The Man Who Counts nvr-1
Page 16
“So you are walking again. Good fellow! The only way you get well is not sip dishwater soup and take it easily, like that upgebungled horse doctor has the nerve to tell me to do.” He purpled with indignation. “Does one thought get through that sand in his synapses, what it is costing me every hour I wait here? What a killing I can make if I get home among those underhand competition jackals before the news reaches them Nicholas van Rijn is alive after all? I have just been out beating the station engineer over his thick flat mushroom he uses for a head, telling him if my spaceship is not ready to leave tomorrow noon I will hitch him to it and say giddap. So you will come back to Earth with us your own selfs, nie?”
Wace had no immediate reply. Sandra had followed the merchant in.
She was driving a wheelchair, and looked so white and thin that his heart cracked over. Her hair was a pale frosty cloud on the pillow, it seemed as if it would be cold to touch. But her eyes lived, immense, the infinite warm green of Earth’s gentlest seas; and she smiled at him.
“My lady—” he whispered.
“Oh, she comes too,” said Van Rijn, selecting an apple from the fruit basket at Wace’s bedside. “We all continue our interrupted trip, maybe with not so much fun and games aboard—” He drooped one little sleet-gray eye at her, lasciviously. “Those we save for later on Earth when we are back to normal, ha?”
“If my lady has the strength to travel—” stumbled Wace. He sat down, his knees would bear him no longer.
“Oh, yes,” she murmured. “It is only a matter of following the diet as written for me and getting much rest.”
“Worst thing you can do, by damn,” grumbled Van Rijn, finishing the apple and picking up an orange.
“It isn’t suitable,” protested Wace. “We lost so many servants when the skycruiser ditched. She’d only have—”
“A single maid to attend me?” Sandra’s laugh was ghostly, but it held genuine amusement. “After now I am to forget what we did and endured, and be so correct and formal with you, Eric? That would be most silly, when we have climbed the ridge over Salmenbrok together, not?”
Wace’s pulse clamored. Van Rijn, strewing orange peel on the floor, said: “Out of hard lucks, the good Lord can pull much money if He chooses. I cannot know every man in the company, so promising youngsters like you do go sometimes to waste on little outposts like here. Now I will take you home to Earth and find a proper paying job for you.”
If she could remember one chilled morning beneath Mount Oborch, thought Wace, he, for the sake of his manhood, could remember less pleasant things, and name them in plain words. It was time.
He was still too weak to rise — he shook a little — but he caught Van Rijn’s gaze and said in a voice hard with anger:
“That’s the easiest way to get back your self-esteem, of course. Buy it! Bribe me with a sinecure to forget how Sandra sat with a paintbrush in a coalsack of a room, till she fainted from exhaustion, and how she gave us her last food… how I myself worked my brain and my heart out to pull us all back from that jailhouse country and win a war to boot — No, don’t interrupt. I know you had some part in it. You fought during that naval engagement: because you had no choice, no place to hide. You found a nice nasty way to dispose of an inconvenient obstacle to the peace negotiations. You have a talent for that sort of thing. And you made some suggestions.
“But what did it amount to? It amount to your saying to me: ‘Do this! Build that!’ And I had to do it, with nonhuman helpers and stoneage tools. I had to design it, even! Any fool could once have said, Take me to the Moon.’ It took brains to figure out how!
“Your role, your ‘leadership,’ amounted to strolling around, gambling and chattering, playing cheap politics, eating like a hippopotamus while Sandra lay starving on Dawrnach — and claiming all the credit! And now I’m supposed to go to Earth, sit down in a gilded pigpen of an office, spend the rest of my life thumb-twiddling… and keep quiet when you brag. Isn’t that right? You and your sinecure—”
Wace saw Sandra’s eyes on him, grave, oddly compassionate, and jerked to a halt.
“I quit,” he ended.
Van Rijn had swallowed the orange and returned to his sandwich during Wace’s speech. Now he burped, licked his fingers, took a fresh puff of his cigar, and rumbled quite mildly:
“If you think I give away sinecures, you are being too optimist. I am offering you a job with importance for no reason except I think you can do it better than some knucklebone heads on Earth. I will pay you what the job is worth. And by damn, you will work your promontory off.”
Wace gulped after air.
“Go ahead and insult me, public if you wish,” said Van Rijn. “Just not on company time. Now I go find me who it was put the bomb in that cruiser and take care of him. Also maybe the cook will fix me a little Italian hero sandwich. Death and dynamite, they want to starve me to bones here, them!”
He waved a shaggy paw and departed like an amiable earthquake.
Sandra wheeled over and laid on a hand on Wace’s. It was a cool touch, light as a leaf falling in a northern October, but it burned him. As if from far off, he heard her:
“I awaited this to come, Eric. It is best you understand now. I, who was born to govern… my whole life has been a long governing, not?… I know what I speak of. There are the fake leaders, the balloons, with talent only to get in people’s way. Yes. But he is not one of them. Without him, you and I would sleep dead beneath Achan.”
“But—”
“You complain he made you do the hard things that used your talent, not his? Of course he did. It is not the leader’s job to do everything himself. It is his job to order, persuade, wheedle, bully, bribe — just that, to make people do what must be done, whether or not they think it is possible.
“You say, he spent time loafing around talking, making jokes and a false front to impress the natives? Of course! Somebody had to. We were monsters, strangers, beggars as well. Could you or I have started as a deformed beggar and ended as all but king?
“You say he bribed — with goods from crooked dice — and blustered, lied, cheated, politicked, killed both open and sly? Yes. I do not say it was right. I do not say he did not enjoy himself, either. But can you name another way to have gotten our lives back? Or even to make peace for those poor warring devils?”
“Well… well — “The man looked away, out the window to the stark landscape. It would be good to dwell inside Earth’s narrower horizon.
“Well, maybe,” he said at last, grudging each word. “I… I suppose I was too hasty. Still — we played our parts too, you know. Without us, he—”
“I think, without us, he would have found some other way to come home,” she interrupted. “But we without him, no.”
He jerked his head back. Her face was burning a deeper red than the ember sunlight outside could tinge it.
He thought, with sudden weariness: After all, she is a woman, and women live more for the next generation than men can. Most especially she does, for the life of a planet may rest on her child, and she is an aristocrat in the old pure meaning of the word. He who fathers the next Duke of Hermes may be aging, fat, and uncouth; callous and conscienceless; unable to see her as anything but a boisterous episode. It doesn’t matter, if the woman and the aristocrat see him as a man.
Well-a-day, I have much to thank them both for.
“I—” Sandra looked confused, almost trapped. Her look held an inarticulate pleading. “I think I had best go and let you rest.” After a moment of his silence: “He is not yet so strong as he claims. I may be needed.”
“No,” said Wace with an enormous tenderness. “The need is all yours. Good-by, my lady.”
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Document creation date: 08.09.2010
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