Inferno: A Chronicle of a Distant World (The Galactic Comedy) (3 page)

"Ambassador, eh? They
are
a little more advanced than McConnell's reports would indicate." Cartright cleared his throat. "So much the better. It looks like we chose the right world."

"That's my initial impression," agreed Beddoes. "Of course, we'll need a few more months to be sure."

"We don't have that luxury," replied Cartright. "We're operating on a very tight schedule. I don't know how much longer Breshinsky can hold on to her job at the Department of Alien Affairs, and if Nkomo succeeds her, as seems likely, we're not going to have much time before he decides to call in the Navy. We've opened six mining worlds near Faligor; the Republic desperately needs an agricultural world to supply them. Also, while McConnell's analysis wasn't as thorough as we might have wished, it looks like Faligor has more than its share of gold, silver and fissionable materials, especially in that mountain range to the west of you."

"I thought they were going to let us open this world our way," said Beddoes.

"Half the politicians on Deluros don't understand what our function really is," said Cartright, frustration creeping into his voice. "To them, the Department of Cartography is just some huge, overfunded mapmaking institute. They still don't realize that we're the ones who determine how and where Man is to expand in the galaxy, who tell the Navy where to set up its lines of supply and defense. They're already resentful that we determine which planets the Republic assimilates; and now that we're also trying to show them
how
, they're up in arms."

"You'd think after all the messes that Alien Affairs has had to clean up, they'd be thrilled to have someone besides the military open up some worlds."

"I wish it was that simple, but we're invading their turf, so to speak, and when you deal with power brokers of this magnitude there are always problems," said Cartright.

"So what happens next?"

"We speed up our schedule."

"But we'd planned each step so carefully," protested Beddoes.

"Susan, we no longer have the luxury of being as careful as we'd like. I'd hoped to spend ten years carefully assimilating Faligor into the Republic, but I'd say we have three at the outside."

"So it's gone from being our best hope to our last one, right?" said Beddoes bitterly.

"Let's not be negative, Susan. We've learned from our mistakes on Peponi and Lodin XI and Rockgarden. If we didn't think we could do a better job of it, we wouldn't have lobbied for permission." He sighed deeply. "There are two million oxygen worlds yet to be opened up in the galaxy. Our computers tell us that from ten to twelve thousand of them will possess sentient life. If we can make Faligor a model of how to assimilate such worlds, maybe we can save some of them—and ourselves—the problems we've caused elsewhere."

"All right," said Beddoes. "What do we do next?"

"I'm dispatching a contact team of two hundred Men to Faligor the day after tomorrow. It will contain the usual—doctors, agricultural experts, geologists, aquaculturalists, everything except military advisors. They'll arrive about ten days from now."

"And what do you want me to do in the meantime?" asked Beddoes.

"Nothing special," replied Cartright. "Learn what you can about their society. Prepare them for our arrival, and see if you can get them to look forward to it with some enthusiasm. Tell them about the wonderful inventions and medicines we're bringing them. In short," he concluded wryly, "just be an exemplary representative of your race. Hell, you can even continue to go around collecting bugs of you want; after all, that's your specialty."

"What do I tell them about the farmland?"

"I don't quite follow you."

"You need a farming planet," Beddoes pointed out. "How much of their land are you going to appropriate?"

"We're not going to
appropriate
anything. If we have to, we'll find some land no one is living on or working—but I'd much rather try to introduce a monied economy to Faligor and let the inhabitants sell their produce to the mining worlds." He paused again, then said passionately: "Just this once, we're going to do it right. Man has enough subjects; he needs some partners."

"Will you be coming yourself?" asked Beddoes.

"As soon as I can," answered Cartright. "We're currently engaged in military actions in six different sectors, and the Department of Energy is in urgent need of another dozen mining worlds, and we're only halfway done charting the Albion Cluster. If I'm lucky, I might make it there in about three Standard months. Probably four—and that's if nothing else crops up."

"Do you want me to make daily reports until your team arrives?"

"No, I only want you to do it when it's convenient. The last thing we want them to think is that you're sneaking off to the ship each night to plot an invasion. Anything you don't tell me you can tell the team leader."

"All right," said Beddoes. "Is there anything else?"

"No, just do a good job," said Cartright. "There aren't that many Edens in the galaxy, and we've destroyed quite enough of them. It's time we left one intact."

He broke the connection.

2.

The contact team landed on schedule. Within a week a vaccination clinic had been set up for the Enkoti, and in a month's time there were more than two dozen other clinics in operation among the Rizzali, the Traja, the Bolimbo, and all the other tribes.

The land proved as fertile as Susan Beddoes had hoped, and the team appropriated some 30,000 square miles of untilled soil for human farmers. When some of the sitates objected, emissaries were dispatched to make restitution; the Traja and Bolimbo accepted tractors and mutated seeds, but Disanko, who had been studying Men as closely as they had been studying him, insisted upon currency.

Within three months there were tarmac roads connecting the capitals of the major tribes, and some two hundred human teachers were imported to teach both the children and the adults the rudiments of science, mathematics and the Terran language, which was the official language of the Republic and was fast becoming the
lingua franca
of the galaxy.

Then, six months after Beddoes had first landed, a discovery was made that brought Arthur Cartright to Faligor ahead of schedule. He landed at the temporary spaceport, got right into a small airplane, and took off. He returned that evening and immediately summoned a dozen of his most trusted aides to the hastily-erected building that momentarily served as humanity's headquarters.

Beddoes was among the invitees, and she filed into a large meeting room along with the other staff members. Cartright was waiting for them, standing stiffly in front of the chairs that had been lined up to face him. He was a tall, lean man, exquisitely dressed, with soft brown eyes and shaggy, unkempt gray-brown eyebrows, an aquiline nose, and a narrow mouth. He seemed uneasy, as if he were more used to doing his business on the vidphone or via subspace radio, as indeed he was. When all of his aides had taken their seats, he cleared his throat and began to speak.

"Before I get to the purpose of this meeting, I want to take this opportunity to tell you that I think you've done an excellent job thus far. We've made far more progress than even I had hoped for."

"The jasons get all the credit for that, sir," said the woman in charge of coordinating the medical efforts. "You couldn't ask for a friendlier, more intelligent, more pliable race to work with."

"Jasons?" repeated Cartright.

She smiled. "That's our name for them. Because of their golden fleeces."

"Very good," said Cartright, returning her smile. "I approve. Unless they object, that is."

"They don't seem to mind it at all."

"Fine." He paused awkwardly. "Anyway, as I said, I think you've all done a remarkable job thus far." He fumbled with his pocket for a moment, then withdrew a hand computer and studied it briefly. "And now for reason I've called this meeting. As you are aware, we chose Faligor because we knew it to be a rich agricultural world, with an ample water supply, an ideal climate, and a populace that we felt we could work with." He looked at the computer again, then put it back in his pocket. "Well, it turns out that Faligor is even richer than we had anticipated. I have just come back from the mountain range known as the Hills of Heaven, and it appears that they are honeycombed with exceptionally rich veins of gold and silver, as well as a not-inconsiderable supply of fissionable materials. Furthermore, in the desert south and west of the mountains we have already discovered three diamond pipes, with the possibility of still more to be found."

There was a brief buzz of excitement, and Cartright waited for it to subside.

"This means that Faligor can more than pay its own expenses, right from the start," he continued. "Not only will it be able to export food to the nearby mining worlds, but it may itself become one of the richest mining worlds in this sector. This presents us with enormous opportunities—but it also poses a problem that I wish to discuss with you, and hopefully to resolve before I leave in two days."

"We can't let the Republic in," said Constantine Talat, the burly medic in charge of the Enkoti vaccination program. "You let their miners set foot on Faligor, and within a month we'll have the Navy running the place. They'll conscript the jasons to work in the mines, and it'll be Rockgarden all over again."

"It was never my intention to invite the Republic to Faligor," answered Cartright, his nervousness gone now that he was addressing himself to his specialty. "We have made Faligor a protectorate, not a colony. The Navy will only come in if our people are endangered." He paused. "There is one exception to that. If word gets out about what we've discovered and we are not exploiting the planet's riches to the Republic's satisfaction, then absolutely nothing Cartography can do will prevent them from moving in."

"So what you're saying is that we've got to start working the mines immediately," said Talat.

"I'm saying that
some
one has got to," answered Cartright. "I'm very loathe to import human miners, because the Navy will insist on protecting them . . . and they won't
need
protection unless the Navy shows up and begins flexing its muscles, as it is inclined to do. So my question is this: are the jasons sophisticated enough to work with our mining equipment?"

"Not a chance," answered an educator. "They have no written language, and were even ignorant of the orbit of their planet until we arrived. They're bright, and most of them are eager learners, but it'll be years before they can deal with the computers and sophisticated machinery required for a full-scale mining operation."

"More to the point," added Victoria Domire, the head of the economic team, "none of them except the Enkoti has even the most rudimentary understanding of money. If you plan to work them in the mines, there's no way you can pay them. That means you'll have to conscript them, which is just the kind of situation we want to avoid."

"All right," said Cartright. "Those are pretty much the answers I had anticipated." He looked around the room. "Now, has anyone got any suggestions?"

Beddoes waited until she saw that no one else had any intention of speaking, and then raised her hand.

"The moles," she said.

"I beg your pardon?" said Cartright.

"Moles," she repeated. "I don't know their official name. They're the inhabitants of Socrates IV. Humanoid, oxygen-breathing, assimilated into the Republic for more than two centuries. They're highly skilled laborers who hire out to any world that can pay them. I ran into a group of them in Alpha Santori II."

"Do they work mines?" asked Victoria Domire.

"That's their specialty," answered Beddoes. "That's why we call them moles: because they spend so much of their time underground."

"We'd need a
lot
of them," said Domire.

"It's a big planet," said Beddoes.

"I'll take your suggestion under consideration," said Cartright. "In fact, if no one comes up with a better one by morning, I'll almost certainly act on it." He paused. "Now, are there any other questions or problems anyone wishes to discuss with me?"

So many hands arose that Cartright was taken aback. "I think the best way to handle this is for me to meet with each department head in my office. In the meantime, keep up the good work." He turned to Beddoes. "Please come with me, Susan. I'd like to speak to you first."

She followed him out of the meeting room, down a long corridor that led to the office he had commandeered for himself when he first arrived. It contained a desk, a small but powerful computer, and two chairs, as well as a holographic map of Faligor.

"You've spent as much time among the jasons as anyone, Susan," said Cartright. "So tell me—how much resentment will there be if we import, say, 50,000 moles to work the mines?"

"I don't know," answered Beddoes. "They don't seem to resent
us
, but—"

"But what?"

"But they can see that we're here to help them. I don't know if they'll understand what the moles are here for."

"Do you think that will make a difference?"

"Not at first."

"Then when?" persisted Cartright.

"When they realize that we're shipping valuable materials off their planet and they're not getting any revenues from them."

"That was never my intention. As I said, we need partners, not subjects."

Beddoes sighed deeply. "I don't know that that will make a difference."

"Please elaborate."

"Four months ago these people were living in the stone age . . . or, at best, the bronze age. Suddenly we're educating them and vaccinating them and showing them how to use farm machinery, and that's all well and good, but I think asking them to understand abstracts like a galactic economy and our need for fissionable materials is asking too much too soon. They can understand steel—after all, it makes better spears—but how can they understand the need for diamonds, especially industrial ones? The sitates will take our money, since they have no way of knowing which metals are worth money or how to sell them, but eventually they're going to feel that we are somehow betraying them by shipping these materials to our people, rather than showing
their
people how to use them and why they're worth so much to us."