Charles Orsino found himself a member of a pirate band that called itself the North American Government.
More difficult to learn were the ins and outs of pirate politics, which were hampered with an archaic, structurally-inappropriate nomenclature and body of tradition. Commander Grinnel was a Sociocrat, which meant that he was in the same gang as President Loman. The late sub commander had been a Constitutionist, which meant that he was allied with the currently-out “southern bloc.” The southern bloc did not consist of southerners at this stage of the North American Government’s history but of a clique that tended to include the engineers and maintenance men of the Government. That had been the reason for the sub commander’s erasure.
The Constitutionists traditionally commanded pigboats and aircraft while surface vessels and the shore establishments were in the hands of the Sociocrats—the fruit of some long-forgotten compromise.
Commander Grinnel cheerfully explained to Charles that there was a crypto-Sociocrat naval officer primed and waiting to be appointed to the command of the sub. The Constitutionist gang would back him to the hilt and the Sociocrats would growl and finally assent. If, thereafter, the Constitutionists ever counted on the sub in a coup, they would be quickly disillusioned.
There wasn’t much voting. Forty years before there had been a bad deadlock following the death by natural causes of President Powell after seventeen years in office. An ad hoc bipartisan conference called a session of the Senate and the Senate elected a new president.
It was little information to be equipped with when you walked out into the brawling streets of New Portsmouth on shore leave.
* * * *
The town had an improvised look which was strange to Orsino. There was a sanitation reactor every hundred yards or so, but he mistrusted the look of the ground-level mains that led to it from, the houses. There were house flies from which he shied violently. Every other shack on the waterfront was a bar or a notch joint. He sampled the goods at one of the former and was shocked by the quality and price. He rolled out, his ears still ringing from the belt of raw booze; as half a dozen sweatered Guards rolled in, singing some esoteric song about their high morale and even higher venereal rate. A couple of them looked at him appraisingly, as though they wondered what kind of a noise he’d make if they jumped on his stomach real hard, and he hurried away from them.
The other entertainment facilities of the waterfront were flatly ruled out by a quick inspection of the wares. He didn’t know what to make of them. Joints back in Syndic Territory if you were a man, made sense. You went to learn the ropes, or because you were afraid of getting mixed up in something intense when you didn’t want to, or because you wanted a change, or because you were too busy, lazy or shy to chase skirts on your own. If you were a woman and not too particular, a couple of years in a joint left you with a considerable amount of money and some interesting memories which you were under no obligation to discuss with your husbands or husband.
But the sloppy beasts who called to him from the windows of the joints here on the waterfront, left him puzzled and disgusted. He reflected, strolling up Washington Street with eyes straight ahead, that women must be in short supply if they could make a living—or that the male citizens of the Government had no taste.
A whiff from one of those questionable sewer mains sent him reeling. He ducked into another saloon in self-defense and leaned groggily against the bar. A pretty brunette demanded: “What’ll you have?”
“Gin, please.” He peeled a ten off the roll Grinnel had given him. When the girl poured his gin he looked at her and found her fair. In all innocence, he asked her a question, as he might have asked a barmaid back home. She could have answered, “Yes,” “No,” “Maybe,” or “What’s in it for me?”
Instead she called him a lousy bastard, picked up a beer mug and was about to shatter it on his head when a hand caught her and a voice warned: “Hold it, Mabel! This guy’s off my ship.
“He’s just out of the States; he doesn’t know any better. You know what it’s like over there.”
Mabel snarled: “You better wise him up, then, friend. He can’t go around talking like that to decent women.” She slapped down another glass, poured gin and flounced down the bar.
Charles gulped his gin and turned shakily to his deliverer, a little reactor specialist he had seen on the sub once or twice. “Thanks,” he said feeling inadequate. “Maybe you better wise me up. All I said was, ‘Darling, do you—’”
The reactor man held up his hand. “That’s enough,” he said. “You don’t talk that way over here unless you want your scalp parted.”
Charles, buzzing a little with the gin, protested hotly: “But what’s the harm? All she had to say was no; I wasn’t going to throw her down on the floor!”
It was all very confusing.
A shrug. “I heard about things in the States—Wyman, isn’t it? I guess I didn’t really believe it. You mean I could go up to any woman and just ask her how’s about it?”
“Within reason, yes.”
“And do they?”
“Some do, some don’t—like here.”
“Like hell, like here! Last liberty—” and the reactor man told him a long, confusing story about how he had picked up this pig, how she had dangled it in front of him for one solid week while he managed to spend three hundred and eighty-six dollars on her, and how finally she had bawled that she couldn’t, she just hated herself but she couldn’t do anything like that and bang went the door in his face, leaving him to finish out the evening in a notch joint.
“Good God!” Charles said, appalled. “Was she out of her mind?”
“No,” the reactor man said glumly, “but I must have been. I should of got her drunk and raped her the first night.”
Charles was fully conscious that values were different here. Choking down something like nausea, he asked carefully: “Is there much rape?”
The little man signalled for another gin and downed it. “I guess so. Once when I was a kid a dame gave me this line about her cousin raped her when she was little so she was frigid. I had more ambition then, so I said: ‘Then this won’t be anything new to you, baby,’ I popped her on the button—”
“I’ve got to go now,” Charles said, walking straight out of the saloon. He was beginning to understand the sloppy beasts in the windows of the notch joint and why men could bring themselves to settle for nothing better. He was also overwhelmed by a great wave of home sickness.
The ugly pattern was beginning to emerge. Prudery, rape, frigidity, intrigue for power—and assassination? Beyond the one hint, Grinnel had said nothing that affected Syndic Territory.
But nothing would be more logical than for this band of brigands to lust after the riches of the continent.
Back of the waterfront were shipfitting shops and living quarters. Work was being done by a puzzling combination of mechanization and musclepower. In one open shed he saw a lathe-hand turning a gunbarrel out of a forging; the lathe was driven by one of those standard 18-inch ehrenhaft rotors Max Wyman knew so well. But a vertical drillpress next to it—Orsino blinked. Two men, sweating and panting, were turning a stubborn vertical drum as tall as they were, and a belt drive from the drum whirled the drill bit as it sank into a hunk of bronze. The men were in rags, dirty rags. And it came to Orsino with a stunning shock when he realized what the dull, clanking things were that swung from their wrists. They were chained to the handles of the wheel.
He walked on, almost dazed, comprehending now some cryptic remarks that had been passed aboard the sub.
“No Frog has staying power. Give a Limey his beef once a day and he’ll outsweat a Frog.”
“Yeah, but you can’t whip a Limey. They just go bad when you whip a Limey.”
“They just get sullen for awhile. But let me tell you, friend, don’t ever whip a Spig. You whip a Spig, he’ll wait twenty years if he has to but he’ll get you, right between the ribs.”
“If a Spig wants to be boiled, I
should worry.”
It had been broken up in laughter.
Boiled! Could such things be?
Sixteen ragged, filth-crusted sub-humans were creeping down the road, each straining at a rope. An inch at a time, they were dragging a skid loaded with one huge turbine gear whose tiny herringbone teeth caught the afternoon sun.
The Government had reactors, the Government had vehicles—why this? He slowly realized that the Government’s metal and machinery and atomic power went into its warships; that there was none left over for consumers, and the uses of peace. The Government had degenerated into a dawn-age monster, specialized all to teeth and claws and muscles to drive them with. The Government was now, whatever it had been, a graceless, humorless incarnate ferocity. Whatever lightness or joy survived was the meaningless vestigial twitching of an obsolete organ.
Somewhere a child began to bawl and Charles was surprised to feel a profound pity welling up in him. Like a sedentary man who after a workout aches in muscles he never knew he owned, Charles was discovering that he had emotions which had never been poignantly evoked by the bland passage of the hours in Syndic Territory.
Poor little bastard, he thought, growing up in this hellhole. I don’t know what having slaves to kick around will do to you, but I don’t see how you can grow up a human being. I don’t know what fear of love will do to you—make you a cheat? Or a graceful rutting animal with a choice only between graceless rutting violence and a stinking scuffle with a flabby and abstracted stranger in a strange unloved room? We have our guns to play with and they’re good toys, but I don’t know what kind of monster you’ll become when they give you a gun to live with and violence for a god.
Reiner was right, he thought unhappily. We’ve got to do something about this mess.
A man and a woman were struggling in an alley as he passed. Old habit almost made him walk on, but this wasn’t the playful business of ripping clothes as practiced during hilarious moments in Mob Territory. It was a grim and silent struggle—
The man wore the sweater of the Guards. Nevertheless, Charles walked into the alley and tore him away from the woman; or rather, he yanked at the man’s rock-like arm and the man, in surprise, let go of the woman and spun to face him.
“Beat it,” Charles said to the woman, not looking around. He saw from the corner of his eye that she was staying right there.
The man’s hand was on his sheath knife. He told Charles: “Get lost. Now. You don’t mess with the Guards.”
Charles felt his knees quivering, which was good. He knew from many a chukker of polo that it meant that he was strung to the breaking point, ready to explode into action. “Pull that knife,” he said, “and the next thing you know you’ll be eating it.”
The man’s face went dead calm and he pulled the knife and came in low, very fast. The knife was supposed to catch Charles in the middle. If Charles stepped inside it, the man would grab him in a bear hug and knife him in the back.
There was only one answer.
He caught the thick wrist from above with his left hand as the knife flashed toward his middle and shoved out. He felt the point catch and slice his cuff. The Guardsman tried a furious and ill-advised kick at his crotch; with his grip on the knife-hand, Charles toppled him into the filthy alley as he stood one-legged and off balance. He fell on his back, floundering, and for a black moment, Charles thought his weight was about to tear the wrist loose from his grip. The moment passed, and Charles put his right foot in the socket of the Guardsman’s elbow, reinforced his tiring left hand with his right and leaned, doubling the man’s forearm over the fulcrum of his boot. The man roared and dropped the knife. It had taken perhaps five seconds.
Charles said, panting: “I don’t want to break your arm or kick your head in or anything like that. I just want you to go away and leave the woman alone.” He was conscious of her, vaguely hovering in the background. He thought angrily: She might at least get his knife.
The Guardsman said thickly: “You give me the boot and I swear to God I’ll find you and cut you to ribbons if it takes me the rest of my life.”
Good, Charles thought. Now he can tell himself he scared me. Good.He let go of the forearm, straightened and took his foot from the man’s elbow, stepping back. The Guardsman got up stiffly, flexing his arm, and stooped to pick up and sheath his knife without taking his eyes off Charles. Then he spat in the dust at Charles’ feet. “Yellow crud,” he said. “If the goddam crow was worth it, I’d cut your heart out.” He walked off down the alley and Charles followed him with his eyes until he turned the corner into the street.
Then he turned, irritated that the woman had not spoken.
She was Lee Falcaro.
“Lee!” he said, thunderstruck. “What are you doing here?” It was the same face, feature for feature, and between her brows appeared the same double groove he had seen before. But she didn’t know him.
“You know me?” she asked blankly. “Is that why you pulled that ape off me? I ought to thank you. But I can’t place you at all. I don’t know many people here. I’ve been ill, you know.”
There was a difference apparent now. The voice was a little querulous. And Charles would have staked his life that never could Lee Falcaro have said in that slightly smug, slightly proprietary, slightly aren’t-I-interesting tone: “I’ve been ill, you know.”
“But what are you doing here? Damn it, don’t you know me? I’m Charles Orsino!”
He realized then that he had made a horrible mistake.
“Orsino,” she said. And then she spat: “Orsino! Of the Syndic!” There was black hatred in her eyes.
She turned and raced down the alley. He stood there stupidly, for almost a minute, and then ran after her, as far as the alley’s mouth. She was gone. You could run almost anywhere in New Portsmouth in almost a minute.
A weedy little seaman wearing crossed quills on his cap was lounging against a building. He snickered at Charles. “Don’t chase that one, sailor,” he said. “She is the property of O.N.I.”
“You know who she is?”
The yeoman happily spilled his inside dope to the fleet gob: “Lee Bennet. Smuggled over here couple months ago by D.A.R. The hottest thing that ever hit Naval Intelligence. Very small potato in the Syndic—knows all the families, who does what, who’s a figurehead and who’s a worker. Terrific! Inside stuff! Hates the Syndic. A gang of big-timers did her dirt.”
“Thanks,” Charles said, and wandered off down the street.
It wasn’t surprising. He should have expected it.
Noblesse oblige.
Pride of the Falcaro line. She wouldn’t send anybody into deadly peril unless she were ready to go herself.
Only somehow the trigger that would have snapped neurotic, synthetic Lee Bennet into Lee Falcaro hadn’t worked.
He wandered on aimlessly, wondering whether it would be minutes or hours before he’d be picked up and executed as a spy.
THE SYNDIC, by C. M. Kornbluth (Part II)
X
It took minutes only.
He had headed back to the waterfront, afraid to run, with some vague notion of stealing a boat. Before he reached the row of saloons and joints, a smart-looking squad of eight tall men overtook him.
“Hold it, mister,” a sergeant said. “Are you Orsino?”
“No,” he said hopelessly. “That crazy woman began to yell at me that I was Orsino, but my name’s Wyman. What’s this about?”
The other men fell in beside and behind him. “We’re stepping over to O.N.I.,” the sergeant said.
“There’s the son of a bitch!” somebody bawled. Suddenly there were a dozen sweatered Guardsmen around them. Their leader was the thug Orsino had beaten in a fair fight. He said silkily to the sergeant: “We want that boy, leatherneck. Blow.”
* * * *
The sergeant went pale. “He’s wanted for questioning by the O.N.I.,” he said stolidly.
“Get the marine three-striper!” the Guardsman chortled. He stuck his
jaw into the sergeant’s face. “Tell your squad to blow. You marines ought to know by now that you don’t mess with the Guard.”
A very junior officer appeared. “What’s going on here, you men?” he shrilled. “Atten-shun!” He was ignored as Guardsman and marines measured one another with their eyes. “I said attention! Dammit, sergeant, report!” There was no reaction. The officer yelled: “You men may think you can get away with this but by God, you’re wrong!” He strode away, his fists clenched and his face very red.
Orsino saw him stride through a gate into a lot marked Bupers Motor Pool. And he felt a sudden wave of communal understanding that there were only seconds to go. The sergeant played for time: “I’ll be glad to surrender the prisoner,” he started, “if you have anything to show in the way of—”
The Guardsman kicked for the pit of the sergeant’s stomach. He was a sucker Orsino thought abstractedly as he saw the sergeant catch his foot, dump him and pivot to block another Guardsman. Then he was fighting for his life himself, against three bellowing Guardsmen.
A ripping, hammering noise filled the air suddenly. Like cold magic, it froze the milling mob where it stood. Fifty-caliber noise.
The jaygee was back, this time in a jeep with a twin fifty. And he was glaring down its barrels into the crowd. People were beginning to stream from the saloons, joints and shipfitting shops.
The jaygee cocked his cap rakishly over one eye. “Fall in!” he rasped, and a haunting air of familiarity came over Orsino.
The waiting jeep, almost bucking in its eagerness to be let loose—Orsino on the ground, knees trembling with tension—a perfect change of mount scene in a polo match. He reacted automatically.
There was a surrealist flash of the jaygee’s face before he clipped him into the back of the square little truck. There was another flash of spectators scrambling as he roared the jeep down the road.
The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack Page 42
