Imperial Stars 3-The Crash of Empire (44 page)

"But you might have freed those hostages." An approving murmur answered Parsons, and some of my fellow Structuralists nodded agreement. I couldn't hold that against them. I wasn't sure myself that restraint had been the right move.

"I considered that, ma'am," the Colonel said. "I also considered that a battle might have killed many of the people we wanted to save—and that the outlanders would rather kill slaves than free them. In addition, I have standing orders to remain in the Neutral Zone."

Parsons shifted her attack. "You had an observer on this patrol. Didn't Secretary Woodman have anything to say about your decision?"

"Ma'am, I didn't consult him. Civilian observers have no place in making tactical decisions."

"This particular civilian is also the Secretary of War," Parsons countered. "That also makes him your superior. Why didn't he countermand your orders?"

Ryan rapped her gavel on the bench. "Madam Parsons, that question is out of order."

Parsons looked at her. "May I address it to Mr. Woodman?"

"Yes." Ryan nodded for me to take Washington's place.

Before the Collapse, I'm sure, the podium would have had a hot, bright light focused on it. We don't have such luxuries, but I felt as hot and naked as if I'd been pinned under a spotlight. Parsons eyed me for a moment as I stood at the podium. "Mr. Woodman, why didn't you countermand the Colonel's orders?"

"I don't countermand common sense," I told her bluntly. "And I have no authority to order the colonel to leave the Neutral Zone. I'm not empowered to start wars; that's the Legislature's duty."

That gave the EP chief pause—briefly. "Perhaps. . . but Weyler has
de facto
started a war—and a raid, even if it failed, would have shown our determination to revive civilization. That's the goal of both our parties, no matter how much we disagree on techniques."

Ryan rapped her gavel again. "Please, madam, no speeches during questioning."

"My apologies, madam." Even at this distance I could see the sardonic touch to her smile. "My point is that the outlanders invaded the Neutral Zone and took slaves. So far all this government has done is to bury the dead. Mr. Woodman, what
do
you propose to do?"

She had me—and the Speaker, and the whole Structuralist Party—neatly trapped with that question. "As Secretary of War, I'll follow the government's decisions. As a legislator and citizen, I favor any solution which will stop the raids—without endangering the Republic."

"Ah, yes." Parson's voice was just this side of a sneer. "I have no further questions, Madam Ryan—but I would like to make a motion." The other legislators sat down at once. The EPs sat to let their boss make her motion; our people sat because there was no point in stalling—and perhaps because a good many of them agreed with what was coming.

Parsons looked around the Forum, spoke in formal tones. "Madam Speaker, fellow legislators. In view of the Weyler raid, I move that we vote to declare war on Weyler, depose him and annex his lands."

Ryan sighed, a sound I could barely hear from where I stood. "Are there any objections?" she asked, and then waited through a stony silence. "Very well, the motion carries. We will vote after debate tomorrow. This body is dissolved for twenty-four hours."

That gave me one day to stop a war.

I drink at the Crushed Alien for two reasons: the view and the food.

The inn has a dining terrace which overlooks my home district. Zone Twenty-nine isn't much to see, by day or night, but I'm fond of it. The main attraction is the chemical plant, which produces everything from fertilizer through medicine and gasoline to gunpowder . . . all in inadequate amounts, I'll concede; but the output grows every year. Right now it produces enough to help support a nation of two million people, in a section of land that used to be Illinois.

The food? It's nothing fancy, which is a virtue. A lot of tavern cooks like to improvise pre-Collapse dishes, especially things that remind us oldsters of fast foods and other lost delights. That's not for me, thank you; I lost too much in the Collapse to dredge up old memories. A tavern is also a good place for a politician to do business. An office intimidates some people, especially when they have to face you across a desk. Shooting the breeze over stew and ale is another matter, as long as you remember that nothing you hear is trivial—not to the voter who's saying it.

Pete Bodo, a farmer on the western edge of my zone, was bending my ear. "I don't care about this war talk," he said. "Either Weyler throws in the towel, or we stomp him. Either way, it's all going to happen a couple hundred miles from here. Besides, I have other problems." Collapse or no Collapse, midwesterners are isolationists at heart. I gave him an encouraging nod. "It's not the water pumps again, is it?"

"Naw. You really got engineering straightened out on that." He set his mug down on the table. "Someone in my neck of the woods is shooting cats. I lost two of my best ratters this past month."

"I see." Rats don't just eat crops, although farmers like Bodo have had granaries ruined by them. The bubonic plague which decimated the East Coast after the Collapse was spread by rats, and no one forgets that. Cats are our first line of defense against rats. "Do you suspect anyone?"

"Naw. All I know is, it's someone with a .410 shotgun." He pulled a brass casing from a pocket and gave it to me. "Found this on the road, fifty yards from one of my dead ratters."

I looked at the shell, and wished that we could afford the luxury of a police department and detectives. We were lucky to have as little crime as we did—or perhaps it wasn't luck. I'd read somewhere that vigorous, pioneering cultures have little crime. "A small gauge like this can't be too common," I said. "Maybe I can find out who bought it."

"Good. Well, I thank you, Tad." We shook hands and he left.

I doubt it occurred to Bodo that finding his cat-killer would take a lot of my time. He was a dawn-to-dusk, light-of-the-moon farmer, the sort who thinks that no other farmer works half as hard as he does, and that all non-farmers are idle hands. Well, this would give me an excuse to nose around my zone and see how things stood.

I was almost finished eating when Gwen Parsons joined me. "Hello, Mr. Secretary," she said, seating herself.

"Mulch that, Gwen," I said. I suppose her formality was a way of apologizing for the debate, as if I might have taken it personally. Well, I
might
have, but I couldn't afford that. If I could convince
her
that a war was a bad idea, I'd gladly forget it. "What brings you out here?"

"You, of course." Gwen has the sort of face and voice that make everything she says sound deadly serious. "You know how the vote will go tomorrow, of course."

I nodded. "I'm still willing to act as though you might win anyway."

She acknowledged the hit with a crooked smile. "Tad, in the unlikely chance that we win, would you consider staying on as our Secretary of War?"

I decided not to fence with her. "You don't have your own choice lined up?"

"I do," Gwen said. "But there are two good reasons to keep you. One, we traditionally have a coalition government during a war. Two, it always takes a month for a new appointee to learn the ropes. We're not going to wait a month to attack."

"Ah." Passions can cool in a month. She'd want to attack Weyler while everyone was fired up over the raid.

" 'Ah,' nothing, Tad," she said. "We have guns, poison gas, cannon, even aircraft. Weyler has bows and arrows, and so forth. Yet he's just provoked us. He expects a war with us—and no one starts a war with the idea that they're going to lose."

"He can't win."

"You're certain?"

I stared at the horizon for a long while. The sun had just set, and a few electric lights came on here and there: at the chemical plant, along the Main Concourse, atop the towers of the radio station. Most of the lights were decoration, but they helped show off our accomplishments.

"He
can't
win," I repeated. "We have the technology, the numbers, the organization—and the
will
. If we fight, we can grind his kingdom into a pulp."

Gwen rested her hands on the terrace table. "But you don't want to fight."

"It's wasteful. Expensive. It takes as many work hours to build a cannon as it does to make a tractor. A soldier can't spend his time teaching or smelting iron. We're trying to rebuild civilization; every resource we divert from that delays the job."

"So you want to toe the Structuralist line." She tilted her head back and looked at the sky. " 'Make war only in self defense; let the barbarians join us when they see the virtues of civilization.' "

I nodded. "Coercion doesn't work—the victims always resent it. The Republic is expanding nicely as it is. In a few more years, Weyler's people will be with us."

"Yes—after a few years of living with slavery, superstition, and Weyler's version of monarchy. What sort of citizens will they be then? If we don't act fast . . ." Her voice trailed off. She craned her head and looked straight up. "Aw, nuts."

I looked and saw it, right on the zenith: the feathery shape of a fusion flame, drifting across Earth's sky like a lazy comet. The Alien ship itself was a silver pinpoint at the head of the drive flame.

After a quarter of a century the Aliens had returned.

I'd known that the Aliens were real when the tabloid papers all declared they were a CIA-created hoax.

Marcia, my first wife, had been beside herself ever since the Alien drive flame was spotted decelerating into the Solar System. Now that I was convinced, she could stop quibbling over a trivial point and get down to some serious arguing. It was going to be the biggest event in our history, she said; even if the visitors forced us to take some strong medicine, they would do it with benevolence and in our best interests.

After a while I'd come to enjoy her optimism. As the UFO neared Earth, the news and entertainment media filled with gloom and uncertainty. Along with were some idiotic speculation on invasion and conquest from space, there was a lot of conjecture about possible dangers to our culture. In the space of two months I heard about every primitive culture which ever collapsed in the face of a superior civilization.

After all the media hype,
Scented Vines
arrival in Earth orbit was almost an anticlimax. There'd been an accident on board, they informed us, and they'd stopped here to make repairs.
Scented Vine
was a cargo ship, going from one unimportant star to another. It had been a long, rough trip, and the Aliens (they never told us what they called themselves) wanted to take shore leave.

We believed them. It was disappointing to know that our first contact was brought on by a leaky fuel line, but there was no helping that. Shore leave wasn't the scientific, diplomatic, and cultural exchange everyone had envisioned, but it was better than nothing. Like South Sea islanders greeting a Yankee whaler, we welcomed them to our shores.

After a month I noticed that things were—not different, perhaps, but certainly not right. The Aliens were all over the TV, naturally, doing and saying colorful things. We weren't learning much about them, but they were learning a lot about us, especially our faults and foibles. They never had any suggestions on how to improve ourselves—they would never dream of upsetting the development of aboriginal cultures, they said—but they made plenty of disparaging comments, in the form of innocent questions. Had we ever thought about what would happen if we used those nuclear weapons we had developed? Our cults intrigued them, but why did we allow our shamans and priests to participate in serious political decisions?

The questions were not new, but hearing them from outsiders gave them a weight they had never had before. Our answers were neither new nor good, and they did not impress the Aliens, who made it clear that even by primitive standards we were fairly inept. The media echoed and amplified their remarks, until it seemed everyone was wondering if humanity was good for anything at all.

There were other things, worse things. One of
Scented Vines
's crew, the doctor, had agreed to spend an afternoon with a team from the World Health Organization. It broke the appointment when, on the way into New York, it spotted an astrologer's shop. While the WHO scientists cooled their heels the Alien had its horoscope cast. The networks gave the proceedings full coverage, and interviewed a variety of soothsayers on the technical problems of tailoring astrology to fit an Alien's birth. Someone with a pseudo-Gypsy name was blathering about planetary influences and the Zodiac when the Alien emerged from the shop. It announced its satisfaction with our sophisticated magic.

What happened next
was
news. A TV preacher came roaring out of the crowd, shouting about blasphemy and iniquity, vowing to smite the Beast. That was when we learned about the zapper. The preacher and a half-dozen sight-seers went down in convulsions, overcome by perfect bliss. One camera showed the televangelist's face as he dropped. For the first time in memory his fixed, money-making smile looked genuine. The next day he preached a brief, disjointed sermon on the Nirvana of the zapper.

It didn't take long for the chaser movement to begin. Within a month tens of thousands of people around the world were looking for the Aliens; when the creatures showed up the chasers would provoke the Aliens into zapping them. To the Aliens it was just another picturesque native activity, one they indulged without interest or sympathy.

More than American society was falling apart. Russia, Red China, Japan, Western Europe, India—no country could keep them out; they landed their shuttlecrafts where they pleased, and everywhere the Aliens turned up they created problems. Things became especially bad in the Soviet Union. Maybe the Soviets thought we were behind their troubles, or maybe they thought we had made a deal with the Aliens. All I know is that five months after the first Alien landing the President ordered a creeping mobilization of American forces. I was a reservist and I was called up, which took me away from home at the height of the Collapse.