Haze

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “We’re close to three hundred klicks from Skeptos,” he ventured.

  “There’s a reason for that. The cottages are purposely isolated, except by subtrans. You’ll see why.”

  “You people never explain anything before the fact,” Roget observed.

  “That’s not true. We explain whatever we can. Some things have to be experienced or observed for the explanation to make sense, and trying to explain them before the fact just creates false impressions and preconceptions.”

  Roget couldn’t help but wonder if overwhelming people with experiences that they were unprepared for did exactly the same thing but saw no reason for voicing the point, not given Lyvia’s attitude.

  When they emerged from the subtrans tunnel and ramp, Roget noted that there was but a single walkway leading due north out of a low circular grassy vale, totally without trees. At least Roget thought the walkway led north, but without a visible sun and with his questions about just how precise his internal monitors were, his directional senses were as likely to be assumptions as totally accurate. Beyond the grassy depression were trees in all directions, as if the subtrans station had been set in the midst of a vast forest.

  “Can you tell me why the cottages are located in such an isolated locale?”

  “For safety purposes,” replied Lyvia. “You’ll see.”

  “How far do we have to walk?”

  “It’s four klicks to the outskirts of the cottages.”

  The forest held more deciduous trees than had the one on the peninsula, and the air was even more humid. The underlying scents mixed a richness with dampness, but without the hint of sweetness that had bothered Roget. “There aren’t any butterflies here.”

  “No. Their absence makes balancing the ecology more difficult, but it’s necessary.”

  “Is that because it’s not that deep … literally?”

  “There is an indigenous subsurface microbial ecology, but it never evolved beyond that, and it’s not hostile. Not any more hostile than any bacterial or microbial ecology anyway, and there are some interesting things going on there. It’s more a problem of balancing with people in a way that makes sense practically and economically. We’ve opted away from truffles, for example. If they eventually develop, that’s fine, but introducing that kind of gourmet and economic temptation is just asking for trouble.”

  Roget kept asking about the ecology as they walked, because that was an area where Lyvia was willing to talk, and information, any information, was better than no information. Besides, he could deduce some things from what she did say.

  The forest ended abruptly, as if a line had been drawn, and a good klick ahead, Roget saw a series of low dwellings—cottages, in fact. Somewhere in the distance, the forest resumed, but the cleared area that held the cottages looked to be a rough oval about three klicks across. The cottage walls looked to be of local stone, and the roofs of something resembling slate, although Roget wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been some form of composite.

  “There are the Manor Farm Cottages, and there’s the security station.” Lyvia pointed.

  Ahead on the right side of the path stood a single dwelling, separated from those farther north by a good hundred meters of open grassy ground. “That’s the first security establishment you’ve pointed out.”

  “It’s been the only one to point out,” she replied.

  As they neared the security cottage, a muscular man wearing a short-sleeved yellow singlesuit stepped out of the dwelling and stood on the front stoop, waiting for them.

  “How many security agents are there here?”

  “I’d imagine just a few, either a couple or a pair of partners. They’re really here to deal with outsiders or illnesses or accidents.”

  “Agent Rholyn, you’re expected. I’m Mattias Singh.” The black-haired man smiled, then turned to Roget. “What you see in and around the cottages may be disturbing. Please keep in mind that no one there can physically touch anyone else without suffering. It would be for the best if you did not touch them either.”

  Roget nodded.

  “Take your time, and see what you need to see, Agent Rholyn.”

  “Thank you.” Lyvia’s voice was pleasant but cool.

  Less than fifty meters past the cottage, Roget’s internals registered a low-level energy field of some sort. Even without his monitors, he could sense something, a low sound that raised the hair on the back of his neck, but it passed after he’d taken another dozen steps.

  Off to his left, a gray-bearded man wearing brown trousers and little else ran across the grass away from the cottages, then collapsed in a heap. Roget stopped and watched. The gray-beard rolled over, then crawled back toward the cottages before slowly standing. Then he again ran away from the cottages, as if trying to escape, before he crumpled onto the grass once more.

  Roget turned to Lyvia.

  “There’s a subsonic fence around the cottage area. Didn’t you sense it? All of those restrained here experience agonizing pain if they even approach it. Sometimes some of them will crawl halfway in and become so paralyzed with pain that they can’t move. That’s one of the things that Mattias or his partner have to watch for.”

  “Can’t anyone else…” Roget broke off his question. The immobilizing nature of the pain and the fact that none of the inmates could touch another supplied him with the answer to his uncompleted inquiry.

  As Roget and Lyvia neared the first line of cottages, a woman wearing antique hoop skirts with her hair piled into a conical shape that looked like the tip of an ancient artillery shell waddled toward them. “I dare say that you be visitors, and unwelcome you are. Please cease and desist, and depart henceforth.”

  “We’ll depart soon enough.” Roget didn’t want to walk over her, but she was blocking the middle of the walkway, and he took another step.

  She scuttled back. “Begone, evil one.”

  On the side porch of the next cottage, a painfully thin woman sat rocking on a makeshift rocker. Her eyes were fixed on the porch railing, even as she rocked herself methodically.

  Roget blinked. A man hurried toward them, wearing a Federation shipsuit.

  “You’re not one of them, are you? I can see the difference. We’re all prisoners here. Can you tell the Federation about us? Please! Anyone who’s different they lock up here, and they say we’re maladjusted, but we’re not. I’ve been here years and years. I just want to go home. Please. I don’t belong here. I really don’t.”

  Roget couldn’t help but stop, but when he looked more closely at the shipsuit, he could see that it was well-sewn but poorly designed, and with insignia and devices he’d never seen and that mixed officer and enlisted emblems.

  “You have to tell them. You have to get help.”

  Roget looked at Lyvia.

  She smiled sadly.

  “You’re no Fed! You’re one of them. You’re just trying to trick us…” Tears ran from the corners of the man’s eyes, and he turned away. Roget moved on.

  “Come to the circus … come to the play, for all the world’s a play, and the play’s the thing…” Those words came from a thin-faced man who sat on a stool before a small table at the west side of the walkway, under an open window to a cottage. His fingers flicked out oversized cards onto the polished but battered wood surface. “I can call up Madame Sosotris for you, or even Tiresias… for you, sir, are the hanged man. You may not know it, but, that, you are … and you will return to your people, an alien people who clutch alien gods…”

  Roget repressed a shiver. Mad as the man clearly was, Roget might well end up a hanged man, figuratively, of course, if dead all the same.

  A woman of indeterminate age sat on the ground, leaning back against the wall of the next cottage, her feet splayed across dirt that might once have been a flower bed. She just giggled, then giggled again.

  An odor of rancidness and outright filth crept more tightly around Roget the deeper he and Lyvia walked into the cottages.

  “Doesn�
�t anyone take care of them?” he asked in a low voice.

  “Why? They’ve chosen not to be taken care of. We keep the replicators full and the houses functional. They can go to the clinic if they choose, or not, as they please. None of them is of exceptionally poor intelligence. All of them have chosen to remain here, and they did so while their minds were stabilized. We used to do stabilization once every five years and ask again, but the results were the same.”

  Everywhere Roget looked was madness, from glittering bright eyes to dull or vacant ones. What the inhabitants of Manor Farm Cottages wore ranged from almost any kind of clothing Roget had ever seen to nothing at all. Those who wore nothing tended to be painfully thin.

  Abruptly, Lyvia turned to Roget. “You’ve seen enough. We need to head back to Skeptos. I’d like to pick up Aylicia before it’s too late.”

  “That’s fine with me.” It certainly was, because it hadn’t been Roget’s idea to visit the cottages. Besides, both the sights and odors were beginning to get to him.

  Lyvia turned. “We can go back this way. It’s the other main walkway. That way, you can see a different view of more of the same.” Her voice remained cool.

  Roget frowned as he neared another cottage. The stones of the walls glistened. The windows sparkled, and the trim was even painted. An angular man was scrubbing the stones of the north wall of the small dwelling vigorously. He didn’t look up or sideways as Lyvia and Roget walked by. Roget had the feeling that his scrubbing was what had polished the stones. He wondered how many years it had taken.

  In an open grassy area to his left, Roget turned to watch a gray-haired woman running, holding a string with a small kite attached. Even at full speed, the woman could barely keep the little kite airborne.

  Roget said nothing more. He just kept watching and walking until he and Lyvia were on the path away from the cottages and had passed the subsonic barrier.

  “Now you’ve seen the Manor Farm Cottages.”

  “How can anyone do that? How can you?”

  “It’s their choice.”

  “That’s no choice,” snapped Roget.

  “No … they have a choice. They can ask for personality modification or guided re-memory emphasis. All of them have rejected that. They claim that they wouldn’t be themselves.”

  “Isn’t that true?”

  “Absolutely,” Lyvia agreed. “But the people that they are as themselves make choices that impact violently and adversely on others, occasionally fatally, and individual freedom must always stop well short of other people’s persons.”

  “So you’d turn them into automatons…”—he struggled for the word—”… zombies, the living dead.”

  “They’re very much alive. Not particularly sane, but definitely alive. Medicating or adjusting them might turn them into zombies, though.”

  “And you can’t do anything better than this? There has to be a better way.”

  “Sometimes there isn’t. There are limits to what one can do to the human brain,” Lyvia replied. “Are you running around screaming that we’re evil monsters who won’t share our technology? Even if you feel that way?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Exactly. Even you choose to behave civilly in a situation where you feel under threat. If they choose to live in what amounts to an animal farm … that’s their choice,” Lyvia replied. “We don’t feel obligated, beyond the basic necessities, to coddle those who are unwilling to make decisions that allow them to function in society. We don’t believe that we should have to spend huge amounts of resources keeping people who won’t act responsibly comfortable and in better situations than those who work. Unlike some societies, we require accountability and real choices.”

  “What sort of choice is that?” He gestured back toward the cottages. “It’s a real choice.”

  “Why don’t you just… adjust them?”

  “Without their consent? And then where would it stop?” asked Lyvia. “Once you give governments the power to adjust people and their perceptions, you’re on the road to empire and ruin. Throughout history, societies have forced unfree choices on people. We don’t force the choices; we just insist on the consequences of those choices falling on the choosers—except when it’s clear that there isn’t the mental capacity to choose. There are very few people to whom that applies, and they’re handled far more gently and warmly.”

  “What about the lack of emotional capacity?”

  She gestured back toward Manor Farm. “They end up in cottages like these and they remain there for life … or until they decide they want to change.”

  “That’s… cruel.”

  “Is it? All choices involve change,” she said patiently. “These people wish to hurt others in one way or another, either by refusing to take responsibility for their actions or taking emotional or physical pleasure in inflicting abuse. That’s not acceptable.”

  “What about those who seek adventure, the thrill of danger? Do you imprison their minds as well?”

  Lyvia smiled. “No. Just as there is always another dynasty, so to speak, there are always frontiers, and we let them seek such—just not on Dubiety.”

  “What do you mean by ‘another dynasty’?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? In stable empires, the rulers change. If matters get too bad, another family or group usurps power, and matters go on mostly as before. Societies that have frontiers tend to be more stable in the center because the adventure-and-danger seekers gravitate toward the frontiers, as do the antisocial or the less advantaged.”

  “How many of your well-adjusted citizens know about places… like these?”

  “Every last one of them over the age of eighteen. It’s called the Omelas requirement. I don’t know the origin of the term, but it means that they have to see that, while all choices are possible, they all have repercussions, and that even in the best of societies, the greatest cruelty is freedom of choice. A society that eliminates all misery eliminates true choice and freedom.”

  “The great freedom to be miserable.” Roget didn’t hide the sarcasm.

  “Without it, there is no joy.” After a moment, she gestured behind them. “Do you think I really wanted to bring you here? That I enjoyed this?”

  Roget was silent.

  20

  26 LIANYU 6744 f. e.

  Roget did get some sleep on Saturday night and early Sunday morning, but he still woke with a headache—and a very sore leg. He could move his leg, and that would have to do. A very hot shower helped get rid of the headache and eased the soreness in his leg somewhat. As he hurried through a marginally palatable and fully replicated breakfast, he considered what he needed to do … and what the Saint dissidents might do—although he had no doubt that they thought they were patriots or idealists or true believers, something along those lines.

  One possibility was that none of the conspirators would do anything and, if questioned, claim that Smith had been operating on his own. The other was that they’d attempt to remove any additional evidence located elsewhere. Roget was betting on the second, and that was another reason why he was up early on Sunday.

  He sponged and wiped off the nightsuit as well as he could, then donned it. He did not power it up. That would come later. While it wouldn’t be as effective in daylight, its background matching provided excellent camouflage during the day, especially inside and when he wasn’t moving, and that might come in useful. Then he reloaded the wrist-dart, still with just paralyzing darts rather than the lethal variety, and gathered his equipment together. Within ten minutes he was out of the apartment, walking up 800 East to the tram station, where he waited ten minutes before he took the next eastbound. He was one of three people in the entire car, and the other two were Sudam men who seemed to be dozing.

  Once he left the Red Cliffs station, and he was the only one who got off there, he walked to the path down Middleton wash, through the gate to Delbert Parsens’s studio, and up the path and around to the east side of the building. The sign in the outs
ide niche read studio closed. That didn’t surprise Roget. He’d discovered that most Saint establishments were closed on Sunday, as they had been traditionally for centuries, if not longer.

  He stepped into the shadows of the entrance at the top of the stone steps and powered up the nightsuit, then eased the mesh hood over his face. Roget could sense the energies of the building’s security system, but it was on standby, suggesting that people were inside, for all that the studio area looked empty. The door was locked, but only manually, and it took but a few moments with his picks before Roget was inside. He locked the door behind himself, replaced the picks in his waist-pak, and moved slowly down the long gradual ramp from the entrance into the main studio, keeping close to the walls and display cases to his right.

  No one was in the studio. Roget glanced at the block of redstone Parsens had been working earlier but didn’t see that the sculptor had made that much progress on the John D. Lee statue. He continued through the studio and up a short and narrow ramp to the older section of the building. The staircase to the lower level wasn’t concealed at all, but lay behind a partly open door off the old main foyer of the building. Roget could sense energies below, as well as hear the murmur of voices that grew louder as he eased down the steps. At the bottom was a small foyer and an open door to the right. The room there was empty, but was set up as a small lecture hall or classroom.

  From where were the voices coming?

  Then he realized that the mirror at the rear of the lower foyer wasn’t anything of the sort, but a reflective holo screen. He started to ease his head through the screen near the edge, fighting the disorientation, and found himself looking at a closet. To his right was a side panel, barely ajar. He stepped into the closet, then peered through the narrow opening in the sliding side panel.

  Beyond it was a long chamber, and along one side were piping and what looked to be antique heat concentrators and generators. Beyond them was an array of more modern and large flash capacitors. As Roget had suspected, a small geothermal power plant lay under the studio, most probably the source of the thermal discharge to the Virgin River.