Leaping to the Stars
Page 26
"I don't want to do the whole college-level course, Charles. I just need you to understand that simple explanations let you think you're doing right, even when you're doing wrong."
"Like the way you think you're doing right by kidnapping me—?"
"Charles, if you had a sick child, would you give him the medicine he needs to cure him, even if it's very bad tasting medicine?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Of course, you would. And if you had a child who was sick and didn't know it, would you try to convince him he's sick, or would you just give him the medicine? This isn't about being right. It's about rescuing you from a machine that creates sick and evil memes. Under the influence of HARLIE, you've done terrible things, haven't you?"
"And all the terrible things that others have done to me, to my family, to my father—that was right? That was justified?"
"I'm sorry about your father, Charles. But two wrongs don't make a right. They make two wrongs. Where does the wrongness stop? It stops with each and every one of us taking a stand, and saying, 'If peace is to be, let it begin with me.' We have to give up the sickness of the godless memes. Now, I'm going to leave you alone for a while. I have some things to take care of. While I'm gone, I want you to do something for me. Will you do that?"
"What?"
"I want you to look at everything HARLIE has done—everything—and ask yourself if any of it is the action of an entity that serves a higher calling? Or is it the behavior of a selfish being, interested only in its own self-preservation? You need to look and see, son. You're the key. Has HARLIE been using you? If you are to be saved from his control, first you need to recognize that he has been controlling you. I'll be back soon."
I wanted to protest, but—
—Dr. Pettyjohn had asked the right question. The one question I'd been fighting with since HARLIE had turned invisible Luna inside out. Yeah, I'd been pleased that he'd gotten even with Alexei Krislov and all the others who'd done it to us—but he'd hurt a lot of innocent people at the same time. We'd left a trail of dead bodies and broken fortunes all the way back to Earth. We'd embarrassed people, used them, stripped them of respect, we'd done the same thing everybody else had done—we'd used HARLIE's power. And we'd convinced ourselves that it was right for us to do that because they were bad and we were good. And then we'd done a lot of very bad things. And it didn't matter that Dr. Pettyjohn and his people were doing something bad right now—what only mattered to me was whether or not J was doing bad.
I didn't want to be a bad person. I wanted to take a stand for something good. That was my commitment—
That was the problem. Everybody made sense. Dr. Pettyjohn, Douglas, Dr. Oberon, Professor Whitlaw, Mickey, Mom, Bev—and HARLIE too. HARLIE made more sense than anybody, because that's what he was supposed to do. But if all of our explanations were made-up ones, which one was the right one?
Maybe they were all right. Maybe they were all wrong. And maybe it didn't matter. Maybe right and wrong were concepts as arbitrary as right and left—Judge Griffith had asked that question and I'd never been able to answer it. And if I couldn't explain the difference between right and left, how could I tell the difference between right and wrong?
Maybe everything really was chaos. And if it was, then what? Why bother? If Invisible Hank isn't going to pat us on the head and say, "Good job," or kick us in the ass and say, "To Hell with you," then why bother?
Why—?
I already knew the answer to that. I didn't need HARLIE to coach me.
Because that's who we are. That's what we're up to. That's the stand. That's the commitment.
It took me a while to figure that out. My strength, whatever it was, came from inside me. Not from anybody else's explanation. That was nice to know—
—it was nice to know, but I was still webbed up and pasted to a wall.
I took a sip of water.
And thought.
I took another sip.
I started humming. Nothing big. Nothing important. Just something simple that would let me turn off my mind and float downstream. Something that would echo through the keel, in case anyone was listening. "Hey Jude, don't make it bad … "
MAKE IT BETTER
Then, nothing happened. Nothing happened for a long while.
The nice thing about "Hey Jude" is that you can sing it for twenty or thirty minutes. All those "Na Naaah Na-na-na-naaah's" can go on forever.
I kept expecting someone to open the hatch and tell me to shut up, but that didn't happen. So I sang louder. I thought about singing "Amazing Grace," but that would have been a little too obvious, under the circumstances. No, "Hey Jude" was just fine.
And then there were some funny noises outside, and some shouting that stopped abruptly, and then the hatch opened and Jeremy Lang swam in, followed by Karl Martin. "You can stop singing now," Karl said. He started freeing me from the webbing. Jeremy looked around the cabin, noting all the writing on the walls with an expression of sick distaste.
"HARLIE heard me—didn't he?" I asked.
"Nope, sorry." Karl kept on cutting.
"Huh?"
"Oh, he listened hard enough, but these folks aren't stupid. Somebody was playing scrambler noises—too complex for him to filter quickly."
"Then how—"
"Someone tipped us off," said Jeremy. "We'd have been here sooner, but we had to figure the best way in."
Karl freed my arms and I began stretching and flexing. "Are you all right?"
"Yeah, I think so. It wasn't as tight as last time. How'd you get in?"
"You're going to laugh—"
"Why?"
"We came in through the bathroom window," Karl said, blandly.
Jeremy explained: "One of the communal shower and restroom pods. One of the few places they didn't think to post guards. We stretched an access tube across, sealed it to the hull, and cut a hole."
Karl was right. I did laugh.
"Come on, let's go—"
There were two more crew members outside the cabin door. They had lethal guns. There were other people floating in the corridor, but they were unconscious. I smelled electricity. And globules of stinky stuff floated in the air—something nasty had happened—Douglas once told me that when you get stunned, you lose control of your bowels. Trent was floating here too. He looked unhurt but shocked. I saw him and I wanted to punch him in the face. I would have too, except Jeremy stopped me.
"He's the one who turned me over to them—!"
"He's also the one who tipped us off to where you were."
"Huh?"
"What you said to me, Charles—that's not true. I'm not like you."
"Oh." I didn't know how to answer that.
"You can talk about it later. Come on, let's go. Trent, you'll come with us—"
Jeremy and Karl took us up a side corridor to the shower-pod, where four more crewpeople waited with guns. We swam out the window and into the connecting tube. It was long and wiggling, it had been stretched hurriedly from the forward part of the ship, and parts of it were dark, and parts of looked kinked—but it took only a few minutes to reach the bridge.
Commander Boynton met us in the corridor. "Are you all right, son?"
I nodded.
"This is an ugly business," he said. Then he noticed Trent. "What's this—?"
"We thought he'd be safer with us—" said Jeremy.
Boynton looked exasperated. "Terrific. Just what I needed," he said. "Now they're going to accuse us of kidnapping."
"The kid could have been in danger, sir."
"I'm not arguing the point. Trent, you can return to your people as soon as it's safe." And then he remembered something else. "How did you get into the keel, son?"
Trent looked uncomfortable.
"Spit it out, son. We don't have a lot of time here."
"Um. We had an override code, sir."
Boynton's expression went dark. He glanced to Jeremy. "You were right. Go ahead. Change the codes. Again. Change them every fifteen minutes." He
took a breath, one of those exasperated sighs that meant he knew what decision he had to make. He looked to the other officers. "All right. What else is going to go wrong?"
"In addition to the web-guns, they have stun weapons," said Karl Martin.
"Eh?" That brought him up short. "Where'd they get them—?"
"They must have built them in the machine shop. They're not that hard to do, if you know what you're doing."
"We shouldn't have let them have access—"
"Belay that," Boynton said. "The damage is already done. Let's not beat ourselves up. We'll have plenty of time to do that later. At least, we know what we're up against now." He was already thinking toward the future. I had the sudden thought, this is what commitment looks like.
"I think we've got them neutralized," Damron reported. "The entire ship is locked down. And every crew member is armed and on station."
Boynton nodded, preoccupied. He was studying the display on his clipboard. A schematic of the ship. Parts of it were glowing red. After a moment, he switched on his communicator. "Pettyjohn, this is Boynton."
"Commander … ?" Pettyjohn's voice was weird. Calm. Like he was in control.
"We have the Dingillian boy."
"Yes, I know."
"We could charge you, you know—"
"We weren't going to hurt him—"
"That's irrelevant—"
Pettyjohn interrupted. "I assume there's another reason for this call?"
"Yes," said Boynton. "The situation is serious. We need to resolve this before it gets out of control."
"It is already out of control, Commander—"
"Only if you want it to be. Flag of truce?"
Pettyjohn paused. Then, "All right, Commander. We're not unreasonable people. We'll listen."
"Thank you. Bring your committee to the gym. Forty-five minutes. Agreed?"
"Agreed."
Boynton switched off. He looked around.
Damron spoke first. "You have grounds. You can charge them with mutiny."
"If I do that, it guarantees a riot. We don't have a lot of wiggle room here. If we lose control, everybody loses. These are very frightened people. They're no longer in the realm of rational thought. We've got to deal with their fears first."
He turned to Jeremy. "How's the security on the hyperstate?"
"Completely locked down. Has been since we arrived. As you ordered."
"That'll be their first target. If they can break even a single fluctuator, we're stuck here. Better implement Operation Starsuit too. Let's put a squad outside. Arm them with guns. Lethal guns. If any unauthorized person goes toward a fluctuator, put a hole in them."
Destroying a fluctuator would strand us here. The supplies aboard the Cascade could save New Revelation—at the expense of Outbeyond. I looked to Trent. I wanted to say something about people who do bad things for good reasons—
After that, things started happening very fast. Boynton ordered guards around the Command Module—a lot of colonists were being drafted for security duty—and then the rest of us hurried down to the gym.
CONFRONTATION
Doynton conferred privately with a few people before heading aft toward the gym. By the time we arrived, the gym was starting to fill up.
The entire ship was organized in teams of five to ten people. Every team leader was a de-facto council member. Even the kids' teams. That didn't mean that every team leader attended every council meeting; mostly the little stuff was handled by committees. Full council meetings were very rare, and only when the situation was really serious.
Like now.
Crewpeople were directing the Outbeyond Council members to one side of the webbing in the gym. A deliberately empty space on the other side was left for the Revelationists. J'mee and her Dad met us at the hatchway. He clapped me on the shoulder, as if that was all that needed to be said. J'mee hugged me and kissed my cheek. Then Damron pointed Cheifetz forward, and us kids up to an out-of-the-way corner near the top where Douglas and Mickey were stationed. "Be quiet, be inconspicuous," he told us.
J'mee's dad took his place near Boynton. He was in the second tier of the council and there was a lot of talk that he'd be moving up next time there were elections. Trent and J'mee and I scrunched in behind Douglas and Mickey, so we couldn't be seen by anyone on the Revelationist side. Douglas was here because he was the head of the team that organized the Moebius Races, which was part of the education and training team, and Mickey was head of one of the service teams. I saw Bev too. She was a farm manager. I tried waving to her, but she didn't see me.
Boynton didn't have time to wait for the rest of the council to arrive. He dove over to the end of the gym that nominally served as the "stage," and started talking almost immediately. "Everybody shut up. There's a lot you need to know, and not a lot of time to tell you. Yes, I've activated the reserves. And, yes, it's necessary. For those of you who are wondering—since before this voyage began, we've been aware of the possibility of an attempt to hijack this vessel. With the polycrisis on Earth and the resultant breakdown of support for the star colonies, we had no choice but to consider it a very real possibility. The failure of the Conway to deliver its promised support to New Revelation makes it an inevitability.
"That's why we've had a shadow program in place for over a year, training every physically able Outbeyond Colonist for precisely this kind of confrontation. We have good reason to believe that the Revelationists have also been training their own people. But we have them outnumbered, outgunned, and surrounded.
"Dr. Pettyjohn and his people are on their way here now. This will be our last chance to avoid bloodshed. If we cannot convince these folks that violence is not an answer, then it is certain that lives will be lost." He held up a hand. "No, we do not have time for discussion. This is not a negotiation, this is not a discussion, this is not an opportunity to share our feelings. This is an ugly confrontation, and we need to show them that we are absolutely united against them. Every single one of us.
"Yes, I know that many of you have not yet been fully briefed. That was my decision. I wanted to minimize the number of people who knew the details so we wouldn't risk compromising our preparations. After I deliver you all safely to Outbeyond, you may court-martial me for that. But right now, this minute—what I want and need from each and every one of you is that no matter what happens, no matter what you hear me say, I want you to go along with it as if you have been fully briefed, as if you have been kept fully informed every step of the way, and as if you have already voted enthusiastically to support me in whatever actions I deem necessary—
He didn't get to finish. The applause had started when he'd said "as if you have already voted" and kept building and building—
He held up his hands and angrily gestured for people to stop. "No matter what you hear, show no signs of surprise. Show no signs of disagreement with me. No matter what they say, do not speak up. Don't anyone try to be a peacemaker—I mean it, I'll have you shot for sedition. I might even do it myself, if that's what it takes to make the point." He patted the sidearm he wore.
"Yes, I know what you all learned in your dirtside schools about compromise and consensus and meeting each other halfway. This isn't one of those situations. There is no halfway. If they think we are not united in our resolve—"
"They're coming, Boss!" That was Martin, at the hatch.
Without missing a beat, Boynton continued, "—so then the first leprechaun says, 'Beggin' your pardon, Mother Superior, could ye be tellin' me how many leprechaun nuns you have in this convent—?" as Reverend Dr. Pettyjohn and the Revelationist Council came floating in. "Never mind, I'll finish the story later."
BREAKING THE NEWS
Doynton and O'Koshi and one other man I didn't recognize floated across the gym to greet Reverend Pettyjohn and his people. The Revelationists were not a happy-looking group and none of them offered to shake hands. I recognized Trent's dad and a few others. Their expressions ranged from grim to scowling.
While we waited, Douglas poked me. "Charles, look over there. Notice anything peculiar?" He pointed toward the entrance where Whitlaw was huddled with Damron and Lang. Every so often, one of them would glance up across our side of the room. And every so often, Damron would break away and whisper something to a nearby crew-member—and wasn't it awfully convenient that so many of them were so close by? And then shortly after that, the crew-member would then casually pull himself or herself across the orange webbing to go hang next to, or above, or behind someone.
For instance, why would Wanda Biggie, the sweetest lady in the world, want to perch next to Hilda Bigmouth, the most obnoxious woman aboard? Every meeting I'd ever seen her in, all she wanted to do was argue. For instance, if everybody else voted for spaghetti, she'd insist on lasagna. If everybody wanted lasagna, she'd argue for spaghetti. Win or lose, it didn't matter—she just wanted to argue. Nobody wanted to be in a meeting with Bigmouth, nobody wanted to be on a team with her. She didn't follow instructions. If you told her, "Go and do this job—" she wouldn't hear it as an instruction, she'd hear it as an invitation to an argument. She'd been sinking down so low on the efficiency ratings, that the only job left for her was ballast. Nobody knew how she'd qualified for emigration—she couldn't possibly have been like this in the interview process. Anyway, I wouldn't sit next to Bigmouth unless I had a stun-gun on my hip … Oh.
How interesting.
"I see you got it," Douglas said.
"Boynton is stacking the deck—?" I whispered.
Douglas nodded.
"Hey," I whispered. "How come you and Mickey aren't on security?"
"What makes you think we're not?" Douglas opened his jacket just enough to show me a stun-gun on his hip. Mickey too.