An Enemy of the State

by Wilson, F. Paul

And then there was the feeling that LaNague was maneuvering him toward something. It was all so subtle that he had no idea in which direction he was being nudged…but he felt the nudge. If LaNague was in such complete control of everything, why was he spending so much time with Broohnin? What did he have in mind for him?

  “Mr. LaNague awaits you at the flitter dock.”

  Broohnin spun sharply at the sound of the voice behind him. It was the same female guard who had led him out. “Something wrong?” she asked. He ignored her and began walking toward the dock.

  “You'll be taking the Penton & Blake back alone,” LaNague told him.

  Broohnin was immediately suspicious. “What about you?”

  “I'm taking the Adzel back to Tolive. I've business to attend to there before I return to Throne.”

  Both men sat staring out the view wall of the Bernardo de la Paz way station as the globe of Earth passed above them. LaNague had retrieved his tree from the quarantine section and sat with it on his lap. “And what am I to do until then?”

  “You'll be contacted shortly after your return.”

  “By Flinters?”

  LaNague smiled at Broohnin's concern, but it was not a jeering grimace. He seemed relaxed, at ease, almost likable. The thought of returning to his home world seemed to have changed him into a different person.

  “Flinters make up only a small part of my force on Throne. And they must stay out of sight.” He turned toward Broohnin and spoke in a low voice. “Have you ever heard of Robin Hood?”

  “Does he live in Primus City?”

  LaNague's laughter was gentle and full of good humor. “In a way, yes! You'll become intimate friends, I think. And if all goes well, people will come to think of you and he as one and the same.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?” Broohnin found this new, easygoing side of LaNague disconcerting, and harder to deal with than the dour, reserved, omniscient conspiratorial mastermind he had been traveling with since their departure from Throne. Which was real?

  “All in good time.” He rose to his feet. “My ship leaves before yours. Have a good trip. I'll see you again on Throne.”

  Broohnin watched the Tolivian stroll away with his damned tree under his arm. It was obvious that LaNague thought he was going to use him. That was okay. Broohnin would be quite happy to play along for a while and wait for his chance. He'd let LaNague live as long as he was useful. When the time was right, Broohnin would step in and take over again. And then he would settle with LaNague once and for all.

  PART TWO

  The Anarchist

  The Year of the Tiller

  CHAPTER TEN

  The world little knows or cares the storms through which you have had to pass. It asks only if you brought the ship safely to port.

  Joseph Conrad

  The first time had been a frantic headlong dive to ease a mutual hunger of desperate dimensions, begun and ended so quickly that it had already become a dim memory. The second was more exploratory, a fruitful search for familiar responses, familiar patterns of give and take. And the third was a loving, leisurely welcome home that left them both drained and content.

  “Been too long, Peter,” Mora said.

  “Much.”

  They huddled in deep-breathing silence for a while, then Peter spoke. “You haven't asked me about the trip.”

  “I know. I thought it could wait.”

  “Afraid we'd fight again?”

  Peter could feel her head nodding in the dark next to him. “I was sure of it. With the new year beginning, I wanted us to enter it in arms instead of at arms.”

  He smiled and held his wife closer. “Well, it's here and so are we. And this is the only way to start a new year.”

  “You were gone when the Year of the Tortoise began. That was a lonely time. And you won't be here for the Year of the Malak either.”

  “But I'm here now and we can discuss the rest in the morning. No talk now.”

  Mora fell asleep first, her head on his shoulder. Peter, despite his fatigue, lay awake awhile longer, listening to the rumble of the storm-whipped surf outside. It was so good to be home. So comfortable. So safe. He knew he could not bring himself to leave again. Let someone else take care of things on Throne from now on. He'd had enough. Next Year Day and every other day in between would find him here in his little house on the dunes. Then the dream would stop.

  That decision made, he drifted off to sleep.

  The first one was a woman. She slipped through the open bedroom door and slinked across the room toward the bed, a large cloth-wrapped bundle in her arms. After peering carefully at his face to be sure that it was him, her eyes lit with maniacal rage and she dumped the contents of her bundle over him. Thousands of orange and white Imperial mark notes fell like a poisonous snow. She turned and called soundlessly over her shoulder, and soon a steady stream of strangers trailed through the door, all with hate-filled eyes, all with bundles and bushels of mark notes that they emptied over him. He could only move his head back and forth. Mora was gone. He had been left alone to face this silent, murderous crowd. And still they came, and the pile of mark notes covered his face, and he could no longer breathe, and he was dying, dying, suffocated by Imperial marks…

  Peter awoke in a sitting position, drenched with sweat. It had happened again. The dream had pursued him across half of Occupied Space. That did it. He was through.

  “COME on, DADDY! Hurry, please!”

  Children, he thought, trudging up the celadon dune in the wake of his seven-year-old daughter. You go away for a year and a half and you don't recognize them when you come back, they've grown so. And they're a little shy with you at first. But by the next day, they treat you like you were never away.

  “I'm coming, Laina.” She stood at the top of the dune, slim and sleek and straight and fair, staring seaward, her blond hair streaming in the stiff onshore breeze. Something began to squeeze his larynx and knot the muscles of his jaw as he watched her. She's growing up without me. He continued up the dune, not daring to stop.

  The wind slapped at him when he reached the top. The weather did nothing to lighten his mood…one of those gray days with a slippery slate sky dissolving into a molten lead sea, small white clouds like steam obscuring the junction. Another two steps and he could see the beach: Laina hadn't been exaggerating.

  “Daddy, it's really a malak, isn't it?”

  “So it is!” Peter muttered, staring at the huge blunt-headed mass of fish flesh, inert and lifeless on the sand near the high water mark. “Last time this happened was when I was about your age. Must be at least thirty meters long! Let's go down for a closer look.”

  As Laina leaped to run down the dune, Peter scooped her up and swung her to her shoulders, her bare legs straddling the back of his neck. She liked to ride up there—at least she had before he left—and he liked the contact. Needed it.

  Sea wind buffeted their ears and salt mist stung their eyes as they approached the decaying form.

  “A sieve malak, leviathan class,” he told her, then sniffed the air. “And starting to stink already. Before they were all killed off, there used to be creatures like this on Earth called baleen whales. But whales weren't fish. Our malaks are true fish.”

  Laina was almost speechless with awe at the immensity of the creature. “It's so big! What killed it?”

  “Could've died of old age out at sea and drifted in, but I don't see much evidence of the scavengers having been at it. Probably got confused by the storm last night and wound up beached. I read somewhere that all the insides get crushed when a malak is beached…killed by its own weight.”

  “Must eat a whole lotta other fish to make it grow so big.”

  “Actually it doesn't eat other fish at all.” He walked her closer to the huge mouth that split the head, their approach stirring up a flight of scale-winged keendars from their feast on the remains. “See those big plates of hairy bone along the upper jaw…looks like a comb? That's the sieve. As they swim alon
g, these malaks strain sea water through their sieve and eat all the tiny animals they trap in the hairs. Mostly it's stuff called plankton.”

  He let Laina down on the sand so she could run up for a closer look. She wasn't long—the stench from the cavernous maw was too strong to allow a leisurely inspection.

  “What's plankton?” she asked as she returned to his side. “I never heard of that before.”

  “Let's go back up on the dune where the smell isn't so bad and I'll tell you all about it.”

  Hand in hand they plodded through the damp, yielding blue granules to a point overlooking the waterline, yet beyond the carcass's fulsome stench, and watched the screaming, circling keendars for a quiet moment.

  “Still interested in plankton?” Receiving a nod, Peter spoke in a slow, almost reminiscent manner, gearing his explanation to a child's mind, yet keeping it up at a level where Laina would have to reach a bit.

  “Plankton is the basic food of the sea. It's billions of tiny little creatures, some plants, some animals, but all very, very tiny. They gather in huge batches out at sea, some just drifting others wiggling a little whip-like arm called a flagellum to push them here and there.

  “All they really do is live and die and provide food for most of the ocean. They probably think they know just where they're going, never realizing that all the time the entire plankton patch is being pushed about at the whim of wind and current. They get gobbled up by huge sieve malaks that can't see what they're eating, and the plankton don't even know they've been eaten till it's over and done with.”

  “Poor plankton!” Laina said, concern showing in her face.

  “Oh, they're happy in their own way, I suppose. And while the malaks are cutting huge swaths out of their ranks, they just go on whipping the old flagella about and having a grand time. Even if you tried to tell them of the malaks and other sea creatures that constantly feed off them, they wouldn't believe you.”

  “How come you know so much about plankton?”

  “I've studied it up close,” Peter said, thoughts of Earth flashing through his mind.

  Laina eyed the long baleen combs on the malak's jaw. “Glad I'm not a plankton.”

  “If I have my way,” Peter said, putting his arm protectively around his daughter, “you never will be.” He stood up and gave the inert leviathan one last look. “But it's nice to know that malaks die, too. Let's go. Your mother'll have the morning soup ready and we don't want cold soup.”

  Backs to the ocean, they walked along the blue dune toward the house, wind spasms allowing a murmur or two of small talk to drift back to the beach where keendars were crying the sound that had given them their name and pecking morsels from the malak's landward eye, glazed and forever sightless.

  “YOU'RE GOING BACK, aren't you,” Mora said as they sat in the Ancestor Grove under Peter's great-grandfather tree. He hadn't told her of his pre-dawn resolution to stay, and was glad. The light of day quickly revealed the many flaws in plans that had seemed so simple and forthright in the darkness. He had to go back. There was no other way.

  “I must.” Leaning against the tree, a much larger version of Pierrot, gave him the strength to say it. On the day of his great-grandfather's death, a hole had been dug into the root ball of this tree and the coffinless remains interred there. Throughout the remainder of the following year, the tree had absorbed nutrients from the decomposing body, incorporating them into itself, growing taller on the unique organic fertilizer. The seeds that formed on the tree's branches the following spring were saved until the birth of the next LaNague child. And on that day, the day of Peter LaNague's birth, two of those seeds were planted—one in the Ancestor Grove, and one in an earthenware pot that would remain cribside as the child grew.

  The Tolivian mimosa, it had been learned, possessed a unique ability to imprint on a human being. A seedling—called a misho—in constant exposure to a growing child will become attuned to that particular child, sensitive to and reflective of his or her moods. The art of branch and root pruning, necessary to limit the tree's size, is carefully taught as the child grows. Raising a child with a personal misho was a common practice on Tolive, but hardly universal. Mora's family considered it a silly custom and so she was never given her own tree, and now could never have one since codevelopment was necessary for imprinting. She could never understand the indefinable bond between her husband and Pierrot, nor the growing bond between Laina and her own misho, but she could see that it seemed to add an extra dimension to each of them and felt poorer for never having experienced it herself.

  Peter looked at his wife in the midday light. She hadn't changed, not in the least. The deep, shining, earthy brown of her hair caught the gold of the Tolivian sun and flung it back. The simple shift she wore did little to hide the mature curves enclosed within. She appeared at ease as she reclined against him, but he knew that was a façade.

  “The gloves ready?” he asked, making small talk.

  “A hundred pairs. They've been ready for a long time.” She looked away as she spoke.

  “And the coins?”

  “Being minted as fast as possible. But you know that.”

  Peter nodded silently. He knew. He had seen the reports around the house.

  Mora was a supervisor at the mint. The star-in-the-ohm design was hers, in fact.

  “You could still get out of it,” she said abruptly, twisting toward him. “I could. But would you want to live with me if I did?”

  “Yes!”

  “I don't think I'd be good company.”

  “I don't care. You know how I feel. This revolution is all a huge mistake. We should just sit back and let them all rot. We've no obligation to them. They built the fire—let them burn!” Mora was not alone in her opinion; quite a few Tolivians were uncomfortable with the idea of fomenting a revolution.

  “But we'll burn, too, Mora. And you know that. We've been over this a thousand times, at least. When the Imperium economy crumbles—and it's already started to—they'll go looking for ways to bolster the mark. The only way for a bankrupt economy to do that is to find a huge new market, or to confiscate a hoard of gold and silver and use it to make its currency good again. Tolive is known to be the largest hoarder of precious metals in Occupied Space. They'll come to us and they won't be asking, they'll be demanding—with the full force of the Imperial Guard ready to back up any threat they care to make.”

  “With Flint on our side we could hold them off.” Mora said eagerly. “And then the Imperium will fall apart on its own. All we have to do is hold them off long enough!”

  “And then what? With the Imperium gone, Earth will step in and take over the out-worlds without a single energy bolt being fired. With everything in chaos, Earth will act as if it's doing everyone a favor. But this time they'll make sure none of the out-worlds gets free again. This time they'll not allow maverick planets like Tolive and Flint to remain aloof. And with our own resources already drained by a drawn-out battle with the Imperium, we'll have no chance at all against the forces Earth will array against us. There must be a revolution now if there's to be a free Tolive for Laina.”

  “You don't know that Earth'll take us over!” Mora said, warming to their habitual argument. “You want to cut all the out-worlds free of the Imperium so they can go their own ways. But do you have the right to do that? Do you have the right to cut people free like that? A lot of them won't want it, you know. A lot of people are scared to death of freedom. They want somebody hanging over them all the time, wiping their noses when they're sad, paddling their rumps when they diverge from the norm.”

  “They can have it, if they wish! They can set up their own little authoritarian enclaves and live that way if it pleases them. I don't care. Just don't include me, my family, my planet, or anybody else who thinks that's no way to live! We have a right to try to preserve a place for the safety and growth of the people, ideas, and things we value!”

  Despite her anguish, Mora could not bring herself to disagree with him
then, for she believed what he believed, and valued what he valued. Tears came to her eyes as she pounded her small fists futilely against the ground at the base of the tree.

  “But it doesn't have to be you! Somebody else can go! It doesn't have to be you!”

  Wrapping his arms around her, Peter held her close, his lips to her ear, aching to tell her what she wanted to hear, but unable to. “It has to be me. The Charter, the Sedition Trust, they've all been LaNague family projects for generations. And it so happens that the destruction of the Imperium, which we all knew would someday be necessary, has fallen to me.”

  He rose and pulled her gently to her feet, keeping his arm around her. “I'll walk you home. Then I've got to go see the Trustees.”

  Mora was quiet for a while as they walked through the sun-dappled tranquillity of the Ancestor Grove. Then: “You should stop by the Ama Cooperative on your way to the Trustees. Adrynna's been sick.”

  Sudden fear jolted him. “She's dying?”

  “No. She recovered. But still, she's old and who knows…? She may not be here when you get back.”

  “I'll stop in first thing this afternoon.”

  PETER WAS CONSISTENTLY struck by the smallness of the Ama Cooperative whenever he visited it, probably because all his impressions of the asymmetrical collection of squat buildings where the teachers of Kyfho dwelt were gathered during his childhood. He was announced via intercom from the courtyard and granted immediate entry. Everyone knew who he was and knew his time on the planet was short. He found his ama, his lifelong intellectual guide and philosophical mentor, in her room, gazing out the window from her low chair.

  “Good day, Ama Adrynna,” he said from the doorway.

  She swiveled at the sound of his voice, squinting in his direction. “Come into the light where I can have a good look at you.” Peter obliged, moving toward the window, where he squatted on his haunches next to her. She smiled, cocking her head left, then right. “So it's you after all. You've come to say good-by to your old ama.”