Gabrel met her eyes with a penetrating stare. “You didn’t do anything at all to the printer, did you?”
Isovel felt too much at a disadvantage to lie. “No.”
“You calculated that it would mess up production just as much if you made us afraid you had done something?”
“Not as much,” Isovel admitted. “But…I couldn’t think of anything but overheating it to failure and you know what that would have done. I only wanted to damage the machine, not people.”
“You see, Patrik? The lady’s a very principled Harmonica. She eschews violence.”
After that spectacular failure Isovel applied herself to the problem of escape. If she couldn’t stop the terrorists from making weapons, she must at least warn the army that they’d not be up against helpless unarmed civilians, but facing blaster fire in a territory where any rock or tree could conceal an armed enemy. The problem wasn’t just slipping away; it was having her departure go unnoticed until she was safely distant. She knew two ways to the river; what if she left an obvious trail along one path and took the other one?
An overheard scrap of conversation added a third element to the problem. It had been one of the days when the glowering Jesse had seemed especially disturbed by her presence. Jesse was never assigned to guard her, but on that day he’d had nothing to do but wait for a batch of blasters to be prepared for delivery. Isovel felt that everywhere she looked she saw his burning eyes and silently moving lips. Once, when she had been trying to follow a novel on Gabrel’s antiquated reader for over an hour, constantly distracted by finding Jesse’s eyes on her every time she looked up, she heard Ravi cautioning him.
“Don’t worry about the Harmonica,” Ravi had said. “She’s Gabrel’s- “
“Property. I know,” Jesse growled.
“I was going to say, problem. But either way, it’s not your place to interfere.”
“Not unless I catch her up to something,” Jesse conceded.
“Even then. Tell me, or tell Gabrel. I think it would be… very unwise to take it upon yourself to deal with her. Remember, we need her in good condition when we sell her back.”
“We don’t need that complication.”
“That’s Gabrel’s call to make. Not mine, and not yours.”
Isovel recalled that Gabrel had never once told Jesse to guard her closely watched trips to the creek, and told herself that he was completely in control here and she had nothing to fear from anyone under his command. But Jesse continued to stare at her, and she began imagining that she could tell when he was near by the feeling of caterpillars creeping over her skin.
On a rare evening when Gabrel actually took a moment of leisure to sit with her again, she asked him about Jesse.
“He seems… different from the rest of you.” Not all there? Paranoid schizophrenic? Missing a control chip? Hmm, better stick with “different.”
Gabrel had been squatting on his good leg with the bad one straight out in front of him. Now he shifted position and sighed. After a pause so long that Isovel had almost given up waiting for a reply, he said, “Do you ever wonder why so many of us are running around the mountains and raiding your bases in the plains?”
“Well –” Isovel faltered. “I gather you have some issues with the Governor.”
“Three years ago you might have described it that way. All we asked for was permission to trade with other worlds directly instead of passing everything through a bureaucracy on Harmony that skimmed off most of the profits.”
“Trade! What do you have to trade?”
Gabrel’s grin was… not nice. “I see our situation has not been on the top of Harmony’s newscasts. Why am I not surprised?” He shifted again, turning to face her. “What do we have to trade? Mostly ideas and innovation. When you think about it, those are the best interplanetary trade goods. Ideas take up even less space than sasena extract and are potentially worth more.”
“Umm. It’s a little hard for me to picture a bunch of men who almost melted their printer as part of a sophisticated, high-tech society.”
“We don’t have a lot of hands-on experience,” Gabrel admitted. “Harmony restricts the tech we can import. But they’ve been kind enough to export their brightest people.”
“Criminals?”
“I keep telling you, they don’t send violent criminals here. This continent is supposed to isolate anybody with ideas that the Committee finds threatening. Once you redefine treason to include having unapproved thoughts, well, you have an awful lot of traitors. And you tend to sweep up anybody who thinks at all.”
“And your thoughts are so valuable?”
“Harmony certainly must think so, considering how they tax them. This whole mess started when we decided not to sell our latest idea unless we got to keep more of the profits.”
“And what was this brilliant idea?”
“We’ve found a way to make flitters useable in the mountains.”
“Oh!” Isovel had known, as a matter of theory, that flitters and floats operated partially by sensing the ground directly beneath them. That was fine for flat places like Harmony, but she could see that there would be a problem in this province, where – as Patrik complained – what passed for “ground” was frequently vertical. If a flitter didn’t crash on encountering its first mountain, it would become useless shortly thereafter, because it would sink to two feet above ground in the first valley, would “read” cliffs as the walls of buildings, and would have no way to rise again.
“That would be… very valuable in some regions.”
“Valuable! It would transform our economy. This district is the only part of the continent that naturally has water. We’ve done a lot of primitive engineering to get the water passing through plains farms before it reaches the sea, and we’ve paid a lot more for desalinating nano tech along the coast. But if the mountains were opened up with decent transport, we could – oh, start serious mining, do a lot more small hydroelectric projects for the villages, bring in fertilizer – hell, we could bring in dirt and give every village a set of beautifully terraced plots so they could make the most of their wealth of water.”
“Well, why haven’t you done that?”
Some of the energy went out of Gabrel’s voice. “We don’t have the manufacturing base to do massive retrofits. We were going to license the plans to some off-planet mining company and take part of the licensing fee in retrofitted flitters. The catch is, Harmony taxes our sales progressively – the more we get for a sale, the higher percentage of tax we pay. The flitter project would put us into the 95 percent bracket. That’s when we decided to hold on to it until we could negotiate a better tax deal.”
“This is what you call negotiating? Hiding out in the mountains and making raids on our positions in the plains?”
“No.” Gabrel sounded very tired. “We call this surviving. Your government did not respond well to our decision. The first –”
But somebody was calling him. Gabrel rose stiffly to his feet and excused himself. “We’ll talk about the war later. Who knows, by the next time I have a free hour the story might have a happy ending!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Isovel decided it was time to start actively preparing for an escape. She had no excuse to explore along the cable line, but she could learn her way to the creek and back. She started dawdling on her escorted visits, noting landmarks, asking more questions about the topography. Not that it was easy to find landmarks in this random wilderness! She thought wistfully about maps. And street signs. And then she made a point of memorizing the clusters of summer sunstaff that bloomed sporadically along the way to the creek wherever they could find a patch of light.
“It’s no good you trying to learn the route by following sunstaff flowers,” Amari told her one day when she had dawdled more than usual.
Isovel gave him her best wide-eyed innocent look. “Oh, I was just admiring the flowers. Could I pick some to take back with us, do you think?”
“You might as well;
they’ll shed their blossoms in a few days anyway, and then they won’t look any more interesting than any other weed along here.” Amari smirked at her.
That afternoon she collected white limestone chips from the base of the cliff behind the cave, and during the night she stretched out a narrow pocket on the side of her tunic to hold the tiny rocks.
The trail of white chips against the brown carpet of fallen needles didn’t show up as clearly as she’d expected. Her escorts this time were Ravi and Nikos, and Ravi was short-sighted. But Nikos fell behind on the return trip, and when they were back at the cave he offered her a hat full of limestone chips. “Your rock collection, I believe.”
Isovel tried to look chagrined.
Excellent. When I do disappear, they’ll be sure I headed for the creek. She didn’t want to arouse competing suspicions by exploring the area where the cable left the clearing, so in some ways she’d be going blind. But how hard could it be to follow a power cable?
Now all she needed was an opportunity to get away without being followed immediately. Isovel sat cross-legged at the shady edge of the clearing and fingered her “rock collection,” while she thought about that problem. Fake an illness? She scattered her handful of white chips on the hard-packed dirt just beyond the grass. No. At best they wouldn’t believe her, at worst they’d ask Jesse to diagnose… Isovel scooped up a cluster of five chips and dropped them into the palm of her left hand. If these guys would just behave like the rabble she’d called them, it would be much easier; they’d get roaring drunk on that mountain liquor two or three times a week and she’d have plenty of chances to slip away.
Three chips had fallen in a rough triangular shape; she captured those next. Perhaps she could make a bundle of, oh, spare blankets and stuff to occupy “her” niche in the cave, cover it all with a blanket and just slip in among the needle trees and stay quietly out of sight until everybody was asleep. She captured the remaining four chips in two grabs.
All right, that seemed to be the best of her lousy options. She could improve her chances a bit by feigning a headache and announcing that she was going to sleep early. She’d still have to make the beginning of her escape in the dark, but there was a good moon all this week. Anyway, following a cable didn’t exactly require superb nature skills. Isovel scattered the chips and began scooping them up again.
“I can’t decide whether you’re telling fortunes or playing catch-stone.” Gabrel settled down beside her with only a slight hesitation as his bad knee took some weight. It was finally getting better.
“How would you know about catch-stone? Do boys play that here?”
“I have sisters,” Gabrel reminded her. “Many sisters. At times, I felt I had a superfluity of sisters. They didn’t make me play catch-stone, but I got drafted often enough to turn a rope for their skipping games. As I recall, though,” he frowned at the chips which she was scattering again, “there was a bouncing ball involved in catch-stone. Didn’t you have to pick up the rocks while the ball was in the air?”
“That’s the classic form of the game,” Isovel agreed. “Not having a little red ball, I’ve developed a variant. The goal here is to pick up all the rocks with fewer scoops than I used last time.”
“And they told me Harmonicas aren’t creative!”
Isovel scowled at him. “They told me Colonials were backward, and so far I haven’t seen much to contradict that. Only tall tales about magical flitters.”
“Well, that’s how Harmony likes to think of us, and it’s not my job to disillusion them. I do wonder occasionally how they reconcile our ‘backwardness’ with the taxes they collect for every idea or design we sell, but it’s not my problem. Anyway, nearly everything your people think is wrong.”
“That’s rather a sweeping statement.”
“Yes, I might not have made it if I hadn’t had the benefit of your company for the last week. But even apart from your misconceptions –” Gabrel’s grin flashed white against his shadowed face – “the official misapprehensions are truly amazing. Your Central Committee think they don’t permit us to build research labs, and that they censor our university and medical school to teach only the basic knowledge that support workers need.”
“That’s not true!”
“Well, no, it isn’t, but it saves us a lot of interference to let your government think that.”
“No, I mean – we would never, ever stand in the way of anybody acquiring knowledge. That’s just wrong!”
“Oh? Remind me why you aren’t taking advanced applied math classes?”
“That’s different. It’s, it’s a matter of deciding how individual skills and talents can best be utilized for the good of the whole society.”
“I see. And who decides? Not you, evidently.”
“The Bureau for Labor assigns positions,” Isovel said stiffly. “It’s necessary to keep society properly balanced: they calculate how many workers we need in each field, and they think ahead to our future needs and educate people to serve those needs. Even if I’m not personally happy with how that worked out in my case, I’m also not stupid enough to think I can do the Bureau’s job for them.”
“What if all you had to do was to figure out how you personally could best use your skills, and what you needed to study? What if everybody did that for themselves?”
“It would be a disaster,” Isovel said. “If you let people choose for themselves, how can you be sure they’ll do what’s best for the community? They don’t have the overview the Central Committee has.”
“Were your wishes bad for the community?” Somehow Gabrel seemed to be closer, invading her space. If she leaned sideways just a bit her head would be on his shoulder. Why would I even think about that? Isovel shifted her own position slightly to keep more space between them. “Wouldn’t you be more use to Harmony as a tech designer than as a housekeeper? They can’t have many people as bright as you; it’s wasteful to keep you in a position any moron could fill.”
Isovel could feel her face burning. Oh, great, she was probably showing those stupid red spots on her cheeks that signaled to everybody when she was upset. She tried to channel her last crêche-mistress. Don’t think about what you want, think about what the community needs. “If you’d ever had to make up a menu for a seven-course formal dinner, and arrange the seating for a couple dozen high committee members who like to pretend everyone’s equal while counting their prestige points jealously, you might not think it was so easy. Anyway, we’re not talking about me.”
“I am.”
“Only because you changed the subject. I wanted to know about Jesse. He… makes me nervous.”
“He makes me nervous,” Gabrel said. “But I’ve got him under control… I think. It’s not always easy, commanding someone ten years your senior.”
Isovel blinked. “He doesn’t look as if he’s nearly forty.”
“Of course not, he’s….” Gabrel stopped whatever he’d been about to say and backpedaled. “Mountain air, it’s marvelously rejuvenating, don’t you know? By the time you see your father he’ll accuse us of substituting an ingenue straight out of finishing crêche for you.” He looked at her with a perfect imitation of Patrik’s sad-puppy eyes. “I’m counting on you to speak up in our favor and save us from the firing squad.”
Isovel tried not to laugh. “You’re changing the subject again!”
“Right. Look, I don’t know what you’ve been told about the war, but you need a bit of background before I can explain Jesse. Like I said, it started when our previous governor, Danyel Aberforss, got tired of forwarding our requests for tax relief and took ship for Harmony to plead our case in person.”
“I thought your governors were all assigned from Harmony?”
“Oh, Danyel was a Harmonica all right. He was just an unusually open-minded one, and he’d been stationed on this continent for nearly twenty years. He didn’t go so far as supporting our request for a needleport so we could trade directly, but he did think Harmony taxed our exports ex
cessively.”
Isovel noticed that he was using the past tense. “What happened to him?”
Gabrel sighed and his shoulders slumped. “We don’t know exactly. The deportees who came out on the same ship as his replacement said he’d been diagnosed as mentally ill and was, presumably, locked up in an asylum somewhere. Anyway.” He straightened. “Our Governor Aberforss, who was as well liked as any Harmonica could be, disappeared, and his replacement – that would be Governor Serman, if you’re keeping track – announced on his first day that he had been sent to teach us upstart colonials our place and he’d brought a special squad of peace officers to enforce his rules.
“He brought back antique punishments like public flogging and hanging – good thing he doesn’t know much history, he’d love burning at the stake but he’s not imaginative enough to think of it on his own. He made new laws. Speaking against the state became a flogging offense; gathering with others to do so, a hanging offense; withholding taxes meant the destruction of an entire village. And he had his own accountants inventing laws about what taxes everybody owed. Excuse me, not laws, only your own elected parliament in Harmony City can pass laws; these went out as Governor’s Special Orders.
“It took nearly a year of this treatment before some of us decided that we’d rather die fighting than be worn down daily by his oppressive policies. I understand that during that year Serman remitted record amounts of taxes and became something of a hero in Harmony.”
Isovel nodded slowly. “That much is true, anyway. The newsers were always singing his praises. And there were special distributions of luxury goods, supposedly sharing out the surplus from the tax payments. A lot of High Committee women were annoyed: they didn’t like it that suddenly anybody could afford to dress in smartcloth. So then the Committee announced that they were developing an adaptive color-changing smartcloth that would be very expensive, and that made them happy. Some of the girls I went to finishing crêche with took to wearing blueflowers in their hair because they match Wilyam Serman’s eyes. They even changed the name; instead of blueflowers, they’re now called Sweet Wilyams.”
Insurgents (Harmony Book 1) Page 8
