The Iron Maiden (32 page)

An hour later Hope Hubris emerged and announced that he was abdicating in favor of his wife, Megan Hubris. He and his sister Spirit would depart Jupiter in exile as soon as an orderly transfer of power could be accomplished.

In the course of the following week, Jose Garcia announced his own retirement, feeling that after negotiating the conclusion of the Tyrancy he had no further need for public life, and he faded from view.

Many were disappointed, for he had been an obvious candidate for high office in the new regime. Even Thorley remarked on the regrettable loss of such a fair minded man. He concluded “I must confess to suffering a certain guilty pang of regret for the loss of the Tyrant, also, for he was a marvelously newsworthy figure, and his sister remains a handsome woman.” Few understood how sincerely he meant that, or knew what Spirit was feeling as she faced the prospect of being forever separated from her secret lover. She could not show her tears.

Others had to find other placements. Amber returned to New Wash, alone, where she worked as a translator of recorded transmissions, using the helmet to communicate her renditions. She never commented publicly on her private relationship with the Tyrant or Jose Garcia. She shared a residence with her virtual sister and friend Hopie, who was allowed to retain her post as head of the Department of Education. That was a bit of nepotism the public endorsed, for Hopie had done a decent if sometimes controversial job, and she was legally the daughter of both the former Tyrant and the new administrator, Megan. She represented a tangible bridge between administrations. Their eleven year old virtual brother Robertico joined them there.

Coral, unable to join Hope in exile, accepted a position as a physical therapist with the Shelia Foundation. Ebony joined her there. It was generally known how close they both had been to the living Shelia; they were in this manner remaining as close to her as was possible.

And so Shelia had been not only the central coordinator of the Tyrancy, and perhaps the inadvertent instrument of its demise; she was now the enduring symbol of some of the good the Tyrancy had accomplished. The mascot of the Shelia Foundation was an empty wheelchair, in its way also a symbol of the vacated Tyrancy. Hope in his madness had a vision of Shelia in a heaven populated by folk in wheelchairs; Spirit found that vision comforting, for if heaven existed, Shelia surely belonged there. She was always a good person, and all her associates loved her.

Saturn

Megan headed a brief caretaker government, setting up a framework for restored elections and public representation. She had no interest in power for herself and stepped down the moment the elections produced a new president and Congress. She was called a great woman. She was. Hope loved her, and so did Spirit.

Actually, the Tyrancy had accomplished much of what it could. It had not only balanced the budget, it had paid down the planetary debt. It had instituted adequate medical care for all citizens. It had abolished the drug problem. Crime, both street and corporate, had dropped to record lows. And it had made the press, in all its forms, free; there was no censorship at all. Jupiter had become a beacon of good government, and many of its programs had been emulated elsewhere in the System. So perhaps it was time for the Tyrancy to end. Certainly Spirit was ready for less administration and more adventure in her life, and she liked the prospect of interacting closely with her brother again.

It turned out that a number of planets were interested in providing sanctuary for the exiled former Tyrant of Jupiter. He accepted the most challenging offer. Thus it was that Hope and Spirit Hubris traveled to Saturn to commence what turned out to be perhaps the most remarkable stage of their careers.

Hope was sixty-one and Spirit was fifty-eight, but they might as well have been children again. They faced the presentation screen and gawked at the magnificence of Planet Saturn. The rings were spectacular. Of course the image was enhanced by false color, making it more dramatic, but still it was a wonder. All the colors of the spectrum seemed to be there in the great splay of the rings, and in the roughly spherical body of the planet itself. “Beautiful!” he breathed. “Jupiter's rings hardly compare!”

Spirit murmured agreement. “But nevertheless a sterner environment than we knew on Jupiter,” she reminded him. “Their residential band has about eight and a half bars pressure, and their winds are up to quadruple Jupiter's--almost five hundred meters a second.”

“A thousand miles an hour,” he agreed. Of course such velocities were not directly experienced, because the city-bubbles floated in the wind currents. Survival would be impossible if relative wind velocity of that strength were felt; storms whose winds were only a tenth as strong had been called hurricanes back on ancient Earth, and had wreaked enormous damage.

Hope had just one personal acquaintance at Saturn--but that one was Chairman Khukov, the highest political figure there. He had achieved his dominance at about the time Hope became the Tyrant of Jupiter, and they had worked tacitly together to buttress each other's power and defuse interplanetary tension. Spirit did not really know Khukov, apart from two meetings, but she trusted her brother's judgment.

“Ship under attack,” the intercom said. “Secure--”

The voice was cut off by the impact of a strike. The ship shook, and the power blinked. They were not under acceleration at the moment; the normal course was to achieve cruising velocity, then coast to the destination, conserving fuel. The vessel was spinning to provide half gee in that interim.

“Better take evasive action,” Spirit muttered. Their careers in space were three decades past, but the reflexes had not been lost.

The ship did not. It drifted along on its original course, not cutting in the drive.

They got out of their harnesses, acting as one. Obviously the ship's captain was a noncombatant, uncertain what to do in battle. That would get them killed promptly enough. He didn't realize that the first thing to do was to put the ship under acceleration, regardless of its course.

They burst into the control chamber. “Get it moving!” Hope barked in Russian.

“But the damage report is not yet in,” the pilot protested. He was young, obviously inexperienced: the kind normally used on what was called a milk run, a routine mission. “The captain has not--”

Hope reached down and took the man's laser pistol from his body. He gave it to Spirit. “Get out of that seat,” he said. There wasn't time to educate the man in battle procedure.

“But you are passengers! Not even of Saturn--” Then he turned his head and spied the laser bearing on his right eye. He got out of the seat.

Hope jumped into it. The ship's controls were unfamiliar in detail, but he understood the principle well enough. In a moment he had the drive started.

Meanwhile, Spirit was marching the pilot out of the chamber. Hope knew where she was headed. He spoke into the intercom. “Captain, I am assuming temporary command of this vessel,” he said in Russian.

“Acknowledge, and relay the directive to your crew.”

“This is impossible!” the captain sputtered. Spirit heard him on the intercom. She did not know Russian, but the tone gave her the general nature of the man's exclamations. Hope was also speaking Russian, but she knew what he would be saying in a case like this. He was distracting the captain, to give her time to complete her part. Meanwhile she was silently marching the pilot to the captain's office.

It was all coming back: her pirate and Navy experience. She felt a fierce rush of the passion of battle, mixed with the dreadful tension of danger. She loved the one and hated the other, but both came together. She felt more fully alive than she had in some years.

“Captain, we don't have time for debate,” Hope said, and she heard him also on the intercom. “I am taking evasive action, but very soon the pirate will reorient and tag us with another shell.”

“This is piracy!”

“Captain, do you know who I am?”

“No, they did not inform--”

“I am the Tyrant of Jupiter, deposed.”

The captain made a gasp of surprise, but it was not entirely because of what Hope had said. Spirit had just entered his office and covered him with the pistol.

“Chamber secured, sir” she said on the intercom. “Orders?”

The captain, realizing that he had no choice, yielded. He agreed to serve the new captain. He gave the information Hope demanded.

It turned out that the ship had been converted for passenger use. It was extremely fast, but had no real weapons. Meanwhile, the attacking ship was showing pirate colors on the communication screen. This was real trouble.

“Spirit,” Hope said.

“Have to try chicken,” she said in Spanish. If any of the Saturn personnel knew that language, they might still miss the implication. That was the intent. If they caught on, there would be a counterrevolution aboard ship. Chicken was when two foolish kids got into transport bubbles and headed straight for each other. Collision course--and the first to swerve was “chicken.” The game had been played in one form or another for centuries, and had accounted for its share of injuries and deaths.

Hope oriented the ship, then jammed up the drive. Suddenly they were accelerating, in the relative framework of the two moving ships, toward the pirate.

It took a moment for the pirate to realize what was happening, for this was completely unexpected. It was like a wounded rabbit charging the pursuing hound.

That was the first surprise. Then Hope sprang the second one: he fired the ship's lifeboat at the pirate. It rammed the ship and holed it. The pirates were dead.

Hope and Spirit led a boarding party. They discovered that the pirate crew was of the Middle Kingdom, nominally an ally of the Union of Saturnine Republics. But this seemed to be a frame, intended to implicate an innocent party.

“So we are left with only the mysteries of who is the real assassin, and how the ship spotted us.”

“I don't like such mysteries,” Spirit said.

“Neither do I. Yet it is like old times.”

She smiled. “Like old times.”

He put his arm around her, and she melted into him. Those old times had been horrible, but not without their redemptions. They had suffered grievously at the brutal hands of pirates, but had been closer to each other than ever since.

Chairman Khukov was a busy man, but he made time for them. Within an hour of their arrival they found themselves in his private suite. He had aged visibly, with what hair remaining to him turning off-gray, and he had put on weight. They conversed in English, for Spirit did not speak Russian and Khukov's knowledge of Spanish was never advertised. Hope and Khukov trusted each other because each understood the other in a way no other person could. Differences of language or culture or politics became insignificant in the face of this fundamental understanding.

“You know the origin and motivation of the attack?” Hope asked.

“The nomenklatura.”

They looked blank.

Khukov smiled. "Brace yourselves for a small lecture on Saturnine internal politics. You know that we are theoretically a classless society, unlike you of the decadent capitalistic planets. But we have classes, and of these the most privileged is the nomenklatura, the bureaucratic stratum of the Party. Those in all the key positions of the Party, the military, and the secret police belong to this hereditary class. I belong.

They pass themselves off as mere civil servants, but they are the true rulers. Our society is stultified, because the nomenklatura wants no change; it wants only perpetuation of its own power. This is your enemy--and mine. I sought to reform our system, to eradicate corruption, to make of Saturn a truly superior power.“ He shook his head. ”The task was more difficult than I had suspected."

“Infinitely,” Hope agreed ruefully. It seemed that the nomenklatura wanted to stop the reform, and knew that Hope might be an instrument of reform. Khukov, it turned out, had a dream: The unification of the species in harmony.

“An excellent dream,” Hope agreed wryly. “But difficult to implement.”

He waggled a finger at them. “A dream without substance is worthless. I have a mechanism, if it can be implemented. Do you remember how the society of ancient Earth was ready to explode, to destroy itself by internecine warfare, until the onset of the gee-shield?”

“That gave man the Solar System,” Hope agreed. “The pent-up energies were released positively by the expansion into the new frontier, rather than turning destructively upon themselves.”

“And now that frontier has been conquered, and the energies are turning destructive again, exactly as before. But with a new frontier--”

“To divert man's destructive energies,” Hope said, beginning to visualize the dream.

“And provide man a common challenge,” Spirit added. “But what could that frontier be?”

Khukov made an expansive gesture. “What else? The galaxy.”

“But the gee-shield can hardly do that,” Hope said. "Gravity is not much of a problem in interstellar space, so shielding it doesn't make much difference. For that kind of travel, we need sustained thrust that could take us up toward light speed, and even CT drive isn't enough. Even so, it would take a decade or so just to reach the nearest star--where there might not be anything worthwhile for colonization anyway.

It's not enough just to get there; there have to be resources to exploit. Just the problem of growing new bubbles to house increasing population--that requires planets like Jupiter and Saturn. The answer always comes out the same: There is no solution in interstellar space."

“Ah, but there is,” he insisted. “If we can find those suitable stars for energy, and suitable planets for material resources, and get to them. Five, six new systems to start, more when required. We know they exist; our problem is locating them. Reaching them.”

“Confirming them,” Spirit said. “To make the enormous investment and risk of decades-long travel to them worthwhile.”

“But a light-speed drive would make this feasible,” he said. “Go, explore, return, report--within our lifetimes, late as our lives are getting. Discovering the galaxy.”

“A light-speed drive is a fantasy,” Hope said. “A relativistic impossibility. Only radiation does it.”

“Just suppose, Tyrant, that there were a breakthrough of this nature. A mechanism to convert a physical object to the equivalent of light, without destroying it. And to restore it to solidity on demand. What then?”

“If a spaceship could be changed to light, travel as a beam, then be solidified at the far reflector--”

“With living things. Human beings, complete city-bubbles, perhaps. Largely self-contained units. But if the city becomes light, time within it becomes infinite, and for the passengers, nonexistent. They could travel four years, and to them it would be not even a moment, no time at all. It would feel like instant matter-transmission. No supplies used, no energy expended, merely a new star beyond.”

“Suspended animation,” Hope said. “That might make it feasible, indeed.” He sighed. “But since there is no such device...”

Khukov smiled. “Ah, but there may be. Tests are commencing, and we shall shortly know whether this is a drug dream or reality. If reality--”

“Then it would be worthwhile to seek the political breakthrough,” Hope finished. “To get our entire species organized for the great new frontier. For it would have to be done on a System-wide basis, as it was done on an Earth-wide basis before. The new diaspora of mankind.”

“The new diaspora,” he echoed. “That is the dream.”

“When Earth colonized the Solar System,” Hope said, “the need was desperate and the leadership inspired. No nation gave up its share of the pie. Thus the political and economic and military situation of Earth was reestablished in the System--with all its problems. We have been flirting with the same disaster as before, on a larger scale.”

“But the same solution offers. Except that the galaxy is vast beyond the aspiration of man to fill. It would take a hundred thousand years merely to cross it, and much longer to colonize it. I think we would not soon again see a crisis of confinement.”

“The colonization of the galaxy,” Hope repeated, feeling Khukov's Dream take hold. “You really believe the challenges can be met?”

“I am prepared to supervise the scientific challenge,” he said. “I believe it can be met, if there is cooperation by the other planets. First we must develop a large-scale demonstration project, to prove that it works, and to establish its feasibility in a fashion that all men will believe. That will cost some hundreds of billions of rubles, and I think Saturn could not do it alone. That places it in the camp of the political challenge. If we can unify the planets--”