Other

by Gordon R. Dickson

  The two Exotic planets and the Dorsai no longer occupied the thoughts of people on other New Worlds the way they once had, when those three worlds were the ones to consider in any interstellar situation for the other human-occupied planets. But the images were still there. Images of the Exotics with their almost wizardly business skills and wealth in interstellar currency. Images of the legendary Dorsai, from a world of which it was said that the Grey Captains—as the leading mercenary commanders there were called—could, if they chose to band together rather than hiring themselves out separately, have raised a trained military force that all of the other inhabited Worlds together would not have been able to stand against.

  Those around the table might utter public regrets over anything that damaged the society of any other New World. But behind the old fears was a deep desire to see both the Exotics and the Dorsai brought down to a position below all the rest of them.

  Bleys had led both Jay and Anjo to expose their high cards; evidently, Hytry had none. Now was the time to wind things up.

  “So,” Bleys said, speaking into their silence, “we’ve got two jobs before us. One is the reorganization of the individual; the other is the reorganization of all the New Worlds into a single social unit.”

  He paused to give anyone there a chance to respond; but they were still held and silent, absorbing what he was saying.

  “Achieving the second of these things, the reorganization of the Worlds, will lead us whether we like it or not, to a final confrontation with Old Earth; and necessarily putting an end for all time to her attempts to influence us, particularly through the Final Encyclopedia. To win that battle—and we have to win or be forgotten by history—we’ve got to begin a process of rearming now. So that when we do confront her, it will be with enough power to back up what we say. Bear in mind: Earth’s population still outnumbers that of all our New Worlds combined, if we subtract the Exotics and Dorsai from our social group—which, as I say, unfortunately we’ll have to—”

  For the first time there was a break in the motionlessness of his audience. The figure with the head-blur had moved slightly the arm he or she had been resting on the table next to the pad and stylus there. Bleys went forward rapidly without pausing.

  “Happily, in this, my Other organizations can help. The people in them have been trained—and many more are going to have to be trained, to work with them—as a cooperative management system to tie their organizations on all the New Worlds together. It may sound too ambitious; to suggest tying our Worlds as a whole together the same way. But, in fact, I think there are parallels.”

  He took time out to let his last words sink in.

  “As I said earlier, the historic pattern’s been moving in the direction of a single New Worlds Society, anyway. There’s the example of a three-world combination in this world with Cassida and Newton. The only drawback to it at the moment is that the plans have mostly been made by Newton—which hopes to control all the other New Worlds itself. What I work for is a community of Worlds in which no one World dominates all others. But what Newton’s been doing for over half a century won’t be wasted, since the alignment’s already there. It’ll require a shift of attitude in some people, though—don’t you agree with me, Pieter DeNiles?”

  The person with the blur where a head should be suddenly lost that blur; and the face of the man Bleys had met on Cassida emerged. The head and neck belonging to the face now betrayed how, indeed, the upper part of the jacket had been padded to hide the thin, stooped shoulders of age.

  Bleys had noticed on Cassida how his face had been quick to smile, and how deep the smile wrinkles were around the corners of DeNiles’ eyes under the graying eyebrows. Those eyes were now literally twinkling with amusement.

  “I wondered how long it would take you to make the connection,” he said.

  The spell binding those around the table was broken. Bleys was no longer the center of the attention. They were all staring at DeNiles.

  “It was the only reasonable conclusion,” Bleys said. “I expected you here for this meeting. You made one mistake when we met on Cassida. It wasn’t necessary to rub your frailty into me by having one of your attendants make an angry remark about the way I’d tired you out when we” walked from your building to those trees. That was overdoing it. The attendants might have showed their resentment in many ways; but having one of them put the lesson in words to someone like me was bound to make me question it.”

  “I am old,” Pieter said, “and that walk to the trees was rather hard on me, particularly keeping up with those long legs of yours—even if you did slow down.”

  “I’m sure it was,” Bleys said. “But the impression you wanted me to have was that you were too old and frail to do anything like take a working trip to another New World. Only that could have been the reason for so much emphasis on your weakness; but I didn’t actually begin to lose my last sense of doubt until I came in from that balcony on Newton, the evening Council meeting, after hearing and seeing a figure with a blurred head sitting there—” he turned to the others around the table—“forgive me, I should introduce the person you now see. Pieter DeNiles, Cassidan born, but apparently an invaluable voice in the Laboratories Review Council on Newton—if an anonymous one. Normally he attends Council meetings there under the name of ‘the Gentleman.’ “

  “I don’t think—” Jay Aman began; but Pieter cut him short.

  “Don’t make yourself seem any more foolish than you already have,” Pieter said. “The First Elder already knows all about our connection with you CEOs. He could hardly miss it. It wouldn’t take a Bleys Ahrens to figure out that, while the CEOs might be well off, raising the international currency to make an immediate payment on a contract for fifty thousand Friendly troops would be something that might be beyond CEOs’ means.”

  “I’ll have you know we have—”

  Jay‘s voice was cut short again by DeNiles.

  “As I said, don’t make yourself look any more foolish,” Pieter said. “Undoubtedly you can pay such a bill—eventually; but there’s a tremendous difference between having that kind of credit on record and being able to draw down on it at short notice, to pay what you had to agree-to pay to the Friendlies’ government on that kind of contract. You needed us. Not that it makes much difference because you’d have had us helping you, anyway. First Elder, I think while you’ll have some trouble convincing some of these New Earth people to go your way, Newton’s populace is nowhere near that vulnerable. The social connections Newton has been setting up now for a matter of generations are firmly in place.”

  “Convincing isn’t the word!” Jay almost shouted. His expression had changed, and his voice had begun to reach a pitch rather like that heard from his uncle before. “Speaking for the CEOs, we aren’t bound to anyone, including Newton, even if we are somewhat in debt to them; and we don’t intend to be bound to your plan either, Bleys Ahrens. Apparently—” he looked at Bleys and then DeNiles with white anger—“the two of you think you’re the only ones who can make plans and carry them out successfully over a period of time. My uncle’s not the fool that many people take him for; and even before his time, the CEOs were thinking ahead. It was inevitable that sooner or later the CEOs had to completely own New Earth—”

  “I dispute that!” Hytry cried. “Our Guilds—”

  “Your Guilds were never anything but unions for a bunch of sheep that don’t know their own minds!” Jay snapped. “Except for your Guildhouses and your titles, you’re no different from the People of the Shoe. It’s the CEOs who own the corporations. It’s the CEOs who control the planetary government. And it’s the CEOs who are going to bring not only Newton and Cassida, but all the other worlds into line!”

  Jay paused and calmed with surprising rapidity. He looked around the table slowly.

  “All we ever needed,” he said quietly, “was our own army. And now—we’ve got that.”

  They were all watching him. He let them sit for a moment and absorb his
last words. Then he almost smiled.

  “In fact,” he said, “our planning has always run far ahead of that of two other people you’ve just been listening to at this table. That’s something that ought to be of particular interest to you Guilders and you Shoes. You’d better face the fact that you may have been betting on the wrong horse. As an example of CEOs thinking ahead, I’ll tell you now I arranged for the Commander of the Friendly troops on our World to come here shortly after this meeting was to start; and say he’d wait until it was over, so he could speak to me. I’ll call him in now.”

  He lifted his wrist control pad to his lips.

  “This is Jay Aman,” he said, and his voice came back at them from the intercom structure in the walls and ceiling. “Marshal, would you come in now?”

  He lowered his arm again to the table without waiting for an answer, reached to an inside pocket of his jacket and came out with a folded handkerchief, with which he wiped his lips. Behind him one of the doors to the room slid open, and Marshal Cuslow Damar stepped through it. He took a couple of paces into the room to stand behind Jay’s chair.

  “You sent for me, Mr. Chairman?” he asked the back of Jay’s head. He looked exactly the same as he had when Bleys had seen him the day before. His uniform, his way of standing, even the expression on his competent face and an evident willingness to listen to anything, were the same.

  Jay swung half-about in his chair so that he could look momentarily at the Marshal.

  “We don’t use that title in public, Damar,” he said. “You’ll have to learn that.”

  “My apologies, Jay Aman,” said Cuslow, his tone of voice also unchanged.

  “Granted—this time,” Jay said. He swung back to face those at the table. “What I brought you here to do, Damar, is to stand there and tell these people if what I say agrees with what you know—that is, if I ask you whether it does.”

  “A pleasure, Jay Aman.”

  “For those of you who don’t know him—that, of course, excludes the First Elder—the man behind me now is Marshal Cuslow Damar, commander of the troops we’ve just bought from the Friendlies. Actually, he was born right here on New Earth; but his father moved the whole family to one of the Friendlies—Harmony, I believe—when the Marshal was only eight years old. I don’t remember just what age the Marshal is now, but it’s a fair number of years ago since he was taken to Harmony. I mention this just to show how we of the CEOs plan ahead.”

  No one offered to question or dispute the information. Jay went on.

  “Damar, is that correct?”

  “Yes, Jay Aman.”

  “His father had a mission,” Jay went on, dabbing his lips again with the handkerchief, “a mission for us. It was to live on Harmony and raise his family there. The Marshal was the third son, I believe, and they all went into the military; but the oldest two ran into accidents and died. The Marshal here, however, survived. He rose through the officer ranks to high command. When we talked to the Friendly government about buying these troops, we asked them to send, if possible, a commanding officer who had knowledge or experience with New Earth. Naturally, they sent us Damar. Correct, Damar?”

  “Exactly correct, Jay Aman.”

  “Yes,” said Jay. “You know, Damar, we consider anyone who was born on New Earth a citizen of it forever, so you know that you’re actually a citizen of New Earth?”

  “I’ve always known that, Jay Aman.”

  “As a matter of fact, I believe most of your family is back here now. Aren’t they, Damar?”

  “That’s right, Jay Aman.”

  “In fact, I believe even his father is among them,” Jay went on, but this time to the people around the table. “We have them under guard—protective guard, of course. Your father just returned recently, didn’t he, Damar?”

  “He got a message my sister was very sick,” said Cuslow, “so he decided to come back. Happily, it turned out when he got here she wasn’t as ill as he’d assumed from the message. In fact, I think he’s got passage booked back to Harmony in a couple of weeks.”

  “All in good time, Damar.” Jay was still looking at those around the table. “It’s a great expense, even for a successful merchant like your father, to be taking spacecraft interworld like this. Let’s see if we can’t persuade him to stay and enjoy his native world a while longer. We intend to take care of him, you know; along with all the rest of your family, in spite of all the years he spent on Harmony. In fact, in spite of his becoming, necessarily we hope, among the most religious of those religious-minded Friendlies. And he did become just that, didn’t he, Damar?”

  “My father became a True Faith-Holder,” said Damar. “This was acknowledged by all who knew him on Harmony. I’ve always told people there how proud I was of him and how I hoped someday to be worthy of achieving such faith myself.”

  “I’m sure you did, Damar,” Jay said to the table. “However, at the moment I’ve got a duty for you. We’ve got two off-planet visitors here in this room. One of them, of course, is Bleys Ahrens, First Elder of the Friendlies, and the other’s a visitor from Newton—just look for the oldest person here—a ‘Gentleman’ named Pieter DeNiles. Our government has just decided these two are now persona non grata on New Earth; and accordingly you’ll make arrangements now—I assume you brought some other military people with you?”

  “I’ve some aids and a few enlisted men with me, who could come if I called them, Jay Aman.”

  “Yes, well, then, possibly you ought to do that now. I don’t think Pieter DeNiles will give you any trouble; but the First Elder has rather made a fetish of physical exercise and might do something foolish. We wouldn’t want him to get hurt—it might create an interstellar incident. So call your men in and escort the two off-planet now, by the first vessel headed interstellar. They can make their own arrangements from wherever it takes them.”

  “Just a moment,” Bleys said. He reached inside his jacket and brought out a bound sheaf of paper which was the copy of the contract the Marshal had given him earlier. “I think you’d better have another look at your contract before you do anything drastic, Mr. Chairman.”

  He skidded the bound sheets down the tabletop to Jay, who knocked them aside.

  “I don’t need to look at it! I already know what’s in it.”

  Jay produced his handkerchief and dabbed at his lips again, then went on more calmly.

  “I think you’re the one who might be surprised by that contract, Bleys Ahrens. We went over it very carefully, with the best of our legal experts. It contains all the points we demanded from the Friendly government. All of them. Damar, you have your orders.”

  “Indeed, Jay Aman,” said Damar, “there’s only the matter of consulting with my superior about a diplomatic matter like this.”

  Jay‘s face, which had by now recovered its usual color, went white again. His mouth twisted, and he spun about in his seat.

  “What do you mean?” he said. “I’m your superior! I own you and your people! Do you understand that? I own you, all your military and your family. Particularly your family. Hasn’t that penetrated your skull?”

  “Indeed it has,” Damar said. But now he was speaking over Jay’s head to Bleys. “First Elder, do I have your permission to execute this order?”

  “I think not in this case, Marshal,” Bleys said. “I think Jay Aman—or the Chairman—whichever address he prefers—might be a little confused.”

  He looked from Damar to Jay.

  “Jay Aman—or Mr. Chairman—” he said, “you really should look at that contract again. This time, you might keep in mind that it’s modeled on a Dorsai contract; and the Dorsai have had a couple of hundred years of practice in making out military contracts. I’m saying nothing against your legal advisors, of course. But I think you’ll find in there that the one who commands the Friendly troops on Harmony, if it comes down to a matter of making a decision for the use of any of them, is the superior Friendly official on the world at that time. I happen to be the one
on New Earth at this moment.”

  Jay stared at him, unmoving and wordless, the handkerchief now crumpled but still held in one of his fists.

  His lips moved slightly, but no sound came out. He swung about to face Cuslow Damar again.

  “Did you hear me?” he said. “Do I have to remind you of your duty again—and your family? Particularly your father?”

  “I love my family deeply,” Cuslow said; and now there was emotion in his voice. “Above all, I love my father and would do anything to keep him and the others safe. But I have always striven to walk in his footsteps; and he, himself, would say that my duty to God comes first. And that duty requires me to obey the command of my superior, who is the First Elder, at the moment. Neither to God nor my superiors will I fail in my duty.”

  “Mr. Chairman—” Bleys said softly—and Jay spun back to face him across the table. “Did you really think the Friendly Worlds would lease you our children if their Commander was not a true man of the faith? I think you’d better look in that contract. Page seven, the section marked ‘COMMAND AND DISPOSAL OF TROOPS UNDER CONTRACT.’ “

  Staring at him, Jay reached out blindly, closed his fingers on the sheet of paper he had knocked aside and pulled it to him. He turned pages.

  “I think the eighth line down,” said Bleys, “is where you’ll find the words—beyond a colon, there—’…the troops under contract shall be under the command of the senior officer present and his superiors, including the authorities on Harmony and Association who are committed to the supplying of the troops earlier enumerated.’ “

  Jay Aman’s eyes ran down the page and stopped. He looked up at Bleys again.

  “I see it,” he said; “What about it?”

  “Jay Aman,” Cuslow said behind Jay’s head, “the First Elder is my superior officer.”

  If Jay’s face had paled before, it became almost completely drained of blood now. He stared at Bleys.

  “You see,” said Bleys, “the Dorsai, as I said, have been honing contracts like these for a couple of centuries, now. Early in their time of supplying mercenaries on contract to other worlds, they were often cheated by contractees who tried to take control of the Dorsai troops with a commander of their own; on the argument that the only Dorsai left alive to command the troops was of inferior rank to their general commander, or some such excuse.”