The Paradise Game

by Brian Stableford

  We watched her come in from the eastern horizon, growing bigger and bigger all the while, until she overtook the sun and blotted it out, casting the whole field into black shadow, and surrounding herself with a halo of brightness. She slowed down until she seemed to be inching her way across the sky, and still she grew as she dropped farther and farther.

  I could see the awe in Just’s face out of the corner of my eye as he misjudged her distance and her size because of her velocity.

  Suddenly, while she was still some way from overhead, but still blocking the sunlight with her tail, she shot forth a horde of tiny black dots. She looked like a seed pod bursting, spewing out hundreds of tiny spores. Each one was a copter or a flipjet, and each one was large enough to carry heavy artillery as well as armour and a platoon of men, but as they moved in the shadow of the mother-ship they seemed like a swarm of black flies.

  Then the sun was exposed again and we both had to look away, dazzled. By the time we could see again, the battleship was beginning to shrink as she accelerated and climbed, while the infant fleet grew as it descended, changing appearance momentarily as our prospective adjusted, so that it was first a swarm of bees, then locusts, and then black butterflies.

  The mother-ship passed on, and her children became recognisable. We could see the shape of their bodies, sense the whirr of rotors, hear the soft buzz of low-power piledrivers. It hardly seemed that they would be able to find space on the field, but as they fell they sorted themselves out into formation, and began to manoeuvre themselves into a tight bunch. As they sank still farther they began to circle, and then they began to peel off in fours and set down with military exactness in the available space.

  The copters came down in rows so tight that there was hardly a yard of clearance between the tips of their blades. They were big—not as big as the Swan, but easily of a size with the old Fire-Eater and the Javelin—the ships I used to fly. Yet these things were fitted in hundreds into the coat-lining of the battleship. I didn’t know how many battleships Caradoc possessed, but the mere thought of one would be enough to intimidate most worlds. I knew New Rome had nothing to compare, and I knew that the shipyards on Penaflor had never turned out a monster like that. That ship had been built in space, in the system of Vargo’s Star, where the Caradoc operation had its guts, if not its heart. The Engelian hegemony might have half a dozen ships of kindred spirit, and no doubt the other companies were busy putting them together, but I had seen nothing like her before.

  As I watched the field fill up with planes, and saw the black dot that was the battleship disappear into the thin tissue of cloud that hung above the western horizon, I realised for the first time exactly what sort of a threat the companies posed. The first power that went out into space had been the power of the Earth governments. If Earth had had only one government, like Khor, that power might have proved effective. But as it was, it proved worthless very quickly as colonies seized independence as soon as they became self-sufficient. The power that took over then was the power of know-how—Library power and bureaucracy power. The power to do things was completely devalued—everyone had that. The power that mattered was the power of knowing how to do them. New Alexandria supplied the worlds and then New Rome unified them into a civilisation. When I had first gone into space, nearly twenty years previously, that had still been a fair picture of the situation. But during those years the companies bloomed like novas. New Alexandria and New Rome had civilised the galaxy—had fed it and nurtured it like a suckling pig—and had created opportunity on a scale hitherto unsuspected. Suddenly, it was possible to own whole worlds. The capacity for growing rich through exploitation suddenly acquired near-infinite proportions. There were no horizons in space. There was a Caradoc Company before I was born, of course—and a Star Cross Combine, and a Sunpower Incorporated—but it was during my lifetime, and my years in space, that their exponential growth gave them such awesome proportions. They had grown to the point where their power was measurable against the power of New Alexandria and New Rome. But it was a different sort of power.

  Up to now, the Library and the Law had always contained and controlled the companies. I had always known that there would come a time when the situation would reach a balance—when the companies would try to reverse the containment and the control. I had not expected it so soon.

  It wasn’t the two years on Lapthorn’s Grave that had left me unprepared for such developments—it was a general tendency throughout my life to misjudge the velocity of change. Things happened faster now than they had at any time in history. And we were still accelerating.

  I looked out at the serried ranks of Caradoc’s pride and joy—at the men in black who were piling out of the copters and the flipjets—and I knew all of a sudden that they weren’t playing toy soldiers. This was for real. If it wasn’t this world, it would be the next or the next. The galaxy was full of worlds for the taking, and sooner or later (sooner, it now seemed), Caradoc was going to start just taking them. It had grown too big to be ordered around. Charlot was busy hunting for a miracle to snatch this world from its cavernous maw. He might find one. But not even Titus Charlot could provide ten miracles, or a hundred, to order.

  ‘I guess this is it,’ said Just quietly. ‘The war starts here.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘The war started many, many years ago. What starts here is the choice of weapons.’

  ‘What the hell am I supposed to do?’ he said. ‘This is illegal. You know it and I know it. So who do I arrest? Capella? The battleship? Just what the hell am I supposed to do?’

  ‘Just be thankful,’ I said. ‘Everybody here is sitting on dynamite cushions. You can’t do a thing. That’s good. If you had an army as well, you’d be carrying the fate of worlds on your bony shoulders. Be glad that you haven’t.’

  ‘What about you?’ he asked, a slight hint of spite creeping into his voice, as if I’d just accused him of being impotent in more ways than one. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Me?’ I said innocently. ‘It’s not my fight. It’s not my scene at all. I only work here. My soul is only in hock—it isn’t pledged to any side except mine. As for Charlot—he won’t fight with fire. The last thing in the world he’d ever think of is levelling a gun at the smallest of Caradoc’s minions. He’ll fight this on his own ground, and if Caradoc wins he’ll simply pack up his ground and move inside. It won’t matter to him whether the Library and the Law control the companies or vice versa. He’ll try to run the whole show regardless, inside or out, from the top or from the shadow behind the throne.’

  Just shook his head. ‘I could almost throw in with those Aegis bums,’ he said. ‘For all the trouble they’ve been to me, they’re not bad people. At least they have the questions clear in their minds.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘They have the questions clear in their minds. They have simple minds. Whatever gives you the idea that the questions are clear? The questions are as murky as the depths of a stagnant well, and so are the answers. It’s just not that easy. It never is. Turn the Aegis boys loose—let ‘em sink their teeth into this lot. Then we can forget all about them.’

  ‘I don’t get you,’ said Just. ‘I don’t get you at all.’

  ‘Few do,’ I consoled him. ‘Few do.’

  The Caradoc private army marched away into town. A couple of hours later, they marched back. By that time, Eve and Nick had returned with everything they could steal from Kerman and Merani. They hadn’t been able to take the Maiden out to the camp, of course, so they’d had to carry most of it by hand. They’d apparently asked for help and it had been provided—in the shape of one solitary Caradoc tech, who must have weighed all of a hundred and twenty pounds. But among the three of them, they had a pretty impressive haul. It would provide Titus with some heavy reading for a good few hours. At least it would mean that he didn’t have to leave the Swan. Although he wasn’t issuing any medical reports, it was fairly clear that he was suffering somewhat. As if he didn’t have the odds stacked high enou
gh against him anyway.

  When the army came back—not quite so many of them—they got around to sending some people out to us.

  The first one to arrive on our doorstep was the security officer, who explained to our anxious ears that he had been ordered to approach Keith Just with a view to co-operating in the matter of dangerous murderers on the loose.

  Just, unfortunately, was not in the best of moods, and had taken refuge from the situation in an orgy of self-pity and resentment. The security officer was quite a young man, and although he was probably not innocent of all the evil-mindedness of the Caradoc higher echelons with respect to this affair, he was not an outstandingly nasty man.

  Just’s only address to him, however, was quite short, and merely consisted of a suggestion that the security officer should do something rather horrible to himself.

  The young man did not appear to be terribly offended, nor in the least surprised. As he turned to make his way back to his superiors, probably in order to make preparations for his own search, I called to him to wait.

  He half turned, and hesitated.

  ‘If it’s any help,’ I shouted, ‘he went thataway.’

  The security officer gave me a dirty look.

  I was only trying to be helpful.

  About five minutes later, someone else came across to the Swan, and was likewise accosted on the doorstep by a small group of people, including myself, intent on stopping him from invading the ship’s sacred precincts.

  The new arrival was broad, and red-haired, and wore a broad grin that curled at the edges. He didn’t have any vast quantities of braid on his uniform, nor any specially ornate insignia, so I assumed that he wasn’t important. But he obviously expected his personality to carry enough evidence of his rank.

  ‘I want to see Charlot,’ he announced. ‘My name’s Ullman.’

  ‘You can’t,’ I said. ‘My name’s Grainger.’

  ‘I’m the captain of the ship up there,’ he said, pointing at the sky. ‘And I’m in charge of this operation on the ground. I have important business to discuss with your boss.’

  I stared at him for a measured ten seconds, hoping that his grin would falter. It didn’t. Finally, I said: ‘I’ll tell the captain you’re here.’

  I called Nick delArco, and left him to look after Ullman. I went to see Charlot myself.

  Eve was with him. He’d made a start on the reports—he had them spread out all over the lower deck—and he was giving Eve a careful account of the ideas he’d come up with earlier in the day.

  ‘The battleship skipper’s down below,’ I said. ‘I’ve left him with Nick. What’s our policy?’

  ‘Ignore them,’ he said.

  ‘And perhaps they’ll go away?’

  He looked at me sharply. ‘I thought that you were too involved with this operation to adopt your customary flippant approach,’ he said, with deceptive softness.

  ‘Believe me,’ I said, ‘if I were to worry about the situation I’d be scared to death. Battleships always bring out my sense of humour.’

  ‘Just keep it out of here,’ he said, but with a hint of resignation in his voice. ‘Keep these soldiers out of my way, and especially off my back. Let them hunt for the killer and drill on the field to their heart’s content. Pretend they don’t exist.’

  ‘Just’s jumpy,’ I said.

  ‘Forget Just. He’s not important. Let Nick take over here—he’ll look after things. I want you to go back to Kerman’s place. I don’t know what we’ve got here, but it won’t give us anything like the full story. Just talk to people, use your eyes and your head. We can’t afford not to have a man on the spot, and I’m too busy.’

  ‘Do you honestly think it will do any good?’ I asked.

  ‘Did you have something else urgent to do?’ he countered.

  I went back to the alien encampment. Eve went with me—she hadn’t got the full story from Charlot yet, but he would have time later for recording his thoughts.

  ‘How ill is he?’ Eve asked me, once we were clear of the field.

  ‘So what am I?’ I said. ‘A doctor?’

  ‘You’ve seen more of him the last couple of days than anyone else,’ she said.

  ‘We haven’t been talking about his symptoms,’ I told her. ‘We have a king-size headache here.’

  ‘The landing of all those men is bound to count against Caradoc in the courts,’ she said.

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t sound convinced.’

  ‘Now there’s a thing,’ I said.

  ‘God,’ she said. ‘You haven’t changed at all. Not since you were in the port in New York. You’ve got that same chip on your shoulder and it hasn’t shifted an inch. Don’t you think for once that you could drop that razor’s edge from your conversation?’

  ‘You can’t teach an old dog,’ I said, with a lamentable lack of originality.

  ‘How did Michael manage to stand you for all those years?’ she asked.

  ‘With difficulty,’ I said. And added: ‘But he hadn’t any choice.’

  ‘Is that your idea of an excuse?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  We occupied ourselves with such happy and irrelevant exchanges throughout the long walk. The wind never intervened, but I could feel him disapproving all the way. He was another one who believed that I ought to be making gigantic strides in reuniting myself with the human race. He didn’t believe that solitude was a reasonable way of life either.

  When we got to the camp, I set about making a nuisance of myself in pretty much the way Charlot had intended that I should. I didn’t see any reason to be particularly cagey, but on the other hand, I didn’t want to tell them anything they hadn’t already worked out for themselves. Most especially, I didn’t want to tell them anything that might add to their ideas about how valuable the planet was. So I kept quiet about Charlot’s theory of a mutational filter replacing natural selection as the principal agent of evolution. My questions weren’t quite as guarded as their answers, but I had the distinct impression that we could dance around the point for years without ever getting there.

  I stuck mainly with the biologists—the cellular biologists, who might have found some interesting anomalies about the way the beasties were put together at subcellular level. But it wasn’t really the level at which my own know-how operated. I was no scientist, just an observer who liked to understand how things worked.

  All in all, we got pretty well nowhere except frustrated.

  Even so, I kept going, and it was getting close to sunset when we began to head back to the ship.

  The forest was very quiet, very peaceful, and very pretty, but I no longer had any trouble with my own personal Paradise syndrome. It no longer looked to me anything like Paradise.

  It wasn’t, of course, that I’d been put off by what I’d learned about the Pharos life-system. It was just that every twenty minutes or so one of those great big black whirlybirds would do a slow sweep across the nearby treetops. They were looking for Varly. And they were having about as much success as we were.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Instead of going through town, Eve and I elected to take a more direct route through the forest. Its directness was more theoretical than actual owing to the fact that it is impossible to walk a straight line in a forest, and it was undoubtedly slower than the usual route, but time-saving was not our primary objective. We were avoiding people. At least, we thought we were avoiding people.

  We had barely gone halfway when one of the copters made a pass over our heads, did a tight turn, and commenced to hover over us while a stentorian voice came over a loudspeaker ordering us to stop or be shot.

  We stopped.

  The loudspeaker kept on bawling at us, giving out extremely precise instructions as to how still we were supposed to stand, what posture to adopt. It also took time out to tell us exactly what wouldn’t happen provided we complied with the suggestions.

  It took five minutes for the men in the co
pter to redirect men on the ground to our position, which gave me, at least, plenty of opportunity to get fed up with standing still waving my fingers in the air.

  The search party arrived at the double and surrounded us, pointing their guns at us in a wholly futile display of courage and determination.

  The boss was a thin man with a face like a rat and incipient acne. He peered at us both with what I supposed to be a regulation snarl, and decided after due thought and process that neither of us was Varly.

  ‘What the hell you doin’ way out here?’ he demanded, with an asperity which suggested that we were wholly to blame for the inconvenience caused him.

  ‘It’s a free country,’ I said.

  ‘Don’ you know there’s a dangerous murderer out here someplace?’

  ‘Son,’ I said, ‘I am fully aware of that fact. I have had the doubtful pleasure of having been on this planet for a good deal longer than you. I have had the misfortune of meeting Mr Varly. I have even had the dubious pleasure of being pushed aside by Mr Varly. I am not flattered by being mistaken for Mr Varly. If it is all right with you and your merry men, I would like each and every gun barrel to be redirected to some neutral direction, so that I can continue my walk home. It has been a long day.’

  ‘It sure as like hell is not all right with me,’ he said, mixing his metaphors painfully.

  ‘Well then,’ I said, ‘perhaps you’ll tell me just exactly what you intend to do about it.’ I reached out a hand and gently redirected one of the gun barrels with the tip of my forefinger.

  ‘I’m goin’ to sen’ you home under escort,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want an escort,’ I said. ‘Do you want an escort, ex-Captain Lapthorn?’

  ‘It might be a good idea,’ she said. ‘It’s getting dark, and we don’t want any of these cretins blazing away at us on suspicion.’

  She had a point. But there were principles at stake.

  ‘I am not going to be shown home by a bunch of feckless kids in black romper suits,’ I said coldly.