Other

by Gordon R. Dickson

  There was really no way in which McKae, without Bleys, could fulfill his glowing election speeches, promising to improve the centuries-long dearth of interstellar credit on the two Friendly worlds. Marketing more of their young men of both planets as mercenary soldiers was, as it had always been, the only possible way. Neither Association nor Harmony had ever really had much else to export. Together with the Dorsai, they had originally been spoken of as the “Three Starvation Worlds.”

  On all three, natural resources were scanty; and none of them lent itself to the home growth of experts in any profession other Younger Worlds would need to hire—except military personnel; and the Dorsai, starting early, had chosen to take the high road of quality, there, leaving only the low road of quantity to the Friendlies.

  So now McKae was realizing how dependent he was on Bleys—and not liking it. Hopefully, he would accept that worry as only an immediate concern, and not begin to entertain the suspicion of it being an opening wedge to a much greater control of him by Bleys.

  Thoughtfully, Bleys fed the written records of his note into the slot of the phase-shift sheet destructor and watched them disappear, their least physical elements now spread out evenly and instantly throughout the universe.

  There was another note he should write while it was fresh in his memory. It was only now that he faced the fact that he had, unconsciously, been putting off setting it down in words. A hesitation like this was a bad sign, hinting that his memory might be trying to forget something it should remember, because it opened up possibilities that were frightening or distasteful.

  He took another sheet of single-molecule paper and began.

  “This is a note on shipboard on my way to Cassida,” he wrote. “Ironically, it’s something I’d give a great deal to talk over with Toni. I write ‘ironically,’ because a talk about this is impossible. I’m sure if I told her even part of what I hope, she would be shocked by the human cost—the necessary cost—of what I must do to achieve what I want for the future.

  “Some days before leaving Harmony she and I went out into its countryside, when Barbage had been told the Militia had surrounded the Command of revolutionaries Hal Mayne had joined. The Militia had not. But the trip provided me with two harsh discoveries about myself."

  “The first had to do with the local Militia Commander deciding to hang three local residents, since he had failed to capture the actual revolutionaries; and Toni was hard-hit by the callous brutality of his order."

  “I could tell myself it was Toni’s shock that caused me to react the way I did, but that would mean lying to myself. The fact is I was not able to let the hanging take place."

  “What caused me to react like that—my Exotic ancestry or the example of my mother—doesn‘t matter. The fact remains that, faced with people about to be executed before my eyes, I reacted in a way that could, if it happens again at the wrong time, threaten all my plans."

  “I’ve always told myself I’d have to face the fact that there would be a cost in human lives to achieve the change I want in human society in my lifetime."

  “That has always meant, inevitably, that some must die as at least an eventual result of my orders."

  “But out in the foothills of a mountain range on Harmony, I found that I was not capable of accepting an unjust execution, such as would have been a minor part of the price to be paid for what I want."

  “My reaction was not cold and reasoned. It was a hot, instinctive, visceral reaction—as instinctive as one that would make me defend against some physical attack."

  “I must also remember what I saw on the face of the major when I told him I would not let him kill those men."

  “I know that my face, after all these years of training and practice, was unthreatening and calm. I know my voice was perfectly under control, equally unthreatening and calm. But something about me completely convinced him I meant what I said. Plainly, I terrified him."

  “The important question is—how can I do what I plan if I cannot trust myself to face the cost of doing it? I could not let the men hang. But if the major had defied me, I was ready to kill him."

  “There seems no solution to this, now. I won’t know how I’ll react until I face the situation that either makes or breaks everything I have planned."

  “All I can do otherwise is continue as planned and hope. Because I will not give up my dream of what might be. Those living today will barely begin to see its promise. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be the ones to perceive it—an opening out into a vaster and more understandable future. It is too valuable not to try for. At the moment, all I can do is go forward. So I will.”

  He sat, gazing for a moment more at what he had written. Then he picked up the two sheets he had filled and fed these, also, through the slot that would destroy them. But their destruction made no difference. The years of training had now imprinted what he had written in his memory, and the questions would not go away. They would be there, his realization of what the day had told him, along with the events of the day itself.

  He sat where he was for a little longer, with not merely his body, but his mind, it seemed, in suspension. His conscience was the first part to wake, and it reminded him that he had another memory note yet to make. A note he had also put off, finding it strangely hard to put into words. But the solution to that problem, he told himself now, was simply to sit down and start writing. The words would either come or they would not. The important thing was to get it down any way he could; and perhaps that writing would itself clarify it, so that his mind could deal with it.

  “I’ve not mentioned this to Toni,” he wrote. “I’m not quite sure why not. There is no specific reason not to tell her. The fact that it concerns another woman is entirely beside the point of my hesitation—I think—though, in fact, I also think the uncomfortableness in mentioning something like this would be on my side rather than hers.”

  He paused in his writing for a moment, considering that.

  “But I must enter into my memory file the moment of my stepping into the forest,” he wrote on; “and my one glimpse of the woman who must have been Rukh Tamani, leader of the Command to which Hal Mayne—under the name of Howard Immanuelson, possibly—is now supposed to be attached.

  “What I must remember is the way I was impressed by her. It was not merely her unusual beauty. She was, literally, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen or ever expect to see. In fact, I would not have believed that such a human essence of the word ‘beauty’ was possible. But the remarkable thing was that the real power of it was not really resident merely in her face and body, at all. It was something much more that illuminated her. I would speak of a light glowing from within her, but that is not really a good description. What struck me so strongly was something closer to a sort of invisible, but palpable, aura about her; that I felt, even before my eyes, adjusting to the dimness of the woods, had taken in her physical appearance. If I had owned the slightest scrap of Friendly religiosity—say, the smallest part of Henry’s sort of feeling in that area—I could almost have knelt before her.

  “I would give a very great deal to know her better. I would not place that desire ahead of my hunger to know and speak to Hal Mayne. Try as I will, I can summon up no memory which fits my image of what a grown-up Hal should look like. It seems to me that my memory gives me the faces of all those I saw at that time—and a face that could be his is not among them. It’s possible he managed to hide himself among them; but that’s a farfetched supposition. The only other possibility is even more farfetched.

  “Could it be that unconsciously I am afraid of finding him after all, and learning what his capabilities or potentials actually are?

  “What if he is my equal, or close to it, and his role in history is to be my Antagonist—not my ally—after all?

  “This, too, is unanswerable until at last we come face to face. Then I will know.”

  He paused again, sitting staring at the words his hand had written. Then, he went
on.

  “In the meantime, I can only hope that when the Harmony Militia find him, they don’t damage or kill him. I don’t trust Barbage. His fanaticism outruns any fear of consequences—even from me.”

  He did not reread this last part of his note. His mind fled to the matter of the upcoming days on Cassida, now only a few more days of ship-time away.

  There was, legally and officially, no Others organization on Cassida. Two years before, both Cassida and Newton had declared the rather large Others’ organization each had to be illegal. Therefore Bleys would theoretically be without contacts there. Actually there was a small hard core of the Organization that kept in contact as members of other, legal organizations. Toni had written to their secret leader, Johann Wilter, about Bleys’s arrival—but, strangely, he did not seem to be on hand. Nor was there any sign of the cortege of limousines Toni had arranged through a travel agency, to meet them. When she asked the terminal agent waiting at the end of the disembarkation ramp about the vehicles, the green-uniformed woman shook her head.

  “Non-terminal traffic is never allowed on the spacepad,” she said.

  Toni looked over her shoulder at Bleys, who looked back, frowning a little. This was the sort of situation in which Dahno was useful—but Dahno was back on Association, getting himself elected to the Member seat in the Chamber, there. It was quite true that ordinarily civilian traffic was not allowed onto a spacepad, on any world. But on any world people with diplomatic passports and a security need had that rule waived for them. It should have been waived in this particular instance, since Bleys was, as far as the government of Cassida knew, a member of Association’s planetary government.

  “This way, please,” the terminal agent continued. She was a slightly overweight young woman with a cheerful round face—which now, however, was unusually solemn as she turned and indicated two young men in uniform, with the silver of officers’ insignia in bands around their blue sleeves. Just beyond them was a double file of what were obviously enlisted troops in slightly lighter blue uniforms, but distinguished more by virtue of being less well-fitting and lacking other small graces of tailoring, from the officers.

  One of these officers was shorter than the other and had a pale, yellowish-white face, and slightly protruding eyes that gave him a look of single-minded stupidity.

  The other was a tall, lean youngster, with nose slightly askew in a narrow face and two silver arrows on his left lapel, instead of the single one his companion wore—glinting under the light of Alpha Centauri A—a sun so close in apparent color and size at Cassida’s distance from it, that it was the one star under which people newly out from Old Earth felt at home. In fact, even in Toni and Bleys, Alpha Centauri A’s light had seemed to wake some comfortably familiar atavistic memory, so that they had spoken of it, as Favored drifted in orbit, awaiting permission for landing.

  However, they did not need to go to the two officers, because those were both already advancing toward them. They came up to Bleys.

  “Bleys Ahrens?” said the taller of the two.

  “Yes,” said Bleys. “What’s this all about?”

  “You’re under arrest, Bleys Ahrens,” said the officer. “If you and your party will come with us quietly, we can avoid a great deal of bother.”

  “Go with you where?” Toni demanded. “Do you realize what you’re doing? You can’t arrest a foreign diplomat. Bleys Ahrens is covered by his diplomatic passport—”

  “I’m sorry—Antonia Lu, I believe?” said the officer. “But I’m following orders. We have troop trucks over here to transport you. If you and Henry MacLean would follow the lieutenant with me to the second vehicle, and your escort to the trucks behind that, please? Bleys Ahrens, if you’ll come with me in the first vehicle—”

  Chapter 20

  The trucks were heavy-duty military vehicles painted a mud-colored gray. There were two swivel seats in front, so arranged that the truck’s control stick was available to either of them. Behind these seats were two more for passengers; and behind those the back of the truck, an open area with a removable weather cover overhead and two long, hinge-up bench seats, one on each side of the back section. Bleys took the passenger seat directly behind the enlisted-man driver, while the officer took the other front seat.

  “I apologize for the cramped conditions, sir,” said the officer, swiveling his seat half-around to speak to Bleys.

  Bleys only nodded. An apology was certainly called for. Not only the lowness of his seat, but the meager distance between it and the two seats ahead, had forced him to sit at an angle, in order to seat himself at all, with his knees hard against the back of the officer’s seat.

  But he did not make an issue of it. There had been no reason why they could not have provided a vehicle with comfortable seating for him; no more than there really was for the arrest itself. Therefore the discomfort must be part of whatever plan was at work here—perhaps an attempt to suggest mere thoughtlessness on the part of those sent to pick him up.

  Bleys therefore endured the situation, distanced his attention from the cramps already starting in his legs and directed his thoughts elsewhere. He could simply have stepped over into the back of the truck and made the ride on one of the hinged benches. That would have given him half the width of the truck bed to stretch out his legs.

  However, in the back there were no window areas. Here he could look out through the windshield transparency and see where he was being taken.

  The officer spoke to the driver. The truck—a magnetic-lift vehicle—lifted a meter above the pad and slid off across it toward an entrance ramp which sent them angling downward to an underground level.

  Such entrances to a network of underground tunnels were common in most spaceports. But from the moment they reached the lower level here, a difference appeared. Their ramp ended in a road-wide empty trough, set crosswise and running off to their left. The driver entered it and began to move down the trough; but at a swiftly increasing speed that outpaced any speed at which mag-lev drives could normally move them.

  Behind the enlisted driver, Bleys got the strong impression that their truck had been encapsulated in some invisible way, and that it was the trough that now controlled their speed. In any case, they were soon moving so fast that it was less than five minutes before the trough rose above-ground again, and they found themselves encased in a transparent—at least from the inside—tunnel, literally flashing through a large city.

  Their speed was such that it was impossible to get a close look at the buildings as they passed. But, taken altogether, they were interestingly different from what Bleys had seen on all other Younger Worlds. All those—even the poor ones, like the Friendlies—had metropolitan areas that in many ways were modern enough to be virtually interchangeable between worlds. If this was Tomblecity, it was entirely different from the city he had visited once before.

  It was as if the whole city had been completely rebuilt since Bleys had last been here, some years back, slightly before the meeting on Old Earth that had required the taking over of the Mayne estate. But Cassidans were known for their technolust, and of all the New Worlds were in the best position with both credit and manufactories to satisfy it.

  Now it appeared as if everything he had seen before had been torn down and reconstructed according to a single master plan. For one thing, all of the buildings gave the impression of being buried deeply in the ground, so that only one to six of their top stories showed.

  Not only that, but there seemed to have been a general agreement about their materials and construction. The individual structures grew uniformly taller as they approached the center of the city, and then began to lose height again as the farther edge of the metropolitan area was approached.

  When at last the trucks reached the last of the city proper, the trough in which they traveled branched off from the wider one they had been sharing with other vehicles, traveling in parallel channels, and their speed was reduced.

  They slowed almost as quickly as t
hey had accelerated. The feeling of being encapsulated fell away. The tunnel ended, and they drove off onto a wide paved road that led up a steep and winding route on a mountainside.

  They moved more slowly on this road, but still at what would have been an extremely good pace—much faster than Bleys had traveled on other worlds on like roads.

  But their speed slowed even more as they climbed higher and the road narrowed. Eventually it wound off on what seemed to be a side road; and, at the end of this, they stopped in a paved area just before a spreading palatial-looking structure, nowhere more than three stories in height but covering a large expanse of mountainside.

  Large as it was, something about it gave it the look of a personal dwelling.

  With the exception of Old Earth, the two Exotic worlds and the Dorsai, a home so large ordinarily did not exist. Single dwellings were normally small, meager structures, or—in the countryside—farmhouses, like Henry’s home on Association, though they might be a good deal larger and much more comfortable than Henry’s. Otherwise, people lived in city apartments or hotel suites.

  But this place was clearly their destination. The officer in front looked back at Bleys.

  “If you don’t mind,”—he opened the door beside him as the truck stopped—“this way out, please.”

  Bleys followed him into the building. Within, it was even more plainly the dwelling place of some family or individual—but a very rich one.

  From the lofty entrance hall, which gave an impression of having been carved out of one impossibly huge chunk of white marble, a ramp mounted to an upper level; and this started to move the moment they set foot on it, delivering them to the upper level. They stepped off onto a deep, ivory-colored carpet, and the officer led the way through several corridors and rooms until they came at last to a relatively small room, with a large and ornate door closed in the far wall of it.