by David Weber
He hated that sort of intrusion into other people’s privacy just because they’d come into proximity with him, and he generally refused to listen to anything more than very general information about them. He hadn’t had a choice about hearing rather more than that in this case, however, because what Palace Security had discovered had triggered enough internal alarm bells for them to approach Queen Samantha with an urgent recommendation that Roger be removed from Adcock’s vicinity.
Samantha, aware of how much Roger had discovered he liked Adcock, had refused to take their advice without discussing the situation with Roger, first, and that was how Roger had come to know that Jonas Adcock’s family was from the Maslow System, deep in the Haven Quadrant. In fact, Maslow had been a staunch ally of the Republic of Haven for over three hundred T-years, and in light of Haven’s current expansionism, the mere notion of the heir associating with a Maslowan expatriate had produced instant paranoia within the bowels of Palace Security.
A paranoia, Roger had pointed out acidly after sitting through an excruciatingly total dissection of a friend’s life, which was as stupid as it was irrational.
Jonas’ father Sebastian had been a prominent Maslowan engineer, a highly successful specialist in deep space infrastructure design and development. Normally, that would have been considered a good thing, but Maslow had followed its treaty partner, friend, and mentor into exactly the same sort of economic system Haven had developed. Unfortunately, Maslow’s economy had never been as large and robust as Haven’s, and despite its later start, it had started drifting towards the reefs of insolvency quickly. Nor had it helped that professionals like Sebastian Adcock had been given the chance to see the writing on the Havenite wall. In particular, they’d seen the Republic’s Technical Conservation Act of 1778, which had classified an entire series of professions and skill sets as “national assets” and made any attempt to emigrate by someone who possessed them an act of treason. The TCA had been Haven’s answer to its economy’s steady hemorrhaging of people with marketable skills as that economy crunched into decline, and more than one Maslowan professional had feared their own government would follow suit, probably sooner, rather than later.
Sebastian’s first wife, Angelique, had died shortly after giving birth to her daughter, but his second wife, Annette, had told him flatly that it was time for him to go. Time for him to find a star nation which still valued and rewarded individualism, hard work, and ability. Unfortunately, they’d waited just too long, and Maslow had, indeed, passed its own Technical Conservation Act in 1815. Sebastian Adcock had become a “national resource” who had no right to use his skills and abilities except as directed by his government.
Not even Palace Security or the SIS had been able to determine exactly how the Adcocks managed it, but two years later, in 1817, Sebastian, Annette, and their four children—Jonas, Angelique, Jeptha, and Aidan—had reached Manticore. How they’d gotten out of Maslow was a mystery, and one they’d refused to discuss with anyone, which led Roger to suspect there were people still on Maslow who’d helped them. But what was clear was that they’d left everything they owned behind, arriving in the Star Kingdom literally with nothing more than the clothing on their backs.
Jonas had been nineteen, the son of penniless immigrants with no family or friends to help them get their feet under them. Despite which, after a two-year intensive personal study program, he’d won admission to Saganami Island in 1819 and graduated four years later, eighth in his class. His father had found work, at first, as little more than a common laborer on Hephaestus, the planet Manticore’s primary orbital industrial platform. By the time of his death, thirty years later, Senior Station Operations Manager Adcock had run the space station, and no nativeborn Manticoran could possibly have matched the Adcock family’s passionate devotion to the Star Kingdom.
Roger had made that point to the security briefers. He’d made it at some length, in a tone which he’d later realized sounded remarkably like his mother’s upon certain particularly frustrating occasions. He’d pointed out the Adcock family’s contributions to the Star Kingdom. He’d pointed out that Jonas had passed every security check the Navy had ever thrown at him with flying colors. He’d suggested that when the analysts concerned over Jonas Adcock’s patriotism and loyalty had demonstrated their own patriotism and loyalty one half as clearly he might be more inclined to listen to them. And he’d finished by pointing out that treecats’ ability to identify anyone who harbored ill will towards their human partners was proverbial . . . and that Monroe liked Jonas immensely.
And that, as his mother had observed rather dryly into the ringing silence which followed his explanation, had been that.
Still, Jonas had been nineteen when his family left Maslow behind forever. However passionately loyal he might be to his new homeland, that was where he’d been born, where the childhood friends he’d left behind still lived. And that was why his usual sense of humor had become more than a little strained when the Peoples Navy occupied the Maslow System and it, too, was “voluntarily associated” into the People’s Republic of Haven.
Not, unfortunately, without a certain degree of bloodshed among Maslowans who didn’t want to become Havenites. That much had leaked out before the news blackout slammed down completely. No open reports were getting out at this point, but Manticoran intelligence still had some assets on the planet, and Roger suspected that he knew more about just how ugly the situation on Jonas’ original homeworld actually was at the moment than Jonas himself did.
“Now,” Jonas went on a bit more briskly, putting the moment firmly behind him, “I’ve been following some of that research at Grendel U for a month or so now, Rog, and if you’re here to talk about what I think you’re here to talk about, I’m definitely interested. I think we may need to get Chief Thompson in to discuss it with us, as well, since it’s going to fall into her bailiwick, unless I’m mistaken. But before we do that, Angel happened to be in town and decided to drop by to drag her ancient and decrepit brother off to lunch. Under the circumstances, I’d like to invite you to accompany us . . . if you’ll leave that reader right here on my desk and promise not to say a single word about it until we get back. Deal?”
Roger started to refuse politely. He knew Angelique lived on Gryphon, the single habitable planet of Manticore-B, where she was one of the planet’s leading silviculturalists. She didn’t get to Manticore all that often, and he had no business intruding into a family lunch. But then he glanced at Angelique and noticed her quick, fleeting smile at Jonas’ stern tone.
It was a very attractive smile, he thought, bending over to scoop up Monroe and lift him to his shoulder perch.
“Deal . . . Sir,” he said with a smile of his own, and dropped the reader on Jonas’ desk.
July 1852 PD
“—SO I’M AFRAID I CAN’T quite agree with you there, My Lord,” Roger Winton said politely, looking across the palatial conference table at Jackson Denham, the Baron of Seawell and the Star Kingdom’s Chancellor of the Exchequer.
“Indeed, Your Highness?” Seawell arched his eyebrows, then let his eyes flick very briefly—so briefly it was almost unnoticeable—towards the head of the table before he focused intently on Roger’s expression. “I’m afraid I don’t follow your logic. Perhaps you could explain it a bit more clearly?”
Roger made himself smile calmly, despite a frission of anger. He kept his own eyes on Seawell, without so much as a glance in his mother’s direction.
“I’m not questioning your current figures, My Lord,” he said. “My problem is with the basis for some of your projected future numbers. Specifically, the ones you’re showing for trade in the Haven Quadrant. I think the underlying assumptions are far too optimistic given what we’ve seen out of the People’s Republic’s current economy.”
“Those assumptions are based on quite a few decades worth of computer time, Your Highness, Seawell pointed out. “And the analysis they support is the product of some highly experienced analysts.”
You have heard of “Garbage In-Garbage out,” haven’t you? Roger didn’t quite ask out loud. And those “highly experienced analysts” of yours know exactly what you wanted to hear out of them. Don’t you think that might have helped them . . . shave their analyses just a bit? Besides, we wouldn’t want them to entertain a fresh thought and strain their brains, now would we?
“I understand that, My Lord, but I’d also like to point out that everything coming out of our human intelligence sources in the People’s Republic suggests Haven is in the process of adopting highly protectionist economic policies, and I don’t see any mention of that in this analysis.” He tapped the display in front of him, still smiling pleasantly. “Instead, it assumes current trend lines will continue, rather than dip sharply, and I think that’s highly unlikely. According to Dame Alice’s current figures, for example, our carrying trade to the People’s Republic has fallen by almost nine percent over just the last three quarters. Would you care to comment on that, Dame Alice?”
He looked at the pleasant faced, silver haired woman sitting two seats down from Seawell. Dame Alice Bryson was the Star Kingdom’s Minister of Trade, and she and Seawell didn’t exactly see eye to eye on quite a few topics these days. At sixty-nine, she was only five T-years younger than he was, but she often seemed half his age when it came to mental flexibility, in Roger’s opinion. Of course, that might be because she was a Centrist while Seawell was a card-carrying member of the Conservative Association.
“I think the figures speak for themselves, Your Highness,” she said now, never even glancing in the Queen’s direction. Instead, she turned her head to smile at Seawell. “His Highness is quite correct about the People’s Republic’s protectionist tendencies, I’m afraid, Jackson. Their government is steadily nationalizing the independent shipping houses of each of their new member systems. As they shut down the independents, they’re also freezing out everyone else’s carriers . . . including ours. It may not show up as much in your projections because our shipping lines are taking up the slack in Silesia and the League and at the moment the People’s Republic’s still buying plenty of Manticoran goods, so the trade balance is still a long way from tanking. They’re simply sending their own ships to collect them—and to deliver what little we’re buying from them. But everything we’re hearing at Trade suggests they probably won’t be doing that much longer.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Seawell said testily. “It’s going to cost them at least twenty percent more, possibly even more than that, to try to produce locally what they’ve been buying from us! And unless they want to cut their defense budgets, where are they going to get the investment capital to build the production facilities in the first place?”
“I’m afraid you’re missing my point, My Lord,” Roger said. Seawell looked back at him, and Roger shrugged. “At the moment, and increasingly, Havenite policies are being driven by ideology, not rational analysis. I don’t say the Legislaturalists really buy into the ideology they’re selling to everyone else in the PRH, but they have to at least act as if they do. And some of them probably do believe everything they’re saying. What matters from our perspective is less the why than the what of what they’re doing, however, and the problem is that they’re buying more and more deeply into the notion of a command economy. And what their economic analysts are seeing at this moment isn’t the opportunities of selling to an external market, but the opportunities of exploiting an internal market for Haven’s benefit even at the expense of the economies of the People’s Republic’s other member systems.
“They see the star systems they control as a closed internal market, one they can lock other producers out of with protectionist measures to create a situation in which market demand can be satisfied only out of their domestic industry. Protectionism is supposed to create a situation in which market pressures will support the development of the industry their top-down system hasn’t generated, and they don’t care if that drives their subjects’ standard of living down by driving prices up. And they intend to concentrate all of that new industry in the Haven System and their older daughter colonies. I believe they used to call that sort of thinking ‘mercantilism’ back on Old Earth.”
The crown prince shook his head, his expression grim.
“I think your analysts are missing that because from the perspective of the PRH and its citizens as a whole, it’s very, very bad policy. But from the perspective of the Haven System—which is all the Legislaturalists are actually concerned about at the moment, when all’s said—it makes good short-term sense. In essence, they’re looting the economies of the systems they’re conquering—excuse me, peacefully annexing—” his irony was withering “in order to prop up and grow their own domestic economy in Nouveau Paris. In the end, it’s going to wind up costing them far more for manufactured goods and they’re going to take a hammering on lost foreign markets for their own products, but it will force the growth of their own heavy industry in the systems which are most important to them. And because it’s an ultimately irrational policy from the perspective of the PRH as a whole, your rational analysts missed it.”
Seawell started to say something, then made himself stop and closed his mouth firmly. He sat that way for several seconds before he nodded grudgingly.
“You may—may, I say—have a valid point there, Your Highness. I’ll certainly sit down with my staff and examine all of our models in the light of what you and Dame Alice have just said. Having said that, however,” he continued, rallying gamely, “the fact remains that increasing the Navy budget yet again is going to place a very serious strain on the economy as a whole. Because of that—”
“You did well, Roger. Very well,” Samantha Winton said, sipping her tea. “I was particularly impressed when you didn’t reach across the table and pull his tonsils out through his nose.”
“I thought I concealed my unhappiness rather well, actually, Mom,” he replied, sitting back with a tankard of cold beer while Monroe purred across the back of his chair. “Besides, if I wanted his tonsils, I’d ask Monroe to extract them. His claws are a lot better equipped for that kind of surgery.”
Samantha chuckled, and Monroe reached out to smack Roger gently on top of the head with a true-hand. Roger smiled, but there was a carefully hidden darkness behind that smile as he looked at his mother. She’d aged noticeably over the last couple of years, and something inside him raged at her increasing frailty, the slight bend in her spine that defied everything the doctors could do. It wasn’t right—it wasn’t fair!—for her to be visibly fading in front of him when she was barely thirty T-years older than he was.
“Don’t go giving Monroe any ideas,” she said sternly after a moment. “’Cats are very direct souls. If you give him the idea that he can go around dissecting cabinet ministers, it’s going to get very messy.”
“Not if he and I make a few salutary examples right up front, surely!” Roger replied. “Just one or two. I’m sure the others would get the idea and begin deferring suitably to my tyrannical whims.”
“I wish,” Samantha said with rather less humor.
She set down her teacup and leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes for a moment, and Roger felt a fresh pang as Magnus looked down at her protectively. The older treecat no longer rode his person’s shoulder the way he had for as long as Roger could remember, and he was constantly at her side, watching over her. Roger could read his concern, his worry, in his body language, and another strand of concern of his own went through him.
Treecats almost never survived their companions’ deaths. That had made their practice of adopting the shorter-lived humans a virtual death sentence for centuries, and the idea of losing Magnus, who’d been a part of his own life from the day he learned to walk, at the same time he lost his mother was almost insupportable.
At least that’s not likely to be a problem for Monroe. The thought tasted much bleaker than usual at the moment. That’s one good thing about prolong. Not that it’s going to help Mom
or Magnus.
“I think I’m getting too worn out for this, Roger,” Samantha said without opening her eyes. “I just don’t have the energy to beat up on them the way I used to. It helps—if that isn’t an obscene use of that particular verb—that the Havenites are getting increasingly blatant. People can still argue about how much of a threat they are to us, but nobody can simply deny that they pose a threat to anyone anymore.”
“I wouldn’t go quite that far, Mom,” he said dryly. “There’s always Lady Helen.”
“Oh, God.” Samantha opened her eyes and looked at him. “I could’ve gone all day without thinking about her. Thank you, Roger. Thank you ever so much.”
Roger snorted and took a long pull at his beer. Lady Helen Bradley was the current leader of the Liberal party in the House of Lords, and her insulation from the electoral process also seemed to insulate her from rationality, in Roger’s opinion. She got to live in her own little echo chamber, where the only people she ever spoke to were those—from all sides of the aisle, he had to acknowledge—who agreed with her, and the electorate couldn’t even punish her at the ballot box, because she never had to stand for office.
The good news (from Roger’s perspective, at least) was that the Conservative Association had never had much representation in the House of Commons to begin with and that the isolation from reality of peers like Bradley was steadily eroding the Liberals’ popular support, which was actively costing them seats in the lower house, as well. Allen Summervale, the Duke of Cromarty, who’d assumed the leadership of the Centrist Party with Earl Mortenson’s resignation last year, was gathering up quite a few of those disaffected Liberals. The bad news was that the Star Kingdom’s constitution gave the House of Lords disproportionate power, which meant a sufficient number of nobly born drooling idiots could still hamstring the government’s policy badly.
