized; there was no way to report damage; and no repair crews were likely to want to come into the area.
He sat on the bare dock and ate what they were given, in company with other small knots of refugees who had no more than he. People looked on each other in fear.
“We aren’t getting out,” he heard repeatedly. “They’ll never clear us to leave now.”
More than once he heard mutterings of a different sort, saw men he knew had been in the gangs of rioters, which had begun in his barracks, and no one reported them. No one dared. They were too many.
Unionizers were among them. He became sure that these were the agitators. Such men might have most to fear in a tight check of papers. The war had reached Pell. It was among them, and they were as stationers had always been, neutral and empty-handed, treading carefully among those who meant murder… only now it was not stationers against warships, metal shell against metal shell; the danger was shoulder to shoulder with them, perhaps the young man with the hoarded sandwich, the young woman who sat and stared with hateful eyes.
The convoy came in, without troops for escort. Dock crews under the protection of a small army of station police managed the unloading. Refugees were let through, processed as best could be with most of the housing wrecked, with the corridors become a jungle. The newcomers stood, baggage in hand, staring about them with terror in their eyes. They would be robbed by morning, Kressich reckoned, or worse. He heard people round about him simply crying softly, despairing.
By morning there was yet another group of several hundred; and by now there was panic, for they were all hungry and thirsty and food arrived from main station very slowly.
A man settled on the deck near him: Nino Coledy.
There’s a dozen of us,“ Coledy said. ”Could sort some of this out; been talking to some of the gang survivors. We don’t give out names and they cooperate. We’ve got strong arms… could straighten this mess out, get people back into residences, so we can get some food and water in here.“
“What, we?”
Coledy’s face took on a grimace of earnestness. “You were a councillor. You stand up front; you do the talking. We keep you there. Get these people fed. Get ourselves a soft place here. Station needs that. We can benefit by it.”
Kressich considered it. It could also get them shot. He was too old for this. They wanted a figurehead. A police gang wanted a respectable figurehead. He was also afraid to tell them no.
“You just do the talking out front,” Coledy said.
“Yes,” he agreed, and then, setting his jaw with more firmness than Coledy might have expected of a tired old man: “You start rounding up your men and I’ll have a talk with the police.”
He did so, approaching them gingerly. “There’s been an election,” he said. “I’m Vassily Kressich, councillor from red two, Russell’s Station. Some of our own police are among the refugees. We’re prepared to go into the corridors and establish order… without violence. We know faces. You don’t. If you’ll consult your own authorities and get it cleared, we can help.”
They were not sure of that. There was hesitation even about calling in. Finally a police captain did so, and Kressich stood fretting. The captain nodded at last. “If it gets out of hand,” the captain said, “we won’t discriminate in firing. But we’re not going to tolerate any killing on your part, councillor Kressich; it’s not an open license.”
“Have patience, sir,” Kressich said, and walked away, mortally tired and frightened. Coledy was there, with several others, waiting for him by the niner corridor access. In a few moments there were more drifting to them, less savory than the first. He feared them. He feared not to have them. He cared for nothing now, except to live; and to be atop the force and not under it. He watched them go, using terror to move the innocent, gathering the dangerous into their own ranks. He knew what he had done. It terrified him. He kept silent, because he would be caught in the second riot, part of it, if it happened. They would see to that.
He assisted, used his dignity and his age and the fact that his face was known to some: shouted directions, began to have folk addressing him respectfully as councillor Kressich. He listened to their griefs and their fears and their angers until Coledy flung a guard about him to protect their precious figurehead.
Within the hour the docks were clear and the legitimized gangs were in control, and honest people deferred to him wherever he went.
i
It was storm on Downbelow when the shuttle came down, and that was not uncommon, on a world of abundant cloud, when all the winter on the northern continent was wrapped in sea-spawned overcast, seldom cold enough to freeze, not warm enough for human comfort — never a clear sight of sun or stars for month on dreary month. The unloading of the passengers at the landing site was proceeding in a cold, pelting rain, a line of tired and angry people trudging over the hill from the shuttle, to be settled into various warehouse digs amid stacks of mats and musty sacks of prosh and fikli. “Move it over and stack it up,” the supervisors shouted when the crowding became evident; and the noise was considerable, cursing voices, the beating of rain in the inflated domes, the inevitable thump of compressors. The tired stationers sulked and finally began to do as they were told… young, most of them, construction workers and a few techs, virtually without baggage and no few of them frightened at their first experience of weather. They were station-born, wheezing at a kilo or so extra weight from Downbelow’s gravity, wincing at thunder and at lightning which chained across the roiling skies. No sleep for them until they could set up some manner of dormitory space; no rest for anyone, native or human, who labored to carry foodstuffs over the hill to lade the shuttle, or the crews trying to cope with the inevitable flooding in the domes.
Jon Lukas oversaw some of it, scowling, walked back to the main dome where the operations center was. He paced, listened to the rain, waited the better part of an hour, finally suited up again and masked to walk to the shuttle. “Goodbye, sir,” the com operator offered rising from his desk. Others stopped work, the few who were there. He shook hands, still frowning, and finally walked out the flimsy lock and up the wooden steps to the path, spattered again by the cold rain. His fiftyish overweight was unflattered by the bright yellow plastic. He had always been conscious of the indignity and hated it, hated walking in mud up to the ankles and feeling a chin which penetrated even the suit and the liner. Raingear and the necessary breathers turned all the humans at the base into yellow monsters, blurred in the downpour. Downers scurried about naked and enjoying it, the brown fur of their spindly limbs and lithe bodies dark with moisture and plastered to them, their faces, round-eyed and with mouths set in permanent o’s of surprise, watched and chattered together in their own language, a babble in the rain and the constant bass of thunder. He walked the direct trail to the landing site, not that which led on the other leg of the triangle, past the storage domes and barracks domes. This one had no traffic. No meetings. No good-byes. He looked across to fields which were aswim; the gray-green brush and the ribbon trees on the hills about the base showed through curtains of rain, and the river was a broad, overflowed sheet on the far-side bank, where a marsh tended to form, for all their attempts to drain it… disease among the native workers again, if any Downers had slipped in unvaccinated. It was no paradise, Downbelow base. He had no reluctance to leave it and the new staff and the Downers to each other. It was the manner of the recall which rankled.
“Sir.”
A last, parting nuisance came splashing after him on the trail. Bennett Jacint. Jon half turned, kept walking, made the man work to overtake him in the mud and the downpour,
“The mill dike,” Jacint gasped through the stops and hisses of the breather. “Need some human crews over there with heavy equipment and sandbags.”
“Not my problem now,” Jon said. “Get to it yourself. What are you good for? Put those coddled Downers to it. Take an extra crew of them. Or wait on the new supervisors, why don’t you? You can explain it all to my nephew.”
“Where are they?” Jacint asked. A skilled obstructionist, Bennett Jacint, always on the line with objections when it came to any measures for improvement. More than once Jacint had gone over his head to file a protest. One construction project he had outright gotten stopped, so that the road to the wells stayed a mired track. Jon smiled and pointed across the grounds, far across, back toward the warehouse domes.
“There’s not time.”
“That’s your problem.”
Bennett Jacint cursed him to his face and started to run it, then changed his mind and raced back again toward the mill. Jon laughed. Soaked stock in the mill. Good. Let the Konstantins solve it
He came over the hill, started down to the shuttle, which loomed alien and silver in the trampled meadow, its cargo hatch lowered, Downers toiling to and fro and a few yellow-suited humans among them. His trail joined that on which the Downers moved, churned mud; he walked on the grassy margin, cursed when a Downer with a load swayed too near him, and had the satisfaction at least that they cleared his path. He walked into the landing circle, nodded curtly to a human supervisor and climbed the cargo ramp into the shadowed steel interior. He stripped the wet rainsuit there in the cold, keeping the mask on. He ordered a Downer gang boss to clean up the muddied area, and walked on through the hold to the lift, rode it topside, into a steel, clean corridor, and a small passenger compartment with padded seats.
Downers were in it, two laborers making the shift to station. They looked uncertain when they saw him, touched each other. He sealed the passenger area and made the air-shift, so that he could discard his breather and they had to put theirs on. He sat down opposite them, stared through them in the windowless compartment. The air stank of wet Downer, a smell he had lived with for three years, a smell with which all Pell lived, if one had a sensitive nose, but Downbelow base worst of all: with dusty grain and distilleries and packing plants and walls and mud and muck and the smoke of the mills, latrines that flooded out, sump pools that grew scum, forest molds that could ruin a breather and kill a man who was caught without a spare — all of this and managing halfwitted Downer labor with their religious taboos and constant excuses. He was proud of his record, increased output, efficiency where there had been hands-folded complacency that Downers were Downers and could not comprehend schedules. They could, and did, and set records in production.
No thanks of it. Crisis hit the station and the Downbelow expansion which had limped along in and out of planning sessions for a decade was suddenly moving. Plants would get the additional facilities he had made possible, manned by workers whose supply and housing he had made possible, using Lukas Company funds and Lukas Company equipment.
Only a pair of Konstantins was sent down to supervise during that stage, without a thank you, Mr. Lukas, or a well done, Jon, thanks for leaving your own company offices and your own affairs, thanks for doing the job for three years. Emilio Konstantin and Miliko Dee appointed Downbelow supervisors; please arrange affairs and shuttle up at the earliest. His nephew Emilio. Young Emilio was going to ran things during construction. Konstantins were always in at the last stage, always there when the credit was about to be handed out. They had democracy in the council, but it was dynasty in the station offices. Always Konstantins. Lukases had arrived at Pell as early, sunk as much into its building, an important company back in the Hinder Stars; but Konstantins had maneuvered and gathered power at every opportunity. Now again, his equipment, his preparation, and Konstantins in charge when it reached a stage when the public might notice. Emilio: his sister Alicia’s son, and Angelo’s. People could be manipulated, if the Konstantin name was all they were ever allowed to hear; and Angelo was past master at that tactic.
It would have been courtesy to have met his nephew and his wife when they came in, to have stayed a few days to trade information, or at the least to have informed them of his immediate departure on the shuttle which had brought them down. It would also have been courtesy on their part to have come at once to the domes for an official greeting, some acknowledgment of his authority at the base — but they had not. Not even a com-sent hello, uncle, when they landed. He was in no mood for empty courtesies now, to stand in the rain shaking hands and mouthing amenities with a nephew with whom he seldom spoke. He had opposed his sister’s marriage; argued with her; it had not linked him in to the Konstantin family: with her attitude, it was rather a desertion. He and Alicia had not spoken since, save officially; not even that, in the last several years… her presence depressed him. And the boys looked like Angelo, as Angelo had been in his younger days; he avoided them, who probably hoped to get their hands on Lukas Company… at least a share of it, after him, as nearest kin. It was that hope, he was still persuaded, which had attracted Angelo to Alicia: Lukas Company was still the biggest independent on Pell. But he had maneuvered out of the trap, surprised them with an heir, not one to his taste, but a live body all the same. He had worked these years on Downbelow, reckoning at first it might be possible to expand Lukas Company down here, through construction. Angelo had seen it coming, had maneuvered the council to block that. Ecological concerns. Now came the final move.
He accepted the letter of his instruction to return, took it just as rudely as it was delivered, left without baggage or fanfare, like some offender ordered home in disgrace. Childish it might be, but it might also make a point with council… and if all the stock in the mill was soaked on the first day of the Konstantin administration here, so much the better. Let them feel shortages on station; let Angelo explain that to council. It would open a debate in which he would be present in council to participate, and ah, he wanted that.
He had deserved something more than this.
Engines finally activated, heralding lift. He got up, searched up a bottle and a glass from the locker. He received a query from the shuttle crew, declared he needed nothing. He settled in, belted, and the shuttle began lift. He poured himself a stiff drink, nerving himself for flight, which he always hated, drank, with the amber liquid quivering in the glass under the strain of his arm and the vibration of the ship. Across from him the Downers held each other and moaned.
ii
The prisoner sat still at the table with the three of them, stared at the guard supervisor in preference, his eyes seeming focused somewhere beyond. Damon laid the folder on the table again and studied the man, who was most of all trying not to look at him. Damon found himself intensely uncomfortable in this interview… different from the criminals he dealt with in Legal Affairs — this man, this face like an angel in a painting, this too-perfect humanity with blond hair and eyes that gazed through things. Beautiful, the word occurred to him. There were no flaws. The look was complete innocence. No thief, no brawler; but this man would kill… if such a man could kill… for politics. For duty, because he was Union and they were not. There was no hate involved. It was disturbing to hold the life or death of such a man in his hands. It gave him choices in turn, mirror-imaged choices — not for hate, but for duty, because he was not Union, and this man was.
We’re at war, Damon thought miserably. Because he’s come here, the war has.
An angel’s face.
“No trouble to you, is he?” Damon asked the supervisor.
“No.”
“I’ve heard he’s a good midge player.”
That got a flicker from both of them. There were illicit gamblings at the detention station, as in most slow posts during alterday. Damon offered a smile when the prisoner looked his way, the least shifting of the pale blue eyes… went sober again as the prisoner failed to react. “I’m Damon Konstantin, Mr. Talley, of the station legal office. You’ve given us no trouble and we appreciate that. We’re not your enemies; we’d dock a Union fleet as readily as a Company ship — in principle; but you don’t leave stations neutral any longer, not from what we hear, so our attitude has to change along with that. We just can’t take chances having you loose. Repatriation… no. We’re given other instructions. Our own security. You understand that.”
No response.
“Your counsel’s made the point that you’re suffering in this close confinement and that the cells were never meant for long-term detention. That there are people walking loose in Q who are far more a threat to this station; that there’s a vast difference between a saboteur and an armscomper in uniform who had the bad luck to be picked up by the wrong side. But having said all that, he still doesn’t recommend your release except to Q. We have an arrangement worked out. We can fake an id that would protect you, and still let us keep track of you over there. I don’t like the idea, but it seems workable.”
“What’s Q?” Talley asked, a soft, anxious voice, appealing to the supervisor and to his own counsel, the elder Jacoby, who sat at the end of the table. “What are you saying?”
“Quarantine. The sealed section of the station we’ve set apart for our own refugees.”
Talley’s eyes darted nervously from one to the other of them. “No. No. I don’t want to be put with them. I never asked him to set this up. I didn’t.”
Damon frowned uncomfortably. “We’ve got another convoy coming in, Mr. Talley, another group of refugees. We have arrangements underway to mix you with them with faked papers. Get you out of here. It would still be a kind of confinement, but with wider walls, room to walk where you want, live life… as it’s lived in Q. That’s a good part of the station over there. Not regimented — open. No cells. Mr. Jacoby’s right: you’re no more dangerous than some over there. Less, because we’d always know who you are.”
Talley cast another look at his counsel. Shook his head, pleading.
“You absolutely reject it?” Damon prodded him, vexed. All solutions and arrangements collapsed. “It’s not prison, you understand.”
“My face — is known there. Mallory said — ”
He lapsed into silence. Damon stared at him, marked the fevered anxiety, the sweat which stood on Talley’s face. “What did Mallory say?”
“That if I made trouble — she’d transfer me to one of the other ships. I think I know what you’re doing: you think if there are Unionists with them they’d contact me if you put me over there in your quarantine. Is that it? But I wouldn’t live that long. There are people who know me by sight. Station officials. Police. They’re the kind who got places on those ships, aren’t they? And they’d know me. I’ll be dead in an hour if you do that. I heard what those ships were like.”
“Mallory told you.”
“Mallory told me.”
“There are some, on the other hand,” Damon said bitterly, “who’d balk at boarding one of Mazian’s ships, stationers who’d swear an honest man’s survival wasn’t that likely. But I’d reckon you had a soft passage, didn’t you? Enough to eat and no worries about the air? The old spacer-stationer quarrel: leave the stationers to suffocate and keep her own deck spotless. But you rated differently. You got special treatment.”
“It wasn’t all that pleasant, Mr. Konstantin.”
“Not your choice either, was it?”
“No,” the answer came hoarsely. Damon suddenly repented his baiting, nagged by suspicions, evil rumor of the Fleet. He was ashamed of the role in which he was cast. In which Pell was. War and prisoners of war. He wanted no part of it.
“You refuse the solution we offer,” he said. “That’s your privilege. No one will force you. We don’t want to endanger your life, and that’s what it would be if things are what you say. So what do you do? I suppose you go on playing midge with the guards. It’s a very small confinement. Did they give you the tapes and player? You got that?”
“I would like — ” The words came out like an upwelling of nausea. “I want to ask for Adjustment.”
Jacoby looked down and shook his head. Damon sat still.
“If I were Adjusted I could get out of here,” the prisoner said. “Eventually do something. It’s my own request. A prisoner always has the option to have that, doesn’t he?”
“Your side uses that on prisoners,” Damon said. “We don’t.”
“I ask for it You have me locked up like a criminal. If I’d killed someone, wouldn’t I have a right to it? If I’d stolen or — ”
“I think you ought to have some psychiatric testing if you keep insisting on it.”
“Don’t they test — when they process for Adjustment?”
Damon looked at Jacoby.
“He’s been increasingly depressed,” Jacoby said. “He’s asked me over and over to lodge that request with station, and I haven’t.”
“We’ve never mandated Adjustment for a man who wasn’t convicted of a crime.”
“Have you ever,” the prisoner asked, “had a man in here who wasn’t?”
“Union uses it,” the supervisor said in a low voice, “without blinking. Those cells are small, Mr. Konstantin.”
“A man doesn’t ask for a thing like that,” Damon said.
“I ask,” Talley insisted. “I ask you. I want out of here.”
“It would solve the problem,” Jacoby said.
“I want to know why he wants it”
“I want out!”
Damon froze. Talley caught his breath, leaning against the table, and recovered his composure a little short of tears. Adjustment was not a punitive procedure, was never intended to be. It had double benefits… altered behavior for the violent and a little wiping of the slate for the troubled. It was the latter, he suspected, meeting Talley’s shadowed eyes. Suddenly he felt an overwelling pity for the man, who was sane, who seemed very, very sane. The station was in crisis. Events crowded in on them in which individuals could become lost, shoved aside. Cells in detention were urgently needed for real criminals, out of Q, which they had in abundance. There were worse fates than Adjustment. Being locked in a viewless eight-by-ten room for life was one.
“Pull the commitment papers out of comp,” he told the supervisor, and the supervisor passed the order via com. Jacoby fretted visibly, shuffling papers and not looking at any of them. “What I’m going to do,” Damon said to Talley, feeling as if it were some shared bad dream, “is put the papers in your hands. And you can study all the printout of explanation that goes with them. If that’s still what you want tomorrow, we’ll accept them signed. I want you also to write us a release and request in your own words, stating that this was your idea and your choice, that you’re not claustrophobic or suffering from any other disability — ”
“I was an armscomper,” Talley interjected scornfully. It was not the largest station on a ship.
“ — or condition which would cause you unusual duress. Don’t you have kin, relatives, someone who would try to talk you out of this if they heard about it?”
The eyes reacted to that, ever so slightly.
“Do you have someone?” Damon asked, hoping he had found a handhold, some reason to apply against this, “Who?”
“Dead,” Talley said.
“If this request is in reaction to that — ”
“A long time ago,” Talley said, cutting that off. Nothing more.
An angel’s face. Humanity without flaw. Birth labs? The thought came to him unbidden. It had always been abhorrent to him, Union’s engineered soldiers. His own possible prejudice worried at him. “I haven’t read your file in full,” he admitted. “This has been handled at other levels. They thought they had this settled. It bounced back to me. You had family, Mr. Talley?”
“Yes,” Talley said faintly, defiantly, making him ashamed of himself.
“Born where?”
“Cyteen.” The same small, flat voice, “I’ve given you all that. I had parents. I was born, Mr. Konstantin. Is that really pertinent?”
“I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. I want you to understand this: it’s not final. You can change your mind, right up to the moment the treatment begins. All you have to say is stop, I don’t want this. But after it goes so far, you’re not competent. You understand… you’re no longer able. You’ve seen Adjusted men?”
“They recover.”
“They do recover. I’ll follow the case, Mr. Talley… Lt Talley… so much as I can. You see to it,” he said to the supervisor, “that any time he sends a message, at any stage of the process, it gets to me on an emergency basis, day or night You see that the attendants understand that too, down to the orderlies. I don’t think he’ll abuse the privilege.” He looked at Jacoby. “Are you satisfied about your client?”
“It’s his right to do what he’s doing. I’m not pleased with it. But I’ll witness it. I’ll agree it solves things… maybe for the best.”
The comp printout arrived. Damon handed the papers to Jacoby for scrutiny. Jacoby marked the lines for signature and passed the folder to Talley. Talley folded it to him like something precious.
“Mr. Talley,” Damon said, rising, and on impulse offered his hand, against all the distaste he felt The young armscomper rose and took it, and the look of gratitude in his suddenly brimming eyes cancelled all certainties. “Is it possible,” Damon asked, “is it remotely possible that you have information you want wiped? That that’s why you’re doing this? I warn you it’s more likely to come out in the process than not. And we’re not interested in it, do you understand that? We have no military interests.”
That was not it. He much doubted that it could be. This was no high officer, no one like himself, who knew comp signals, access codes, the sort of thing an enemy must not have. No one had discovered the like in this man… nothing of value, not here, not at Russell’s.
“No,” Talley said. “I don’t know anything.”
Damon hesitated, still nagged by conscience, the feeling that Talley’s counsel, if no one else, ought to be protesting, doing something more vigorous, using all the delays of the law on Talley’s behalf. But that got him prison; got him… no hope. They were bringing Q outlaws into detention, far more dangerous; men who might know him, if Talley was right. Adjustment saved him, got him out of there; gave him the chance for a job, for freedom, a life. There was no one sane who would carry out revenge on someone after a mind-wipe. And the process was humane. It was always meant to be.
“Talley… have you complaint against Mallory or the personnel of Norway?”
“No.”
“Your counsel is present. It would be put on record… if you wanted to make such a complaint.”
“No.”
So that trick would not work. No delaying it for investigation. Damon nodded, walked out of the room, feeling unclean. It was a manner of murder he was doing, an assistance in suicide. They had an abundance of those too, over in Q.
iii
Kressich winced at the crash of something down the hall, beyond the sealed door, tried not to show his terror. Something was burning, smoke reaching them through the ventilation system. That more frightened him, and the half hundred gathered with him in this section of hallway. Out on the docks the police and the rioters still fired at each other. The violence was subsiding. The few with him, the remainder of Russell’s own security police, a handful of elite stationers and a scattering of young people and old… they had held the hallway against the gangs.
“We’re afire,” someone muttered, on the edge of hysteria.
“Old rags or something,” he said; shut it up, he thought They did not need panic. In a major fire, station central would blow a section to put it out… death for all of them. They were not valuable to Pell. Some of them were out there shooting at Pell police with guns they had gotten off dead policemen. It had started with the knowledge that there was another convoy coming in, more ships, more desperate people to crowd into the little they had; had started with the simple word that this was about to happen… and a demand for faster processing of papers; then raids on barracks and gangs confiscating papers from those who did have them.
Burn all records, the cry had gone out through quarantine, in the logic that, recordless, they would all be admitted. Those who would not yield up their papers were beaten and robbed of them; of anything else of value. Barracks were ransacked. Gangs of the ruffians who had forced Griffin and Hansford gained membership among the desperate, the young, the leaderless and the panicked.
There was quiet for a time outside. The fans had stopped; the air began to go foul. Among those who had seen the worst of the voyage, there was panic, quietly contained; a good number were crying.
Then the lights brightened and a cool draft came through the ducts. The door whipped open. Kressich got to his feet and looked into the faces of station police, and the barrels of leveled rifles. Some of his own band had knives, sections of pipe and furniture, whatever weapons they had improvised. He had nothing… held up frantic hands.
“No,” he pleaded. No one moved, not the police, not his own. “Please. We weren’t in it. We only defended this section from them. None… none of these people were involved. They were the victims.”
The police leader, face haggard with weariness and soot and blood, motioned with his rifle toward the wall. “You have to line up,” Kressich explained to his ill-assorted companions, who were not the sort to understand such procedures, except only the ex-police. “Drop whatever weapons you have.” They lined up, even the old and the sick, and the two small children.
Kressich found himself shaking, while he was searched and after, left leaning against the corridor wall while the police muttered mysteriously among themselves. One seized him by the shoulder, faced him about. An officer with a slate walked from one to the other of them asking for id’s.
“They were stolen,” Kressich said. “That’s how it started. The gangs were stealing papers and burning them.”
“We know that,” the officer said. “Are you in charge? What’s your name and origin?”
“Vassily Kressich, Russell’s.”
“Others of you know him?”
Several confirmed it. “He was a councillor on Russell’s Station,” said a young man. “I served there in security.”
“Name.”
The young man gave it. Nino Coledy. Kressich tried to recall him and could not. One by one the questions were repeated, cross-examination of identifications, mutual identifications, no more reliable than the word of those who gave them. A man with a camera came into the hallway and photographed them all standing against the wall. They stood in a chaos of com-chatter and discussion.
“You can go,” the police leader said, and they began to file out; but when Kressich started to leave the officer caught his arm. “Vassily Kressich. I’ll be giving your name to headquarters.”
He was not sure whether that was good or bad; anything was a hope. Anything was better than what existed here in Q, with the station stalling and unable to place them or clear them out.
He walked out onto the dock itself, shaken by the sight of the wreckage that had been made here, with the dead still lying in their blood, piles of combustibles still smouldering, what furnishings and belongings had remained heaped up to burn. Station police were everywhere, armed with rifles, no light arms. He stayed on the docks, close to the police, afraid to go back into the corridors for fear of the terrorist gangs. It was impossible to hope the police had gotten them all. There were far too many.
Eventually the station set up an emergency dispensary for food and drink near the section line, for the water had been shut down during the emergency, the kitchens vandalized, everything turned to weapons. Com had been vandalized; there was no way to report damage; and no repair crews were likely to want to come into the area.
He sat on the bare dock and ate what they were given, in company with other small knots of refugees who had no more than he. People looked on each other in fear.
“We aren’t getting out,” he heard repeatedly. “They’ll never clear us to leave now.”
More than once he heard mutterings of a different sort, saw men he knew had been in the gangs of rioters, which had begun in his barracks, and no one reported them. No one dared. They were too many.
Unionizers were among them. He became sure that these were the agitators. Such men might have most to fear in a tight check of papers. The war had reached Pell. It was among them, and they were as stationers had always been, neutral and empty-handed, treading carefully among those who meant murder… only now it was not stationers against warships, metal shell against metal shell; the danger was shoulder to shoulder with them, perhaps the young man with the hoarded sandwich, the young woman who sat and stared with hateful eyes.
The convoy came in, without troops for escort. Dock crews under the protection of a small army of station police managed the unloading. Refugees were let through, processed as best could be with most of the housing wrecked, with the corridors become a jungle. The newcomers stood, baggage in hand, staring about them with terror in their eyes. They would be robbed by morning, Kressich reckoned, or worse. He heard people round about him simply crying softly, despairing.
By morning there was yet another group of several hundred; and by now there was panic, for they were all hungry and thirsty and food arrived from main station very slowly.
A man settled on the deck near him: Nino Coledy.
There’s a dozen of us,“ Coledy said. ”Could sort some of this out; been talking to some of the gang survivors. We don’t give out names and they cooperate. We’ve got strong arms… could straighten this mess out, get people back into residences, so we can get some food and water in here.“
“What, we?”
Coledy’s face took on a grimace of earnestness. “You were a councillor. You stand up front; you do the talking. We keep you there. Get these people fed. Get ourselves a soft place here. Station needs that. We can benefit by it.”
Kressich considered it. It could also get them shot. He was too old for this. They wanted a figurehead. A police gang wanted a respectable figurehead. He was also afraid to tell them no.
“You just do the talking out front,” Coledy said.
“Yes,” he agreed, and then, setting his jaw with more firmness than Coledy might have expected of a tired old man: “You start rounding up your men and I’ll have a talk with the police.”
He did so, approaching them gingerly. “There’s been an election,” he said. “I’m Vassily Kressich, councillor from red two, Russell’s Station. Some of our own police are among the refugees. We’re prepared to go into the corridors and establish order… without violence. We know faces. You don’t. If you’ll consult your own authorities and get it cleared, we can help.”
They were not sure of that. There was hesitation even about calling in. Finally a police captain did so, and Kressich stood fretting. The captain nodded at last. “If it gets out of hand,” the captain said, “we won’t discriminate in firing. But we’re not going to tolerate any killing on your part, councillor Kressich; it’s not an open license.”
“Have patience, sir,” Kressich said, and walked away, mortally tired and frightened. Coledy was there, with several others, waiting for him by the niner corridor access. In a few moments there were more drifting to them, less savory than the first. He feared them. He feared not to have them. He cared for nothing now, except to live; and to be atop the force and not under it. He watched them go, using terror to move the innocent, gathering the dangerous into their own ranks. He knew what he had done. It terrified him. He kept silent, because he would be caught in the second riot, part of it, if it happened. They would see to that.
He assisted, used his dignity and his age and the fact that his face was known to some: shouted directions, began to have folk addressing him respectfully as councillor Kressich. He listened to their griefs and their fears and their angers until Coledy flung a guard about him to protect their precious figurehead.
Within the hour the docks were clear and the legitimized gangs were in control, and honest people deferred to him wherever he went.
Chapter Seven
i
Pell: 5/22/52
Jon lukas settled into the council seat his son Vittorio had sat proxy for during the last three years, and sat scowling. Already he had been up against one in-family crisis: he had lost three rooms of his five-room lodging, literally sliced off by moving a partition, to accommodate two Jacoby cousins and their partners in alterday rotation, one of them with children who banged the wall and cried. His furnishings had been piled by workmen into what was left of his privacy… lately occupied by son Vittorio and his current affection. That had been a homecoming. He and Vittorio had reached a quick understanding: the woman walked out and Vittorio stayed, finding the possession of an apartment and an expense account more important, and far better than transfer to Downbelow base, which was actively seeking young volunteers. Physical labor, and on Downbelow’s rainy surface, was not to Vittorio’s taste. As figurehead up here he had been useful, voted as he was told, managed as he was told, had kept Lukas Company out of chaos, at least, having sense enough to solve minor problems on his own and to ask about the major ones. What he had done with the expense account was another matter. Jon had spent his time, after adjusting to station hours, down in company offices going over the books, reviewing personnel and those expense accounts.
Now there was some kind of alert on, ugly and urgent; he had come as other councillors had come, brought in by a message that a special meeting was called. His heart was still hammering from the exertion. He keyed in his desk unit and his mike, listening to the thin com chatter which occupied council at the moment, with a succession of ship scan images on the screens overhead. More trouble. He had heard it all the way up from the dockside offices. Something was coming in.
“What number do you have?” Angelo was asking, and getting no response from the other side.
“What is this?” Jon asked the woman next to him, a green sector delegate, Anna Morevy.
“More refugees coming in, and they’re not saying anything. The carrier Pacific. Esperance Station: that’s all we know. We’re not getting any cooperation. But that’s Sung out there. What do you expect?”
Other councillors were still arriving, the tiers filling rapidly. He slipped the personal audio into his ear, punched in the recorder, trying to get current of the situation. The convoy on scan had come in far too close for safety, above system plane. The voice of the council secretary whispered on, summarizing, offering visuals to his desk screen, none of it much more than what they had before them live.
A page worked through to the back row, leaned over his shoulder and handed him a handwritten note. Welcome back, he read, perplexed. You are designated proxy to Emilio Konstantin’s seat, number ten. Your immediate experience of Downbelow deemed valuable. A. Konstantin.
His heart sped again, for a different reason. He gathered himself to his feet, laid down the earplug and turned off the channels, walked down the aisle under the view of all of them, to that vacant seat on the central council, the table amid the tiers, the seats which carried most influence. He reached that seat, settled into the fine leather and the carved wood, one of the Ten of Pell; and felt an irrepressible flush of triumph amid these events — justice done, finally, after decades. The great Konstantins had held him off and maneuvered him out of the Ten all his life, despite his strivings and his influence and his merits, and now he was here.
Not by any change of heart on Angelo’s part, he was absolutely sure. It had to be voted. He had won some general vote here in council, the logical consequence of his long, tough service on Downbelow. His record had found appreciation in a council majority.
He met Angelo’s eyes, down the table, Angelo holding the audio plug to his ear, looking at him still with no true welcome, no love, no happiness whatsoever. Angelo accepted his elevation because he must, that was clear. Jon smiled tightly, not with his eyes, as if it were an offer of support. Angelo returned it, and not with the eyes either.
“Put it through again,” Angelo said to someone else, via com. “Keep sending. Get me contact direct to Sung.”
The assembly was hushed, reports still coming in, chatter from central, the slow progress of approaching freighters; but Pacific was gathering speed, going into comp-projected haze on scan.
“Sung here,” a voice reached them. “Salutations to Pell Station. Your own establishment can attend the details.”
“What is the number you’re giving us?” Angelo asked. “What number is on those ships, captain Sung?”
“Nine thousand.”
A murmur of horror broke in the chamber.
“Silence!” Angelo said; it was obscuring com. “We copy, nine thousand. This will tax our facilities beyond safety. We request you meet us here in council, captain Sung. We have had refugees come in from Russell’s on unescorted merchanters; we were constrained to accept them. For humanitarian reasons it is impossible to refuse such dockings. Request you inform Fleet command of this dangerous situation. We need military support, do you understand, sir? Request you come in for urgent consultation with us. We are willing to cooperate, but we are approaching a point of very difficult decision. We appeal for Fleet support. Repeat: will you come in, sir?”
There was a little silence from the other side. The council shifted in their seats, for approach alarms were flashing, screens flicking and clouding madly in their attempt to reckon with the carrier’s accelerating approach.
“A last scheduled convoy,” the reply came, “is coming in under Kreshov of Atlantic from Pan-Paris. Good luck, Pell Station.”
The contact was abruptly broken. Scan flashed, the vast carrier still gathering speed more than anything should in a station’s vicinity.
Jon had never seen Angelo angrier. The murmur in the council chamber deafened, and finally the microphone established relative silence again. Pacific shot to their zenith, disrupting the screens into breakup. When they cleared, it had passed on, to take an unauthorized course, leaving them its flotsam, the freighters moving in at their slow, inexorable pace toward dock. Somewhere there was a muted call for security to Q.
“Reserve forces,” Angelo ordered one of the section chiefs over com. “Call up off-duty personnel — I don’t care how many times they’ve had callup. Keep order in there if you have to shoot to do it. Central, scramble crews to the shuttles, herd those merchanters into the right docks. Throw a cordon of short-haulers in the way if that’s what it takes.”
And after a moment as the collision alarms died and there was only the steady remaining report of the freighters on their slow way toward station: “We have to get more space for Q,” Angelo said, staring around him. “And with regret, we’re going to have to take those two levels of red section… partition them in with Q — immediately.” There was a sorrowful murmur from the tiers, and the screens flashed with an immediate registered objection from red-section delegates. It was perfunctory. There were no supporters on the screen to second their objection and bring it to vote. “Absolutely,” Angelo continued, without even looking at it, “we can’t dislodge any more residents, or lose those upper-level routings for the transport system. Can’t. If we can’t get support from the Fleet… we have to take other measures. And on a major scale, we have to start shifting population somewhere. Jon Lukas, with apologies for short notice, but we wish you could have made yesterday’s meeting. That tabled proposal of yours… Our on-station construction can’t handle security-risk workers. At one time you had plans in some detail for widening the base on Downbelow. What’s the status of those?”
He blinked, suspicious and hopeful at once, frowned at the barb Angelo had to sling, even now. He gathered himself to his feet, which he did not need to do, but he wanted to see faces. “If I had received notification of the situation, I would have made every effort; as it was, I came with all possible haste. As for the proposal, by no means impossible: housing that number on Downbelow could be done in short order, with no difficulty… except for those housed there. The conditions… after three years, I can tell you… are primitive. Downer labor making pit housing, airtightened to a reasonable extent; enough compressors; and the simplest locally available materials for the bracing. Downer labor is always the most efficient down there; no inconvenience of breathers; but humans in great enough numbers can replace them — field work, manufacture, clearing land, digging their own dome shells. Just enough Pell staff to supervise and guard them. Confinement is no problem; particularly your more difficult cases would do well down there — you take those breathers away, and they’re not going anywhere or doing anything you don’t want.”
“Mr. Lukas.” Anton Eizel stood up, an old man, a friend of Angelo’s and a stubborn do-gooder. “Mr. Lukas, I must misunderstand what I’m hearing. These are free citizens. We’re not talking about establishing penal colonies. These are refugees. We’re not turning Downbelow into a labor camp.”
“Tour Q!” someone shouted from the tiers. “See what a wreck they’ve made out of those sections! We had homes there, beautiful homes. Vandalism and destruction. They’re tearing up the place. They’ve attacked our security people with pipes and kitchen knives, and who knows if we got all the guns back after the riot?”
“There’ve been murders over there,” someone else shouted. “Gangs of hoodlums.”
“No,” said a third, a strange voice in council. Heads turned to the thin man who had taken a seat, Jon saw, in the place he himself had vacated above. The person stood up, a nervous, sallow-faced individual. “My name is Vassily Kressich. I was invited to come out of Q. I was a councillor on Russell’s Station. I represent Q. All that you say did happen, in a panic, but there’s order now, and the hoodlums have been removed to your detention.”
Jon drew a breath. “Welcome to councillor Kressich. But for the sake of Q itself, pressures should be relieved. Population should be transferred. The station has waited a decade on the Downbelow expansion, and now we have the manpower to begin it on a large scale. Those who work become part of the system. They build what they themselves live in. Does the gentleman from Q not agree?”
“We need our papers cleared. We refuse to be transferred anywhere without papers. This happened to us once, and look at our situation. Further transfers without clear paper can only add to our predicament, taking us further and further from any hope of establishing identity. The people I represent will not let it happen again.”
“Is this a threat, Mr. Kressich?” Angelo asked.
The man looked close to collapse. “No,” he said quickly. “No, sir. Only I — am speaking the opinion of the people I represent. Their desperation. They have to have their papers cleared. Anything else, any other solution is what the gentleman says — a labor camp for the benefit of Pell. Is that what you intend?”
“Mr. Kressich, Mr. Kressich,” said Angelo. “Will everyone please settle themselves to take things in order. You’ll be heard in your turn, Mr. Kressich. Jon Lukas, will you continue?”
“I’ll have the precise figures as soon as I can have access to central comp. I need to be brought current with the keys. Every facility on Downbelow can be expanded, yes. I still have the detailed plans. I’ll have a cost and labor analysis available within a matter of days.”
Angelo nodded, looked at him, frowning. It could not be a pleasant moment for him.
“We’re fighting for our survival.” Angelo said. “Plainly, there’s a point where we seriously have to worry about our life-support systems. Some of the load has to be moved. Nor can we allow the ratio of Pell citizens to refugees to become unbalanced. We have to be concerned about riot… there and here. Apologies, Mr. Kressich. These are the realities under which we live, not of our choosing, nor, I’m sure, of yours. We can’t risk the station or the base on Downbelow; or we find ourselves all on freighters bound for Earth, stripped of everything. That is the third choice.”
“No,” the murmur went around the room.
Jon sat down, silent, staring at Angelo, reckoning Pell’s present fragile balance and odds as they existed. You’ve lost already, he thought of saying, of standing up in council and laying things out as they were. He did not. He sat with his mouth tightly closed. It was a matter of time. Peace… might afford a chance. But that was far from what was shaping out there with this influx of refugees from all these stations. They had all the Beyond flowing in two directions like a watershed, toward themselves and toward Union; and they were not equipped to handle it under Angelo’s kind of rules.
Year upon year of Konstantin rule, Konstantin social theory, the vaunted “community of law” which disdained security and monitoring and now refused to use the clenched fist on Q, hoping that vocal appeals were going to win a mob over to order. He could bring that matter up too. He sat still.
There was a bad taste in his mouth, reckoning that what chaos Konstantin leniency had wrought on the station it would manage to wreak on Downbelow too. He foresaw no success for the plans he was asked for: Emilio Konstantin and his wife would be in charge of the work, two of a kind, who would let the Downers take their own time about schedules and protect their superstitions and let them do things their own leisurely, lackadaisical way, which ended with equipment damaged and construction delayed. And what that pair would do with what was over in Q offered worse prospects.
He sat still, estimating their chances, and drawing unhappy conclusions.
ii
“It can’t survive,” he said to Vittorio that night, to his son Vittorio and to Dayin Jacoby, the only relative he favored. He leaned back in his chair and drank bitter Downer wine, in his apartment which was piled with the stacked expensive furniture which had been in the other, severed, rooms. “Pell’s falling apart under us. Angelo’s soft-handed policies are going to lose it for us, and maybe get our throats cut in riot into the bargain. It’s going, you understand me? And do we sit and take what comes?”
Vittorio looked suddenly whey-faced as his habit was when talk turned serious. Dayin was of another sort. He sat grim and thoughtful.
“A contact,” Jon said yet more plainly, “has to exist.”
Dayin nodded. “In times like these, two doors might be a sensible necessity. And I’m sure doors exist all over this station… with the right keys.”
“How compromised… do you reckon those doors are? And where? Your cousin’s handled cases of some of our transients. You have any ideas?”
“Black market in rejuv drugs and others. That’s in full flower here, don’t you know? Konstantin himself gets it; you got it on Downbelow.”
“It’s legal.”
“Of course it’s legal; it’s necessary. But how does it get here? Ultimately it comes from Unionside; merchanters deal; it comes through. Someone, somewhere, is into the pipeline… merchanters… maybe even station-side contacts.”
“So how do we get one to get a contact back up the pipeline?”
“I can learn.”
“I know one,” Vittorio said, startling them both. He licked his lips, swallowed heavily. “Roseen.”
“That whore of yours?”
“She knows the market. There’s a security officer… high up. Clean paper all the way, but he’s bought by the market. You want something unloaded or loaded, want a blind eye turned — he can arrange it.”
Jon stared at his son, this product of a year’s contract, his desperation to have an heir. It was not, after all, surprising that Vittorio knew such things. “Excellent,” he said dryly. “You can tell me about it. Maybe we can trace something. Dayin, our holdings at Viking — we should look into them.”
“You aren’t serious.”
“I’m very serious. I’ve engaged Hansford. Her crew is still in hospital. Her interior’s a shambles, but she’ll go. They need the money desperately. And you can find a crew…through those contacts of Vittorio’s. Don’t have to tell them everything, just sufficient to motivate them.”
“Viking’s the next likely trouble spot. The next certain trouble spot.”
“A risk, isn’t it? A lot of freighters have accidents with things as they are. Some vanish. I’ll hear from Konstantin over it; but I’ll have the out… an act of faith in Viking’s future. A confirmation, a vote of confidence.” He drank the wine with a twist of his mouth. “You’d better go fast, before some flood of refugees hits us from Viking itself. You make contact with the pipeline there, follow it as far as you can. What chance has Pell got now but with Union? The Company’s no help. The Fleet’s adding to our problem. We can’t stand forever. Konstantin’s policies are going to see riot here before all’s done, and it’s time for a changing of the guard. You’ll make that clear to Union. You understand… they get an ally; we get… as much as we can get out of the association. That second door to jump through, at worst. If Pell holds, we just sit still, safe; if not, we’re better off than others, aren’t we?”
“And I’m the one risking my neck,” Dayin said.
“So, would you rather be here when a riot finally breaks through those barriers? Or would you rather have a chance to make some personal gain with a grateful opposition… line your own pockets? I’m sure you will; and I’m sure you’ll have deserved it.”
“Generous,” Dayin said sourly.
“Life here,” Jon said, “isn’t going to be any better. It could be very uncomfortable. It’s a gamble. What isn’t?”
Dayin nodded slowly. “I’ll run down some prospects for a crew.”
“Thought you would.”
“You trust too much, Jon.”
“Only this side of the family. Never Konstantins. Angelo should have left me there on Downbelow. He probably wishes he could have. But council voted otherwise; and maybe that was lucky for them. Maybe it was.”
i
Jon lukas settled into the council seat his son Vittorio had sat proxy for during the last three years, and sat scowling. Already he had been up against one in-family crisis: he had lost three rooms of his five-room lodging, literally sliced off by moving a partition, to accommodate two Jacoby cousins and their partners in alterday rotation, one of them with children who banged the wall and cried. His furnishings had been piled by workmen into what was left of his privacy… lately occupied by son Vittorio and his current affection. That had been a homecoming. He and Vittorio had reached a quick understanding: the woman walked out and Vittorio stayed, finding the possession of an apartment and an expense account more important, and far better than transfer to Downbelow base, which was actively seeking young volunteers. Physical labor, and on Downbelow’s rainy surface, was not to Vittorio’s taste. As figurehead up here he had been useful, voted as he was told, managed as he was told, had kept Lukas Company out of chaos, at least, having sense enough to solve minor problems on his own and to ask about the major ones. What he had done with the expense account was another matter. Jon had spent his time, after adjusting to station hours, down in company offices going over the books, reviewing personnel and those expense accounts.
Now there was some kind of alert on, ugly and urgent; he had come as other councillors had come, brought in by a message that a special meeting was called. His heart was still hammering from the exertion. He keyed in his desk unit and his mike, listening to the thin com chatter which occupied council at the moment, with a succession of ship scan images on the screens overhead. More trouble. He had heard it all the way up from the dockside offices. Something was coming in.
“What number do you have?” Angelo was asking, and getting no response from the other side.
“What is this?” Jon asked the woman next to him, a green sector delegate, Anna Morevy.
“More refugees coming in, and they’re not saying anything. The carrier Pacific. Esperance Station: that’s all we know. We’re not getting any cooperation. But that’s Sung out there. What do you expect?”
Other councillors were still arriving, the tiers filling rapidly. He slipped the personal audio into his ear, punched in the recorder, trying to get current of the situation. The convoy on scan had come in far too close for safety, above system plane. The voice of the council secretary whispered on, summarizing, offering visuals to his desk screen, none of it much more than what they had before them live.
A page worked through to the back row, leaned over his shoulder and handed him a handwritten note. Welcome back, he read, perplexed. You are designated proxy to Emilio Konstantin’s seat, number ten. Your immediate experience of Downbelow deemed valuable. A. Konstantin.
His heart sped again, for a different reason. He gathered himself to his feet, laid down the earplug and turned off the channels, walked down the aisle under the view of all of them, to that vacant seat on the central council, the table amid the tiers, the seats which carried most influence. He reached that seat, settled into the fine leather and the carved wood, one of the Ten of Pell; and felt an irrepressible flush of triumph amid these events — justice done, finally, after decades. The great Konstantins had held him off and maneuvered him out of the Ten all his life, despite his strivings and his influence and his merits, and now he was here.
Not by any change of heart on Angelo’s part, he was absolutely sure. It had to be voted. He had won some general vote here in council, the logical consequence of his long, tough service on Downbelow. His record had found appreciation in a council majority.
He met Angelo’s eyes, down the table, Angelo holding the audio plug to his ear, looking at him still with no true welcome, no love, no happiness whatsoever. Angelo accepted his elevation because he must, that was clear. Jon smiled tightly, not with his eyes, as if it were an offer of support. Angelo returned it, and not with the eyes either.
“Put it through again,” Angelo said to someone else, via com. “Keep sending. Get me contact direct to Sung.”
The assembly was hushed, reports still coming in, chatter from central, the slow progress of approaching freighters; but Pacific was gathering speed, going into comp-projected haze on scan.
“Sung here,” a voice reached them. “Salutations to Pell Station. Your own establishment can attend the details.”
“What is the number you’re giving us?” Angelo asked. “What number is on those ships, captain Sung?”
“Nine thousand.”
A murmur of horror broke in the chamber.
“Silence!” Angelo said; it was obscuring com. “We copy, nine thousand. This will tax our facilities beyond safety. We request you meet us here in council, captain Sung. We have had refugees come in from Russell’s on unescorted merchanters; we were constrained to accept them. For humanitarian reasons it is impossible to refuse such dockings. Request you inform Fleet command of this dangerous situation. We need military support, do you understand, sir? Request you come in for urgent consultation with us. We are willing to cooperate, but we are approaching a point of very difficult decision. We appeal for Fleet support. Repeat: will you come in, sir?”
There was a little silence from the other side. The council shifted in their seats, for approach alarms were flashing, screens flicking and clouding madly in their attempt to reckon with the carrier’s accelerating approach.
“A last scheduled convoy,” the reply came, “is coming in under Kreshov of Atlantic from Pan-Paris. Good luck, Pell Station.”
The contact was abruptly broken. Scan flashed, the vast carrier still gathering speed more than anything should in a station’s vicinity.
Jon had never seen Angelo angrier. The murmur in the council chamber deafened, and finally the microphone established relative silence again. Pacific shot to their zenith, disrupting the screens into breakup. When they cleared, it had passed on, to take an unauthorized course, leaving them its flotsam, the freighters moving in at their slow, inexorable pace toward dock. Somewhere there was a muted call for security to Q.
“Reserve forces,” Angelo ordered one of the section chiefs over com. “Call up off-duty personnel — I don’t care how many times they’ve had callup. Keep order in there if you have to shoot to do it. Central, scramble crews to the shuttles, herd those merchanters into the right docks. Throw a cordon of short-haulers in the way if that’s what it takes.”
And after a moment as the collision alarms died and there was only the steady remaining report of the freighters on their slow way toward station: “We have to get more space for Q,” Angelo said, staring around him. “And with regret, we’re going to have to take those two levels of red section… partition them in with Q — immediately.” There was a sorrowful murmur from the tiers, and the screens flashed with an immediate registered objection from red-section delegates. It was perfunctory. There were no supporters on the screen to second their objection and bring it to vote. “Absolutely,” Angelo continued, without even looking at it, “we can’t dislodge any more residents, or lose those upper-level routings for the transport system. Can’t. If we can’t get support from the Fleet… we have to take other measures. And on a major scale, we have to start shifting population somewhere. Jon Lukas, with apologies for short notice, but we wish you could have made yesterday’s meeting. That tabled proposal of yours… Our on-station construction can’t handle security-risk workers. At one time you had plans in some detail for widening the base on Downbelow. What’s the status of those?”
He blinked, suspicious and hopeful at once, frowned at the barb Angelo had to sling, even now. He gathered himself to his feet, which he did not need to do, but he wanted to see faces. “If I had received notification of the situation, I would have made every effort; as it was, I came with all possible haste. As for the proposal, by no means impossible: housing that number on Downbelow could be done in short order, with no difficulty… except for those housed there. The conditions… after three years, I can tell you… are primitive. Downer labor making pit housing, airtightened to a reasonable extent; enough compressors; and the simplest locally available materials for the bracing. Downer labor is always the most efficient down there; no inconvenience of breathers; but humans in great enough numbers can replace them — field work, manufacture, clearing land, digging their own dome shells. Just enough Pell staff to supervise and guard them. Confinement is no problem; particularly your more difficult cases would do well down there — you take those breathers away, and they’re not going anywhere or doing anything you don’t want.”
“Mr. Lukas.” Anton Eizel stood up, an old man, a friend of Angelo’s and a stubborn do-gooder. “Mr. Lukas, I must misunderstand what I’m hearing. These are free citizens. We’re not talking about establishing penal colonies. These are refugees. We’re not turning Downbelow into a labor camp.”
“Tour Q!” someone shouted from the tiers. “See what a wreck they’ve made out of those sections! We had homes there, beautiful homes. Vandalism and destruction. They’re tearing up the place. They’ve attacked our security people with pipes and kitchen knives, and who knows if we got all the guns back after the riot?”
“There’ve been murders over there,” someone else shouted. “Gangs of hoodlums.”
“No,” said a third, a strange voice in council. Heads turned to the thin man who had taken a seat, Jon saw, in the place he himself had vacated above. The person stood up, a nervous, sallow-faced individual. “My name is Vassily Kressich. I was invited to come out of Q. I was a councillor on Russell’s Station. I represent Q. All that you say did happen, in a panic, but there’s order now, and the hoodlums have been removed to your detention.”
Jon drew a breath. “Welcome to councillor Kressich. But for the sake of Q itself, pressures should be relieved. Population should be transferred. The station has waited a decade on the Downbelow expansion, and now we have the manpower to begin it on a large scale. Those who work become part of the system. They build what they themselves live in. Does the gentleman from Q not agree?”
“We need our papers cleared. We refuse to be transferred anywhere without papers. This happened to us once, and look at our situation. Further transfers without clear paper can only add to our predicament, taking us further and further from any hope of establishing identity. The people I represent will not let it happen again.”
“Is this a threat, Mr. Kressich?” Angelo asked.
The man looked close to collapse. “No,” he said quickly. “No, sir. Only I — am speaking the opinion of the people I represent. Their desperation. They have to have their papers cleared. Anything else, any other solution is what the gentleman says — a labor camp for the benefit of Pell. Is that what you intend?”
“Mr. Kressich, Mr. Kressich,” said Angelo. “Will everyone please settle themselves to take things in order. You’ll be heard in your turn, Mr. Kressich. Jon Lukas, will you continue?”
“I’ll have the precise figures as soon as I can have access to central comp. I need to be brought current with the keys. Every facility on Downbelow can be expanded, yes. I still have the detailed plans. I’ll have a cost and labor analysis available within a matter of days.”
Angelo nodded, looked at him, frowning. It could not be a pleasant moment for him.
“We’re fighting for our survival.” Angelo said. “Plainly, there’s a point where we seriously have to worry about our life-support systems. Some of the load has to be moved. Nor can we allow the ratio of Pell citizens to refugees to become unbalanced. We have to be concerned about riot… there and here. Apologies, Mr. Kressich. These are the realities under which we live, not of our choosing, nor, I’m sure, of yours. We can’t risk the station or the base on Downbelow; or we find ourselves all on freighters bound for Earth, stripped of everything. That is the third choice.”
“No,” the murmur went around the room.
Jon sat down, silent, staring at Angelo, reckoning Pell’s present fragile balance and odds as they existed. You’ve lost already, he thought of saying, of standing up in council and laying things out as they were. He did not. He sat with his mouth tightly closed. It was a matter of time. Peace… might afford a chance. But that was far from what was shaping out there with this influx of refugees from all these stations. They had all the Beyond flowing in two directions like a watershed, toward themselves and toward Union; and they were not equipped to handle it under Angelo’s kind of rules.
Year upon year of Konstantin rule, Konstantin social theory, the vaunted “community of law” which disdained security and monitoring and now refused to use the clenched fist on Q, hoping that vocal appeals were going to win a mob over to order. He could bring that matter up too. He sat still.
There was a bad taste in his mouth, reckoning that what chaos Konstantin leniency had wrought on the station it would manage to wreak on Downbelow too. He foresaw no success for the plans he was asked for: Emilio Konstantin and his wife would be in charge of the work, two of a kind, who would let the Downers take their own time about schedules and protect their superstitions and let them do things their own leisurely, lackadaisical way, which ended with equipment damaged and construction delayed. And what that pair would do with what was over in Q offered worse prospects.
He sat still, estimating their chances, and drawing unhappy conclusions.
ii
“It can’t survive,” he said to Vittorio that night, to his son Vittorio and to Dayin Jacoby, the only relative he favored. He leaned back in his chair and drank bitter Downer wine, in his apartment which was piled with the stacked expensive furniture which had been in the other, severed, rooms. “Pell’s falling apart under us. Angelo’s soft-handed policies are going to lose it for us, and maybe get our throats cut in riot into the bargain. It’s going, you understand me? And do we sit and take what comes?”
Vittorio looked suddenly whey-faced as his habit was when talk turned serious. Dayin was of another sort. He sat grim and thoughtful.
“A contact,” Jon said yet more plainly, “has to exist.”
Dayin nodded. “In times like these, two doors might be a sensible necessity. And I’m sure doors exist all over this station… with the right keys.”
“How compromised… do you reckon those doors are? And where? Your cousin’s handled cases of some of our transients. You have any ideas?”
“Black market in rejuv drugs and others. That’s in full flower here, don’t you know? Konstantin himself gets it; you got it on Downbelow.”
“It’s legal.”
“Of course it’s legal; it’s necessary. But how does it get here? Ultimately it comes from Unionside; merchanters deal; it comes through. Someone, somewhere, is into the pipeline… merchanters… maybe even station-side contacts.”
“So how do we get one to get a contact back up the pipeline?”
“I can learn.”
“I know one,” Vittorio said, startling them both. He licked his lips, swallowed heavily. “Roseen.”
“That whore of yours?”
“She knows the market. There’s a security officer… high up. Clean paper all the way, but he’s bought by the market. You want something unloaded or loaded, want a blind eye turned — he can arrange it.”
Jon stared at his son, this product of a year’s contract, his desperation to have an heir. It was not, after all, surprising that Vittorio knew such things. “Excellent,” he said dryly. “You can tell me about it. Maybe we can trace something. Dayin, our holdings at Viking — we should look into them.”
“You aren’t serious.”
“I’m very serious. I’ve engaged Hansford. Her crew is still in hospital. Her interior’s a shambles, but she’ll go. They need the money desperately. And you can find a crew…through those contacts of Vittorio’s. Don’t have to tell them everything, just sufficient to motivate them.”
“Viking’s the next likely trouble spot. The next certain trouble spot.”
“A risk, isn’t it? A lot of freighters have accidents with things as they are. Some vanish. I’ll hear from Konstantin over it; but I’ll have the out… an act of faith in Viking’s future. A confirmation, a vote of confidence.” He drank the wine with a twist of his mouth. “You’d better go fast, before some flood of refugees hits us from Viking itself. You make contact with the pipeline there, follow it as far as you can. What chance has Pell got now but with Union? The Company’s no help. The Fleet’s adding to our problem. We can’t stand forever. Konstantin’s policies are going to see riot here before all’s done, and it’s time for a changing of the guard. You’ll make that clear to Union. You understand… they get an ally; we get… as much as we can get out of the association. That second door to jump through, at worst. If Pell holds, we just sit still, safe; if not, we’re better off than others, aren’t we?”
“And I’m the one risking my neck,” Dayin said.
“So, would you rather be here when a riot finally breaks through those barriers? Or would you rather have a chance to make some personal gain with a grateful opposition… line your own pockets? I’m sure you will; and I’m sure you’ll have deserved it.”
“Generous,” Dayin said sourly.
“Life here,” Jon said, “isn’t going to be any better. It could be very uncomfortable. It’s a gamble. What isn’t?”
Dayin nodded slowly. “I’ll run down some prospects for a crew.”
“Thought you would.”
“You trust too much, Jon.”
“Only this side of the family. Never Konstantins. Angelo should have left me there on Downbelow. He probably wishes he could have. But council voted otherwise; and maybe that was lucky for them. Maybe it was.”
Chapter Eight
Pell: 5/23/52
They offered a chair. They were always courteous, always called him Mr. Talley and never by his rank — civ habit; or maybe they made the point that here Unioners were still counted rebels and had no rank. Perhaps they hated him, but they were unfailingly gentle with him and unfailingly kind. It frightened him all the same, because he suspected it false.
They gave him more papers to fill out. A doctor sat down opposite him at the table and tried to explain the procedures in detail. “I don’t want to hear that,” he said. “I just want to sign the papers. I’ve had days of this. Isn’t that enough?”
“Your tests weren’t honestly taken,” the doctor said. “You lied and gave false answers in the interview. Instruments indicated you were lying. Or under stress. I asked was there constraint on you and the instruments said you lied when you said there wasn’t.”
“Give me the pen.”
“Is someone forcing you? Your answers are being recorded.”
“No one’s forcing me.”
“This is also a lie, Mr. Talley.”
“No.” He tried and failed to keep his voice from shaking.
“We normally deal with criminals, who also tend to lie.” The doctor held up the pen, out of easy reach. “Sometimes with the self-committed, very rarely. It’s a form of suicide. You have a medical right to it, within certain legal restrictions; and so long as you’ve been counseled and understand what’s involved. If you continue your therapy on schedule, you should begin to function again in about a month. Legal independence within six more. Full function — you understand that there may be permanent impairment to your ability to function socially; there could be other psychological or physical impairments…”
He snatched the pen and signed the papers. The doctor took them and looked at them. Finally the doctor drew a paper from his pocket, pushed it across the table, a rumpled and much-folded scrap of paper.
He smoothed it out, saw a note with half a dozen signatures. Your account in station comp has 50 credits. For anything you want on the side. Six of the detention guards had signed it; the men and women he played cards with. Given out of their own pockets. Tears blurred his eyes.
“Want to change your mind?” the doctor asked,
He shook his head, folded the paper. “Can I keep it?”
“It will be kept along with your other effects. You’ll get everything back on your release.”
“It won’t matter then, will it?”
“Not at that point,” the doctor said, “Not for some time.”
He handed the paper back.
“I’ll get you a tranquilizer,” the doctor said, and called for an attendant, who brought it in, a cup of blue liquid. He accepted it and drank it and felt no different for it.
The doctor pushed blank paper in front of him, and laid the pen down. “Write down your impressions of Pell. Will you do that?”
He began. He had had stranger requests in the days that they had tested him. He wrote a paragraph, how he had been questioned by the guards and finally how he felt he had been treated. The words began to grow sideways. He was not writing on the paper. He had run off the edge onto the table and couldn’t find his way back. The letters wrapped around each other, tied in knots.
The doctor reached and lifted the pen from his hand, robbing him of purpose.
Chapter Nine
i
Pell: 5/28/52
Damon looked over the report on his desk. It was not the procedure he was used to, the martial law which existed in Q. It was rough and quick, and came across his desk with a trio of film cassettes and a stack of forms condemning five men to Adjustment.
He viewed the film, jaw clenched, the scenes of riot leaping across the large wall-screen, flinched at recorded murder. There was no question of the crime or the identification. There was, in the stack of cases which had flooded the LA office, no time for reconsiderations or niceties. They were dealing with a situation which could bring the whole station down, turn it all into the manner of thing that had come in with Hansford. Once life-support was threatened, once men were crazy enough to build bonfires on a station dock… or go for station police with kitchen knives…
He pulled the files in question, keyed up printout on the authorization. There was no fairness in it, for they were the five the security police had been able to pull across the line, five out of many more as guilty. But they were five who would not kill again, nor threaten the frail stability of a station containing many thousands of lives. Total Adjustment, he wrote, which meant personality restruct. Processing would turn up injustice if he had done one. Questioning would determine innocence if any existed at this point. He felt foul in doing what he did, and frightened. Martial law was far too sudden. His father had agonized the night long in making one such decision after a board had passed on it.
A copy went to the public defender’s office. They would interview in person, lodge appeals if warranted. That procedure too was curtailed under present circumstance. It could be done only by producing evidence of error; and evidence was in Q, unreachable. Injustices were possible. They were condemning on the word of police under attack and the viewing of film which did not show what had gone before. There were five hundred reports of theft and major crimes on his desk when before there had been a Q, they might have dealt with two or three such complaints a year. Comp was flooded with data requests. There had been days of work done on id’s and papers for Q, and all of that was scrapped. Papers had been stolen and destroyed to such an extent in Q that no paper could be trusted to be accurate. Most of the claims to paper were probably fradulent, and loudest from the dishonest. Affidavits were worthless where threat ruled. People would swear to anything for safety. Even the ones who had come in good order were carrying paper they had no confirmation on: security confiscated cards and papers to save those from theft, and they were passing some few out where they were able to establish absolute id and find a station-side sponsor for them — but it was slow, compared to the rate of influx; and main station had no place to put them when they did. It was madness. They tried with all their resources to eliminate red tape and hurry; and it just got worse.
“Tom,” he keyed, a private note to Tom Ushant, in the defender’s office, “if you get a gut feeling that something’s wrong in any of these cases, appeal it back to me regardless of procedures. We’re putting through too many condemnations too fast; mistakes are possible. I don’t want to find one out after processing starts.”
He had not expected reply. It came through. “Damon, look at the Talley file if you want something to disturb your sleep. Russell’s used Adjustment.”
“You mean he’s been through it?”
“Not therapy. I mean they used it questioning him.”
“I’ll look at it.” He keyed out, hunted the access number, pulled the file in comp display. Page after page of their own interrogation data flicked past on the screen, most of it uninformative: ship name and number, duties… an armscomper might know the board in front of him and what he shot at, but little more. Memories of home then… family killed in a Fleet raid on Cyteen system mines; a brother, killed in service — reason enough to carry grudges if a man wanted to. Reared by his mother’s sister on Cyteen proper, a plantation of sorts… then a government school, deep-teaching for tech skills. Claimed no knowledge of higher politics, no resentments of the situation. The pages passed into actual transcript, uncondensed, disjointed ramblings… turned to excruciatingly personal things, the kind of intimate detail which surfaced in Adjustment, while a good deal of self was being laid bare, examined, sorted. Fear of abandonment, that deepest; fear of being a burden on his relatives, of deserving to be abandoned: he had a tangled kind of guilt about the loss of his family, had a pervading fear of it happening again, in any involvement with anyone. Loved the aunt. Took care of me, the thread of it ran at one point. Held me sometimes. Held me … loved me. He had not wanted to leave her home. But Union had its demands; he was supported by the state, and they took him, when he came of age. After that, it was state-run deep-teach, taped education, military training and no passes home. He had had letters from the aunt for a while; the uncle had never written. He believed the aunt was dead now, because the letters had stopped some years ago.
She would write, he believed. She loved me. But there were deeper fears that she had not; that she had really wanted the state money; and there was guilt, that he had not come home; that he had deserved this parting too. He had written to the uncle and gotten no answer. That had hurt him, though he and the uncle had never loved each other. Attitudes, beliefs… another wound, a broken friendship; an immature love affair, another case in which letters stopped coming, and that wound involved itself with the old ones. A later attachment, to a companion in service… uncomfortably broken off. He tended to commit himself to a desperate extent. Held me, he repeated, pathetic and secret loneliness. And more things.
He began to find it. Terror of the dark. A vague, recurring nightmare: a white place. Interrogation. Drugs. Russell’s had used drugs, against all Company policy, against all human rights — had wanted badly something Talley simply did not have. They had gotten him from Mariner zone — from Mariner — transferred to Russell’s at the height of the panic. They had wanted information at that threatened station; had used Adjustment techniques in interrogation. Damon rested his mouth against his hand, watched the fragmentary record roll past, sick at his stomach. He felt ashamed at the discovery, naive. He had not questioned Russell’s reports, had not investigated them himself; had had other things on his hands, and staff to take care of that matter; had not — he admitted it — wanted to deal with the case any more than he absolutely had to. Talley had never called him. Had conned him. Had held himself together, already unstrung from previous treatment, to con Pell into doing the only thing that might put an end to his mental hell. Talley had looked him straight in the eye and arranged his own suicide.
The record rambled on… from interrogation under drugs to chaotic evacuation, with stationer mobs on one side and the military threatening him on the other.
And what it had been, what had happened during that long voyage, a prisoner on one of Mazian’s ships…
Norway … and Mallory.
He killed the screen, sat staring at the stack of papers, the unfinished condemnations. After a time he set himself to work again, his fingers numb as he signed the authorizations.
Men and women had boarded at Russell’s Star, folk who, like Talley, might have been sane before it all started. What had gotten off those ships, what existed over in Q… had been made, of folk no different than themselves.
He simply pushed the destruct on lives like Talley’s, which were already gone. On men like himself, he thought, who had gone over civilized limits, in a place where civilization had stopped meaning anything.
Mazian’s Fleet — even they, even the likes of Mallory — had surely started differently.
“I’m not going to challenge,” Tom told him, over a lunch they both drank more than ate.
And after lunch he went to the small Adjustment facility over in red, and back into the treatment area. He saw Josh Talley. Talley did not see him, although perhaps it would not have mattered. Talley was resting at that hour, having eaten. The tray was still on the table, and he had eaten well. He sat on the bed with a curiously washed expression on his face, all the lines of strain erased.
ii
Angelo looked up at the aide, took the report of the ship outbound and scanned the manifest, looked up. “Why Hansford?”
The aide shifted his weight, distressed. “Sir?”
“Two dozen ships idle and Hansford has a commission to launch? Unfitted? And with what crew?”
“I think crew was hired off the inactive list, sir.”
Angelo leafed through the report. “Lukas Company. Viking-bound with a stripped ship and a dock-bound crew and Dayin Jacoby for a passenger? Get Jon Lukas on the com.”
“Sir,” the aide said, “the ship has already left dock.”
“I can see the time. Get me Jon Lukas.”
“Yes, sir.”
The aide went out. In moments the screen on the desk went bright and Jon Lukas came on. Angelo took a deep breath, calmed himself, angled the report toward the pickup. “See that?”
“You have a question?”
“What’s going on here?”
“We have holdings at Viking. Business to carry on. Shall we let our interest there sink into panic and disorder? They’re due some reassurance.”
“With Hansford?”
“We had an opportunity to engage a ship at below standard. Economics, Angelo.”
“Is that all?”
“I’m not sure I take your meaning.”
“She carried nothing like full cargo. What kind of commodity do you plan to pick up at Viking?”
“We carry as much as we can with Hansford in her present condition. She’ll refit there, where facilities are less crowded. Refitting is the hire for which we got her use, if you must know. What she carries will pay the bill; she’ll lade full on return, critical supplies. I’d think you’d be pleased. Dayin is aboard to supervise and to administer some business at our Viking office.”
“You’re not minded, are you, that this full lading include Lukas Company personnel… or others? You’re not going to sell passage off Viking. You’re not going to pull that office out.”
“Ah. That’s your concern.”
“That has to be my concern when ships go out of here with no sufficient cargo to justify their moving, headed for a population we can’t handle if it panics. I’m telling you, Jon, we can’t take chances on some loose talk or some single company pulling its favored employees out and starting a panic on another station. You hear me?”
“I did discuss the matter with Dayin. I assure you our mission is supportive. Commerce has to continue, doesn’t it, or we strangle. And before us, Viking. Stations they rely on have collapsed. Let Viking start running into shortages and they may be here in our laps with no invitation. We’re taking them foodstuffs and chemicals; nothing Pell may run short of… and we have the only two usable holds on the ship fully loaded. Is every ship launched subject to this inquisition? I can provide you with the company books if you want to see them. I take this amiss. Whatever our private feelings, Angelo, I think Dayin deserves commendation for being willing to go out there under the circumstances. It doesn’t deserve a fanfare — we asked for none — but we would have expected something other than accusations. Do you want the books, Angelo?”
“Hardly. Thank you, Jon, and my apologies. So long as Dayin and your ship’s master appreciate the hazards. Every ship that launches is going to be scrutinized, yes. Nothing personal.”
“Any questions you have, Angelo, so long as they’re equally applied. Thank you.”
“Thank you, Jon.” Jon keyed out. Angelo did so, sat staring at the report, riffled through it, finally signed the authorization after the fact and dumped it into the Record tray; all the offices were running behind. Everyone. They were using too many man-hours and too much comp time on the Q processing.
“Sir.” It was his secretary, Mills. “Your son, sir.”
He keyed acceptance of a call, looked up in some surprise as the door opened instead and Damon walked in. “I brought the processing reports myself,” Damon said. He sat down, leaned on the desk with both arms. Damon’s eyes looked as tired as he himself felt, which was considerable. “I’ve processed five men into Adjustment this morning.”
“Five men isn’t a tragedy,” Angelo said wearily. “I’ve got a lottery process set up for comp to pick who goes and stays on station. I’ve got another storm on Downbelow that’s flooded the mill again, and they’ve just found the victims from the last washout. I’ve got ships pulling at the tether now that the panic’s worn down, one that’s just slipped, two more to go tomorrow. If rumor has it that Mazian’s chosen Pell for a refuge, where does that leave the remaining stations? What when they panic and head here by the shipload? And how do we know that someone isn’t out there right now, selling passage to more frightened people? Our life-support won’t take much more.” He gestured loosely toward a stack of documents. “We’re going to militarize what freighters we can, by some pretty strong financial coercion.”
“To fire on refugee ships?”
“If ships come in that we can’t handle — yes. I’d like to talk to Elene sometime today; she’d be the one to make the initial approach to the merchanters. I can’t muster sympathy for five rioters today. Forgive me.”
His voice cracked. Damon reached across the desk, caught his wrist and pressed it, let it go again. “Emilio needs help down there?”
“He says not. The mill’s a shambles. Mud everywhere.”
They find all of them dead?“
He nodded. “Last night. Bennett Jacint and Ty Brown; Wes Kyle yesterday noon… this long, to hunt the banks and the reeds. Emilio and Miliko say morale is all right, considering. The Downers are building dikes. More of them have been anxious for human trade; I’ve ordered more let into base and I’ve authorized some of the trained ones into maintenance up here: their life-support is in good shape, and it frees up some techs we can upgrade. I’m shuttling down every human volunteer who’ll go, and that means even trained dock hands; they can handle construction equipment. Or they can learn. It’s a new age. A tighter one.” He pressed his lips together, sucked in a long breath. “Have you and Elene thought of Earth?”
“Sir?”
“You, your brother, Elene and Miliko — think about it, will you?”
“No,” Damon said. “Pull out and run? You think that’s what it’s coming to?”
“Figure the odds, Damon. We didn’t get help from Earth, just observers. They’re figuring on cutting their losses, not sending us reinforcements or ships. No. We’re just settling lower and lower. Mazian can’t hold forever. The shipyards at Mariner… were vital. It’s Viking soon; and whatever else Union reaches out to take. Union’s cutting the Fleet off from supply; Earth already has. We’re out of everything but room to run.”
“The Hinder Stars — you know there’s some talk about reopening one of those stations — ”
“A dream. We’d never have the chance. If the Fleet goes… Union would make it a target, same as us, just as quickly. And selfishly, completely selfishly, I’d like to see my children out of here.”
Damon’s face was very white. “No. Absolutely no.”
“Don’t be noble. I’d rather your safety than your help. Konstantins won’t fare well in years to come. It’s mindwipe if they take us. You worry about your criminals; consider yourself and Elene. That’s Union’s solution… puppets in the offices; lab-born populations to fill up the world… they’ll plow up Downbelow and build. Heaven help the Downers, I’d cooperate with them… so would you… to keep Pell safe from the worst excesses; but they won’t have things that easy way. And I don’t want to see you in their hands. We’re targets. I’ve lived all my life in that condition. Surely it’s not asking too much that I do one selfish thing — that I save my sons.”
“What did Emilio say?”
“Emilio and I are still discussing it.”
“He told you no. Well, so do I.”
“Your mother will have a word with you.”
“Are you sending her?”
Angelo frowned. “You know that’s not possible.”
“So. I know that. And I’m not going, and I don’t think Emilio will choose to either. My blessing to him if he does, but I’m not.”
“Then you don’t know anything,” Angelo said shortly. “We’ll talk about it later.”
“We won’t,” Damon said. “If we pulled out, panic would set in here. You know that. You know how it would look, besides that I won’t do it in the first place.”
It was true; he knew that it was.
“No,” Damon said again, and laid his hand atop his father’s, rose and left.
Angelo sat, looked toward the wall, toward the portraits which stood on the shelf, a succession of tridee figures… Alicia before her accident; young Alicia and himself; a succession of Damons and Emilios from infancy to manhood, to wives and hopes of grandchildren. He looked at all the figures assembled there, at all the gathered ages of them, and reckoned that the good days hereafter would be fewer.
After a fashion he was angry with his boys; and after another… proud. He had brought them up what they were.
Emilio, he wrote to the succession of images, and the son on Downbelow, your brother sends his love. Send me what skilled Downers you can spare. I’m sending you a thousand volunteers from the station; go ahead with the new base if they have to backpack equipment in. Appeal to the Downers for help, trade for native foodstuffs. All love.
And to security: Process out the assuredly nonviolent. We’re going to shift them to Downbelow as volunteers.
He reckoned, even as he did it, where that led; the worst would stay on station, next the heart and brain of Pell. Transfer the outlaws down and keep the heel on them; some kept urging it. But fragile agreements with the natives, fragile self-respect for the techs who had been persuaded to go down there in the mud and the primitive conditions… it could not be turned into a penal colony. It was life. It was the body of Pell, and he refused to violate it, to ruin all the dreams they had had for its future.
There were dark hours when he thought of arranging an accident in which all of Q might decompress. It was an unspeakable idea, a madman’s solution, to kill thousands of innocent along with the undesirables… to take in these shiploads one after the other, and have accident after accident, keeping Pell free of the burden, keeping Pell what it was. Damon lost sleep over five men. He had begun to meditate on utter horror.
For that reason too he wanted his sons gone from Pell. He thought sometimes that he might actually be capable of applying the measures some urged, that it was weakness that prevented him, that he was endangering what was good and whole to save a polluted rabble, out of which reports of rape and murder came daily.
Then he considered where it led, and what kind of life they all faced when they had made a police state of Pell, and recoiled from it with all the convictions Pell had ever had.
“Sir,” a voice cut in, with the sharper tone of transmissions from central. “Sir, we have inbound traffic.”
“Give it here,” he said, and swallowed heavily as the schematic reached his screen. Nine of them. “Who are they?”
“The carrier Atlantic,” the voice of central returned. “Sir, they have eight freighters in convoy. They ask to dock. They advise of dangerous conditions aboard.”
“Denied,” Angelo said. “Not till we get an understanding.” They could not take so many; could not; not another lot like Mallory’s. His heart sped, hurting him. “Get me Kreshov on Atlantic. Get me contact.”
Contact was refused from the other end. The warship would do as it pleased. There was nothing they could do to prevent it.
The convoy moved in, silent, ominous with the load it bore, and he reached for the alert for security.
iii
Downbelow: main base; 5/28/52
The rain still came down, the thunder dying. Tam-utsa-pi-tan watched the humans come and go, arms locked about her knees, her bare feet sunk in mire, the water trickling slowly off her fur. Much that humans did made no sense; much that humans made was of no visible use, perhaps for the gods, perhaps that they were mad; but graves… this sad thing the hisa understood. Tears, shed behind masks, the hisa understood. She watched, rocking slightly, until the last humans had gone, leaving only the mud and the rain in this place where humans laid their dead.
And in due time she gathered herself to her feet and walked to the place of cylinders and graves, her bare toes squelching in the mud. They had put the earth over Bennett Jacint and the two others. The rain made of the place one large lake, but she had watched; she knew nothing of the marks humans made for signs to themselves, but she knew the one.
She carried a tall stick with her, which Old One had made. She came naked in the rain, but for the beads and the skins which she bore on a string about her shoulder. She stopped above the grave, took the stick in both her hands and drove it hard into the soft mud; the spirit-face she slanted so that it looked up as much as possible, and about its projections she hung the beads and the skins, arranging them with care, despite the rain which sheeted down.
Steps sounded near her in the puddles, the hiss of human breath. She spun and leapt aside, appalled that a human had surprised her ears, and stared into a breather-masked face.
“What are you doing?” the man demanded.
She straightened, wiped her muddy hands on her thighs. To be naked thus embarrassed her, for it upset humans. She had no answer for a human. He looked at the spirit-stick, at the grave offerings… at her. What she could see of his face seemed less angry than his voice had promised.
“Bennett?” the man asked of her.
She bobbed a yes, distressed still. Tears filled her eyes, to hear the name, but the rain washed them away. Anger… that too she felt, that Bennett should die and not others.
“I’m Emilio Konstantin,” he said, and she stood straight at once, relaxed out of her fight-flight tenseness. “Thank you for Bennett Jacint; he would thank you.”
“Konstantin-man.” She amended all her manner and touched him, this very tall one of a tall kind. “Love Bennett-man, all love Bennett-man. Good man. Say he friend. All Downers are sad.” He put a hand on her shoulder, this tall Konstantin-man, and she turned and put her arm about him and her head against his chest, hugged him solemnly, about the wet, awful-feeling yellow clothes. “Good Bennett make Lukas mad. Good friend for Downers. Too bad he gone. Too, too bad, Konstantin-man.”
“I’ve heard,” he said. “I’ve heard how it was here.”
“Konstantin-man good friend.” She lifted her face at his touch, looked fearlessly into the strange mask which made him very horrible to see. “Love good mans. Downers work hard, work hard, hard for Konstantin. Give you gifts. Go no more away.”
She meant it. They had learned how Lukases were. It was said in all the camp that they should do good for the Konstantins, who had always been the best humans, gift-bringers more than the hisa could give.
“What’s your name?” he asked, stroking her cheek. “What do we call you?”
She grinned suddenly, warm in his kindness, stroked her own sleek hide, which was her vanity, wet as it was now. “Humans call me Satin,” she said, and laughed, for her true name was her own, a hisa thing, but Bennett had given her this, for her vanity, this and a bright bit of red cloth, which she had worn to rags and still treasured among her spirit-gifts.
“Will you walk back with me?” he asked, meaning to the human camp. “I’d like to talk with you.”
She was tempted, for this meant favor. And then she sadly thought of duty and pulled away, folded her arms, dejected at the loss of love. “I sit,” she said.
“With Bennett.”
“Make he spirit look at the sky,” she said, showing the spirit-stick, explaining a thing the hisa did not explain. “Look at he home.”
“Come tomorrow,” he said. “I need to talk to the hisa.”
She tilted back her head, looked at him in startlement. Few humans called them what they were. It was strange to hear it. “Bring others?”
“All the high ones if they will come. We need hisa Up-above, good hands, good work. We need trade Downbelow, place for more men.”
She extended her hand toward the hills and the open plain, which went on forever.
“There is place.”
“But the high ones would have to say.”
She laughed. “Say spirit-things. I-Satin give this to Konstantin-man. All ours. I give, you take. All trade, much good things; all happy.”
“Come tomorrow,” he said, and walked away, a tall strange figure in the slanting rain. Satin-Tam-utsa-pitan sat down on her heels with the rain beating upon her bowed back and pouring over her body, and regarded the grave, with the rain making pocked puddles above it.
She waited. Eventually others came, less accustomed to men. Dalut-hos-me was one such, who did not share her optimism of them; but even he had loved Bennett.
There were men and men. This much the hisa had learned
She leaned against Dalut-hos-me, Sun-shining-through-clouds, in the dark evening of their long watch, and by this gesture pleased him. He had begun laying gifts before her mat in this winter season, hoping for spring.
“They want hisa Upabove,” she said. “I want to see the Upabove. I want this.”
She had always wanted it, from the time that she had heard Bennett talk of it. From this place came Konstantins (and Lukases, but she dismissed that thought). She reckoned it as bright and full of gifts and good things as all the ships which came down from it, bringing them goods and good ideas. Bennett had told them of a great metal place holding out arms to the Sun, to drink his power, where ships vaster than they had ever imagined came and went like giants.
All things flowed to this place and from it; and Bennett had gone away now, making a Time in her life under the Sun. It was a manner of pilgrimage, this journey she desired to mark this Time, like going to the images of the plain, like the sleep-night in the shadow of the images.
They had given humans images for the Upabove too, to watch there. It was fit, to call it pilgrimage. And the Time regarded Bennett, who came from that journey.
“Why do you tell me?” Dalut-hos-me asked.
“My spring will be there, on Upabove.”
He nestled closer. She could feel his heat. His arm went about her. “I will go,” he said.
It was cruel, but the desire was on her for her first traveling; and his was on him, for her, would grow, as gray winter passed and they began to think toward spring, toward warm winds and the breaking of the clouds. And Bennett, cold in the ground, would have laughed his strange human laughter and bidden them be happy.
So always the hisa wandered, of springs, and the nesting.
iv
Pell: sector blue five: 5/28/52
It was frozen dinner again. Neither of them had gotten in till late, numb with the stresses of the day — more refugees, more chaos. Damon ate, looked up finally realizing his self-absorbed silence, found Elene sunk in one of her own… a habit, lately, between them. He was disturbed to think of that, and reached across the table to lay his hand on hers, which rested beside her plate. Her hand turned, curled up to weave with his. She looked as tired as he. She had been working too long hours — more than today. It was a remedy of sorts… not to think. She never spoke of Estelle. She did not speak much at all. Perhaps, he thought, she was so much at work there was little to say.
“I saw Talley today,” he said hoarsely, seeking to fill the silence, to distract her, however grim the topic. “He seemed… quiet. No pain. No pain at all.”
Her hand tightened. “Then you did right by him after all, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think there is a way to know.”
“He asked.”
“He asked,” he echoed.
“You did all you could to be right. That’s all you can do.”
“I love you.”
She smiled. Her lips trembled until they could no longer hold the smile.
“Elene?”
She drew back her hand. “Do you think we’re going to hold Pell?”
“Are you afraid not?”
“I’m afraid you don’t believe it.”
“What kind of reasoning is that?”
“Things you won’t discuss with me.”
“Don’t give me riddles. I’m not good at them. I never was.”
“I want a child. I’m not on the treatment now. I think you still are.”
Heat rose to his face. For half a heartbeat he thought of lying. “I am. I didn’t think it was time to discuss it. Not yet.”
She pressed her lips tightly together, distraught.
“I don’t know what you want,” he said. “I don’t know. If Elene Quen wants a baby, all right. Ask. It’s all right. Anything is. But I’d hoped it would be for reasons I’d know.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’ve done a lot of thinking. I’ve watched you. But you haven’t done any of it aloud. What do you want? What do I do? Get you pregnant and let you go? I’d help you if I knew how. What do I say?”
“I don’t want to fight. I don’t want a fight. I told you what I want.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “I don’t want to wait anymore.” Her brow furrowed. For the first time in days he had the feeling of contact with her eyes. Of Elene, as she was. Of something gentle. “You care,” she said. “I see that.”
“Sometimes I know I don’t hear all you say.”
“On ship… it’s my business, having a child or not. Ship family is closer in some things and further apart in others. But you with your own family… I understand that. I respect it.”
“Your home too. It’s yours.”
She managed the faintest of smiles, an offering, perhaps. “So what do you say to it?”
Offices of station planning were giving out dire warnings, advice otherwise, pleadings otherwise. It was not only the establishment of Q. There was the war, getting nearer. All rules applied to Konstantins first.
He simply nodded. “So we’re through waiting.”
It was like a shadow lifting. Estelle’s ghost fled the place, the small apartment they had drawn in blue five, which was smaller, into which their furnishings did not fit, where everything was out of order. It was all at once home, the hall with the dishes stowed in the clothing lockers and the living room which was bedroom by night, with boxes lashed in the corner, Downer wickerwork, with what should have gone into the hall lockers.
They lay in the bed that was the daytime couch. And she talked, lying in his arms, for the first time in weeks talked, late into the night, a flow of memories she had never shared with him, in all their being together.
He tried to reckon what she had lost in Estelle: her ship; she still called it that. Brotherhood, kinship. Merchanter morals, the stationer proverb ran; but he could not see Elene among the others, like them, rowdy merchanters offship for a dockside binge and a sleepover with anyone willing. Could never believe that.
“Believe it,” she said, her breath stirring against his shoulder. “That’s the way we live. What do you want instead? Inbreeding? They were my cousins on that ship.”
“You were different,” he insisted. He remembered her as he had first seen her, in his office on a matter involving a cousin’s troubles… always quieter than the others. A conversation, a re-meeting; another; a second voyage… and Pell again. She had never gone bar-haunting with her cousins, had not made the merchanter hangouts; had come to him, had spent those days on station with him. Failed to board again. Merchanters rarely married. Elene had.
“No,” she said. “You were different.”
“You’d take anyone’s baby?” The thought troubled him. Some things he had never asked Elene because he thought he knew. And Elene had never talked that way. He began, belatedly, to revise all he thought he knew; to be hurt, and to fight that. She was Elene; that quantity he still believed in, trusted.
“Where else could we get them?” she asked, making strange, clear sense. “We love them, do you think not? They belong to the whole ship. Only now there aren’t any.” She could talk of that suddenly. He felt the tension ebb, a sigh against him. “They’re all gone.”
“You called Elt Quen your father; Tia James your mother. Was it that way?”
“He was. She knew.” And a moment later. “She left a station to go with him. Not many will.”
She had never asked him to. That thought had never clearly occurred to him. Ask a Konstantin to leave Pell… he asked himself if he would have, and felt a deep unease. I would have, he insisted. I might have. “It would be hard,” he admitted aloud. “It was hard for you.”
She nodded, a movement against his arm.
“Are you sorry, Elene?”
A small shake of her head.
“It’s late to talk about things like this,” he said. “I wish we had. I wish we’d known enough to talk to each other. So many things we didn’t know.”
“It bother you?”
He hugged her against him, kissed her through a veil of hair, brushed it aside. He thought for a moment of saying no, decided then to say nothing. “You’ve seen Pell. You realize I’ve never set foot on a ship bigger than a shuttle? Never been out from this station? Some things I don’t know how to look at, or even how to imagine the question. You understand me?”
“Some things I don’t know how to ask you either.”
“What would you ask for?”
“I just did.”
“I don’t know how to say yes or no. Elene, I don’t know if I could have left Pell. I love you, but I don’t know that I could have done that — after so short a time. And that bothers me. That bothers me, if it’s something in me that it never occurred to me… that I spent all my planning trying to think how to make you happy on Pell…”
“Easier for me to stay a time… than for a Konstantin to uproot himself from Pell; pausing’s easy, we do it all the time. Only losing Estelle I never planned. Like what’s out there, you never planned. You’ve answered me.”
“How did I answer you?”
“By what it is that bothers you.”
That puzzled him. We do it all the time. That frightened him. But she talked more, lying against him, about more than things… deep feelings; the way childhood was for a merchanter; the first time she had set foot on a station, aged twelve and frightened by rude stationers who assumed any merchanter was fair game. How a cousin had died on Mariner years back, knifed in a stationer quarrel, not even comprehending a stationer’s jealousy that had killed him.
And an incredible thing… that in the loss of her ship, Elene’s pride had suffered; pride … the idea set him back, so that for some time he lay staring at the dark ceiling, thinking about it.
The name was diminished… a possession like the ship. Someone had diminished it and too anonymously to give her an enemy to get it back from. For a moment he thought of Mallory, the hard arrogance of an elite breed, the aristocracy of privilege. Sealed worlds and a law unto itself, where no one had property, and everyone had it: the ship and all who belonged to it. Merchanters who would spit in a dockmaster’s eye made grumbling retreat when a Mallory or a Quen ordered it. She felt grief at losing Estelle. That had to be. But shame too… that she had not been there when it mattered. That Pell had set her in the dockside offices where she could use that reputation the Quens had; but now there was nothing at her back, nothing but the reputation she had not been there to pay for. A dead name. A dead ship. Maybe she detected pity from other merchanters. That would be bitterest of all.
One thing she had asked of him. He had cheated her of it without discussing it. Without seeing.
“The first child,” he murmured, turning his head on the pillow to look at her, “goes by Quen. You hear me, Elene? Pell has Konstantins enough. My father may sulk; but he’ll understand. My mother will. I think it’s important it be that way.”
She began to cry, as she had never cried in his presence, not without resisting it. She put her arms about him and stayed there, till morning.
i
Damon looked over the report on his desk. It was not the procedure he was used to, the martial law which existed in Q. It was rough and quick, and came across his desk with a trio of film cassettes and a stack of forms condemning five men to Adjustment.
He viewed the film, jaw clenched, the scenes of riot leaping across the large wall-screen, flinched at recorded murder. There was no question of the crime or the identification. There was, in the stack of cases which had flooded the LA office, no time for reconsiderations or niceties. They were dealing with a situation which could bring the whole station down, turn it all into the manner of thing that had come in with Hansford. Once life-support was threatened, once men were crazy enough to build bonfires on a station dock… or go for station police with kitchen knives…
He pulled the files in question, keyed up printout on the authorization. There was no fairness in it, for they were the five the security police had been able to pull across the line, five out of many more as guilty. But they were five who would not kill again, nor threaten the frail stability of a station containing many thousands of lives. Total Adjustment, he wrote, which meant personality restruct. Processing would turn up injustice if he had done one. Questioning would determine innocence if any existed at this point. He felt foul in doing what he did, and frightened. Martial law was far too sudden. His father had agonized the night long in making one such decision after a board had passed on it.
A copy went to the public defender’s office. They would interview in person, lodge appeals if warranted. That procedure too was curtailed under present circumstance. It could be done only by producing evidence of error; and evidence was in Q, unreachable. Injustices were possible. They were condemning on the word of police under attack and the viewing of film which did not show what had gone before. There were five hundred reports of theft and major crimes on his desk when before there had been a Q, they might have dealt with two or three such complaints a year. Comp was flooded with data requests. There had been days of work done on id’s and papers for Q, and all of that was scrapped. Papers had been stolen and destroyed to such an extent in Q that no paper could be trusted to be accurate. Most of the claims to paper were probably fradulent, and loudest from the dishonest. Affidavits were worthless where threat ruled. People would swear to anything for safety. Even the ones who had come in good order were carrying paper they had no confirmation on: security confiscated cards and papers to save those from theft, and they were passing some few out where they were able to establish absolute id and find a station-side sponsor for them — but it was slow, compared to the rate of influx; and main station had no place to put them when they did. It was madness. They tried with all their resources to eliminate red tape and hurry; and it just got worse.
“Tom,” he keyed, a private note to Tom Ushant, in the defender’s office, “if you get a gut feeling that something’s wrong in any of these cases, appeal it back to me regardless of procedures. We’re putting through too many condemnations too fast; mistakes are possible. I don’t want to find one out after processing starts.”
He had not expected reply. It came through. “Damon, look at the Talley file if you want something to disturb your sleep. Russell’s used Adjustment.”
“You mean he’s been through it?”
“Not therapy. I mean they used it questioning him.”
“I’ll look at it.” He keyed out, hunted the access number, pulled the file in comp display. Page after page of their own interrogation data flicked past on the screen, most of it uninformative: ship name and number, duties… an armscomper might know the board in front of him and what he shot at, but little more. Memories of home then… family killed in a Fleet raid on Cyteen system mines; a brother, killed in service — reason enough to carry grudges if a man wanted to. Reared by his mother’s sister on Cyteen proper, a plantation of sorts… then a government school, deep-teaching for tech skills. Claimed no knowledge of higher politics, no resentments of the situation. The pages passed into actual transcript, uncondensed, disjointed ramblings… turned to excruciatingly personal things, the kind of intimate detail which surfaced in Adjustment, while a good deal of self was being laid bare, examined, sorted. Fear of abandonment, that deepest; fear of being a burden on his relatives, of deserving to be abandoned: he had a tangled kind of guilt about the loss of his family, had a pervading fear of it happening again, in any involvement with anyone. Loved the aunt. Took care of me, the thread of it ran at one point. Held me sometimes. Held me … loved me. He had not wanted to leave her home. But Union had its demands; he was supported by the state, and they took him, when he came of age. After that, it was state-run deep-teach, taped education, military training and no passes home. He had had letters from the aunt for a while; the uncle had never written. He believed the aunt was dead now, because the letters had stopped some years ago.
She would write, he believed. She loved me. But there were deeper fears that she had not; that she had really wanted the state money; and there was guilt, that he had not come home; that he had deserved this parting too. He had written to the uncle and gotten no answer. That had hurt him, though he and the uncle had never loved each other. Attitudes, beliefs… another wound, a broken friendship; an immature love affair, another case in which letters stopped coming, and that wound involved itself with the old ones. A later attachment, to a companion in service… uncomfortably broken off. He tended to commit himself to a desperate extent. Held me, he repeated, pathetic and secret loneliness. And more things.
He began to find it. Terror of the dark. A vague, recurring nightmare: a white place. Interrogation. Drugs. Russell’s had used drugs, against all Company policy, against all human rights — had wanted badly something Talley simply did not have. They had gotten him from Mariner zone — from Mariner — transferred to Russell’s at the height of the panic. They had wanted information at that threatened station; had used Adjustment techniques in interrogation. Damon rested his mouth against his hand, watched the fragmentary record roll past, sick at his stomach. He felt ashamed at the discovery, naive. He had not questioned Russell’s reports, had not investigated them himself; had had other things on his hands, and staff to take care of that matter; had not — he admitted it — wanted to deal with the case any more than he absolutely had to. Talley had never called him. Had conned him. Had held himself together, already unstrung from previous treatment, to con Pell into doing the only thing that might put an end to his mental hell. Talley had looked him straight in the eye and arranged his own suicide.
The record rambled on… from interrogation under drugs to chaotic evacuation, with stationer mobs on one side and the military threatening him on the other.
And what it had been, what had happened during that long voyage, a prisoner on one of Mazian’s ships…
Norway … and Mallory.
He killed the screen, sat staring at the stack of papers, the unfinished condemnations. After a time he set himself to work again, his fingers numb as he signed the authorizations.
Men and women had boarded at Russell’s Star, folk who, like Talley, might have been sane before it all started. What had gotten off those ships, what existed over in Q… had been made, of folk no different than themselves.
He simply pushed the destruct on lives like Talley’s, which were already gone. On men like himself, he thought, who had gone over civilized limits, in a place where civilization had stopped meaning anything.
Mazian’s Fleet — even they, even the likes of Mallory — had surely started differently.
“I’m not going to challenge,” Tom told him, over a lunch they both drank more than ate.
And after lunch he went to the small Adjustment facility over in red, and back into the treatment area. He saw Josh Talley. Talley did not see him, although perhaps it would not have mattered. Talley was resting at that hour, having eaten. The tray was still on the table, and he had eaten well. He sat on the bed with a curiously washed expression on his face, all the lines of strain erased.
ii
Angelo looked up at the aide, took the report of the ship outbound and scanned the manifest, looked up. “Why Hansford?”
The aide shifted his weight, distressed. “Sir?”
“Two dozen ships idle and Hansford has a commission to launch? Unfitted? And with what crew?”
“I think crew was hired off the inactive list, sir.”
Angelo leafed through the report. “Lukas Company. Viking-bound with a stripped ship and a dock-bound crew and Dayin Jacoby for a passenger? Get Jon Lukas on the com.”
“Sir,” the aide said, “the ship has already left dock.”
“I can see the time. Get me Jon Lukas.”
“Yes, sir.”
The aide went out. In moments the screen on the desk went bright and Jon Lukas came on. Angelo took a deep breath, calmed himself, angled the report toward the pickup. “See that?”
“You have a question?”
“What’s going on here?”
“We have holdings at Viking. Business to carry on. Shall we let our interest there sink into panic and disorder? They’re due some reassurance.”
“With Hansford?”
“We had an opportunity to engage a ship at below standard. Economics, Angelo.”
“Is that all?”
“I’m not sure I take your meaning.”
“She carried nothing like full cargo. What kind of commodity do you plan to pick up at Viking?”
“We carry as much as we can with Hansford in her present condition. She’ll refit there, where facilities are less crowded. Refitting is the hire for which we got her use, if you must know. What she carries will pay the bill; she’ll lade full on return, critical supplies. I’d think you’d be pleased. Dayin is aboard to supervise and to administer some business at our Viking office.”
“You’re not minded, are you, that this full lading include Lukas Company personnel… or others? You’re not going to sell passage off Viking. You’re not going to pull that office out.”
“Ah. That’s your concern.”
“That has to be my concern when ships go out of here with no sufficient cargo to justify their moving, headed for a population we can’t handle if it panics. I’m telling you, Jon, we can’t take chances on some loose talk or some single company pulling its favored employees out and starting a panic on another station. You hear me?”
“I did discuss the matter with Dayin. I assure you our mission is supportive. Commerce has to continue, doesn’t it, or we strangle. And before us, Viking. Stations they rely on have collapsed. Let Viking start running into shortages and they may be here in our laps with no invitation. We’re taking them foodstuffs and chemicals; nothing Pell may run short of… and we have the only two usable holds on the ship fully loaded. Is every ship launched subject to this inquisition? I can provide you with the company books if you want to see them. I take this amiss. Whatever our private feelings, Angelo, I think Dayin deserves commendation for being willing to go out there under the circumstances. It doesn’t deserve a fanfare — we asked for none — but we would have expected something other than accusations. Do you want the books, Angelo?”
“Hardly. Thank you, Jon, and my apologies. So long as Dayin and your ship’s master appreciate the hazards. Every ship that launches is going to be scrutinized, yes. Nothing personal.”
“Any questions you have, Angelo, so long as they’re equally applied. Thank you.”
“Thank you, Jon.” Jon keyed out. Angelo did so, sat staring at the report, riffled through it, finally signed the authorization after the fact and dumped it into the Record tray; all the offices were running behind. Everyone. They were using too many man-hours and too much comp time on the Q processing.
“Sir.” It was his secretary, Mills. “Your son, sir.”
He keyed acceptance of a call, looked up in some surprise as the door opened instead and Damon walked in. “I brought the processing reports myself,” Damon said. He sat down, leaned on the desk with both arms. Damon’s eyes looked as tired as he himself felt, which was considerable. “I’ve processed five men into Adjustment this morning.”
“Five men isn’t a tragedy,” Angelo said wearily. “I’ve got a lottery process set up for comp to pick who goes and stays on station. I’ve got another storm on Downbelow that’s flooded the mill again, and they’ve just found the victims from the last washout. I’ve got ships pulling at the tether now that the panic’s worn down, one that’s just slipped, two more to go tomorrow. If rumor has it that Mazian’s chosen Pell for a refuge, where does that leave the remaining stations? What when they panic and head here by the shipload? And how do we know that someone isn’t out there right now, selling passage to more frightened people? Our life-support won’t take much more.” He gestured loosely toward a stack of documents. “We’re going to militarize what freighters we can, by some pretty strong financial coercion.”
“To fire on refugee ships?”
“If ships come in that we can’t handle — yes. I’d like to talk to Elene sometime today; she’d be the one to make the initial approach to the merchanters. I can’t muster sympathy for five rioters today. Forgive me.”
His voice cracked. Damon reached across the desk, caught his wrist and pressed it, let it go again. “Emilio needs help down there?”
“He says not. The mill’s a shambles. Mud everywhere.”
They find all of them dead?“
He nodded. “Last night. Bennett Jacint and Ty Brown; Wes Kyle yesterday noon… this long, to hunt the banks and the reeds. Emilio and Miliko say morale is all right, considering. The Downers are building dikes. More of them have been anxious for human trade; I’ve ordered more let into base and I’ve authorized some of the trained ones into maintenance up here: their life-support is in good shape, and it frees up some techs we can upgrade. I’m shuttling down every human volunteer who’ll go, and that means even trained dock hands; they can handle construction equipment. Or they can learn. It’s a new age. A tighter one.” He pressed his lips together, sucked in a long breath. “Have you and Elene thought of Earth?”
“Sir?”
“You, your brother, Elene and Miliko — think about it, will you?”
“No,” Damon said. “Pull out and run? You think that’s what it’s coming to?”
“Figure the odds, Damon. We didn’t get help from Earth, just observers. They’re figuring on cutting their losses, not sending us reinforcements or ships. No. We’re just settling lower and lower. Mazian can’t hold forever. The shipyards at Mariner… were vital. It’s Viking soon; and whatever else Union reaches out to take. Union’s cutting the Fleet off from supply; Earth already has. We’re out of everything but room to run.”
“The Hinder Stars — you know there’s some talk about reopening one of those stations — ”
“A dream. We’d never have the chance. If the Fleet goes… Union would make it a target, same as us, just as quickly. And selfishly, completely selfishly, I’d like to see my children out of here.”
Damon’s face was very white. “No. Absolutely no.”
“Don’t be noble. I’d rather your safety than your help. Konstantins won’t fare well in years to come. It’s mindwipe if they take us. You worry about your criminals; consider yourself and Elene. That’s Union’s solution… puppets in the offices; lab-born populations to fill up the world… they’ll plow up Downbelow and build. Heaven help the Downers, I’d cooperate with them… so would you… to keep Pell safe from the worst excesses; but they won’t have things that easy way. And I don’t want to see you in their hands. We’re targets. I’ve lived all my life in that condition. Surely it’s not asking too much that I do one selfish thing — that I save my sons.”
“What did Emilio say?”
“Emilio and I are still discussing it.”
“He told you no. Well, so do I.”
“Your mother will have a word with you.”
“Are you sending her?”
Angelo frowned. “You know that’s not possible.”
“So. I know that. And I’m not going, and I don’t think Emilio will choose to either. My blessing to him if he does, but I’m not.”
“Then you don’t know anything,” Angelo said shortly. “We’ll talk about it later.”
“We won’t,” Damon said. “If we pulled out, panic would set in here. You know that. You know how it would look, besides that I won’t do it in the first place.”
It was true; he knew that it was.
“No,” Damon said again, and laid his hand atop his father’s, rose and left.
Angelo sat, looked toward the wall, toward the portraits which stood on the shelf, a succession of tridee figures… Alicia before her accident; young Alicia and himself; a succession of Damons and Emilios from infancy to manhood, to wives and hopes of grandchildren. He looked at all the figures assembled there, at all the gathered ages of them, and reckoned that the good days hereafter would be fewer.
After a fashion he was angry with his boys; and after another… proud. He had brought them up what they were.
Emilio, he wrote to the succession of images, and the son on Downbelow, your brother sends his love. Send me what skilled Downers you can spare. I’m sending you a thousand volunteers from the station; go ahead with the new base if they have to backpack equipment in. Appeal to the Downers for help, trade for native foodstuffs. All love.
And to security: Process out the assuredly nonviolent. We’re going to shift them to Downbelow as volunteers.
He reckoned, even as he did it, where that led; the worst would stay on station, next the heart and brain of Pell. Transfer the outlaws down and keep the heel on them; some kept urging it. But fragile agreements with the natives, fragile self-respect for the techs who had been persuaded to go down there in the mud and the primitive conditions… it could not be turned into a penal colony. It was life. It was the body of Pell, and he refused to violate it, to ruin all the dreams they had had for its future.
There were dark hours when he thought of arranging an accident in which all of Q might decompress. It was an unspeakable idea, a madman’s solution, to kill thousands of innocent along with the undesirables… to take in these shiploads one after the other, and have accident after accident, keeping Pell free of the burden, keeping Pell what it was. Damon lost sleep over five men. He had begun to meditate on utter horror.
For that reason too he wanted his sons gone from Pell. He thought sometimes that he might actually be capable of applying the measures some urged, that it was weakness that prevented him, that he was endangering what was good and whole to save a polluted rabble, out of which reports of rape and murder came daily.
Then he considered where it led, and what kind of life they all faced when they had made a police state of Pell, and recoiled from it with all the convictions Pell had ever had.
“Sir,” a voice cut in, with the sharper tone of transmissions from central. “Sir, we have inbound traffic.”
“Give it here,” he said, and swallowed heavily as the schematic reached his screen. Nine of them. “Who are they?”
“The carrier Atlantic,” the voice of central returned. “Sir, they have eight freighters in convoy. They ask to dock. They advise of dangerous conditions aboard.”
“Denied,” Angelo said. “Not till we get an understanding.” They could not take so many; could not; not another lot like Mallory’s. His heart sped, hurting him. “Get me Kreshov on Atlantic. Get me contact.”
Contact was refused from the other end. The warship would do as it pleased. There was nothing they could do to prevent it.
The convoy moved in, silent, ominous with the load it bore, and he reached for the alert for security.
iii
The rain still came down, the thunder dying. Tam-utsa-pi-tan watched the humans come and go, arms locked about her knees, her bare feet sunk in mire, the water trickling slowly off her fur. Much that humans did made no sense; much that humans made was of no visible use, perhaps for the gods, perhaps that they were mad; but graves… this sad thing the hisa understood. Tears, shed behind masks, the hisa understood. She watched, rocking slightly, until the last humans had gone, leaving only the mud and the rain in this place where humans laid their dead.
And in due time she gathered herself to her feet and walked to the place of cylinders and graves, her bare toes squelching in the mud. They had put the earth over Bennett Jacint and the two others. The rain made of the place one large lake, but she had watched; she knew nothing of the marks humans made for signs to themselves, but she knew the one.
She carried a tall stick with her, which Old One had made. She came naked in the rain, but for the beads and the skins which she bore on a string about her shoulder. She stopped above the grave, took the stick in both her hands and drove it hard into the soft mud; the spirit-face she slanted so that it looked up as much as possible, and about its projections she hung the beads and the skins, arranging them with care, despite the rain which sheeted down.
Steps sounded near her in the puddles, the hiss of human breath. She spun and leapt aside, appalled that a human had surprised her ears, and stared into a breather-masked face.
“What are you doing?” the man demanded.
She straightened, wiped her muddy hands on her thighs. To be naked thus embarrassed her, for it upset humans. She had no answer for a human. He looked at the spirit-stick, at the grave offerings… at her. What she could see of his face seemed less angry than his voice had promised.
“Bennett?” the man asked of her.
She bobbed a yes, distressed still. Tears filled her eyes, to hear the name, but the rain washed them away. Anger… that too she felt, that Bennett should die and not others.
“I’m Emilio Konstantin,” he said, and she stood straight at once, relaxed out of her fight-flight tenseness. “Thank you for Bennett Jacint; he would thank you.”
“Konstantin-man.” She amended all her manner and touched him, this very tall one of a tall kind. “Love Bennett-man, all love Bennett-man. Good man. Say he friend. All Downers are sad.” He put a hand on her shoulder, this tall Konstantin-man, and she turned and put her arm about him and her head against his chest, hugged him solemnly, about the wet, awful-feeling yellow clothes. “Good Bennett make Lukas mad. Good friend for Downers. Too bad he gone. Too, too bad, Konstantin-man.”
“I’ve heard,” he said. “I’ve heard how it was here.”
“Konstantin-man good friend.” She lifted her face at his touch, looked fearlessly into the strange mask which made him very horrible to see. “Love good mans. Downers work hard, work hard, hard for Konstantin. Give you gifts. Go no more away.”
She meant it. They had learned how Lukases were. It was said in all the camp that they should do good for the Konstantins, who had always been the best humans, gift-bringers more than the hisa could give.
“What’s your name?” he asked, stroking her cheek. “What do we call you?”
She grinned suddenly, warm in his kindness, stroked her own sleek hide, which was her vanity, wet as it was now. “Humans call me Satin,” she said, and laughed, for her true name was her own, a hisa thing, but Bennett had given her this, for her vanity, this and a bright bit of red cloth, which she had worn to rags and still treasured among her spirit-gifts.
“Will you walk back with me?” he asked, meaning to the human camp. “I’d like to talk with you.”
She was tempted, for this meant favor. And then she sadly thought of duty and pulled away, folded her arms, dejected at the loss of love. “I sit,” she said.
“With Bennett.”
“Make he spirit look at the sky,” she said, showing the spirit-stick, explaining a thing the hisa did not explain. “Look at he home.”
“Come tomorrow,” he said. “I need to talk to the hisa.”
She tilted back her head, looked at him in startlement. Few humans called them what they were. It was strange to hear it. “Bring others?”
“All the high ones if they will come. We need hisa Up-above, good hands, good work. We need trade Downbelow, place for more men.”
She extended her hand toward the hills and the open plain, which went on forever.
“There is place.”
“But the high ones would have to say.”
She laughed. “Say spirit-things. I-Satin give this to Konstantin-man. All ours. I give, you take. All trade, much good things; all happy.”
“Come tomorrow,” he said, and walked away, a tall strange figure in the slanting rain. Satin-Tam-utsa-pitan sat down on her heels with the rain beating upon her bowed back and pouring over her body, and regarded the grave, with the rain making pocked puddles above it.
She waited. Eventually others came, less accustomed to men. Dalut-hos-me was one such, who did not share her optimism of them; but even he had loved Bennett.
There were men and men. This much the hisa had learned
She leaned against Dalut-hos-me, Sun-shining-through-clouds, in the dark evening of their long watch, and by this gesture pleased him. He had begun laying gifts before her mat in this winter season, hoping for spring.
“They want hisa Upabove,” she said. “I want to see the Upabove. I want this.”
She had always wanted it, from the time that she had heard Bennett talk of it. From this place came Konstantins (and Lukases, but she dismissed that thought). She reckoned it as bright and full of gifts and good things as all the ships which came down from it, bringing them goods and good ideas. Bennett had told them of a great metal place holding out arms to the Sun, to drink his power, where ships vaster than they had ever imagined came and went like giants.
All things flowed to this place and from it; and Bennett had gone away now, making a Time in her life under the Sun. It was a manner of pilgrimage, this journey she desired to mark this Time, like going to the images of the plain, like the sleep-night in the shadow of the images.
They had given humans images for the Upabove too, to watch there. It was fit, to call it pilgrimage. And the Time regarded Bennett, who came from that journey.
“Why do you tell me?” Dalut-hos-me asked.
“My spring will be there, on Upabove.”
He nestled closer. She could feel his heat. His arm went about her. “I will go,” he said.
It was cruel, but the desire was on her for her first traveling; and his was on him, for her, would grow, as gray winter passed and they began to think toward spring, toward warm winds and the breaking of the clouds. And Bennett, cold in the ground, would have laughed his strange human laughter and bidden them be happy.
So always the hisa wandered, of springs, and the nesting.
iv
It was frozen dinner again. Neither of them had gotten in till late, numb with the stresses of the day — more refugees, more chaos. Damon ate, looked up finally realizing his self-absorbed silence, found Elene sunk in one of her own… a habit, lately, between them. He was disturbed to think of that, and reached across the table to lay his hand on hers, which rested beside her plate. Her hand turned, curled up to weave with his. She looked as tired as he. She had been working too long hours — more than today. It was a remedy of sorts… not to think. She never spoke of Estelle. She did not speak much at all. Perhaps, he thought, she was so much at work there was little to say.
“I saw Talley today,” he said hoarsely, seeking to fill the silence, to distract her, however grim the topic. “He seemed… quiet. No pain. No pain at all.”
Her hand tightened. “Then you did right by him after all, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think there is a way to know.”
“He asked.”
“He asked,” he echoed.
“You did all you could to be right. That’s all you can do.”
“I love you.”
She smiled. Her lips trembled until they could no longer hold the smile.
“Elene?”
She drew back her hand. “Do you think we’re going to hold Pell?”
“Are you afraid not?”
“I’m afraid you don’t believe it.”
“What kind of reasoning is that?”
“Things you won’t discuss with me.”
“Don’t give me riddles. I’m not good at them. I never was.”
“I want a child. I’m not on the treatment now. I think you still are.”
Heat rose to his face. For half a heartbeat he thought of lying. “I am. I didn’t think it was time to discuss it. Not yet.”
She pressed her lips tightly together, distraught.
“I don’t know what you want,” he said. “I don’t know. If Elene Quen wants a baby, all right. Ask. It’s all right. Anything is. But I’d hoped it would be for reasons I’d know.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’ve done a lot of thinking. I’ve watched you. But you haven’t done any of it aloud. What do you want? What do I do? Get you pregnant and let you go? I’d help you if I knew how. What do I say?”
“I don’t want to fight. I don’t want a fight. I told you what I want.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “I don’t want to wait anymore.” Her brow furrowed. For the first time in days he had the feeling of contact with her eyes. Of Elene, as she was. Of something gentle. “You care,” she said. “I see that.”
“Sometimes I know I don’t hear all you say.”
“On ship… it’s my business, having a child or not. Ship family is closer in some things and further apart in others. But you with your own family… I understand that. I respect it.”
“Your home too. It’s yours.”
She managed the faintest of smiles, an offering, perhaps. “So what do you say to it?”
Offices of station planning were giving out dire warnings, advice otherwise, pleadings otherwise. It was not only the establishment of Q. There was the war, getting nearer. All rules applied to Konstantins first.
He simply nodded. “So we’re through waiting.”
It was like a shadow lifting. Estelle’s ghost fled the place, the small apartment they had drawn in blue five, which was smaller, into which their furnishings did not fit, where everything was out of order. It was all at once home, the hall with the dishes stowed in the clothing lockers and the living room which was bedroom by night, with boxes lashed in the corner, Downer wickerwork, with what should have gone into the hall lockers.
They lay in the bed that was the daytime couch. And she talked, lying in his arms, for the first time in weeks talked, late into the night, a flow of memories she had never shared with him, in all their being together.
He tried to reckon what she had lost in Estelle: her ship; she still called it that. Brotherhood, kinship. Merchanter morals, the stationer proverb ran; but he could not see Elene among the others, like them, rowdy merchanters offship for a dockside binge and a sleepover with anyone willing. Could never believe that.
“Believe it,” she said, her breath stirring against his shoulder. “That’s the way we live. What do you want instead? Inbreeding? They were my cousins on that ship.”
“You were different,” he insisted. He remembered her as he had first seen her, in his office on a matter involving a cousin’s troubles… always quieter than the others. A conversation, a re-meeting; another; a second voyage… and Pell again. She had never gone bar-haunting with her cousins, had not made the merchanter hangouts; had come to him, had spent those days on station with him. Failed to board again. Merchanters rarely married. Elene had.
“No,” she said. “You were different.”
“You’d take anyone’s baby?” The thought troubled him. Some things he had never asked Elene because he thought he knew. And Elene had never talked that way. He began, belatedly, to revise all he thought he knew; to be hurt, and to fight that. She was Elene; that quantity he still believed in, trusted.
“Where else could we get them?” she asked, making strange, clear sense. “We love them, do you think not? They belong to the whole ship. Only now there aren’t any.” She could talk of that suddenly. He felt the tension ebb, a sigh against him. “They’re all gone.”
“You called Elt Quen your father; Tia James your mother. Was it that way?”
“He was. She knew.” And a moment later. “She left a station to go with him. Not many will.”
She had never asked him to. That thought had never clearly occurred to him. Ask a Konstantin to leave Pell… he asked himself if he would have, and felt a deep unease. I would have, he insisted. I might have. “It would be hard,” he admitted aloud. “It was hard for you.”
She nodded, a movement against his arm.
“Are you sorry, Elene?”
A small shake of her head.
“It’s late to talk about things like this,” he said. “I wish we had. I wish we’d known enough to talk to each other. So many things we didn’t know.”
“It bother you?”
He hugged her against him, kissed her through a veil of hair, brushed it aside. He thought for a moment of saying no, decided then to say nothing. “You’ve seen Pell. You realize I’ve never set foot on a ship bigger than a shuttle? Never been out from this station? Some things I don’t know how to look at, or even how to imagine the question. You understand me?”
“Some things I don’t know how to ask you either.”
“What would you ask for?”
“I just did.”
“I don’t know how to say yes or no. Elene, I don’t know if I could have left Pell. I love you, but I don’t know that I could have done that — after so short a time. And that bothers me. That bothers me, if it’s something in me that it never occurred to me… that I spent all my planning trying to think how to make you happy on Pell…”
“Easier for me to stay a time… than for a Konstantin to uproot himself from Pell; pausing’s easy, we do it all the time. Only losing Estelle I never planned. Like what’s out there, you never planned. You’ve answered me.”
“How did I answer you?”
“By what it is that bothers you.”
That puzzled him. We do it all the time. That frightened him. But she talked more, lying against him, about more than things… deep feelings; the way childhood was for a merchanter; the first time she had set foot on a station, aged twelve and frightened by rude stationers who assumed any merchanter was fair game. How a cousin had died on Mariner years back, knifed in a stationer quarrel, not even comprehending a stationer’s jealousy that had killed him.
And an incredible thing… that in the loss of her ship, Elene’s pride had suffered; pride … the idea set him back, so that for some time he lay staring at the dark ceiling, thinking about it.
The name was diminished… a possession like the ship. Someone had diminished it and too anonymously to give her an enemy to get it back from. For a moment he thought of Mallory, the hard arrogance of an elite breed, the aristocracy of privilege. Sealed worlds and a law unto itself, where no one had property, and everyone had it: the ship and all who belonged to it. Merchanters who would spit in a dockmaster’s eye made grumbling retreat when a Mallory or a Quen ordered it. She felt grief at losing Estelle. That had to be. But shame too… that she had not been there when it mattered. That Pell had set her in the dockside offices where she could use that reputation the Quens had; but now there was nothing at her back, nothing but the reputation she had not been there to pay for. A dead name. A dead ship. Maybe she detected pity from other merchanters. That would be bitterest of all.
One thing she had asked of him. He had cheated her of it without discussing it. Without seeing.
“The first child,” he murmured, turning his head on the pillow to look at her, “goes by Quen. You hear me, Elene? Pell has Konstantins enough. My father may sulk; but he’ll understand. My mother will. I think it’s important it be that way.”
She began to cry, as she had never cried in his presence, not without resisting it. She put her arms about him and stayed there, till morning.
Chapter Ten
Viking station: 6/5/52
Viking hung in view, agleam in the light of an angry star. Mining, industry regarding metals and minerals… that was its support. Segust Ayres watched, from the vantage of the freighter’s bridge, the image on the screens.
And something was wrong. The bridge whispered with alarm passed from station to station, frowns on faces and troubled looks. Ayres glanced at his three companions. They had caught it too, stood uneasily, all of them trying to keep out of the way of procedures that had officers darting from this station to that to supervise.
Another ship was coming in with them. Ayres knew enough to interpret that. It moved up until it was visual on the screens, and ships were not supposed to ride that close, not at this distance from station; it was big, many-vaned.
“It’s in our lane,” delegate Marsh said.
The ship moved closer still to them, and the merchanter captain rose from his place, walked across to them. “We have trouble,” he said. “We’re being escorted in. I don’t recognize the ship that’s riding us. It’s military. Frankly, I don’t think we’re in Company space any more.”
“Are you going to break and run?” Ayres asked.
“No. You may order it, but we’re not about to do it. You don’t understand the way of things. It’s wide space. Sometimes ships get surprises. Something’s happened here. We’ve wandered into it. I’m sending a steady no-fire. We’ll go in peaceably. And if we’re lucky, they’ll let us go again.”
“You think Union is here.”
“There’s only them and us, sir.”
“And our situation?”
“Very uncomfortable, sir. But those are the chances yon took. I won’t give odds you people won’t be detained. No, sir. Sorry.”
Marsh started to protest. Ayres put out a hand. “No. I’d suggest we go have a drink in the main room and simply wait it out. We’ll talk about it.”
Guns made Ayres nervous. Marched by rifle-carrying juveniles across a dock much the same as Pell’s, crowded into a lift with them, these too-same young revolutionaries, he felt a certain shortness of breath and worried for his companions, who were still under guard near the ship’s berth. All the soldiers he had seen in crossing the Viking dock were of the same stamp, green coveralls for a uniform, a sea of green on that dockside, overwhelming the few civilians visible. Guns everywhere. And emptiness, along the upward curve of the docks beyond, deserted distances. There were not enough people. Far from the number of residents who had been at Pell, in spite of the fact that there were freighters docked all about Viking Station. Trapped, he surmised; merchanters perhaps dealt with courteously enough — the soldiers who had boarded their own ship had been coldly courteous — but it was a good bet that ship was not going to be leaving.
Not the ship that had brought them in, not any of the others out there.
The lift stopped on some upper level. “Out,” the young captain said, and ordered him left down the hall with a wave of the rifle barrel. The officer was no more than eighteen at most. Crop-headed, male and female, they all looked the same age. They spilled out before and after him, more guards than a man of his age and physical condition warranted. The corridor leading to windowed offices ahead of them was lined with more such, rifles all fixed at a precise attitude. All eighteen or thereabouts, all with close-clipped hair, all -
— attractive. That was what urged at his attention. There was an uncommon, fresh-faced pleasantness about them, as if beauty were dead, as if there were no more distinction of the plain and the lovely. In that company, a scar, a disfigurement of any kind, would have stood out as bizarre. There was no place for the ordinary among them. Male and female, the proportions were all within a certain tolerance, all similar, though they varied in color and features. Like mannequins. He remembered Norway’s scarred troops, and Norway’s gray-haired captain, the disrepute of their equipment, the manner of them, who seemed to know no discipline. Dirt. Scars. Age. There was no such taint on these. No such imprecision.
He shuddered inwardly, felt cold gathered at his belly as he walked in among the mannequins, into offices, and further, into another chamber and before a table where sat older men and women. He was relieved to see gray hair and blemishes and overweight, deliriously relieved.
“Mr. Ayres,” A mannequin announced him, rifle in hand. “Company delegate.” The mannequin advanced to lay his confiscated credentials on the desk in front of the central figure, a heavy-bodied woman, gray-haired. She leafed through them, lifted her head with a slight frown. “Mr. Ayres… Ines Andilin,” she said. “A sorry surprise for you, isn’t it? But such things happen. You’ll now give us a Company reprimand for seizing your ship? Feel free to do so.”
“No, citizen Andilin. It was, in fact, a surprise, but hardly devastating. I came to see what I might see and I have seen plenty.”
“And what have you seen, citizen Ayres?”
“Citizen Andilin.” He walked forward a few paces, as far as the anxious faces and sudden movement of rifles would allow. “I’m second secretary to the Security Council on Earth. My companions are of the Earth Company’s highest levels. Our inspection of the situation has shown us disorder and a militarism in the Company Fleet which has passed all limit of Company responsibility. We are dismayed at what we find. We disown Mazian; we do not wish to hold any territories in which the citizens have determined they wish to be otherwise governed; we are anxious to be quit of a burdensome conflict and an unprofitable venture. You know well enough that you possess this territory. The line is stretched too thin; we can’t possibly enforce what residents of the Beyond don’t want; and in fact, why should we be interested to do so? We don’t regard this meeting at this station as a disaster. We were, in fact, looking for you.”
There was a settling in the council, a perplexity on their faces.
“We are prepared,” Ayres said in a loud voice, “to cede formally all the disputed territories. We frankly have no further interest beyond present limits. The star-faring arm of the Company is dissolved by vote of the Company directorates; the sole interest we have now is to see to our orderly disengagement — our withdrawal — and the establishment of a firm border which will give us both reasonable latitude.”
Heads bent. The council murmured together, one way and the other. Even the mannequins about the edges of the chamber seemed disturbed.
“We are a local authority,” said Andilin at last. “You’ll have opportunity to carry your offers higher. Can you leash the Mazianni and guarantee our security?”
Ayres drew in his breath. “Mazian’s Fleet? No, if his captains are an example.”
“You’re in from Pell.”
“Yes.”
“And claim experience with Mazian’s captains, do you?”
He blanked for the instant… was not accustomed to such slips. Neither was he accustomed to distances over which such comings and goings would be news. But the merchanters, he reasoned at once, would know and tell as much as he could. Withholding information was more than pointless; it was dangerous. “I met,” he confessed, “with Norway’s captain, one Mallory.”
Andilin’s head inclined solemnly. “Signy Mallory. A unique privilege.”
“None to me. The Company refuses responsiblity for Norway.”
“Disorder, mismanagement; denial of responsibility… and yet Pell is well reputed for order. I am amazed at your report. What happened there?”
“I do not serve as your intelligence.”
“You do, however, disown Mazian and the Fleet. This is a radical step.”
“I don’t disown the safety of Pell. That’s our territory.”
Then you are not prepared to cede all the disputed territories.“
“By disputed territories, of course, we mean those starting with Fargone.”
“Ah. And what is your price, citizen Ayres?”
“An orderly transition of power, certain agreements assuring the safeguarding of our interests.”
Andilin’s face relaxed in laughter. “You seek a treaty with us. You throw aside your own forces, and seek a treaty with us.”
“A reasonable solution to a mutual difficulty. Ten years since the last reliable report out of the Beyond. Many more years than that with a fleet out of our control, refusing our direction, in a war which consumes what could be a mutually profitable trade. That is what brings us here.”
There was deathly silence in the room.
At last Andilin nodded, her chins doubling. “Mr. Ayres, we shall wrap you in cotton wool and hand you on most gently, most, most gently, to Cyteen. With great hope that at last someone on Earth has come to his senses. A last question, rephrased. Was Mallory alone at Pell?”
“I can’t answer.”
“You have not yet disowned the Fleet, then.”
“I retain that option in negotiations.”
Andilin pursed her lips. “You need not worry about giving us critical information. The merchanters will deny us nothing. Were it possible for you to restrain the Mazianni from their immediate maneuvers, I would suggest you try. I’d suggest that to demonstrate the seriousness of your proposal… you at least make a token gesture toward that restraint during negotiations.”
“We cannot control Mazian.”
“You know that you will lose,” said Andilin. “In fact, that you have already lost, and you’re attempting to hand us what we have already won… and get concessions for it.”
“There’s little interest for us in pursuing hostilities, win or lose. It seems to us that our original object was to make sure the stars were a viable commercial venture; and you patently are viable. You have an economy worth trading with, in a different kind of economic relationship from what we had before, saving us the entanglements with the Beyond we don’t want. We can agree on a route, a meeting point where your ships and ours can come and go as a matter of common right. What you do on your side doesn’t interest us; direct the development of the Beyond as you like. Likewise we will be withdrawing some jump freighters home for the commencement of that trade. If we can possibly secure some restraint on Conrad Mazian, we’ll recall those ships as well. I’m being very blunt with you. The interests we pursue are so far from each other, there’s no sane reason to continue hostilities. You’re being recognized in all points as the legitimate government of the outer colonies. I am the negotiator and the interim ambassador if the negotiations are successful. We don’t consider it defeat, if the will of the majority of the colonies has supported you; the fact that you are the government in these regions is persuasive of that fact. We extend you formal recognition from the new administration which has taken charge in our own affairs… a situation I will explain further to your central authorities; and we are prepared to open trade negotiations at the same time. All military operations within our power to control will be stopped. Unfortunately… it isn’t within our power to stop them, only to withdraw support and approval.”
“I am a regional administrator, a step removed from our central directorate, but I don’t think, ambassador Ayres, that the directorate will have any hesitancy in opening discussion on these matters. At least, as a regional administrator sees things, this is the case. I extend you a cordial welcome.”
“Haste — will save lives.”
“Haste indeed. These troops will conduct you to a safe lodging. Your companions will join you.”
“Arrest?”
“Absolutely the contrary. The station is newly taken and insecure as yet. We want to be sure no hazard confronts you. Cotton wool, Mr. Ambassador. Walk where you will, but with a security escort at all times; and by my earnest advice, rest. You’ll be shipping out as soon as a vessel can be cleared. It’s even uncertain whether you’ll have a night’s sleep before that departure, You agree, sir?”
“Agreed,” he said, and Andilin called the young officer over and spoke to him. The officer gestured, with his hand this time; he took his leave with nods of courtesy from all the table, walked out, with a cold feeling at his back.
Practicalities, he reckoned. He did not like the look of what he saw, the too-alike guards, the coldness everywhere. Security Council on Earth had not seen such things when it gave its orders and laid its plans. The lack of intermediate Earthward stations, since the dismantling of the Hinder Star bases, made the spread of the war logistically unlikely, but Mazian had failed to prevent it from spreading all across the Beyond… had aggravated the situation, escalated hostilities to dangerous levels. The sudden prospect of having Mazian’s forces reactivate those Hinder Star stations in a retrenching action behind Pell turned him sick with the mere contemplation of the possibilities.
The Isolationists had had their way… too long. Now there were bitter decisions to be taken… rapprochment to this thing called Union; agreements, borders, barriers… containment.
If the line were not held, disaster loomed… the possibility of having Union itself activating those abandoned Earthward stations, convenient bases. There was a fleet building at Sol Station; it had to have time. Mazian was fodder for Union guns until then. Sol itself had to be in command of the next resistance, Sol, and not the headless thing the Company Fleet had become, refusing Company orders, doing as they would.
Most of all they had to keep Pell, had to keep that one base.
Ayres walked where he was led, settled into the apartment they gave him several levels down, which was excellent in comforts, and the comfort reassured him. He forced himself to sit and appear relaxed to await his companions, that they assured him would come… and they did come finally, in a group and unnerved by their situation. Ayres thrust their escort out, closed the door, made a shifting of his eyes toward the peripheries of the compartment, silent warning against free speech. The others, Ted Marsh, Karl Bela, Ramona Dias, understood, and said nothing, as he hoped they had not spoken their minds elsewhere.
Someone on Viking Station, a freighter crew, was in great difficulty, he had no doubt. Supposedly merchanters were able to pass the battle lines, with no worse than occasional shepherding to different ports than they had planned; or sometimes, if it was one of Mazian’s ships that stopped them, confiscation of part of the cargo or a man or woman of the crew. The merchanters lived with it. And the merchanters who had brought them to Viking would survive detention until what they had seen at Pell and here ceased to be of military value. He hoped for their sakes that this was the case. He could do nothing for them.
He did not sleep well that night, and before morning of mainday, as Andilin had warned him, they were roused out of bed to take ship further into Union territory. They were promised their destination was Cyteen, the center of the rebel command. It was begun. There was no retreat
Chapter Eleven
Pell: Detention; red sector: 6/27/52
He was back. Josh Talley looked at the window of his room and met the face which was so often there… remembered, after the vague fashion in which he remembered anything recent, that he had known this man, and that this man was part of all that had happened to him. He met the eyes this time and, feeling more of definite curiosity than he was wont, moved from his cot, walking with difficulty, for the general weakness of his limbs — advanced to the window and confronted the young man at closer range. He put out his hand to the window, wishing, for others kept far from him, and he lived entirely in white limbo, where all things were suspended, where touch was not keen and tastes all bland, where words came at distance. He drifted in this whiteness, detached and isolated.
Come out, his doctors told him. Come out whenever you feel inclined. The world is out here. You can come when you’re ready.
It was a womblike safety. He grew stronger in it. Once he had lain on his cot, disinclined even to move, leaden-limbed and weary. He was much, much stronger; he could feel moved to rise and investigate this stranger. He grew brave again. For the first time he knew that he was getting well, and that made him braver still.
The man behind the pane moved, reached out his hand, matched it to his on the window, and his numbed nerves tingled with excitement, expecting touch, expecting the numb sensation of another hand. The universe existed beyond a sheet of plastic, all there to touch, unfelt, insulated, cut off. He was hypnotized by this revelation. He stared into dark eyes and a lean young face, of a man in a brown suit; and wondered was it he, himself, as he was outside the womb, that hands matched so perfectly, touching and not touched.
But he wore white, and it was no mirror.
Nor was it his face. He dimly remembered his own face, but it was a boy his memory saw, an old picture of himself: he could not recover the man. It was not a boy’s hand that he reached out; not a boy’s hand that reached back to him, independent of his willing it A great deal had happened to him and he could not put it all together. Did not want to. He remembered fear.
The face behind the window smiled at him, a faint, kindly smile. He gave it back, reached with his other hand to touch the face as well, barriered by cold plastic.
“Come out,” a voice said from the wall. He remembered that he could. He hesitated, but the stranger kept inviting him. He saw the lips move with the sound which came from elsewhere.
And cautiously he moved to the door which was always, they said, open when he wanted it.
It did open to him. Of a sudden he must face the universe without safety. He saw the man standing there, staring back at him; and if he touched, it would be cold plastic; and if the man should frown there was no hiding.
“Josh Talley,” the young man said, “I’m Damon Konstantin. Do you remember me at all?”
Konstantin. The name was a powerful one. It meant Pell, and power. What else it had meant would not come to him, save that once they had been enemies, and were no longer. It was all wiped clean, all forgiven. Josh Talley. The man knew him. He felt personally obligated to remember this Damon and could not. It embarrassed him.
“How are you feeling?” Damon asked.
That was complicated. He tried to summarize and could not; it required associating his thoughts, and his strayed in all directions at once.
“Do you want anything?” Damon asked.
“Pudding,” he said. “With fruit.” That was his favorite. He had it every meal but breakfast; they gave him what he asked for.
“What about books? Would you like some books?”
He had not been offered that. “Yes,” he said, brightening with the memory that he had loved books. “Thank you.”
“Do you remember me?” Damon asked.
Josh shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said miserably. “We’ve probably met, but, you see, I don’t remember things clearly. I think we must have met after I came here.”
“It’s natural you’d forget. They tell me you’re doing very well. I’ve been here several times to see about you.”
“I remember.”
“Do you? When you get well I want you to come to my apartment for a visit sometime. My wife and I would like that.”
He considered it and the universe widened, doubling, multiplying itself so that he was not sure of his footing. “Do I know her too?”
“No. But she knows about you. I’ve talked to her about you. She says she wants you to come.”
“What’s her name?”
“Elene. Elene Quen.”
He repeated it with his lips, not to let it leave him. It was a merchanter name. He had not thought of ships. Now he did. Remembered dark, and stars. He stared fixedly at Damon’s face, not to lose contact with it, this point of reality in a shifting white world. He might blink and be alone again. He might wake in his room, in his bed, and not have any of this to hold onto. He clenched his mind about it with all his strength. “You’ll come again,” he said, “even if I forget. Please come and remind me.”
“You’ll remember,” Damon said. “But I’ll come if you don’t.”
Josh wept, which he did easily and often, the tears sliding down his face, a mere outwelling of emotion, not of grief, or joy, only profound relief. A cleansing.
“Are you all right?” Damon asked.
I’m tired,“ he said, for his legs were weak from standing, and he knew he should go hack to his bed before he became dizzy. ”Will you come in?“
“I have to stay in this area,” Damon said. “I’ll send you the books, though.”
He had forgotten the books already. He nodded, pleased and embarrassed at once.
“Go back,” Damon said, releasing him. Josh turned and walked back inside.
The door closed. He went to his bed, dizzier than he had thought. He must walk more. Enough of lying still, if he walked he would get well faster.
Damon. Elene. Damon. Elene.
There was a place outside which became real to him, to which for the first time he wanted to go, a place to reach for when he turned loose of this.
He looked to the window. It was empty. For a terrible, lonely moment he thought that he had imagined it all, that it was a part of the dream world which shaped itself in this whiteness, and that he had created it. But it had given him names; it had detail and substance independent of himself; it was real or he was going mad.
The books came, four cassettes to use in the player, and he held them close to his chest and rocked to and fro smiling to himself and laughing, cross-legged on his bed, for it was true. He had touched the real outside and it had touched him.
He looked about him, and it was only a room, with walls he no longer needed.
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска и скачивания книг
Книжный Бот
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте
Саморазвитие
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
ВКОНТАКТЕ