Patriots

32. Some Are More Equal Than Others

"So if you'll help us by providing the arms we need to free ourselves from Alliance tyranny," Mayor Biber said, as Amy recorded him, "Zenith will see to it that Greenwood also becomes independent. Vice-Protector Berkeley Finch has authorized me to make this pledge on behalf of the Zenith Assembly." Biber bowed deeply to the assembled settlers and stepped back from the microphone.

Before Yerby could resume speaking to the crowd, a burly man whose fur coat and fur hat nearly doubled his bulk took one of the mikes in the crowd below. "I'm Magnus Newsome," the fellow boomed. "I got a double section on Big Bay north of the Doodle… and what I want to know is, is why anybody with the sense God gave a goose would trust a Zenith? If that fat bastard said the sun was shining, I'd look up to be sure!"

He waved skyward. Hundreds of the Greenwoods present thundered agreement.

The sun was indeed shining, though it wasn't a day that Mark would have been outside for long if he'd been back on Quelhagen. There was no wind, but the brilliance of sunlight on snow didn't change the fact that the air temperature was well below freezing.

The starship that had landed ten minutes before steamed sullenly. A pool of meltwater had refrozen in the dimple that hundreds of ships had hammered into hard ground. Friction and magnetic eddies had heated the hull enough during descent to vaporize the ice again now.

A man had disembarked almost immediately. He walked toward the Spiker with the stolid determination of somebody virtually blinded by ghost images from sleep travel.

The crowd had trampled the slope west of the tavern into muddy slush. Mark certainly wasn't going to show weakness, and nobody else seemed to mind the conditions. There wasn't any choice but to meet outdoors. No building on Greenwood could hold the five hundred people present, and the assembly was far to important to exclude anybody who wanted to attend.

This might decide the future not only of Greenwood, but of every individual settler on the planet. The problem was, nobody could be certain what effect any particular decision would have.

"May I speak to that?" the PA system boomed in a familiar, unexpected voice. Mark was so startled that he might have fallen forward off the wall if Amy hadn't clutched him.

"Aye, you may," Yerby said. "And you can come up here on the platform to do it, because there's nobody on Greenwood who can advise us better. People, this is Lucius Maxwell!"

The man from the newly landed ship was Mark's father. Yerby squatted and lifted Lucius to the eight-foot-high platform as virtually a dead weight. Mark knew that his father was doing well just to walk a quarter mile this soon after coming out of his transit capsule.

Lucius swayed. Mark half rose, ready to hop up on the platform to help his father, but Yerby had already provided an arm.

"Mr. Newsome's right," Lucius said. Dizziness made him look as white as a vampire's victim, but his voice was strong and vibrant. "You can't trust Zenith-not the Zenith Assembly or any members of it."

He paused for effect, looking down at the settlers' worried faces. "But I'm advising you, I'm begging you, to do what Mayor Biber asks anyway. Because while you can't trust Zenith to help, you can trust the Atlantic Alliance to crush Greenwood and all of you individually unless it's stopped now!"

The last words were in a ringing shout that brought a collective gasp from the assembly. Lucius let the exclamation die away, then raised his spread hands to silence the buzz of conversation that followed.

"There's open rebellion against the Alliance on a score of worlds," Lucius continued. "I'm a delegate from Quelhagen to the parliament of free planets forming on Hestia. The Quelhagen Committee of Governance sent me here first, though, because you on Greenwood know me. Join us and other free peoples and help throw the Alliance out of our lives!"

"Maybe you lot want to get your heads shot off!" shouted a woman Mark didn't know. "I don't see how that makes it our fight here!"

"That's the question you all should be wondering," Lucius agreed, using the PA system to override the arguments that immediately broke out below. "And the answer is, if Earth crushes Quelhagen and the rest of the worlds that are protesting the closure of ports and factories to aid Earth manufactures, then the Alliance will try to prevent a recurrence by shipping millions of Earth citizens onto every settled world."

He pointed to the front of the crowd. "You all remember the city they would have built on Dagmar Wately's land! There'll be a dozen cities here and hundreds on planets like Quelhagen, swamping the present citizens. The Alliance government knows the forced exiles won't get along with real settlers-and they'll make sure they don't by sequestering the best land on each planet for these modular cities. The new arrivals will have to support the Alliance or lose everything a second time to the real owners of the land!"

Lucius gained strength with every word. Yerby had moved aside and stood arms akimbo, smiling and nodding at each point.

"Look," Magnus Newsome said, "I'm not calling you a liar like I do the fellow from Zenith-you I don't know, Maxwell. But it don't make sense to me that Earth's going to send soldiers and what-all here if we don't get their backs up to start with. Sounds like they've got plenty on their plates already."

"Mr. Maxwell," Dagmar Wately added through another of the microphones in the crowd, "you're a smart man and you've helped us a lot, I don't deny. If Earth sends soldiers here to fight us the way they sent soldiers to Zenith-well, they can look for a fight with me. Everybody who knows me knows that I'll hold up my end."

The stocky woman turned to face the crowd as if daring anyone to doubt her word. In the pause, Yerby leaned to the mike on the platform and said, "All right, Dagmar, we all know you chew steel plates and spit out nails. Make your point!"

"I'll make my point, Yerby Bannock!" Dagmar retorted. "I don't go looking for fights. I don't go gallivanting off to some mudhole to steal guns that somebody else needs for a fight that's none of mine. And I'm not going to change!"

At least quarter the crowd sounded agreement, though there were a number of people trying to shout the sentiments down as well. Mark's father stepped back so that Yerby could take the microphone unhindered.

When the initial reaction had bled away, the frontiersman said, "What a lot of pussies! And what a lot of fools with their heads in the sand!"

The response was a near riot. Yerby raised his hands and bent his head to look at his boot toes rather than the crowd. Despite the PA system, it was almost two minutes before he could be heard again. "All right, all right," he resumed in apparent concession. "I don't figure I'd ever be willing to live with an Alliance soldier's boot on my neck, but I guess there's some of you that would. That's your business, I reckon."

He cocked his head back and grinned in challenge at the assembly. "My business is simple. I figure to go to Dittersdorf and pick up hardware for some friends of mine. And I'll bet there's a hundred or two fellows on Greenwood who've got the guts to go with me! Is that true?"

The shout of agreement wasn't general, but it was certainly the hundreds Yerby had asked for. Burly men and not a few women started to push forward to join him.

"Yerby Bannock, you got no right to commit the whole blame planet!" Magnus Newsome said, his amplified voice barely audible over the crowd noise. "I-"

Mark wasn't sure what Newsome meant to say next. Desiree Bannock stepped to the man's side and decked him with one punch as Amy recorded the scene.

Democracy in action, Mark supposed. He was shivering with adrenaline, but he wasn't sure whether fear or excitement was the cause.

Sometimes a man squatted by himself in the night with only his bedroll and a bottle. More often ten or a dozen folk sat in a circle around a lamp or a fire, passing a bottle. At a number of campsites, a couple shared their bottle in front of a small tent.

It bothered Mark that booze was the only social constant he'd found on Greenwood. He knew that life was hard here and that liquor was as much a painkiller as it was recreation, but he knew also that being drunk worsened the problems while it masked them.

But that was none of Mark Maxwell's business. Like Yerby's relationship with Desiree, Mark had both his opinions and the sense to keep them to himself.

"Hey, Yerby!" said one of six men around a fire of oil burning in a tub of sand. "Have a sip of this!"

"Don't mind if I do, Jace," Yerby said as he took the bottle. "Wanted to introduce my friends the Maxwells, Lucius and Mark. We'd be in a right pickle now without the two of them helping us mind our step. And that's my sister Amy with the camera."

The firelight made the settlers' faces even ruddier than the liquor had. To Mark they looked sweaty and cheerful, though mud was spilling from all four sides of the groundsheet on which they sat.

Mud seemed to be the universal fact of Greenwood. When Mark flew over the forest in the daytime, it was a green carpet, and even tonight Tertia's light turned the ground at a distance into a plate of beaten silver, but close up there was always mud.

"Honored, sirs," Jace said. "This is my Uncle Jerry Burns, my cousin Chris, and Bob, Ben and Obed, my brothers."

"Have a drink!" Jerry said brightly, holding out a bottle of his own. "Tell me if this ain't better stuff than the eyewash Jace brews!"

Lucius took the bottle and lifted it to his lips without first wiping the glass with his palm. "Whoo-ee!" he said, handing the liquor to Mark. "Guess I'll let you know what I think about the flavor after I get some feeling back in my mouth. You know how to run your batch strong, friend!"

Mark tilted the bottle upward, blocking the opening with his tongue. This was the twentieth campsite they'd paused at as Yerby led them through the gathering. Even Yerby wasn't taking more than a mouthful from each bottle that came by.

"Be sure to stick around tomorrow," Yerby said to the men around the fire. "We'll be choosing delegates to send to Hestia. If there's going to be a federation of free planets, we can't afford for Greenwood to be left out. Lucius here'll explain it all tomorrow."

"You want some of this, miss?" Jace said, offering Amy the bottle Yerby had returned. "It's a mite strong for a girl like you, I guess."

"Don't mind if I do!" Amy said sharply. She lifted the bottle and, to Mark's horror, really took a swig. He saw the bubble rise through the fire-reddened liquor.

"Heck, Yerby," another of the seated men said. "You pick who you want. That's good enough for me!"

"Hey, but look," Jace said, patting the ground beside him. "You know Chink Ericsson, don't you? Set for a minute and let me tell you about the problem we're having with him. Can you do that?"

Yerby glanced back. Lucius nodded minusculely. Yerby squatted in the circle of settlers, listening intently as they talked. Lucius, Mark, and Amy moved a few steps back into shadow.

"It feels as if I washed my mouth out with full-strength lye," Amy said in a tiny voice.

"My tongue's numb," Lucius said. "I hope you didn't think I was really drinking, Amy. Nor Mark either, since he's still standing and he wouldn't be if he'd been swallowing what he pretended to be."

"Dad?" Mark said. He spoke quickly, before he lost the courage to say what he needed to. "Do you really think the Alliance would move troops and settlements here if Greenwood kept out of the fight? It wasn't Earth, it was people from Zenith who were going to plant the city on Dagmar's land."

Amy raised her camera. Mark shook his head quickly, harshly. "Not this," he said. "This is just between us."

"I don't know, Mark," Lucius said, meeting his son's eyes. "I think it's not unlikely."

This was their first chance to talk since the assembly had closed at dusk. Lucius had suggested to Yerby that they shake some hands to make sure the assembly wouldn't balk the next day at the notion of sending delegates to the parliament on Hestia. Yerby didn't need much urging to socialize and drink with his fellows.

"But not a certainty like you told people today," Mark said. He didn't know whether he was angry or just confused; and, though he hadn't really been drinking, by lifting so many bottles to his lips he'd probably absorbed enough alcohol to affect him.

"It's a certainty for Quelhagen," Lucius said quietly. "I'm here representing Quelhagen, son."

Mark grimaced. "I hate to lie, even by shading the truth," he said. " Greenwood has more in common even with Zenith than it does with Earth, I know that! If we didn't break away now, we'd have to do it later and it might be worse then. But to lie to people who trust me…"

"I haven't heard you lie, Mark," Amy said. "Or your father either. You have an opinion about what's going to happen. Maybe you're right, and maybe you haven't shared it with-" She nodded toward the group around the nearby fire. "-Jace Burns and his kin. But you just heard Obed say that whoever my brother wanted to send to Hestia was fine with them. There's a lot here who feel that way-and the ones who don't, you know they'll have a chance to speak tomorrow too."

Somebody near the wall of the tavern fired a flashgun at Tertia. Some of the concentrated light might actually reach the moon in a few seconds. The nasty crack of the discharge had scarcely died away before a dozen other folk also shot into the sky.

Mark shivered. "I'm afraid to be responsible for everything that could go wrong," he whispered.

"You're right to be afraid," Lucius said. "But very generally the worst decision possible is to refuse to make a decision at all and just let events occur by themselves."

He smiled wanly. "I don't think that's likely to happen in an environment that includes Yerby Bannock, though," he went on. "I'm trying to guide him, and the two of you are also. But don't ever imagine that we're pushing Yerby in a direction he wouldn't have gone without us. Don't ever be that arrogant."

"It was terrible on Zenith," Mark said, almost to himself.

"It's terrible on Quelhagen," Lucius agreed. "It'll be even more terrible when we have weapons to fight back with, but at least then there's the possibility that it'll become better in the future. Until there's revolutionary change, conditions on every 'protected' planet will continue getting bit by bit worse."

"Mark would be a good choice for delegate to Hestia," Amy said.

"No," said Mark. He didn't realize how strongly he felt about it until he'd spoken. "No! I'll be going with Yerby to Dittersdorf."

"There's more to a revolution than fighting, boy," Lucius said. His tone was suddenly as coldly angry as Mark had ever heard it.

"I know that," Mark said, straightening to attention, "but there's fighting too. Sir-Dad. I don't want to explain when I'm your age why I let other people fight for me. I know what you've said about only butchers and fools being fit to be soldiers."

Lucius nodded grimly. "That's right," he said. "But did I ever explain why that was? Because if other kinds of people become soldiers, they find themselves doing things they'll regret for the rest of their lives!"

"You're not going to change my mind!" Mark said. He stared at a campfire three hundred yards beyond the tip of his father's left ear.

Lucius laughed with something close to humor. All the cold passion had vanished from his voice. "I'm not even trying, son," he said. "But when you were complaining a moment ago about the way we weren't telling-" He gestured. "-your neighbors everything we thought we knew… do you like it better now that I have tried to tell you all the things I think I know about this subject?"

Mark chuckled and put his arms around his father, giving him a brief squeeze. Nobody on Quelhagen would have been that demonstrative, but they weren't on Quelhagen now.

"Mark?" Lucius said. "If you like, I'll arrange for you to become a lieutenant in the Quelhagen Defense Forces. The force will certainly grow rapidly, and opportunities for promotion will be considerable." He grinned without humor. "For those officers who survive."

"All right, I'll talk to him," Yerby said in a loud voice. He lurched to his feet, looking around for his companions. "Let's go find Chink Ericsson, Lucius. You can help me bring him around. If we start having wars of our own on Greenwood, we'll never get shut of the Alliance!"

"We're coming," Mark said. In a softer voice he added, "Thanks, Dad, but my business is on Greenwood. And I guess Dittersdorf."