“The holy lady’s got it right, Kolichiyaw,” Sheriff Kwahu said. “Booze and politics don’t mix.”
Kolichiyaw stopped, turned around, and shook his head truculently. “No. Sobriety and politics don’t mix. Especially now that we’ve gotta worry about these Romans sneaking up on us on their way to Earth.”
“Romulans, Koli,” Kwahu said as he rose slowly from his seat. “They’re called Romulans.”
“Whatever. I’m goin’ to get a drink now. Be right back.” With that, the mining chief resumed his course for the bar.
“No,” Kwahu said, loudly enough to bring nearly all the ambient chatter in the room to a halt. “You’re not. If you have anything more to drink, you’d best head straight home instead of back here.”
Brooks watched as Kolichiyaw stopped in his tracks and faced the sheriff yet again. “Look, Kwahu, I really don’t see the problem with me grabbing a little drink, and then coming right back here with it ’fore the meetin’ starts.”
Kwahu shook his head and sighed sadly, then opened his coat momentarily, just long enough to reveal the presence of a rather nasty-looking pistol. The weapon still seemed disconcertingly handy despite the sheriff’s having allowed the flap of his coat to fall and conceal it again.
“Here’s the problem, Koli, at least as I see it,” Kwahu said languidly. “You break the no-drinking-at-public-meetings rule, and I’m going to shoot you. Okay?”
Brooks studied Kolichiyaw’s face very closely. The mining magnate stared back at the sheriff defiantly, his jaw muscles looking as taut as suspension bridge cables bearing far too much weight.
Though Brooks had sought a little local color to illustrate her journalistic portrait of Mars, she hoped not to find blood red on her painter’s palette. A frisson of real fear began surging through her, making her hyperalert to every motion, every facial tic, every nuance of behavior from the men who stood on either side of the standoff.
A tall, rail-thin woman dressed entirely in black rose from the chair positioned almost directly beneath the dart board and approached Kolichiyaw, coming to a stop directly at his side. Apparently unconcerned by the escalating tension between Kolichiyaw and the sheriff, she drew a small object from her pocket from which she extended a long metal strip, perhaps as wide as a human thumb. With the fluid motions of an expert, she anchored one end of the metal strip to the polished stone floor with her foot while extending the strip vertically by hand until its end came to a stop just about parallel to the crown of Kolichiyaw’s tousled head.
“Powaqa, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Kolichiyaw said, now looking profoundly irritated. “This is a damned inconvenient time to measure a man for a new suit.”
The woman reeled the metal strip most of the way in, then took a quick horizontal measurement of Kolichiyaw’s shoulders.
“Not if it’s the suit he’s likely to be buried in,” she said.
“Goddamned corporate royalty,” the old man beside Brooks said as he cast a scowl in Kolichiyaw’s direction. “Think they own the whole damned planet, while we just live on it like the fleas on a big, red, dusty dog.”
“What’s it gonna be, Koli?” Sheriff Kwahu said, tempered steel behind his voice now, his gaze as hard as the local granite.
Despite the obviously sincere warning, neither Kolichiyaw nor the tall, slender woman he had called Powaqa made any move to remove themselves from harm’s way.
Brooks leaned toward the old man who sat beside her, still— amazingly—typing his manifesto. Hiking a thumb toward Powaqa, she said, “Who is she, the town tailor?”
“Yup,” the old man said without looking up from his padd.
Plagued by stereotypical images of the black-clad frontier town morticians for whom pistol-wielding gunfighters created so much business in those ancient Wild West films, Brooks was relieved to hear that Powaqa was merely a clothier.
“She’s the undertaker, too,” the old man continued, grinning as he typed. “Saves a lot of time.”
Qaletaqu entered the room at that moment, rapidly approaching the pool table at the room’s center.
His shoulders suddenly slumping, Kolichiyaw’s defiant manner collapsed into a heterogeneous mixture of resignation and the grumblings of a little kid caught misbehaving. After spending another heartbeat or two in sullen silence looking at the sheriff, he spared a glance at Qaletaqu before meekly taking his seat. The undertaker-cum-tailor did likewise, but not before casting a brief glance at Brooks—a conspicuous stranger in Canyontown, after all—which warned her that Powaqa probably saw her as a potential customer, visitors to Mars sometimes being insufficiently detail-oriented to survive that first (and potentially last) hike outside the safety of the pressurized habitats.
“All right,” Kolichiyaw muttered as the sheriff sat beside him. “Let’s get this damned thing over with before those last three whiskeys start to wear off.”
Okay, so these people do have a few rules, Brooks thought as the air filled with convivial greetings for Qaletaqu, who wasted no time hopping up onto the pool table, an astonishingly graceful-looking move in the weak Martian gravity. They just don’t believe in standing on ceremony over the really trivial ones.
It was now becoming crystal clear to her that the truly important rules—such as the ones that required people to stay sober in extremely unforgiving environments such as airlocks, the Martian surface, and local political conclaves—had to be enforced to a fault in order to ensure the long-term survival and continued smooth functioning of the entire settlement. It makes sense, she thought. Especially considering that these people have managed to survive for nearly half a century out here on the ragged edge of human existence.
That thought reminded Brooks that Canyontown’s almost entirely Hopi/Pueblo population, around twenty-thousand strong at present, had descended from North American desert cliff dwellers, people who had also “lived on the edge,” quite literally, for millennia. Some of these same people had adapted that heritage to the clusters of high-rise towers that had arisen all over the Earth during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; they had become the iron workers who fearlessly walked the narrow paths of steel beams and girders that crisscrossed the skylines they’d helped to fill with iconic monuments of steel and glass.
It was no wonder that these people could eke out a living in a precarious place like Mars, whatever changes the act of adapting to such environments might wreak upon them. Brooks wondered if living on the edge might not be in their very blood, just as their fierce streak of independence, a trait they had first demonstrated to the ancient Spaniards, seemed to be.
Mars doesn’t hold any terror for them, she thought. It’s only encouraged a healthy respect for a world that could kill them all in a heartbeat if they were to allow themselves to get careless or cocky.
Could part of that respect have arisen from the recognition that Mars was one of the few places left in the solar system where such an independent people could truly be themselves? She couldn’t help but wonder when the Canyontowners’ notions of personal and political sovereignty would force them to move on yet again in search of another new home, perhaps orbiting a star that no other human had ever approached.
Using the pool table as a platform, Qaletaqu raised his hands to call for silence. It was clear from the generally warm reaction across the room that the planetary representative to the Coalition Council was one of Canyontown’s favorite sons.
“Before we get sidetracked into discussions of potholes and the new pooper-scooper law,” he said once the room had fallen more or less silent, “let me start with the one topic I know is on everybody’s minds—the Romulans.”
He paused to allow good-natured laughter and murmurs of assent to cross the room back and forth in a series of waves before he continued.
“Unless you’ve been stuck at the bottom of a deep hole on Deimos for the past two Sols, you already know that the Vulcans have decided to leave this entire system essentially undefended except for some sort of
detection grid that they assure us will give us advance warning when unauthorized warp-driven ships approach. Vulcan’s Coalition delegation gave every assurance that the thing will work as advertised.”
“Ha!” the old man with the manifesto in his lap called out.
“I share your skepticism, Ahota,” Qaletaqu said, taking the interruption completely in stride and prompting Brook’s belated recognition that the crazy old-timer was the tavern/hotel’s owner. “But we really don’t have a lot of choice other than to take the Vulcans’ assurances at face value.”
“The problem with doing that,” Sheriff Kwahu said, turning his chair around backward so he could drape himself over the back as he sat, “is that we’re liable to get considerably less advance warning than Earth does.”
“It’s nobody’s fault that Mars is a few million klicks closer to the system’s edge than Earth is,” Kolichiyaw said with a theatrical shrug. “Hell, I always thought that was a big part of this godforsaken dust-ball’s charm.”
A low chuckle passed through the gathering.
“That’s true enough,” Qaletaqu said, slowly walking along the pool table’s length as though it were a stage. “But we’re still stuck with the fact that we have a lot less leverage over Vulcan than either Earth or the Centauri do. And they couldn’t persuade Vulcan to reconsider its decision, even working together.”
A brown-skinned, deeply wrinkled man with flashing eyes and iron-colored, shoulder-length hair rose from a seat in the back of the room.
“We do have at least one other option,” the older man said. Brooks noticed that every head in the room turned attentively toward him, a courtesy that not even the town sheriff received without displaying his shooting iron.
“And what option is that, Katowa my father?” Qaletaqu said. His tone sounded outwardly respectful, though Brooks sensed that the representative was waging a mighty internal struggle to maintain it.
Katowa.
Brooks recognized the name from her background research. This regal-looking man was Qaletaqu’s father, the ceremonial chief of the Martian Hopi-Pueblo nation, a man who had served for many years as the Martian Colonies’ official representative to the United Earth government, prior to its having become one of the founding members of the Coalition of Planets. According to his official bio, Katowa had restricted his activities to Mars during recent years as his advancing age had made him increasingly intolerant of Earth’s much higher gravity. Brooks knew that although Katowa was not the designated head of Canyontown’s government—and therefore could not make any decisions for Canyontown by fiat—she also knew that he was regarded across Mars as one of the planet’s wisest heads, and certainly commanded the respect of everyone in the room.
Katowa walked slowly toward the pool table as he responded to his son’s question. “It is the only option that does not require our meek acceptance of whatever mere scraps others deign to hand to us, Qaletaqu my son.”
“Right on!” Ahota called out. “We’ve been on Mars long enough! Time to pull up stakes and move on!”
Ahota’s wife shushed him with a swift elbow to the ribs.
“With respect, Ahota,” Qaletaqu said, “we still have much work ahead of us here in remaking this world into something the spirits of our ancestors would recognize.”
Katowa came to a stop at the pool table’s edge, his hands clasped before him as he gazed up at Qaletaqu, dark eyes as patient as the ages, and yet filled with an awful urgency.
“The Romulans may not allow that, my son,” the chief said as he carefully stepped up onto the pool table’s surface via a chair placed beside him by the sheriff. “The conflict that is coming is a sign from the spirit world that the time has come once again for the tribe to seek a new home.”
Qaletaqu spread his hands before him in a placating gesture. “We already have a home, father. It is the Valles Marineris.”
“Mars has never been more than a temporary camp site,” Katowa said with a slow shake of his gray-maned head. “The galaxy abounds with new worlds that the spirits of our ancestors would recognize far more readily than they would this one, Qaletaqu. Worlds that need not be remade from scratch. Worlds upon which our tribe might at long last establish a permanent home among rivers and trees and living things, where the very skies do not conspire to kill us.”
Well, running away is certainly one way of dealing with the Romulans, Brooks thought. But out in the wide wicked galaxy, that tactic will work about as well as it would on the local playground bully.
Unfortunately, a whole lot more people, both on Earth and off, were all but certain to embrace this wrong-headed idea, so long as opinion makers like Keisha Naquase—not to mention Chief Katowa—insisted on promoting it.
But Qaletaqu appeared to see this issue the same way Brooks did.
“The tribe has lived here for less than half a century, as measured in the years of our ancestors,” he said. “Frankly, that’s little more than a rounding error compared to the way they reckoned time. They used to consider the future ramifications of their every decision out to seven generations.”
“Had the Romulans menaced our ancestors,” the old man said, “their progeny might never have made it all the way to the present generation.”
“The Great Spirit has never granted us guarantees, Father, only opportunities.”
“Agreed. We should seize the best possible opportunity for the tribe’s continued survival.”
Qaletaqu looked disappointed, but not deterred. “Wouldn’t a decision to leave now, rather than to stay and help all the other tribes of humanity to fight the war that’s coming, merely be capitulation to yet another conqueror? I think the spirit of Popé would not be pleased.”
Katowa stood in silence, facing his son, apparently absorbing and considering his sharp words. Brooks thought those words had cut him deeply, judging from the moisture she saw gleaming in the old man’s eyes.
“I stand by my recommendation,” the old chief said at length. “But I will defer to the wisdom of the vote of the Canyontown Commission.”
Which meant, so far as Brooks understood it, the adult population of this tavern’s game room. She already knew that Katowa’s opinion carried tremendous weight with Canyontown’s rank-and-file citizenry.
What she didn’t know and wouldn’t discover, at least not before what looked to be a very close vote was counted and counted again, was whether or not Katowa could sway a prosperous, settled people into becoming a band of nomads with a future at least as uncertain as the one that included joining the war against the Romulans.
Brooks was relieved to see that Qaletaqu’s view held the day, if only by a whisker. It was only after the second count had been completed— the first count had resulted in a tie—that she realized she had been holding her breath.
Katowa and approximately half the room took in the news of their defeat stoically. The last thing these people were, after all, was a collection of whiners.
“So we Canyontowners will stay right where we are,” Qaletaqu said afterward, in a tone of peroration that clearly signaled that the day’s business was very nearly done. “We’ve invested far too much sweat and blood in this valley, and in this planet, to simply abandon it. We’ll make the most of every last split-second of advance warning the Vulcans can give us before the Romulans come. After all, they’ll have to get past the patrol zones of both the Titan outpost and Jupiter Station before they reach the cold far shore of the inner solar system.
“And once they get here,” Qaletaqu said with a fire behind his eyes that Brooks found both inspiring and frightening, “we’ll give ’em a fight that’ll make our forefather Popé proud.”
The next day, as another interplanetary transport carried her on toward the next stop on her outbound tour, Gannet Brooks reviewed the audio recording she had made of Qaletaqu’s words as she looked out one of the aft observation ports. The cold, rocky world in whose deepest places the determined people of Canyontown had built a home was a rapidly retreating red
-and-brown crescent.
Popé, she recalled, had prevailed against the invading Spaniards, overcoming long odds with moxie, determination, and careful planning. But the people who had followed him into battle had eventually succumbed to infighting and disunity. She breathed a silent prayer of hope that the Martians, particularly the Canyontowners, would do better.
Just as she fervently hoped that they wouldn’t inadvertently vindicate Keisha Naquase’s peace-at-any-cost philosophy by getting themselves wiped out in the conflagration that was coming.
SIXTEEN
Wednesday, July 30, 2155
Vulcan Cargo Ship Kiri-kin-tha, en route to Vulcan
THE STERILE, BRIGHTLY LIT ROOM came back into existence around him yet again, though he still remembered nothing clearly other than the fact that he had already fallen asleep and woken up here, on a medical bed, several times before. But he still could recall very little that had preceded the first time he’d seen this place.
Star Trek: Enterprise: The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Star Trek : Enterprise) Page 18
