Gabrel shook his head. “You people have no gift for names. You make everything sound as appealing as a shopping list. I’m surprised you don’t just number your cities and natural landmarks. City 1, City 2…”
Isobel choked back a laugh. “Please don’t suggest that to the Central Committee. They might think it was a brilliant idea!”
“I see. But however delightful it is to wander through this garden of bright images, are you not forgetting a subject of almost equal importance?”
“What?”
“Ah, you have not encountered Kai Lung. Or even Dorothy Sayers. Well, there’ll be plenty of time to improve your education…. Tell me more about this dashing rebel officer to whom you lost your heart.”
He would have been in time to overhear that line. Naturally. Isovel tried for a light tinkling laugh. It didn’t quite come off. “If you were listening, you also know that I’m shallow and a desperate flirt. I may have relieved the boredom of being a hostage with a light flirtation, but evidently the attraction – on both sides – was not strong enough to survive a few months’ separation.”
“Oh?”
“The man said he would come for me. But the one time that he came, he talked to my father about military matters and didn’t even speak to me – not even to say good-bye.”
“Oh, for the Black Gods’ sake, Izzy. I hinted all over the place until I sounded a complete fool, but your father refused to hear the hints. And I could hardly come right out and request permission to see you. Remember, I was on the wrong side then.”
“Aren’t you still on the wrong side?”
Gabrel waved a hand. “Eh, it’s all over but the details. Hostilities have already ceased, Harmony is going to recognize us as an independent state, and in the future there will be only one side – the side of peace.”
“You’re very confident.”
“About that, yes. About other things… I asked once if you would consider staying in Esilia, but my timing was abominable. Of course you had to return to your father, it was part of the treaty. But now… Have you had time to give the matter any thought?”
“Until today I didn’t know I needed to! You’d disappeared!”
“I too had duties.” Uninvited, he took a seat beside her on the couch. Much closer than necessary; it was a generously built piece of furniture. He didn’t have to crowd against her, to stretch out one lean leg to touch hers all the way down, to put one arm around her shoulders.
It was extraordinarily comfortable. Her traitor body felt that it had come home at last, that ‘home’ was wherever Gabrel happened to be. Isovel put out of her mind the considerations the Political Officer had dinned into her and tried to simply enjoy the moment.
“There is really a lot to be said for staying in Esilia,” Gabrel told her. “For one thing, here you could take all the applied math and science courses you liked – had you thought about that? And don’t you think it would be exhilarating to see a new nation being built?”
“I think,” Isovel said honestly, “that building a nation would involve a lot of very long meetings and a lot of you working 15 hours a day and coming home exhausted.”
“Ah, but if I had somebody to come home to I wouldn’t work such long hours.”
“I don’t believe that for a moment,” Isovel said, “any more than I believe a bunch of Esilians can stop arguing long enough to achieve harmony.”
“Yes, well, there are other ways to proceed besides sitting in meetings until everybody has been browbeaten into supporting the chairman’s views. Like winning the argument.” He dipped his head and kissed her lightly on the lips. “Between two people, though, I’ll admit that consensus is highly desirable.” His lips grazed her jaw line and moved on to her neck. “I am firmly of the opinion that you should stay in Esilia. What do you think?”
“I can’t think at all when you’re doing that!” She pushed his head away from her collarbone before he could venture farther.
And, discord it, now she remembered all of Political Officer Shiflet’s lectures.
“I still have responsibilities here. My father –”
“Esilians,” Gabrel said, “still have the quaint belief that it’s for the parent to take care of the child, not vice versa.”
“Oh, hush up. You don’t understand: it’s all political. Harmony may be tired of war, but that doesn’t mean they’re happy about the prospect of withdrawing their troops and having spent so much for no gain.” When did Harmony become they? “They will be looking for a scapegoat to blame, and one of the easy choices will be to blame my father for incompetence and claim that it was only his blunders that made it impossible to carry on with the war. When we get home, Shiflet says he’ll be that close,” she held up her thumb and forefinger, all but touching, “to a show trial and public disgrace. He can’t survive the public relations disaster of his daughter staying in Esilia and, worse, marrying a rebel leader. Half the newsers will say I rejected him for his bumbling misconduct and the other half will say it proves that he was colluding with the enemy from the beginning.”
“That’s – ah – a very quick political analysis.”
“The new Political Officer has been lecturing me for weeks. After Andrus briefed him, he was certain you were going to come to Colony City and try to seduce me. Of course I told him not to worry, you’d forgotten all about me.”
“You couldn’t have said I was too honorable to seduce you?”
“Oh, shut up.” Isovel took his face between her hands and kissed him. “I have to go back to Harmony with Daddy.” She buried her own face in the crook of his neck. “I have to be seen to be standing by him in this moment of crisis,” she said into his shoulder. “It’s my duty.” His shirt would blot up the tears welling out of her eyes.
Gabrel sighed deeply. “I wish you really were a shallow, frivolous girl living for the moment. You’d be much easier to manage.”
“You wouldn’t love me if I were that girl.”
Gabrel took hold of her shoulders and forced her up to face him. “So you do understand that I love you?”
Isovel nodded and bit her lower lip to keep it from trembling.
“And I would love you wherever we met and whatever you were doing. If you were a flibberty-gibbet of a teenager or a scolding spinster, you would still be my only love.” He lifted the mass of her hair with one hand. “My quarrelsome, difficult, insanely loyal love. Well, if you must return to Harmony…”
“In a year or two the situation might not be so tense,” Isobel offered. “I might be able – of course it’s not fair to you, asking you to wait on something you can’t control.”
“Yes,” Gabrel said, sounding distant already. “I do prefer things I can control. So here’s a promise: I will come for you. If you can wait.”
“But you can’t –”
He stopped her mouth with a kiss. “You would be amazed at what I can do. Remember, you’re talking to the man who organized a cooperative action between the insurgents and the army that was supposed to put them down. And that was when we were still at war. Once peace has been agreed upon, there will be much more scope for creativity.” He paused. “It may take a little while. We have a lot of work to do. But in the meantime… well. I won’t ask you to have faith in me. But promise that you won’t get married without giving me a chance to forbid the banns.”
Isobel sniffed and tried to chuckle. “You haven’t got much to worry about.”
“Oh? Because no other man could possibly attract you, now that you’ve known me?”
Damn the man. He was manipulating her into laughing. “I’m not going to build up your ego that much! I just don’t imagine that somebody who’s been in such notorious fixes, from sleeping with a private to staying all alone with a group of desperate rebels and – it really doesn’t bear thinking about, dear, what they might have done to her!” She ended with a pretty good imitation of a society matron gossiping to a crony. “I doubt I’ll be besieged with suitors!”
“I wi
sh I shared your confidence,” Gabrel said. “I wish I could persuade you not to show anyone your profile, or look at a man with your very fine eyes, or let them glimpse your glorious hair. Oh, and if you could wear dowdy, ill-fitting outfits, that would help.”
“Idiot. You can’t make smartcloth fit badly.”
“You could try!”
And he was off while she was laughing, not even waiting for a last kiss.
Which would probably, despite all his castles in the air, be the last time she ever kissed him.
And she’d lost out on it because the wretched man had made her laugh.
***
“Your victorious forces, eh?”
Gabrel and Colonel Travis were pacing back and forth in the small garden attached to the building that had been requisitioned for the Esilians, on the theory that open air and movement would thwart the bugs with which the house was probably riddled.
The colonel smiled. “We don’t need to get into where they are, or how long it might take me to collect them. No point confusing the Harmonicas with irrelevant details, eh?”
“None at all.”
“Sadly, it will take more than the stick to get them to a treaty. We need to apply the carrot as well. I tried to explain that both our countries would be richer if Esilia were a free and independent trading partner. They seem impervious to that logic. Can they really not get that we’ll will be much more inventive and innovative if we’re allowed to work for ourselves? And that as our only on-planet trading partner, they’ll benefit too?”
“Judging from my experience with one Harmonica,” Gabrel said, “it takes a long, long time to persuade them that coercion isn’t the way to get the best out of people.”
It was a depressing thought.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The meetings to hammer out details of a peace treaty that would allow both sides to claim victory became Gabrel’s new standard for boredom. General Dayvson was recalled to Harmony and Isovel, naturally, went with him. The general was replaced as chief negotiator with a political officer several levels senior to Shiflet, a direct representative of the Central Committee.
Harmony’s government had been conceived in the spirit of consensus. Gabrel had occasionally wondered how a government could accomplish anything at all if the representatives spent all their time debating until they achieved consensus. Now he found out. The Central Committee had redefined consensus as, “We agree with the Head of Committee, and everybody else agrees with us.”
It did not make for smooth negotiations.
“Of course it takes forever,” Gabrel exploded to Renzi one day as they were walking back from the Governor’s Mansion. “How can we work out a treaty with people who don’t even have the concept of negotiating? Their entire government works on a basis of ‘do as you’re told,’ and they can’t figure out how to talk to anybody who doesn’t accept that model.”
That whole morning had been wasted on a series of ‘ultimatums’ from the Central Committee. Colonel Travis, imperturbable as usual, had politely met each ultimatum with an explanation that Esilia considered itself a sovereign state and was no longer bound by the decisions of the Committee. “I don’t know how the colonel keeps his temper. I wanted to set the chief political officer’s beard on fire.”
Renzi’s lips twitched. “I suspect Colonel Travis would say that you are the very model of a firebrand and should not be entrusted with any diplomatic task.”
“Oh, he’s ahead of you there. Do you know why I never say anything during these meetings? I am not permitted to speak. His orders.”
“Hmm. You’ve always been a slippery, twisty devil with a gift for getting your own way. What’s your problem this time?”
Gabrel glared at his friend. “I’m good at making reasonable people see reason. That doesn’t apply here. I don’t know why we have to sit through these interminable meetings. You never say anything either.”
“I suspect you’re there to force them to look at the face of the man who nibbled away at their invading army until they gave up. To remind them that a boy of twenty-three outsmarted their general and all his staff. Repeatedly.”
“I’m twenty-four now,” Gabrel said stiffly. “Not exactly a ‘boy.’”
“Well, you’re going to like my second theory even less.”
“Which is?”
“We’re being groomed to become the colonel’s personal assistants after the treaty is signed. Turning Esilia from a colony into a nation is going to involve a level of work that will make these meetings look like a vacation on the beach. Sitting through the meetings gets us up to speed on a lot of the issues Travis will have to deal with.”
“Issues.” Gabrel kicked a pebble out of his way. “I’m not a damned politician. There are lots of people better qualified.”
“But you,” Renzi said, “are the face of the insurgency.”
“Why me?” Gabrel all but howled. “All I did was follow the colonel’s orders.” He lofted a somewhat larger cobblestone with the toe of his boot.
“Um. The orders were, ‘Harass the enemy at your discretion,’ and you followed them with great initiative and inventiveness. I suspect he plans to turn you loose on our new country’s issues in much the same way. He’ll say, ‘We need an independent judiciary,’ and you’ll come up with a book-length position paper describing which types of judges should be appointed, which ones elected, how their powers can be kept separate from the legislative and executive branches, and names of suitable candidates.”
“Sounds more like you than me.”
“I expect it’ll take both of us.” Renzi sounded infuriatingly calm. “I may not be a Hero of the Revolution, but after maintaining the colonel’s copy of the library and encouraging people to get acquainted with it, I have an encyclopedic knowledge of the contents. And the Reference Library is the closest thing we have to a How-to-Build-a-Nation manual.”
“I. Can. Hardly. Wait. Ow!” Gabrel had found a rock too well wedged into the street to respond to his kick.
***
Renzi’s predictions were all too accurate. Gabrel had been hoping to take a long enough leave to visit Harmony once the countries were formally at peace; instead, the work of hammering out a treaty merged directly into the work of creating a nation. Colonel Travis had secretaries to do the grunt work and expert senior advisers on the topics that obviously needed work, but he said that he couldn’t do without his two young aides to whip up emergency position papers, liaise with expert advisers, and perform all sorts of irregular tasks. “In practice,” Renzi said cheerfully, “that means we rush all around the enterprise applying duck tape.”
“What’s duck tape?”
“Um… I don’t actually know. It doesn’t have anything to do with ducks, I don’t think. But there’s a saying, ‘Duck tape is the force that binds the universe together.’ I think we are Colonel Travis’ duck tape.”
“Not my highest aim in life.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” The colonel’s praise had lifted the final shadow of guilt over Renzi’s performance during the actual fighting. Now he thought of himself as “Young Man on the Way Up,” rather than “Pathetic Failure.” Gabrel had thought that would make his friend easier to live with, but at times Sunny Optimistic Renzi could be just as irritating as Desperately Depressed Renzi. Right now, for instance, he was happily enumerating the subjects on which they’d have both expertise and inside knowledge after Colonel Travis’ work was done.
“I never realized how different a colony was from an independent nation.”
“I know,” said Gabrel glumly. “Even I thought we would just kick the Harmonicas out and go on as we had been doing.”
“Instead, we’re getting an inside view of the birth of a nation. Last week Colonel Travis had me writing position papers on the franchise and the choice of which offices should be elective and which run by appointees.”
“Obviously, they should all be elective.”
“Gabrel, think for a moment. Whoeve
r becomes Prime Minister shouldn’t have to staff his Cabinet with elected officials; they’d inevitably pull all different ways at once and it would be impossible to get anything done. He needs the freedom to choose the people he’ll be working most closely with, just as Colonel Travis chose you and me as his personal assistants.”
“Ha! If personal assistants were elected, I’d never have run for the position, and now I’d be free to… well, you know.” That was the closest Gabrel ever came to discussing his relationship with Isovel Dayvson.
Renzi regarded his friend sympathetically. “I know this isn’t what you want to be doing, Gabe. But the colonel needs us, and in any case you don’t want to rush over to Harmony before the ink on the peace treaty is dry.”
“I don’t?”
“Give it time. There’s a lot of bad feeling in Harmony about the war, and you’d be out there with no support. Better to wait until we have formal diplomatic relations and put an embassy in place. Besides,” Renzi added, “if she wouldn’t stay here because it would hurt her father politically, what makes you think she’ll abandon him now? Let it wait.”
“She just turned twenty-nine. What if she gets tired of waiting?”
Despite his complaints, Gabrel did gradually come to appreciate the great task that lay before Colonel Travis and his masterful handling of it. Elections were just the beginning of it; the new-born country needed a constitution, a legislative structure, a national bank, currency and economic policies. Judges had been appointed by the Governor-General, and the courts had been run under “Colony Law,” which was an awkward hybrid of Harmony law with harsh penalties for colonists and extra control from on high added in.
“We need to do everything at once,” Renzi said happily. “Rules for elections, actually hold elections and get legislators who can make Esilian law for Esilian citizens, create a court system and independent judges to administer the laws. Write a constitution, set up a national bank, fund economic development projects. Isn’t it wonderful!”
Insurgents (Harmony Book 1) Page 19
