Other

by Gordon R. Dickson

“In twenty-four hours, your non-diplomatic people will be arrested on sight,” said Zara Ben, almost with relish, the moment Anjo nodded at her. “No hired vehicle will carry you now; and you’ve already lost your limousines. The drivers would bring them, but the companies won’t let the vehicles out of their garages. There’s been a general clamp-down on you by both Guild and CEOs.”

  “I see,” Bleys said, gravely.

  “Yes,” she went on, “almost all the jobholders would be on your side if they dared, but the CEOs ordered every jobholder not to give you any service. The Guildmasters said almost the same thing. There are too many eyes watching for most of the people to go against orders. We were thinking about moving you out of the city, one or a few at a time in private vehicles.”

  “There’s no immediate rush,” said Anjo, not so much breaking in as taking control of the conversation away from Zara. “As I may’ve said before, you’ve a perfect right to be here, and neither CEOs nor Guilds want to be seen publicly as deliberately forcing you to leave this world.”

  He stopped, with a look at Zara, who appeared ready to speak again—she had leaned forward on her float. She sat back once more, and he went on, “we can keep and feed you here. But you’ll still be pretty much a prisoner as long as you’re in the hotel.”

  “Your hired atmosphere ship—and drivers for it—-are still available at the airport,” said Alann Manders, the newsman. “But if you take it to the next stop on your itinerary, you’ll find the situation there as bad, if not worse.”

  “The general opinion among us who more or less head up an organization to take care of you, Great Teacher,” Anjo told him, “is that sooner or later you’d better disappear, so that neither the Guilds nor the CEOs can find you, and do the rest of your speeches on recordings.”

  He paused. Bleys nodded.

  “I’ve been thinking of that. The jobholders are going to need to know, though, that I’m still with them. I may have to leave New Earth unexpectedly, but even then they should know I went of my own wish, and I’ll be back.”

  “Both letting the jobholders know and your leaving can be managed,” said Anjo. “Now,” he went on, “we could hide you around the city, two or at most three to a single place.”

  “No,” said Bleys, “we’ll stay together.”

  “I thought so,” said Anjo. “Then we take you out of the city entirely. A long ways out.”

  “You’re a sort of explosive material, you see,” said Bill Delancy, in a deep, friendly voice. “Neither the Guild nor the CEO ever imagined anything like you could come in here and upset their applecart.”

  “That’s right,” Manders put in. “Both groups have been tightening down on the general population here. Getting them more and more under their control for a hundred years. But CEOs and Guilds have both got complacent. Now, your coming and talking, and so many people showing up at your first talk and responding to it, has panicked them, confronted them with a situation where they don’t know what to do.”

  Dahno chuckled.

  “So they feel something’s got to be done right away,” Manders went on, earnestly. “They don’t dare frame you on some made-up charge and haul you into court because that would be too obvious. They’re not up to killing you or attacking you openly—yet, anyway—because that’d be very bad for their reputations, not only worldwide here but off-world as well. Also, and more important, it could damage the CEOs’ strong commercial connections with the other Younger Worlds. In special, this world’s necessary

  relations as a part of the Newton-Cassida-New Earth tech-production channel. You know that they just signed us in a worldwide production contract with those two planets?”

  “Yes, I heard of it,” said Bleys.

  “They treat us all like serfs—or slaves!” Manders’ dark face was suddenly dangerous.

  “That’s right,” said Bill Delancy. He took out a small tube and inhaled from it into each of his somewhat hairy nostrils, alternately. “And also, neither the Guild nor the CEO wants to look to Newton and Cassida as if they don’t have their working people under tight control.”

  “A cold?” Bleys asked him sympathetically.

  Bill Delancy shook his head and put the tube away hastily.

  “A sort of arthritis,” he said. “The tube’s something new out of Cassida from a medical research group my outfit makes equipment parts for. The nose is just a quick way of getting the medication into me several times a day.”

  His voice became a little wistful. “I understand that,” he said, “on Old Earth, for years now, they’ve had a way of permanently taking care of any of the autoimmune diseases.”

  “We aren’t really here to talk about that, are we?” Zara said. “I agree with what Anjo says. The Great Teacher and his people can stay here and be taken care of for some time. But I still think we ought to start moving them out as fast as we can, little by little—trickle them out two or three at a time in private cars from the loading dock.”

  “I agree,” Bleys said thoughtfully. “As Bill Delancy just said, we seem to be like an explosive material—or perhaps, more aptly, like the trigger to some already-primed explosive. The deeper you hide us, the better. I seem to have happened along at a critical time on this world of yours.”

  He smiled at the visitors, for Toni had frowned at his last words; and Henry’s face was suddenly stern.

  “Yes,” Bleys went on musingly, “but I’ve always been deeply interested in New Earth. Perhaps I could have come at a better time.”

  His voice had ended on a humorous note, but he glanced for a second at Toni and Henry with no particular expression. Toni erased her frown. But Henry, stubbornly, did not change expression.

  “Would you lead us, Great Teacher?” said Delancy. “If it came to an actual revolution?”

  “No,” Bleys said, firmly. “I’ve said it many times, and I apparently have to keep on saying it. I’m a philosopher, not a revolutionary. But occasionally, it seems, the philosopher has to ran and hide like a revolutionary. And where do revolutionaries traditionally hide when those in power start hunting for them?”

  He looked around at their faces. But when none of them spoke immediately, he answered his own question.

  “Why, in the mountains, of course,” he said. “This world doesn’t lack mountain ranges, and among them there ought to be places where we can hide, even from searching atmosphere craft, while staying all together—which is important.”

  Anjo gave a small sigh. “Great Teacher, that’s where I wanted to take you all. You read minds.”

  “No,” said Bleys, a little sadly. “I just use logic. But we should leave as soon as we can. Tonight, if possible.”

  Chapter 12

  It was past midnight before Anjo could make the necessary arrangements. They went in small parties down through the now-quiet, white-walled service-ways and kitchen of the hotel and out onto the loading dock. Here they were taken, several at a time, into a variety of different vehicles.

  Bleys felt an inner excitement. The same sort of strangely disturbing excitement that had sent him out on the side of the Others’ building back on Association, the night following Henry’s unexpected appearance to offer what help he could. But, he told himself now, it was not the same.

  He had expected Anjo’s appearance—or at least the appearance of someone like Anjo—representing the unnamed third element in New Earth society that was at odds with the CEOs and the Guild, as those two were at odds with each other. Anjo had not been the surprise—even the shock—that Henry had been, appearing so unexpectedly and so fortunately.

  All that the present moment had in common with the way things had been then was this excitement that verged on uneasiness—as if with the inarguable good fortune of what had happened there was mixed in a potential danger of some kind. Clearly, there had turned out to be no such danger with Henry; but, as Bleys had decided there, too much luck, too suddenly, always tended to make most people uneasy. There was probably no reason for uneasiness. Stil
l, in this case, he would probably do well to stay alert with Anjo.

  But, certainly to begin with, there seemed little reason for him to be concerned. Their escape from the city began, at least, by being almost humdrum—more dull, ordinary and uncomfortable than anything else. Bleys pushed the excitement and the uneasiness from him.

  Bleys, Toni, Dahno and Henry went first in the relative luxury of a delivery van—unfortunately merely wheeled, as most of the other nondescript vehicles also were—but the windowless interior of which had been furnished with carpeting, a couple of sofas and two oversized, cushioned armchairs, all non-float furniture, for Bleys and Dahno. The Soldiers went by fours and fives into the vehicles that followed them.

  It was morning before they reached—and stopped briefly for breakfast at—a small town named Guernica, hardly more than a wide spot in the road. It consisted of three houses with unpainted, weathered, shake-shingles covering sides and roof of their gaunt two stories; two squatty stores and a restaurant-bar, facing the houses across a short stretch of the road.

  “Don’t let the looks of this bother you,” Anjo said, as they stepped out of the van on travel-cramped legs. “You’ll be staying with people farther out in the country.”

  They ate breakfast in the restaurant-bar, with more tiredness than appetite, and went on.

  The upland that now surrounded them was of the altiplano desert variety, with hard, reddish earth and little vegetation. It was attractive in a stern, hard, almost forbidding, way. A land of truth, Bleys found himself thinking—but could not remember where he had read or heard the phrase, or why it should come to his mind now.

  A number of cactus-like plants were the most prominent native flora. The rest of the plants—obviously imported—were small patches of variform desert grasses and bush, sown about here as part of the original terraforming operation. They had obviously been introduced both to hold down the earth which had been top-tilled, to make a soil of sorts; and to provide eatable vegetation for whatever variform herbivores were raised in the area.

  “The people in this district,” said Anjo, “are nearly all ranchers.”

  “What kind of ranchers?” asked Toni.

  “Rabbit and goat.” Anjo half-turned from beside the van’s driver, in one of the front two seats, to speak to Toni in the back. “Beef cattle struggle up here; and even if they could do well here, the ranchers here could not compete with the laboratory-raised beef—any more than the small ranchers down on the green plains were able to compete. When the CEOs imported that lab technology from Cassida, they kept it as a monopoly for themselves.”

  “And the ranches died?” Bleys asked.

  “Well, they’re still there,” Anjo said. “But they’re not owned by the same people anymore.”

  “It seems a waste,” said Toni. “I mean, on one of the few among the New Worlds on which Earth beef cattle can successfully be bred—they don’t bother.”

  They had turned off the main highway only a few hours after leaving Blue Harbor; and from then on the roads had become more and more primitive. The road they traveled after leaving Guernica was more a barely-visible marked trail in the hard, red-tinted earth, than anything else. Their van bumped and shuddered over the uneven surface.

  They were headed directly for mountains now. These could be seen ahead through the windshield of the van, looming, as the day wore on, over them in colors ranging from slate blue to deep purple and black, and back to blue again, then off to a bluish-green and finally to red. In a certain light, tiiey might have looked forbidding. To Bleys, who liked mountains, at this moment they were like old, massive friends.

  “It must be something to see this range at sunrise or sunset,” Toni said.

  “It is,” answered Anjo from the front seat. He did not turn to say it.

  They came finally to a low building at the very foot of the mountains’ first steep slope, a building with stone walls and a shake roof. The walls were gray; and the shakes were grayish with a red tinge like the reddish earth—clearly made from the outer bark of some plant or tree; and each one arched upward in the middle, longitudinally, like ceramic roof tiles.

  The van stopped; and, stiffly, they got out of it. A middle-aged couple—a tall man with a face as sharp as a hatchet and as brown as Anjo’s, with a wife of middling size and weight, dressed in an ankle-length blue-and-white checked dress—came rushing out, followed by three girls and one small boy, in ages ranging from six to sixteen.

  “This is Mordard Cruzon and Yala Cruzon,” Anjo made the introductions. “And their family.”

  “Great Teacher,” said Mordard, “we’re happy and honored to have you here. You four we have room for in our home. There are tents behind the house for those with you.”

  “I’ll be going on, to stay with some relatives,” said Anjo. “I’ll see you all later.”

  He and the driver got back into the van, turned it about in a cloud of dust, and went back along the road they had just traveled and which ran along the feet of the first slopes of the mountains.

  “Come inside. Come inside!” cried Yala. “Let’s get away from this dust before we all choke!”

  They went in. The interior was unexpectedly spacious, with wooden furniture, and brilliantly colored rugs hanging on the plank walls of all the rooms. The rugs and furniture, like the house itself, were obviously handmade and all spotlessly clean.

  In the end, they were there for three days before Anjo showed up again, this time with a short, broad man in his fifties and with a full head of thick iron-gray hair, who showed a clear resemblance to Anjo himself.

  “A campsite for you is ready,” said the older man, whom Anjo had introduced as his uncle, Polon Gean. He spoke formally, with a trace of accent, as if from some Old Earth language; either acquired by him on Old Earth, or inherited. “We should start for it now. We’ve got—”

  He glanced in the general direction of the eye-searing dot that was Sirius; placing it, without making the mistake of looking directly at it.

  “We’ve got only eight hours of daylight to get there. It’s not so far, but the last part’s a hard climb.”

  He turned toward the couple who had played host to Bleys, Dahno, Toni and Henry.

  “Mord, you got a goat-cart for me with runners and wheels both—and a team that can make the trip?”

  The tall man nodded.

  The luggage of Bleys, Toni, Dahno and Henry went into the goat-cart behind a team of twelve goats, harnessed two by two. Variform goats were larger and much more train-able than natural Old Earth goats, and consequently the variforms were commonly used for hauling on the Younger Worlds. For a moment, Bleys felt a touch of something almost like nostalgia for his early years at Henry’s farm on Association, where he had traveled in Henry’s cart, pulled by goats. Then they started off.

  It took them until mid-afternoon to reach their destination. The last fifth of it justified Polon’s statement that it would be steep going. Here, the skids came into play. Up on the sides of the mountain, oddly enough, there was a great deal of long, matted dry grass; and the skids operated well on this after being jacked down below the wheels. The goats seemed at home on the slopes; but as the climb threatened to become nearly vertical, all of them—including Bleys, Dahno and Toni—took to pushing the cart to help the animals.

  They reached a more level place at last, an island of tall variform pines, which grew close enough together so that they almost shut out the daylight.

  Bleys saw Toni, once she had seated herself on the stump of a recently cut-down tree and caught her breath, looking around with some obvious skepticism at the unfinished state of the camp. There were the beginnings of permanent structures built here. But it was far too completed to have been started only four days before. Anjo led them to a row of conical lean-to structures constructed of very long branches from the tall pines surrounding them, with their tips laid together.

  “They’re not bad,” said Anjo. “Look inside.”

  He led them to the fi
rst of the lean-tos and in through an upside down, V-shaped slot in the stacked branches. There was a board floor within, raised above the ground, and all the interior walls had been hung with blankets. Altogether, there was an unexpectedly cozy feel to the space inside; and a full-spectrum, hundred-year light bulb was burning under a shade which softened its light to something not too different from what they had been used to in the way of daylight on Association.

  The wooden floor was partly covered with a section of red-and-black carpeting. For furniture there was a folding campbed, covered with some colorful heavy blankets, like those the Cruzons had hung on the walls of their home; a desk, and four armchairs cushioned with blankets—all handmade. For some ridiculous reason, possibly the long, wearing trip, the sight of the carpeting seemed to move Toni deeply. Indeed, thought Bleys, the idea of these people struggling with a roll of such heavy material up that last steep section of mountainside, just to help create an illusion of comfort inside a makeshift shelter like this, was thoughtfulness carried to the extreme.

  “You’re right,” Toni said to Anjo, blowing her nose, “it’s positively beautiful. Do we each get one of these shelters? Or how did you plan to distribute us?”

  “One apiece for you four—except for the Great Teacher, who’ll have an extra one for his office,” said Anjo. “The others with you, as they arrive by various routes, will be six to a residence—theirs just have beds. The conveniences are outside. They’re camp-style, I’m afraid. If you have to go out in the middle of the night, better put on something warm. It gets cold up here.”

  He looked deliberately at Toni.

  “This one’s for you,” he said. “For the Great Teacher and Dahno Ahrens, we’ve made them with larger beds and chairs. Will they do, until the permanent buildings are up?”

  “This is going to be just fine for me,” said Toni. “But when will the permanent buildings be ready?”

  “Maybe only a few days. Maybe a week,” Anjo answered. “We’ve had to scavenge most of the materials from homes around here. We didn’t dare order in anything, for fear of signaling unusual activity in this district.”