Forge of the Elders, page 42
"General Gutierrez, I demand that you put a stop at once to these disgusting amateur individualistics!" It was Empleado. "Our duty is clear! This talk is treason, not just to our government but to humanity itself!"
"Blow it out your ass, you KGB cockroach!" Danny watched his father carefully avoid seeing who'd said that. Some time passed before similar replies, mostly obscene, began to taper off. As his father continued, Danny found that his own choice wasn't all that hard. It was true that, if he sided with the Elders, he might never see his family—mother, brothers, sisters—again. His father had to be aware of that, and of the fact that the government might take his defection out on his wife and children. Danny also knew that this didn't make them different from anybody else here.
Although he couldn't say why, he felt that making the right choice was the best way he could help his family. He also knew that his father faced another problem. Despite his opening remarks, which had represented nothing less than the truth, the general wouldn't want, even by implication, to make choices for others. Wasn't the whole point of this situation the right and necessity to do that for oneself? This probably meant that Danny, too, should wait until the last minute before declaring himself, so as not to tip the balance. As it was, the others seemed to be having more difficulty than their commander and his son.
"I worry most," Gutierrez told them, "that after all we've been through, we'll find ourselves peering at each other over gunsights." He looked at his audience, most carrying weapons as they had since the initial misunderstanding with the Elders. "At the same time, you can bet the Banker's preoccupied with his own great fear that we might use Predecessor technology to defend ourselves. He may not know it, but his concern is groundless."
The crowd gave him a disappointed groan. Many of them, who hadn't helped explore below, had been harboring hopes of a miracle.
"Sorry, but it'll be years before we'll understand what 5023 Eris is capable of, let alone take advantage of it. Of course that hasn't stopped Nikola Deshovich from trying to prevent it. What he didn't count on was that, even with the Predecessors' systems still inactive, we're far from helpless."
"What do you mean, General?" the geologist, Guillermo interrupted. "I thought we were surrounded."
Gutierrez sighed. "Hector, there's a lesson here if we're smart enough to learn it. Back home, we delegate personal defense to the authorities."
"So scum like Deshovich," Danny was unable to help himself, "end up running things."
His father shrugged. "Fair enough. By contrast, the nautiloids are accustomed to personal weaponry." From a pocket, he pulled the tiny Kahr 9mm pistol he'd carried since finding it on Richardson's body. "And to tell the truth, I've sort of gotten used to it myself. Eichra Oren's little hypervelocity steam gun typifies the potency of private arms available to the Elders. The point is that each of these beings controls his own destiny."
Ortega y Pena snorted. "Small arms against nuclear weapons?"
"Excuse me, Horatio, I didn't intend to interrupt." Mister Thoggosh drew himself toward the group. "You mentioned a lesson to be learned. This Banker of yours doesn't want to destroy his enemies so much as steal what belongs to them, is that correct?"
"Not my Banker, Mister Thoggosh. Otherwise, you're right."
"Still, his purpose would be lost in destroying what he wants to seize."
The botanist nodded. "Which is probably why he's withdrawn for the present. A wise barbarian loots before he burns. The only way he could do that was to come down and fight at a level where small arms are effective. And there, he lost."
"For the time being, Federico, as you say," the general answered. "The nukes he brought are an empty threat. His manpower, drawn from World Soviet `peacekeeping' forces, came expecting to assault wholly undefended territory." He indicated the prisoners. "Doctrine gave them no preparation for an armed population. Makes for an effective defense policy, doesn't it? But at a price no government today is willing to pay—"
"Limitations on its own power," Ortega y Pena offered, "set by the same armed population."
Mister Thoggosh chuckled. "They are beginning to learn, Horatio."
"Back on Earth, too," declared Colonel Tai. "Before we ran into Corporal Owen, we, well, asked our friends over there some leading questions."
Toya gasped. "You tortured them?"
Tai laughed. "We didn't have to—Pulaski, is it? They all gave themselves mental hernias thinking up information to swap for their lives. Some would have gone home for more, if we'd let them, and come back to give it to us. The point is, there are scattered uprisings all over Earth. The effort to seize this asteroid exhausted the resources of both Russia and America, weakened both governments, and deprived their leaders of any remaining credibility."
"So it's over."
"I'm not sure I'd go that far, General. If the Banker survived the battle, doubtless he'll continue to be the first-class nuisance he's always been."
"And what will your people do?"
"After things are squared away here, you mean? Well, some of us are preparing to return to Earth. If your people are concerned about events at home or worried about their families, they're free to return with us if they wish—and if you permit, of course."
"I appreciate the courtesy, but anybody can go back who wants to—including prisoners. Won't that make a crowded trip back for you, though?"
"Not for me, General. Many of us have elected to remain. After all, there's so much to be learned from the Elders."
"All right, welcome to 5023 Eris, then. Danny, please dismiss the company and let them do their own thinking." For the first time, he lifted a hand to his wounded neck. "Rosalind, can I see you a moment? I've got a paying customer for you—me."
FIFTY Unfinished Business
Eichra Oren was sweating.
An artificial sun burned through the canopy, sharpening the shadows without raising temperatures. New friends and old enemies had departed for mankind's homeworld hours ago. Order was being restored to the motley communities of 5023 Eris.
By anybody's estimate, his professional tasks were probably over with. Now he steeled himself to attend to personal business. It was necessary, he told himself, and yet something he'd dreaded for weeks.
His relationship with Toya Pulaski, as artificial as the second sun shining overhead, had been imposed on him. From the first it had troubled his sense of ethics. The simple fact was that he found the woman about as unattractive as a human being could be. He felt guilty, but there was nothing he could do to hide it from himself, nor, knowing what he did of sapient psychology, would he have tried.
Just to make things even more complicated, he was interested in Rosalind Nguyen. It seemed to him she was everything that Toya could never be: graceful, beautiful, confident, even a little mysterious; the one similarity between the two was their intelligence. Rosalind, however, was unafraid of hers, and used it to accomplish things in the real world, rather than as a refuge from it. Still, before he could do anything about that, he had a debt to pay, and it was possible that it might spoil whatever chance he had with Rosalind. But as a man, and as a debt assessor, he couldn't afford to abdicate. He must tell Toya the truth about his assignment by Mister Thoggosh. Try as he might, in his 542 years of experience, he couldn't think of anything he'd ever looked forward to less.
After literally searching the world over—his legs ached from being folded under him in the electrostat he'd requisitioned for the purpose—he found her near the yawning triangular entrance to the asteroid's interior. A canvas awning had been put up on poles to protect its occupants from whatever weather 5023 Eris had to offer. Beneath it, a large table had been built from neatly sawn logs.
"Did you have a chance to talk with Colonel Tai about his personal background?" she was asking her companion. "I hear that the Chinese who came here are the result of endless batteries of personality tests as children who then underwent decades of isolation and cold-blooded conditioning."
Since the fighting, there had already been another subsurface excursion. Toya was examining Predecessor artifacts of a technical nature, spread out on the table before her. Nearby lay solvents, soap and water, and brushes of various sizes and stiffness. Bending over the table beside her, the machinist, Owen, was attempting to identify each of the pieces as it was cleaned off.
"What kind of training? Hello, Eichra Oren."
The Antarctican nodded back. Owen's beard was freshly trimmed and he was wearing what Eichra Oren was certain had recently been a clean uniform. He was shocked at this miraculous transformation. He hadn't seen an ironed uniform during his entire acquaintance with his fellow human beings on the asteroid, and Owen was the last individual he'd have expected to be wearing one. Sharp creases and pocket folds were still visible, although he and Toya were covered, head to toe, with several eons' accumulation of dust and dirt. It was clear to any observer that they were having the time of their lives.
"Hello, Eichra Oren," Toya echoed and went on. "Well, some subjects he mentioned were `Elementary Practical Jokes,' `Intermediate Intransigence,' `Advanced Profanity,' and `Postgraduate Greed.' "
"All of them meant," Eichra Oren told them, "to mimic the rugged individualism they feel was once characteristic of Americans and made you a great people. You began to decline—Tai's words, although I agree—when `team-play' and other forms of soft collectivism became the order of the day. `Ask not what your country can do for you,' et cetera, et cetera, et cetera."
"You're saying it was Wall Street and Madison Avenue that ruined us," Owen asked, "rather than Marxism?"
"I'm saying—or Colonel Tai is—that Marxism would have been laughed out of existence without Wall Street and Madison Avenue doing its advance work. However the kind of rugged individual the PRC most admires and tries to emulate isn't Rambo or John Wayne—although it's true that warriors are useful and comforting to have around—but the technically oriented `nerd.' "
Toya started. Owen repeated, "Nerd?"
"Sure. Tai pointed out that the Japanese, to name a bad example, lost their technological and economic lead over that very issue. Not once during the twentieth or twenty-first centuries has that country ever suffered from mischievous computer hacking or lost a single person-hour to a domestic computer virus."
"This is bad?" There was a twinkle in Owen's eye.
"The PRC thinks it's bad for any culture. Like the lack of crime in England—because they haven't got the gumption for it—the Japanese lack the requisite individualism for such pranks. It's beaten out of them at an astonishingly early age, along with any real creativity, by their schoolmates, with the full approval of authority. There's a name for it that means `Hammering down the nail that sticks up.' All they have left after that is a dull, placid conformity—and some really serious pathologies."
Owen nodded. "Therefore they lacked the resources—call it the mental capital—for maintaining their otherwise impressive mid-twentieth-century gains."
"That's about it. The PRC belatedly decided to close its own potential `nerd gap.' They built whole villages, high in the mountains or deep in the deserts, where individualism was practiced as if it were a foreign language. It was their hope that someday their experimental subjects could leave the villages to spread that `language' among the rest of the people."
Toya shook her head. "But instead they risked everything to preserve the international balance of power? That doesn't make much sense."
Eichra Oren shrugged. "The whole effort would have been for nothing if the Russians or Americans acquired exclusive control of an overwhelmingly advanced technology." He cleared his throat. "Pardon me for changing the subject, Roger, but I need to speak with Toya, if you don't mind."
Before Owen could speak, Toya astonished them both. She blinked and looked at Eichra Oren. "I know why you're here and we don't have to make a big deal of it. There isn't anything we can't say in front of Roger."
Owen pointed a stubby finger at his own chest, silently mouthing the word "moi?"
Toya ignored him and continued speaking to the Antarctican. "I've been dreading this moment, having to tell you the truth, for weeks. I was assigned—against my will—by General Gutierrez and by Arthur Empleado, to `distract' you and learn the Elders' secrets. I want to make it clear—no, no, please don't interrupt me, or I'll never get this out—that I have nothing against you. I enjoyed what happened, and I hope you did, too. It didn't just make me feel like a woman, it made me feel like a full-fledged human being for the first time in my life, and I'll always be grateful to you for that. But Eichra Oren, let's be realistic: I had my orders from the KGB, and I'll bet you had yours, too, from Mister Thoggosh."
Eichra Oren felt like imitating Owen, but she didn't give him time.
"Now I have my own interests." He knew that she meant something other than intellectual interests. Her gaze directed itself at the overweight, grease-covered machinist standing next to her. "And from the way you look at Dr. Nguyen and the way she looks at you, I'd guess that you have yours, as well. Over the past few weeks, I've learned to value you as a colleague and as a friend, Eichra Oren. Why can't we just leave it at that?"
Heretofore, Owen had been a dedicated bachelor, the expedition character. The lives of the Soviet Americans had often depended on his ability to fabricate whatever they needed. Laying a grimy hand on Toya's, he looked up from his work and grinned man-to-man at the assessor. Something about that grin told Eichra Oren he was more than he appeared to be. Not knowing what else to do, Eichra Oren grinned back, nodded at Toya, left the pair to their archaeological research, and stumped back the way he'd come to his waiting aerocraft.
To his surprise he found anger bubbling up inside him and knew he had some thinking to do before he could call his mind his own again.
It wasn't that he'd wanted the girl. She was right. His interests, like hers, lay elsewhere. Yet his ego felt bruised by rejection and he was dismayed to discover such a childish reaction lurking within him. It was another phenomenon he felt reluctant to tell his mother about. He knew from experience that this was a danger sign. He'd never been anything resembling a mother's boy. Eneri Relda, an active individual with "interests" of her own, would never have permitted it. But she was also a person of acute judgement who'd lived 15,000 years. He'd always valued her advice even when receiving it was painful or embarrassing.
By the time he reached his aerocraft, he'd had time to consider further and realized, with gratification, what had happened. As usual, the Elders' ancient p'Nan philosophy was proven correct. On the Forge of Adversity, Toya had transformed herself into her own person, self-confident and autonomous. And almost pretty, in a way, now that he came to think of it. It pleased him to believe he might have had something to do with the change.
Relieved—and free—he went to look for Rosalind.
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BOOK III: THIRD AMONG EQUALS
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED to Dr. Jorge I. Aunon, to the faculty and staff of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Colorado State University, and to the CSU chapters of HKN and IEEE, in token payment of the only other kind of moral debt that is essentially unpayable.
FIFTY-ONE Cocktails for Two
"But they're vertebrates, Doctor, they're apes! The fact is, they only qualify as predators on a technicality!"
"Yet qualify they do, my dear Chief Engineer, or they'd scarcely have evolved into sapient beings."
Running the soft grooming bristles growing along the undersides of his foremost pair of arms over his huge satiny-transparent eyes, Dlee Raftan Saon was barely aware of the gesture, which was reflexive. It always became more frequent when he was agitated. He'd have greatly preferred the comfortable ritual of filling, lighting, and tamping his long-stemmed briar pipe, but his companion's respiratory system, with which he had considerable professional acquaintance, was severely irritated by tobacco smoke.
"I beg you, Nannel Rab," he pleaded mockingly, "please tell me that you haven't acquired that pernicious habit of theirs, of judging others strictly by appearances."
Across from the doctor, Nannel Rab was as close to sitting as she ever came. Even as she tried to relax, the hairy palps either side of her mouth stirred restively, and she bounced a little on the eight furred, color-banded legs folded beneath her mass. On a low table between them, tall drinks of diluted grain alcohol (his flavored with honey, hers with dipteroid blood), gathered drops of moisture from the surrounding air.
Other voices came to them, muffled by a rough-textured ceiling, thick carpeting underfoot, soft upholstery, and an array of air curtains designed to provide privacy. Through a window close by, they could see into another lounge where marine sapients swam in liquid fluorocarbon charged with oxygen, breathable by the land species keeping them company. If her eight eyes, shiny black and of assorted sizes, had possessed lids, Nannel Rab would have blinked at what Dlee Raftan Saon had suggested. Even translated electronically, her voice was heavy with incredulity.
"Raftan, it has been my lifelong habit to judge people—of any species—only by what they do. These creatures began by intruding here unannounced, uninvited, disputing our claim to this asteroid—"
"Which only exists," he interrupted, "in their alternative version of the Solar System." He lifted a manipulator, forestalling any indignant retort on her part. "Nannel Rab, I don't question the justice of our claim here—rather, the claim of Mister Thoggosh—nor our right to be here, exploring. But it's wise to recall that we're the interlopers in this particular reality, and very far away from home."
"What is this American Soviet Socialist Republic anyway," she grumbled on as if she hadn't heard him, "but a coercive and collective state the likes of which more civilized versions of the Earth have not suffered in eons? Raftan, these people actually take orders from each other! I tell you, they're little more than savages!"
The doctor shook his head, a habit he'd learned from the very species under discussion. Given his exoskeletal configuration (he'd been compared by humans with a praying mantis a meter and a half tall), the motion came in short, hesitant jerks, his triangular face, mostly taken up by his eyes, swiveling on a nonexistent neck.
