Statesman (13 page)

“I could study her,” Forta said.

Spirit nodded. “If you are willing.”

“Megan knew of the Dream,” Forta said. “She felt I could help in its realization. I see no ethical problem here, especially considering the alternative.”

So Megan had learned of Khukov's Dream! Of course secrets could not be kept, but I found this interesting. Megan was a leading advocate of System peace, and would do anything she could to forward it. She had understood, of course, that when I asked for a woman, I meant one I could take to my bed, and she was realistic enough to accept this. After all, she knew me well indeed. But naturally she had honored my request in a manner calculated to forward her desire as well. Forta's nominal position might be as my mistress—and I knew that it would soon enough be actual—but her real thrust was to facilitate peace and reduce the horrors of war and tyranny. Yet how could a study of the General's dead daughter accomplish any of this?

As I said, this scene passed without making much of an impression on me at the time, and my reconstruction may have embellished it somewhat, but that was the essence. Its significance registered only after the denouement.

We finally got our interview with the General. One of the complications was his refusal to utilize the holo technology. It was possible to transmit the complete image of a person and his surroundings in three dimensions, so that he seemed to be physically present, and this was normally employed for important meetings. I had used it when interviewing the Shogun of Rising Sun. For one thing, it saved the inconvenience of physical travel time; for another, it eliminated any question of assassination, for a weapon smuggled into such an interview could not be effective against a mere image. Staff members offstage from the holo pickup cameras could signal their man, giving him necessary cues, so that he did not suffer embarrassing lapses. When the interview was over, each party could relax immediately, being right at home. The recording of the interview could be rerun as convenient by either party, questing for significant aspects after the fact. No wonder it was the most popular mechanism for such encounters; I certainly preferred it.

But the General was old-fashioned, and did not trust modernistic devices, for all that this one had existed for centuries. He believed only in face-to-face summit-type meetings, and not too many of those, and that was it. If I wanted to address him, it had to be his way. This included his language, French; he would not deign to discourse in our common language, English, though he knew it. So I went, at his convenience, and brought along my sister and secretary; this was as elaborate a party as we could muster. We duly presented ourselves at the palace in the city-bubble of Aris, Gaul.

The General in person was surprisingly affable. We had been braced for boorishness, but he was the soul of hospitality and cheer. He shook my hand, and we took seats. He certainly was physically impressive, both in magnitude and in atmosphere. He seemed every centimeter the leader. He had also done his homework; he knew why I was here and what I wanted of him, in general and in detail. But I knew as I read him that his mind was already made up, and that this was merely a formality. He was not about to render himself subservient, by his reckoning, by participating in the galactic project.

Thus there was no point in talking with him. I was here merely for show. To show that the General could summon the Tyrant like a lackey, to be informed that there was no sale. Three years ago, when I remained in power in Jupiter, he never would have tried it. The sheer arrogance of the man excited my admiration as much as my ire; one seldom gets to experience such towering certainty and folly.

Spirit caught my eye as I exchanged inconsequentials with the General via the interpreter. I gave her to understand my reading, by the slightest nod: thumbs down. I knew she had anticipated as much. She in turn made an unobtrusive signal to Forta, who stood at the edge of the room.

Forta turned around a moment, as if suffering an attack of vertigo. She was doing something to herself; was she really sick? I saw her only peripherally, as I could not take my overt attention from my host. But then she turned again, her aspect changed. She stepped toward us.

The General paused, glancing at her, startled. He got to his feet.

“My secretary,” I said. The translator started to speak, but the General negated him with a curt gesture.

“ Vous avez tort, pere,” Forta said. I saw now that she had entirely changed her hair, and she wore one of her masks, so that she resembled a young woman who would have been attractive except for her overly large nose. That nose resembled that of the General.

The General looked stricken. “ Ce n'est pas ma faute,” he said.

She only gazed at him, shaking her head sadly.

Abruptly he addressed me directly in English: “What do you see here, Hubris?” He was severely shaken.

“Only my secretary,” I said innocently. I realized now that Forta was emulating the General's dead daughter.

He shook himself and blinked. He looked again at Forta. It was as if he saw a ghost.

I glanced again at Spirit. What was the point of this charade?

“You support this man?” the General asked the ghost.

Forta nodded in a special manner. I did not know his daughter's mannerisms, but I was sure Forta did.

“Why are you talking to my secretary?” I asked, as if I didn't understand.

“And if I agree?”

Forta approached him, lifted her face, and kissed his cheek. Then she walked slowly out of the room.

For a moment the General stood stunned. Then he strode after her. Spirit and I remained where we were, letting this play itself out.

All that the General found in the other room, of course, was my secretary, Forta, who could in no way be mistaken for his daughter. Disgruntled, he returned. “You saw only your secretary?”

Spirit and I nodded together, too polite to remark on his erratic behavior.

He considered. “Gaul will support your project, Tyrant,” he said abruptly.

“Your generosity and foresight are much appreciated,” I said. “The greatness of Gaul will long be commemorated.” We concluded the interview with the usual amenities.

In the private airplane that Helvetia had provided for our use, I braced Spirit. “What did you do?”

“Helse manifests to you on occasion,” she replied. “Why not his departed daughter? She had a dream for humanity; all he needed was a reminder.”

And in the face of our insistence that it was only our secretary he saw, the General had realized that his daughter was manifesting to him alone. He could deny us, but he could not deny her. So he had risen to the occasion and done what his beloved daughter wanted. Such persuasion is not to be resisted.

I thought of my own daughter, Hopie. If she had died, and later manifested to me in that manner, I would have done what she wanted, too. I respected the General not less for that, but more.

After that success, the others followed more readily. We interviewed the Kaiser of Prussia, and the Kings of Bohemia, Lithuania, and Etruria. It was a pleasure for me to visit Castile personally, because that was of course colonized by the source of the Hispanics, the peninsula of Spain on Earth. There was no trouble converting Castile to the Dream; Castile had watched my progress on Jupiter all the way to the top, and had broken relations with Jupiter when I was deposed. It was a real pleasure to be welcomed where Spanish was the natural language.

Serbia, Macedonia, Jutland, Lapland, and the others fell into place, one by one. Each was an individual case, of course, and negotiations were at times intricate, but the understanding that the major transmission tube would be constructed here was conducive.

Spirit was of course tied up with the arrangements, and though I was busier than I had been, I still had dull times too. I had thought that age would bring me greater stability of emotion as my passions faded, but this was not the case. I was becoming more conscious of the diminishing time remaining to me in life, and I wanted to savor as much of it as I could.

Thus it was that when Juana came to me again, I was more than willing to be persuaded that she was worthwhile. I knew this was no vision, and that she was Forta doing an emulation, but I stepped right into the game, and it ceased to be a game. I opened my arms to her, and she came into them, and I swear even the scent of her was the same. The true Juana was not dead; she was in her sixties, as I was, and grandmotherly, no longer any object of manly passion. This was the Juana of age twenty, shy and nice and voluptuously endowed.

I kissed her, and her lips were soft and sweet. Her face might be a mask, but it seemed genuine to me.

Surely her breasts had been enhanced, for Forta simply was not of the magnitude that Juana had been in this respect, but they seemed the same. I drew back a little and passed my hand over her bosom, and she drew back nervously—exactly the way Juana had. Weekly sexual activity had been required in the Navy, and Juana had honored that, but she had always been conscious of the rape she had suffered, and was always somewhat reticent. How had Forta learned so much?

“The lights,” I said.

She smiled. “The lights,” she agreed, sounding exactly as Juana had sounded.

I turned off the lights. The darkness was almost absolute, but I found her and kissed her again. Then I led her to my bed. My foot touched a furry body; Smilo was snoozing there, as usual. I reached down to pat him. “This is all right, friend,” I assured him. And it was; it had only been Tasha, in her mole aspect, that had set him off, with reason. He knew Forta, whatever her guise might be, and had no objection to my contact with her.

We stood by the bed in the darkness, and I took the clothing off her body. Soon she was in bra and panties, and the bra was just as full as Juana's had been. I hardly even pondered the matter; I left the bra in place, preferring to maintain that fullness, rather than stripping it with the cloth. The panties I took down, and then I put her on the bed. She remained somewhat reticent, but offered no opposition. Juana had always depended on me to initiate the act of sex, and to bring her through it successfully; with her it had to be acquiescence, never desire. But I had always chosen to believe that within that framework, she did appreciate it; I think I could not have done it otherwise.

I did it now. As I climaxed, the mood of it overwhelmed me, and I kissed her savagely. “Juana!” I gasped.

“Hope!” she responded, and her arms hugged me close.

That did something to me. I cannot say I understand it, but it was in its fashion wonderful. I held her and I cried, silently, my tears coursing from my face across hers. We lay there for some time, intimately embraced, and though we shifted position in due course so that my weight would not be on her, we remained embraced, and I fell asleep.

When I woke, she was gone. Juana had always done that, too, preferring to clean up without disturbing me. I got up and went through my own toilet, and returned to the office section of the suite.

Forta was there, as usual, sifting through information on the computer. She was as severe and angular as ever, and when she glanced at me there was no trace of intimacy. She knew that no one could be turned on by that horribly scarred face.

“You remind me of Tasha,” I said. “Inverted.”

She smiled somewhat coolly and returned to her work. I retired to a book, but my mind was not on it.

Forta had just become my mistress, as she had said at the outset she would. She had assumed another guise for the purpose, but it had been her body and her mind in reality. Tasha had sent me perpetual sexual signals, but turned killer when the connection was made; Forta sent me none, but was as spectacularly apt in the performance as I could imagine. Truly, it seemed I had been with Juana!

Yet if I could complete the act with a woman playing a role, why could I not do it with the woman as herself? I did not know, but knew I could not. I remained a fool, in the masculine way: Appearance was more important than reality.

Just as it had been with the General of Gaul. He had known that my secretary was not his daughter, yet the aspect of her was so compelling that, to please it, he had reversed himself. How could I call him a fool, when I understood the situation so much better than he did, and still was governed by the illusion?

Forta's art of emulation had persuaded the General to do what was best for the System, and had persuaded me to accept her offering, despite my understanding.

Dear Daddy,

I must confess, that was some demonstration you did with the light drive! It wasn't broadcast on Jupiter holo for some reason, but the news got around. Turning an entire spaceship into light—just imagine! I understand that Uranus is all agog, but they are underplaying it here, saying that the reliability is uncertain and that you were lucky you weren't killed.

I wish you were back here, and not just because I am concerned for your welfare. But the present administration will never permit your return. Perhaps they will let me visit you at Uranus or somewhere; I'd like that. There is so much I could tell you!

Take good care of your tiger, Daddy....

Having done what we could on the Continent, as it was locally termed, we next tackled the islands. The most important of these were Umbriel and Titania, two moons about a quarter million and two-fifths of a million kilometers out from the residential band of the planet, respectively, and just below and just above a thousand kilometers in diameter. These were tiny, on the scale of the satellites of Jupiter, but physical size was no necessary indication of importance.

The fact is, there is a lot of area available on a solid moon. We become accustomed to the limitations of the city-bubbles in the atmospheres of the major planets, where space is always at a premium though distances between cities are vast. On an airless moon like Titania the cities still need to be enclosed by domes, but many, many domes can be set up in limited territory. They won't collide; the common anchorage makes it feasible. So an entire nation of several tens of millions of human beings resides on a moon that would fit inside the merest whorl in a major planet's atmosphere.

Titania, small as it seemed in space, had inherited the British Empire tradition. Indeed, at one time it had had major holdings all across the Solar System, including the entire planets of sparsely settled Neptune and densely settled Earth. Today the Titanian Commonwealth remained, but the political and economic power of Titania itself was much diminished and still waning. The System was simply too large to be dominated by one tiny moon! But the influence of the so-called Saxon culture remained, with English being perhaps the most prevalent second language in the System.

We landed at the monstrous city-dome of Don, situated in the channel of Tems, near the South Pole of the moon. Since the moon did not rotate on its own, one face being locked toward Uranus, there were no problems of adjustment; the near face could be treated in many respects like a flat terrain. All of the significant human habitations were on this face; the far face was left for mining and light-collection and special projects. Perhaps this was just as well, for the light lenses were monstrous, quadruple the diameter of those of Jupiter. There was no mystery about this; Uranus is almost four times as far from the sun as is Jupiter, so equivalently larger lenses are required to focus the sunlight to similar intensity. Truly is it said: If you want to know where you are in the System, look at the size of the light lenses. These ones had to gather sunlight from a region just about three hundred times as large as that to be covered by Earth-normal daylight. That left huge areas in shade.

I had, as I mentioned, become accustomed to the floating bubbles of the major planets in the course of the past thirty years. My youth had been spent on Callisto, where there were landbound domes. But there was little similarity to those domes here. Callisto was a much larger body than Titania, and used the gravity lens to focus the gravity of the planet and bring it up to Earth-norm in the cities. Thus the domes sat firmly and immobily on the surface.

These domes did not. They were mounted on firm bases, and were in the form of monstrous cylinders, spinning about their axes. They depended on centrifugal gee, exactly as did the bubbles floating in atmosphere. This was similar in principle to the domes of Jupiter military bases on moonlets or planetoids, but Don was of a completely different scale. It was one of the largest cities in the System, as populous as Jupiter's Nyork or Langel, though not as large as RedSpot City had become. Here in the ice-covered valley, it was phenomenally grand; the landscape gave it contrast.

We took the shuttle subway into the city proper, for entry was via the interior of the pedestal on which it rotated. There was so little gravity on the surface that it seemed almost like free-fall; we had to strap in to prevent sailing into the ceiling with every bump. I believe Titania's surface gee is about one-thirtieth Earth-norm, though I would have to look it up to be sure; certainly it is very slight. It becomes difficult to judge by mere physical sensation.

The subway capsule made a right-angle turn and carried us upward into the city. Then it descended, and we gained weight. Of course this was relative; we were actually facing straight up, away from the surface of the moon, but now it seemed like the horizontal.

We debouched at a station on a lower level; it was easy enough to tell by the higher gee. They were prepared for our arrival, for the section was cordoned off. I can't think why; I had Smilo on a leash. Our inprocessing was remarkably efficient, and before we knew it we had been assigned a nice cottage in the country, well up toward the Scot border. We did need a place to stay, as it was evident that formal negotiations were not going to be any more rapid here than they had been on the Continent. I knew better than to protest the glacial course of such things; I represented the interests of Saturn and Titan, and Titania's relations with either planet were not phenomenally good. Also, the fact that I had negotiated first with Gaul would not sit well here. But if I had come to Titania first, the General would have been totally intractable, and not even the ghost of his daughter would have swayed him.

We boarded a tram, which was a sealed travel-capsule that loaded itself onto a wheelbase and a set of tracks once it exited Don. It traveled swiftly northward across the frozen surface, guided by an old motorman. Smilo decided he liked this part of the journey; he prowled along the length of the tram and peered out the ports. The motorman seemed a bit nervous at first, but relaxed when it became clear that the tiger accepted him as one of the functionaries. Soon he was announcing the stations we passed.

It seemed that Titania was divided into many small counties, and at our velocity we crossed each one quickly. There was Hert and Bed and Hamp and Leic in the first hour. We saw the spinning domes of the cities of Wat and Bed and Hamp and Leic; evidently the counties were usually but not invariably named after their leading cities. The tramway tracks divided and crossed and merged throughout, and there were many other trams on them, speeding from city to city. This was a busy world!

The landscape itself, apart from the tracks, was completely barren. With no atmosphere there was no weather, just the rock ice. It reminded me of Callisto, when my family had gone out in quest of a bootleg bubble to Jupiter, seeking a better life. We had found, instead, betrayal and misery and death, and our own kind treated us more savagely than did the barrenness of space. I had been but fifteen, then, naïve about the ways of man. I had not remained so. I have wondered whether I would have been better off had I never left Callisto. Certainly I would have for the short term, because then I would not have witnessed the brutal rape of my sister Spirit or the slaughter of my father, or suffered the privations of space. But neither would I have found my first love, Helse—or lost her. My military career would never have occurred, and my political rise to the Tyrancy would not even have been a dream. I had to conclude that my life, taken as a whole, had been correctly guided, despite the early horrors of it.

“Derby,” the motorman announced. I began to see what was not there, outside: the green pastures, the picket fences, the cows and the gardens of the olde England that this world emulated, and I felt nostalgia for it though I had never been there. What a joy it must have been to live on Earth, shielded by its breathable atmosphere: an entire planet habitable without suits or domes or devices of gravity and light concentration!

We passed the industrial city of Manch, where freight lines converged, and on into the county of Lanc, and a mountainous region. Here the mountains were genuine; jagged crags rose up beside the tramway.

One tends to think that small worlds should have small mountains, but the diminished natural gravity enables them to be rougher in outline than the larger ones.

At last we came into Cumber, relatively sparsely settled, where we were to stay. The authorities had wanted to get Smilo well away from temptation! The tracks wound about in an effort to avoid the rising contours, and finally gave up and climbed, passing over the heights. I suppose these mountains were minor compared to what could be found elsewhere in the System, or even elsewhere on Titania, but here in our tiny capsule they were quite impressive. I saw vertical rises I would have been afraid to climb, even in the fractional gee, and a chasm between peaks that looked right for a glacier.

“Scafell Crag,” the motorman said, announcing the site the way he had the counties.

Then down into the valley, and on to our destination, Carl. There we had to leave the tram and take a limo to the cottage, which was a mini-dome east of the city. Here I became aware of another feature of the landscape, that had perhaps been present throughout, but missed because of the velocity of our tram travel. There were paired cords stretched across the terrain, each being set about a meter above the ground, supported at intervals by T-shaped structures. They connected to each separate dome, and divided and crossed in much the fashion of the tramway rails.

“Power lines?” I asked Spirit, perplexed.

“Ley lines,” the limo driver said, with a private, knowing smile.

“What are they for?”

“For walking,” he explained. “Use the rollers.”

I had the impression that he enjoyed our perplexity, so I dropped the subject. But I watched the lines.

Occasionally a set crossed the road we were on, and they did this by rising up on ramps to either side and crossing above the level of the traffic. I could see how a person in a suit, walking on the low-gee surface, might use the lines as a handhold—but why would he cling to them dangling above the road?

The driver deposited us at the cottage. This was based on the principle of the cities, being a disk that spun about its axis, with entry from below. The limo entered the garage, which was a kind of air lock, and when the pressure equalized we stepped down into the chamber. A lift conveyed us into the center of the disk above, and a ladder led down (again it was a horizontal “down”) to the residential floor. Smilo was learning to navigate these contours, but he obviously felt better once normal gee returned. The driver departed, and we were on our own.

The first thing we did was rest. Travel is wearying, and Spirit and I were no longer young. We had been in trace gee for several hours, and that tends to disrupt the normal bodily processes. So the four of us settled down for a nap, and then another nap, and the night's sleep, and in due course our systems settled down and we were ready for food and work.

We ate sparingly the next day, and Smilo was content to gnaw on a pseudosteak and use the sandbox.

Forta got on the phone and ascertained that it was a local holiday, so there would be no political activity for another day. This was just as well, for it gave us more time to adjust.

Smilo was getting restive, having been in confined quarters for some time. Normally I had taken him out for a walk or run somewhere, because a big cat lives not by snoozing alone; he needs exercise in a psychological as well as physical way. Here there were no halls to use, but we had prepared for this contingency by having a space suit made up for him. We hadn't used it before, and now seemed to be the time to try it.

I unpacked the suit. These things are very light, and fit the body so comfortably that they can be worn for prolonged periods. The material stretches just enough to allow circulation of air about the body, but not enough to interfere with motion. Its insulative properties are phenomenal; hardly any heat is lost, and that's important, because the temperature of this surface was in the neighborhood of 50°K, or considerably closer to absolute zero than to human living temperature. I'm sure the technology in a modern suit is about as sophisticated as that in a holophone, just of a different nature. There is of course oxygen-refreshing apparatus, and recondensation, and our suits were guaranteed for two hours before requiring the exchange of breathing cylinders.

“You're taking him out?” Forta asked. “Better review the ley system.”

“The what?”

“I have researched it this past hour. Those ley lines are a joke, named after the old supposed lines of ancient monuments in England, Earth. Here they are merely cords used to hold walkers down to the planet, so they don't go flying with every step. The natives do a lot of walking, as many of them don't have cars—cars tend to fly, too, unless they have somewhat adhesive tires the way the limo did—and it's easy enough to get about when you know how. They use the rollers.” She went to the wall, and there hung several devices that looked like antique paint rollers. She took one down. “You hook this under the line from the right, and hold it firm, and it rolls along the line and keeps you down.”

I considered that. It seemed feasible. “Why not hook in from the left?”

“This is Titania; traffic travels on the left side of the road. So you are always on the left of the line, and when you return you come in on the other side, which is still your right.”

I hefted the roller. Its operation seemed simple enough. “But how is Smilo going to use this?”

“I think he has a problem.”

“Well, he needs his exercise, so we'll tackle that problem,” I decided. I put the suit on the tiger, noting with approval that the extremities were reinforced to be impenetrable by claws. It would be a tragedy if Smilo extended his claws to get a good grip on something, and punctured his suit and died. As it was, I suspected he would have an uncertain time.

Finally I put the helmet over his head. It was completely clear, so he could see well, and sound would be conducted by the ground, as well as a mini suit radio locked on our mutual channel. “We have to wear these to go out,” I explained, hoping he would understand enough to accept it. He did know that the outside was a region completely unlike the inside.

I donned my own suit, and the two of us used the personnel exit lock, emerging from the opposite side as the garage. There was no point in having to recompress such a large amount of air as was required for a car, when we were only two.

“Now, Smilo,” I cautioned him as we emerged. “Take it easy on the leaping; I fear you could achieve escape velocity if you really tried, and that would be awkward indeed.” I had no leash on him now; I would not be able to hold him down if he leaped anyway, and I wanted him to have the maximum freedom.