The Lotus Eaters (19 page)

Marguerite thought she saw a thin smile on the druid's face, but the beard concealed so much of that she couldn't be sure.

"Quite possibly," he answered. "And that might be a best case." The druid's face grew dark as he added,
sotto voce
, "Though for all that, I can hardly say you've done anything worse than have my orthodox brethren, of late."

"What was that, Chaplain?"

"Nothing," the druid said. "Just thinking aloud."

Wallenstein suspected she knew what her chaplain had muttered.

"You have a serious problem, Marguerite," the druid said.

"I
know
that, Druid. Why do you suppose I asked to confess?"

The smile shone through the beard now, without doubt or question. "Oh, maybe because it's been
decades
," the druid observed.

"No, that's not it," Wallenstein insisted. "Then again, I'm not sure what it is."

That's a lie
, a little voice whispered in Marguerite's head.
It's that after being used for well over a century you finally realized that you
were
being used, and to no good end for anyone except those who used you. And you know it, just as you know that you were complicit in your own degradation, and for unworthy goals.

But I have no need to tell
him
that
.

Don't you
? the little voice insisted.

No. Not for what I plan.

Suit yourself. You will anyway.

Yes, and isn't that a nice change?

"Well," said the druid, "it doesn't really matter. Ours is a religion somewhat short on mandatory ritual. As least, we of the Reformed Druidic faith are short on mandatory ritual."

The Druid smiled again, asking, "Have you never thought about our religion, Marguerite? I mean really
thought
about it? How is it that a faith that was essentially extirpated by the seventh century found a rebirth in the seventeenth? And what of what was lost in those thousand years? What of what was lost between when Vespasian overran the Isle of Wight and when Suetonius Paulus destroyed our center at Anglesey?"

"It's never really been my job to think about it," Marguerite answered. "My mother was a priestess and so she raised me in it."

"The answer is simple, in any event," the druid said. "It doesn't matter in the slightest," he shrugged. "It doesn't matter because our faith really isn't about gods anymore, if it ever was. Rather, it speaks to human needs. The God or gods—oh, yes, I believe he or she or they exist—can fend for themselves and hardly need us.

"Instead, we are a philosophy, a philosophy concerned with people living well, and reasonably virtuously. The religious aspects are tacked on tatters and scavenged rags, not even good whole cloth. And none of that matters because we are not about God or gods, but about people.

"It is our
reason
that leads us to the religious convictions we have. It is our reason that leads us to reject the notion of Heaven and Hell and substitute for them reincarnation, something theologically almost indistinct from the old Catholic notion of Purgatory, just as our reason and our understanding of people has caused us to adopt the old Catholic sacrament of Confession, along with much of the pomp and ceremony.

"You asked to confess because you have a cancer in your soul and need a way to excise it. I would answer you that by confessing you have in goodly part already excised it. I would say to you too that, just as one can never cross the same river twice, so you, too, have changed and are hardly the same person who did the things that are eating at your soul. Finally, I would say to you that to be whole and pure again, you must do some great good for your people, or indeed
all
people."

'
Some great good,'
mused Wallenstein.
How hard it is to do a 'great good.' Even so, I can still do some little ones.

The newly ennobled High Admiral, escorted by a half dozen Marines, moved through the market on foot. She stopped here and there to inspect the merchandise, sometimes pulling a chin down to check teeth. The hawkers came up to her at each stop she made. Some had the girls and boys bow. Others tapped the goods with short whips to make them turn to display their wares.

One girl in particular caught Marguerite's attention. She was a lovely little brown creature, perhaps fourteen years of age or a bit more.

"Where are you from child?" the High Admiral asked.

"TransIsthmia, your highness," the girl answered.

"How did you end up here?" Wallenstein asked.

The vendor supplied the answer. "She's a rebel brat, sold by Count Castro-Nyere. If she isn't sold quick, a buyer from the Orthodox Druids has expressed an interest."

Marguerite nodded. "And your name?" she asked.

"Whatever you want to call me," the child said, casting a fearful look at her owner and vendor.

"I want to call you what those whom you grew up with called you."

"Esmeralda, then, your highness."

Wallenstein nodded began to turn away.

"You worthless little twat," the vendor said, frustrated at the apparently lost sale. The frustration was all the worse because he hadn't a clue how the wretched bitch had screwed it up. He raised a scream from the girl when he struck her across her budding breasts with his short whip. He raised his arm to strike his property again. Before the blow could land, the vendor felt his wrist held in a firm grasp. Turning, he saw the blond woman in the black uniform, a wicked grin splitting her face and her fingers wrapped around his whip hand.

"That will be
quite
enough," Marguerite announced. She released the hand and then turned to one of her Marines. "Call in the troops," she ordered.

The Marine spoke into his communicator. Almost immediately the air was split with the sonic boom of a dozen or more shuttles. These landed and began disgorging troops to surround the largest and oldest slave market on the Continent. Indeed, it was so old it had actually been established by the long since defunct United States of America.

Turning back to the vendor, Marguerite said, "Fetch me the owner of this place, and any vendors who wish to make a claim for recompense on their . . . property . . . before I seize it for service to the Fleet by the authority of the Secretary General of the Consensus."

The perception of a left-right political spectrum has survived for seven centuries and spread across two planets. There are sound reasons for this, despite the fact that it is not perfectly descriptive. One reason is that the core of political differences is the varying perception of the nature of man, at those perceptions' extremes: Perfectible by breeding (right), perfectible by training and education (left), neither perfectible nor even all that changeable by either (center). A second reason is that the existence of one extreme tends to organize people along the other. Perhaps better said, the two extremes tend to organize each other. Moreover, they tend to drag people away from the center, or to make those who remain in the center very quiet . . .
Take the typical X-Y graph that purports to describe the true nature of the political spectrum, one that, perhaps, posits an X axis that describes the attitude to planned social progress or attitude to human reason, while the Y axis describes the attitude to government or attitude to power. If one plots out a given sample of people one will find that two corners of the graph are uninhabited. There is no one who is both sane and not a moron who has a very positive attitude towards government (except insofar as such a person may be personally dependent upon a government meal ticket) and a very negative attitude to planned social progress, or vice versa. Instead, in plotting a sample, one gets a fairly narrow oval, running from lower left to upper right. Turn that graph clockwise forty-five degrees and look at it again. Yes, it now describes left-right again, with minor up and down differences, which differences are irrelevant when compared to the major right-left differences and which are, again, overcome by the mutual and hostile organization driven by the extremes . . .

—Jorge y Marqueli Mendoza,
Historia y Filosofia Moral
,
Legionary Press, Balboa,
Terra Nova, Copyright AC 468

There were secrets well kept and then there were rumors of secrets not so well kept. One of the latter was that the Legion had captured a UEPF shuttle in Pashtia some years before. The rumor was, in fact, quite true, though never admitted to.

"Unfortunately, Patricio, we can't get it to so much as hover, let alone fly," Lanza said to Carrera, the both of them deep in the bowels of Hill 287 in a specially constructed hangar.

"Why not?" Carrera asked.

Lanza sneered. "It's partly a function of the fact that your ham-fisted ground pounders shot it up. But what little damage that didn't do was done when you had
infantrymen—
Boss, what the
fuck
were you thinking?
Infantrymen?
They can break
anvils!
—take the goddamned thing apart before you loaded it out."

"Best we could do on short notice," Carrera shrugged. "Besides, it looks fine."

"Oh, sure," Lanza agreed. "We got the body put back together. Sortakindamaybealmost. We even got the engines to work. But you know what? You can't fly it without the computer and the right program and the computer was
toasted.
Just toasted. We can't even make up a simulation to
train
somebody to fly it."

"Well don't
cry
about it," Carrera said. "What do you need to make it work?"

Lanza shrugged. "A new flight computer? At least the goddamned
manual
for the wrecked one."

"No manual in the thing?"

"No, lots of manuals in the thing. On Old Earth microdisc. Which, admittedly, we have been able to read. But none of them tell us how to fix the blasted flight computer. Apparently it an 'echelons above God' level of maintenance."

For just a fleeting moment Carrera thought about a UEPF communications device sitting in an electro-magnetic proof safe at the Casa Linda.
No
, he thought.
That UEPF captain with the sexy voice knows about a lot of what I have. But she doesn't, I don't
think
, know about this. Besides, the only things she'd take in trade are my nukes and those I'm not about to give up. And even if I would, I not only need this thing to fly, I need her not to know about it. Which she would if I asked to trade for a replacement flight comp.

Carrera looked over the smooth lines of the dead shuttle. It was actually quite a pretty craft, a large wing itself with smaller, variable geometry wings for control when in atmosphere. The repair crew had even repainted the symbol of United Earth, a distorted drawing of the home planet in white, surrounded by a wreath, and with abstract lines superimposed for latitude and longitude.

"We
think
the IFF"—Identification, Friend or Foe—"still works," Lanza offered. "Though the codes have got to be out of date."

"Why do you think so?" Carrera asked.

"Just that it had no obvious damage and when we took it into the secure vault and powered it up we got a satisfying light display. 'Best we could do,' " he echoed.

"I asked Fernandez already," Lanza said. "He says his 'special intelligence source' has dried up. At least temporarily. He also said he was doing
his
best."

Hmmm
, Carrera wondered.
What's the best
I
could do? Hmmm . . . haven't used her in years, but maybe, just maybe, Harriet might be of some help. On the other hand, can I really
trust
Harriet, even if she can help and is willing to? Have to think about that one.

"Is there anything the Federated States might have that would help you?' he asked Lanza.

"A Lob mainframe computer, maybe," the aviator admitted. "Maybe somebody
really
good at recovering data from a fucked up . . ." Lanza stopped momentarily, plainly puzzled. "I was about to say 'hard drive,' but the fucking thing doesn't
have
a hard drive, at least not what we generally mean by the term."

"Keep working on it," Carrera said. "Let me see what I can do."

Aircraft took off and landed in steady streams from the airfield at one end of the arc of land that made up the tail of the tadpole shaped island. A very few ignored the airstrip, landing or taking off from the ship anchored in the harbor that the tail formed.

The ship was old and, more than any warship afloat on Terra Nova, battle scarred. The worst of the scarring was on her portside rear quarter, where she'd once been the recipient of an anti-shipping missile that had nearly destroyed her . . . and had destroyed many, many of her crew.

To one side of that scar, enclosed in clear polycarbonate, an ancient sword—at least the core of it was ancient—that had made the trip from Japan on Old Earth to Yamato on New was welded to the hull. Likewise inside the polycarbonate was the shadow of a small man, the hand of the shadow touching the hilt, the
tsuka
, of the sword.

That was the holiest spot on a ship that every man of the crew considered generally holy.

Above the polycarbonate case, welded sword and thin shadow was a flight deck, roughly seven hundred feet in length. Along one side of the flight deck a mix of light attack, reconnaissance, and rotary wing aircraft were lined up. As the ship was under blackout they were only visible at a distance as shadows, back-illuminated by the lights of the fleet base, itself on the northern edge of the island by the bay.

Above the flight deck, in the superstructure on the port side amidships, Legate Roderigo Fosa, commander of the
classis
, or fleet, trusted his own eyes more than any technological marvels. Below the bridge crew watched radar and sonar screens, as well as the closed circuit, light amplifying televisions that showed both the surrounding waters and the crew working the flight deck.