Prisoners of Tomorrow (88 page)

“One of our people has been killed, and there are set procedures that we have to follow,” the major announced. “My orders require me to take you three back with us. It would make things a lot easier for everybody if you complied. I’m sorry, but I don’t have any choice.”

“Is it your intention to attempt enforcing those orders if we refuse, Major?” the Chironian who had killed Wilson asked. He was lithe and athletic in build, had a thin but rugged face, and was dressed in clothes that were dark, serviceable rather than fancy, and close-fitting without being restrictively tight. He reminded Colman of the bad guy in an ancient Western movie. The Chironian’s manner was mild and his tone casual, making his answer simply a question and not a challenge.

The major met his eye firmly. “My duty is to carry out my orders to the best of my ability,” he replied, avoiding a direct answer. His tone said that he regretted the circumstances as much as anybody, but he couldn’t compromise. The display of tact seemed to do the trick. The Chironian held his eye for a moment longer, and then nodded. “Very well.” Inwardly Colman breathed a sigh of relief. The women were evidently willing to allow the man to speak for them too. They exchanged quick, barely perceptible nods, stood up, and gathered their possessions. Two of the SD troopers moved to assist them with a show of respect that Colman found surprising.

The major hesitated for a second, and then said, “Ah . . . in view of the circumstances, it would be better if you permitted us to carry your guns back for you. Would you mind?”

“Are you telling us we’re prisoners?” the Chironian man asked.

“I would prefer not to use that term,” the major answered. “The legal ramifications are not for me to comment on. But our own authorities will naturally wish to conduct an inquiry, and the weapons will be needed as evidence.”

“By
your
customs,” the Chironian observed.

“It was one of
our
people,” the major said.

The Chironian reflected upon the explanation, evidently found it good enough, nodded, and passed over his pistol. The girl who had wounded Ramelly followed suit. Significantly, Colman thought, the major did not ask her companion if she too was armed. As the guards began motioning Padawski and his group to their feet, the major marched over to where Colman and the others from D Company were standing with the Chironians who had been upstairs with them. He had already taken their names and established that they had not witnessed the incident firsthand. “You guys are free to go,” he informed them. “If there’s a hearing, you might be called in to testify. If so, the appropriate people
will
contact you.”

“They know where to find us,” Colman said. Kath’s pocket communicator buzzed, and she took it out to answer. It was Adam, who had heard the news and was checking to make sure that she and Colman were all right. Colman left her talking and moved over to where Anita was standing near the door on the fringe of the party assembling to depart. “Why’d you ever get mixed up with that bunch?” he murmured. “Wise up when it’s all over. Get out of it.”

There was no repentance or remorse in her eyes when she looked at him. “It’s none of your business anymore,” she hissed. “How I choose to have fun is my affair and my life.”

Colman snorted derisively. “You call that fun?”

“You know what I mean. They weren’t doing anything. They’d just had a bit too much to drink. Those two bitches didn’t have to do something like that.”

“Maybe you should try looking at it their way,” Colman said.

Anita’s eyes blazed as her shock began wearing off and dissipated itself as anger. “Why should I? Bruce just got killed and Dan’s got a hole in his leg, and you’re telling me to see it
their
way? What kind of a man are you anyhow?” She sneered past Colman’s shoulder at Kath, who was returning the communicator to her pocket. “I can see why. It didn’t take
you
long, did it. Is she good?”

Colman ignored the remark. “Just think about it,” he muttered. “For your own sake.”

“I told you once already, it’s none of your business anymore. Leave me alone. I don’t want to talk to you. Just—go away and leave me alone.”

Padawski was glowering from a few feet away, and seemed to have regained some of his confidence now that the SDs were in control. “You stay away from her, Goldilocks,” he spat. “Stick with your nice, murdering friends. We won’t forget you either.” He turned his head back to glare at the whole room before turning for the door. “And that goes for all of you,” he warned in a louder voice. “We won’t forget. You’ll see.”

“On your way.” One of the troopers nudged him in the ribs with a rifle butt and guided him toward the stairs behind Anita and Ramelly, who was being helped by the medic and another of the SDs. Colman watched until they had all left, then returned to the others. “Is she a friend of yours?” Kath inquired. “From a while back. But not anymore, I guess, by the look of it.”

“She’s a good-looking girl. What does she do?”

“A communications specialist at Brigade.” Kath’s eyebrows lifted approvingly. “Smart as well, eh?”

“She could do a lot better than waste herself with those bums. She’s the kind that prefers the easy road . . . for as long as it lasts, anyhow.”

“That’s a shame,” Kath said.

Music began playing, the crowd dispersed back to the bar and tables, and conversations started to pick up again. Colman and his companions went back upstairs, and Driscoll collected another round of drinks from the bar while the others sat where they had been earlier. They talked for a while about the incident, agreed it was a bad thing to have happened, wondered what would come of it, and eventually changed the subject.

“I guess you have to learn moderation in this place,” Stanislau remarked, studying his half-emptied glass of dark, frothy Chironian beer. He shook his head slowly. “You know, this sounds crazy but sometimes I wish they would make us pay for it.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Carson said. Driscoll nodded his mute assent also.

“I’m not so sure I agree,” Swyley said, which meant that he did.

Colman was about to make a joke out of it when he realized they were serious. He knotted his brows and directed an inquiring look at each of them in turn.

“It’s this whole business of not paying for anything,” Stanislau said at last. “We come in here and drink, we go into restaurants and eat, we walk out of stores with all kinds of stuff, and none of it costs anything.” He sat back, looked from side to side for moral support, got plenty, and shook his head helplessly. “It seemed too good to be true at first, but that soon wears off. It’s not funny anymore, chief. It’s getting to all of us.”

“We feel we owe something, and we want to pay our way,” Driscoll confirmed. “We don’t want any free rides. But all we get are pieces of paper that aren’t any good for anything here. What can you do?”

“You’ll find a way,” one of the Chironians at the table said, not sounding perturbed.

“Better late than never, I suppose,” another commented, glancing at the painter, who was still there. The painter nodded but didn’t reply.

“What does that mean?” Driscoll asked, looking at the Chironian who had spoken.

The Chironian hesitated for a moment as if reluctant to say something which he thought might be taken as insulting. Kath caught his eye and nodded reassuringly. “Well,” the Chironian began, then paused again. “Most people here start to feel that way by the time they’re about ten. I’m not trying to offend anyone—but that’s the way it is.”

Carson frowned and thought about the implications, then shook his head. “It’s impossible,” he said. “No system could work like that.”

An intrigued and thoughtful look came over Swyley’s face as he listened. He said nothing, which meant that he didn’t agree.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Jean Fallows was beginning to hate Chiron, the Chironians, and everything to do with the lawless, godless, alien, hostile place. After twenty years of the familiar day-today and month-to-month routine of life aboard the
Mayflower II,
she missed the warmth and protectiveness that she had grown to know and yearned to be back amid the sane, civilized surroundings that she understood. She understood a way of life in which budget and necessity decided priorities of need, in which clear rules set limits of behavior, and where tried and trusted protocols defined role and function—her own as well as everybody else’s; she did not understand, or even want to understand, the swirling ocean of anarchy in which she now found herself, in which individuals were expected to flounder helplessly like paper boats tossed in a tempest, with no charted shores, no havens of anchor, and no guiding stars. She had no place in it, and she desired no place in it. Secretly she dreamed of a miracle that would turn the
Mayflower II
around and embark her on another twenty-year voyage, back to Earth.

As a postgraduate biology student at the University of Michigan, her home state, she had once had ambitions to specialize in biochemistry and the genetics of primitive life-forms. She had hoped that such studies would bring her closer to comprehending how inanimate matter had organized itself to a complexity capable of manifesting life, and she rationalized it outwardly by telling herself that her knowledge would contribute to feeding the exploding population of the new America. And then she had met Bernard, whose youthful zeal and visions of the Reformation that would sweep the world had awakened her political awareness and carried her along with him into a whole new dimension of human relationships and motivations which until then she had hardly recognized as existing at all. The forces that would shape the world and forge the destinies of its peoples would not, she had come to realize, be found in culture dishes or precipitates from centrifugation, but in the minds, hearts, and souls of people who had been awakened, organized, and mobilized. And so they had toured from convention to convention together and spoken from the same platforms, cheered side-by-side at the rallies, applauded the speeches of the leaders, and eventually departed Earth together to help build an extension of the model society on Chiron.

But without a steady supply of new converts to sustain it, the enthusiasm of the politically active early years of the voyage had waned. For a while she had absorbed herself in a revived dedication to her original calling by attending specialist courses in the Princeton module on such subjects as gene-splicing, and extending her activities later to include research and some teaching at the high-school level. Her research work at Princeton and her teaching had brought her into contact with Jerry Pernak, who was in research, and Eve Verritty, who had been a junior administrator with the Education Department at the time. In fact it was Jean who had first introduced them to each other.

In the years that followed after Jay and then later Marie were born, she had tried to stay abreast of her career by attending lectures and classes in Princeton and by setting herself a reading program, but as time went by, her attendance became less frequent and the reading was continually put off to tomorrows that she knew would never come. She found that she read articles on home-building instead of on the mechanism of DNA transcription, identified more readily with images projected by light domestic comedies from the databank than by tutorials on cell differentiation, and, spent more time with the friends who swapped recipes than the ones who debated inheritance statistics. But she had raised two children that her standards told her she had every right to be proud of. She was entitled to rewards for the sacrifices she had made. And now Chiron was threatening to steal the rewards away.

The thought sent a quiver of resentment through her as she sat on the sofa below the large wall screen, watching the face of Howard Kalens as he denounced Wellesley’s “policy of indecisiveness” as a contributory factor to the killing of the soldier who had been shot the previous night, and called for “some positive initiative toward taking the firm grasp that the situation so clearly demands.”

“A boy of twenty-three,” Kalens had said a few minutes previously. “Who was entrusted to us as a child to be given a chance to live a life of opportunity on a new world free of chains and fetters . . . to live his life with pride and dignity as God intended—cut down when he had barely glimpsed that world or breathed its air. Bruce Wilson did not die yesterday. His life ended when he was three years old.”

Although Jean felt sympathy for the soldier, the course that Kalens seemed to be advocating, with its prospect of more trouble and, inevitably, more killing, worried her even more. Why did it always have to be like this? she asked herself. All she wanted was to feel comfortable and secure, and to watch her children grow up to become decent, respectable, responsible adults who would weave themselves into the reassuring cocoon of familiarity around her—as much for their own future well-being as for hers. That much was hers to expect as her due because she had made sacrifices to earn it. It threatened nobody. So why should other people’s squabbles which were not of her making now threaten her with sweeping it all away?

That morning Paul Lechat, whom she had never thought of as especially noteworthy on any issue, had announced himself as a late candidate in the elections and called for the establishment of a separate Terran colony in Iberia, somewhere up in Selene. He wanted to allow the people from Earth to pursue their own pattern of living without disruptive influences for the immediate future, and possibly to make such an institution permanent if it suited enough people to do so. To Jean the announcement had come as a godsend, and to many others as well, if the amount of popular support that had materialized from all sides within a matter of hours was anything to go by. Why couldn’t everybody see it that way? she wondered. It was so obvious. Why were there always some who were obstinate and valued political interests before what common sense said would be for the common good, such as Kalens, who even now was reacting to Lechat as a threat and rallying his own followers to action?

“Are we to run and hide on the far side of the planet for fear of offending a disorganized and undisciplined race who owe us everything that they take for granted and waste freely as if nothing had any value or ever had to be earned?” Kalens was asking from the screen. “Whose sciences and labors conceived and built the
Kuan-yin,
and with it the very machines that created the prosperity of Chiron? Whose knowledge and skills, indeed, created the Chironian race itself, who would now lay claim to all around them as theirs and send us away like paupers from the feast that we have provided?” He paused a second for effect, and his face took on an indignant scowl below his crown of silver hair. “I say no! I will not be driven away in such fashion. I will not even contemplate such an action. I say, publicly and without reservation, that any such suggestion can be described only as a surrender to moral cowardice that is beneath contempt. Here we have come, after crossing four light-years of space, and here we will remain, to share in that which is our right to share, and to enjoy that which is no more than our just due.” A thunder of applause greeted the exhortation. Jean had heard enough and told Jeeves to turn off the screen.