Patriots

17. The High and the Mighty

The palace of Guillaume Giscard, Protector of Zenith, was on a mountaintop 270 miles from New Paris. Eastward through the glass walls of the anteroom to Giscard's office Mark could see a breathtaking sweep of bare ridges plunging thousands of feet toward the foothills.

To the immediate south, Alliance troops bundled in winter uniforms like so many gray snowmen were being drilled in a courtyard two stories below. The site was a barracks as well as a palace. Judging from the number of corrugated-plastic huts, there must be several thousand soldiers quartered here.

Very uncomfortable soldiers, too. It was only fall in this hemisphere, but the palace was high enough that snow already drifted around the shelters.

A servant so gloomy that he could have been a basset hound threw open the doors to the office. "His Excellency will see you now, Mr. Maxwell," he said, as if he were reading the burial service for a very sinful man. Mark entered behind his father.

There were seven people in the large room. Four, including both women, wore Alliance military dress uniforms. Protector Giscard was a tall, stooped man. He rose from behind a desk littered with papers, recording chips, and three different styles of hologram projector. The remaining civilians were an older man across the desk from the soldiers and a supercilious-looking youngster.

"Mr. Maxwell," Giscard said, extending his hand, "I'm seeing you out of respect for those who recommended you, but there's absolutely no way that I can interfere in the matter you raise. Or would want to."

Lucius shook hands politely; Mark bowed in Quelhagen style, feeling very tense. He didn't worry about the Alliance officials, but he didn't want to embarrass himself in front of his father.

"Well, I appreciate your position," Lucius said. "However, I thought-"

"I mean, my own Vice-Protector's involved in the matter, I understand," Giscard interrupted. He played nervously with the papers on his desk. "With all the trouble going on here, I'm certainly not going to get him and the rest of the local council stirred up."

"Stirred up, hell," said a heavyset officer with close-cropped, iron gray hair. "If you took my advice, Finch would be in jail right now."

"And if he resisted," added a woman of similar age and physique, "he'd be under the jail. He's a prancing little prick."

Giscard forced his face into a smile. " Paris thought if I associated responsible local people in the government, things would… there'd be less trouble," he said to Lucius apologetically. "So I appointed Mr. Finch, but-"

He broke off and waved a hand, frustrated at his own dithering. "Anyway, I can't interfere. I'm sorry you had your trip for nothing, but I'm sure my secretary warned you you were wasting your time."

"Many times," said the young man. He couldn't have stuck his nose farther in the air if there'd been a turd on the carpet. "But Mr. Maxwell absolutely insisted."

"I thought it only fair that I give you a chance to cover yourself before the matter goes to Paris," Lucius said. His nonchalance made Mark shiver with its glacial perfection: polite but at the same time utterly superior and dismissive. It was the tone that Mark had expected the Protector to be using on them.

" Paris?" Giscard said. "You can't-"

"I'm afraid that in some quarters your decision to let planetary courts invalidate Alliance grants won't be very well received," Lucius said. This time he raised his voice enough to override the Protector's.

"Those Hestia grants are invalid!" said the elder civilian.

Lucius cocked an eyebrow. "That's certainly the position a Zenith court took," he said. "Very possibly a commission set up by the proper Alliance authorities might agree. But I very much doubt that officials in Paris will believe that a Zenith court had authority to make that decision on its own."

Giscard swallowed. He looked at the aide who'd just spoken. That fellow cleared his throat and said, "There are no grounds for appeal of a local decision to authorities in Paris." Mark could almost hear the question in his voice.

"Grounds?" said Lucius. "Oh, I think if the proper people in the Protectorate Office learn of what's happened here, they'll find grounds at least to recall His Excellency-"

Lucius bowed to Giscard.

"-to explain why he allowed local authorities to overrule the actions of an Alliance protector. But of course that's your decision, Your Excellency. Thank you for your time."

"Wait!" Giscard said.

Lucius raised an eyebrow. "Yes, Your Excellency?" he said, as if he were only vaguely interested in what the protector had to say.

"I can't invalidate my own grants," Giscard said, wringing his hands. "I just can't."

One of the military officers sneered and ostentatiously turned her back.

"Why, of course not," Lucius said. "This is clearly a case that a commission from the Protectorate Office has to decide. It seems to me that a responsible official in your position would freeze all proceedings in local courts and refer the question of validity back to Paris for determination. That's what a strong and responsible Protector of Zenith would do."

"That could take years," said the civilian aide, apparently Giscard's legal advisor. "That could take a decade."

Lucius smiled more broadly than he had before during this discussion. "Yes, it could well defer the question of enforcement until long after Protector Giscard has been appointed to some distant post."

"Yes, that's right," Giscard said. "Yes!" He bobbed his head three times as if shaking the point down into his consciousness. He looked at his legal advisor and said, "Candace, see what you can do, will you? And quickly, this has gone on long enough."

"As a matter of fact, Mr. Candace," Lucius said, "I happen to have a draft right here that you might like to look at."

He took a recording chip from his breast pocket and offered it to the advisor. Lucius' smile had the same authority Mark had seen on the face of Yerby Bannock as he surveyed the unconscious thugs on Dittersdorf.

The limousine Lucius had borrowed from Daniels purred softly at a thousand feet. The land below showed few marks of human involvement: a road, scattered farms; a village of thirty or forty houses. Before he visited Greenwood, Mark would have thought of this as wild country.

Before Greenwood…

"Dad," Mark said. He forced himself to look at his father as he spoke. If one or the other of them had been driving, there'd have been an excuse to avoid eye contact.

Lucius waggled a finger toward the ground. "I suppose you find this a change from Earth," he said. "And Greenwood, on the other end of the scale."

"I was thinking about Greenwood," Mark explained. "It's-Dad, what do you think would happen if the plaintiffs offered Mr. Bannock a bribe to, to see things their way?"

Lucius laughed wholeheartedly. Since most of his actions were muted by calculation, this loud amusement was like seeing the sun come out in the middle of a blizzard. "Oh, surely they wouldn't be that stupid, would they?" he said at last.

Mark felt an enormous sense of relief. "You think he'd turn them down even if he sounded tempted?" he said.

"No, no," his father said with a dismissive sweep of his hand. "That kind, the Yerby Bannocks-they'll never turn down a franc, a drink, or a woman. But he'll weasel-word his promise and then he'll go right ahead and do exactly what he intended to do from the first."

"Ah-h-h," Mark said as the light dawned. He thought for a moment and went on, "So Yerby's a type, then? I've never met…"

"Yerby Bannock's a type in the same sense that the Mars Diamond is a type," Lucius said. He studied Mark with an intensity Mark didn't understand. "There are many other diamonds, but the rest aren't flawless and don't weigh thirty-seven pounds."

Lucius looked at the ground out his side of the clear compartment. After a moment he turned back to Mark and said, "Ah… sometimes there might be a situation where soldiers were required to destroy an enemy automatic weapon."

Mark looked blank. He didn't have any idea of why his father had changed the subject. For the first time in Mark's memory, he thought he saw embarrassment beneath the normal cool expression.

"Generally, almost always, there's a better way to deal with the gun than charging straight at it," Lucius continued, holding eye contact. "But every once in a while there's a case where you really do have to go in head-on. Then it's useful to have a Yerby Bannock around."

"Ah!" said Mark. He was glad to have a context, though he knew there had to be more in the explanation than he was seeing at the moment.

"The odd thing is," Lucius continued, "the Bannocks survive that sort of activity more often than you'd imagine. But it's not a good idea to stand very close to them. Unless you have to."

"I see," said Mark. And now he did.