Island Worlds (16 page)

When we realized he was gone, we sent a search party out for him. On the crater rim, they found all his emergency signaling gear. There are nearly a century's worth of tire tracks up there, so there was no way to find which were his and he obviously didn't want to be found, anyway. After three days we held a wonderful wake for him. He would have loved it. Please accept our deepest condolences, we know how much you loved him. We did, too. The rest of these papers he left for you.

It was signed by Nectar and Ambrosia Fu. Thor's eyes stung as he passed the paper to the others. Tears are a terrible thing in freefall. They just stay there on the eyeballs and have to be brushed away. The others let him get control of himself before commenting.

"I'm sorry, Thor," Caterina said. "You've told me so much about him I feel like I've lost a kinsman, too." She was sincere and it was quite different from her usual tone with him.

"One thing's for sure," said Roalstad. "When they arrest billionaires like him, things are getting serious. In normal times, wealth like his buys immunity from almost anything."

"What did he send you,
amigo
?" Ortega asked.

Thor scanned the sheets, which were all covered with incomprehensible symbols. "It's in code," he said, puzzled.

"Then it's important," Caterina said. "Turn it over to a data service when we get to Avalon. And we'll be there soon. Drink up, we're pulling out. Sean, I'd suggest you go too. Something big is up."

"I'll beat you there," said Roalstad.

"Five hundred says you won't."

"You're on." They left the teeming, noisy chamber, and around them word spread that the times were changing.

The scene in HMK was chaos. There were groups gathered around signs, others in uniforms of a sort. There was shouting and fist-waving and slogan-bearing banners had been hung prominently. "I think I detect the fine hand of my friend Shaw in all this," Thor said. Beside him, Caterina nodded. At one end of the cavern, a tall, spindly speaking platform had been erected, and he saw Martin Shaw pulling himself up a rope hand-over-hand to its apex. Apparently, Shaw had no use for magnified holographic images. He waved his arms and the hubbub subsided.

"If you don't know me by now," Shaw said, "I'm Martin Shaw." There was cheering and waving from the crowd. Apparently, Shaw was a popular man. The PA system made his voice boom throughout the cavern. "I represent the Outerworlds Survival Party. Because that's exactly what we're facing, people: survival. What we decide and do in the next few months will determine whether offworld humanity is to be a continuing part of human history or just a footnote; a failed experiment in the course of Earth's self-destruction. If we fail, what the history books will say won't concern us greatly, because we'll all be dead!" There was restrained pandemonium from the crowd below him.

"You notice something?" Thor said. "Most of the noise and fist-waving is coming from immigrants. The Spaceborn have no feel for mob action."

"Shh!" Cat hissed. "He's talking."

"By now, most of you have heard of the latest decrees and actions of the United Nations of Earth." Thor instantly caught the "of Earth" qualifier. It was the first time he had heard such an expression. "The resolution passed by the General Assembly and the Security Council amounts to a declaration of war in all but formal, legalistic terminology."

A professorial-looking man leaped to a height of five or six meters and shouted: "The U.N. has no power to declare war on behalf of the member nations!"

"Nothing is being done on behalf of the member nations," Shaw answered. "This is being done by and for the Earth First Party. And forget about declarations of war, nobody's used one in over a century. You can make war without declaring it just as easily as you can commit murder without declaring it. Supposedly, the U.N. can only vote for military action to enforce peace where war has already broken out, but nations have always known that you can wage war as effectively with political and economic action as with guns and bombs. Lock a man up in a cell and starve him to death and you've killed him just as dead as if you'd shot him.

"For years, Earth First has tried to portray the outerworlds as an evil parasite exploiting humanity. While we've gone our merry way concentrating on how to out-compete each other, they've reaped most of the profits while turning us into the enemy in most peoples' perceptions. And we've nobody to blame but ourselves!"

"How come we're at fault?" yelled a man leaping upward and drifting slowly downward. "We've done nothing to the Earthies except support 'em!" Lots of murmuring in support of that one. The timing was good and Thor wondered whether Shaw had coached the questioners beforehand.

"I'll tell you why! It's because we've come out here and turned our backs on the mother world. We've cultivated the mystique of our own superiority for years and we've come to despise the homeworlders as contemptible Earthies. When you're contemptuous of somebody, it's easy to forget how resentful and dangerous they can be. We've pretended we were some kind of aristocracy and we've committed the aristocrats' historical sin of blindness and self-absorption. Even now, with annihilation staring us in the face, most of us would rather cherish our vaunted 'independence' than unite against a common threat. All our 'independence' is good for now is ensuring that we'll hang alone instead of together. The kind of independence we need now is national independence. The individual kind does us little good in a war."

Another man jumped up. He wore the brown coverall of the Brethren of Patmos. "I'll fight the heathen Earthies if need be, but," he flung a pointing finger about him in a dramatic gesture, "I'll not ally with these godless money-grubbers."

Next was a man with fluffy side-whiskers. "The Society of Friends cannot countenance war. Independence with peace would be a good thing for us all, but if thee preach violence, we are not with thee."

"It's just this kind of divisiveness we're going to have to overcome," Shaw shouted. He pointed across the chamber to a ledge near the one where Thor and Caterina were standing. Thor could just make out Sean Roalstad's extravagant, feathered cape in the midst of a knot of crewpeople from
Odin
and the
Longship
. "Sean Roalstad! How do you stand on this?" Shaw pointed a directional mike at the skipper.

Roalstad looked uncomfortable and embarrassed. "You all know me. I'm not afraid to fight and never have been. But war isn't fighting. It's murder on a big scale. Besides, it's bad for business. Maybe not for Earth, the Earthie industries get fat on wartime manufacturing and service contracts. But we're prospectors and miners and shippers. If we can't move about freely, we're ruined." His words were sobering and the crowd grew less agitated.

"Exactly!" Shaw pounced triumphantly. "We are heading into a time of trial that is going to cost us all dearly. Anyone who paints a rosy picture for you is a fraud! To survive and prevail, we will all have to sacrifice. We must sacrifice our precious exclusivity. You can't accomplish anything if you can't work with people you don't much like. A lot of us may have to sacrifice our lives. Let the Earthies call it what they like, what's coming is war and people get killed in war. A lot of us are going to lose everything material: savings, businesses, ships, the works. That's tough. We'll just have to start over when it's done.

"Some three centuries ago, another group of colonists sat down to hammer out the terms of their independence. A number of them were the richest men in the colonies, those with the most to lose, and those surest of the traitor's noose should they fail. They pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, to the effort and signed their names so that there could be no doubt of who they were. Whatever happens, you can keep honor, but sometimes at the cost of the first two items. If we aren't prepared to go as far as they did, we might as well capitulate and accept slow death now." The scene on the floor turned to chaos as everyone cheered, booed or demanded to be heard.

"Let's go," Caterina said. "This will go on for days. We can catch the highlights on the holos."

"Where are we going?" Thor asked. "I was looking forward to a bath and a beer."

"Sidon," she said. "That's where the family is meeting."

"You want me to come along?" Thor was suspicious. He had never attended one of the inner-family conferences. Even the Taggarts and Cianos out here treated him like a poor relation, a steerage Earthie with a mere two years in the outerworlds. He had expected to be welcomed with open arms and was somewhat embittered by his near-rejection.

"The family may have work for you," she said, leading the way into the nearest tube station.

"The family already has work for me," he said. "I've been crewing on one of their ships for a couple of years now, remember?"

"I mean
important
work. Not just family business." She climbed into a four-passenger tube cab and strapped herself into one of its seats. It could make the trip to Sidon in twenty minutes instead of a train's hour or more.

"What's so important?" he asked, taking a facing seat.

"You'll find out. Maybe it'll be nothing." She seemed distracted and refused to respond to Thor's proddings. He was used to these moods of hers. From the day he had arrived in Avalon, she had been maddeningly inconsistent in her attitude toward him, alternating between a warm friendliness and impersonal disdain. On at least a dozen occasions, he had sworn to give up trying. Not that he had remained celibate while pursuing his abortive courtship. There was Gallina Federova, who bossed the operation on L-591. There had also been Titania Carrarra, who had crewed in the
Sisyphus
. Affairs within the closed little world of a ship were always touchy and potentially volatile. His with Titania had not lasted long, but he had taken comfort in the way Caterina had treated him like a leper for months afterward.

The car pulled into the small station at Sidon. They were a few degrees north of the equator, but well into the interior, near the axis, so that the perceived gravity was about one-third Earth normal, roughly Martian level. Thor felt a little wobbly on his legs in the unaccustomed gravity. He had found that he was most comfortable when he had just enough gravity to feel his weight and have a definite sense of up and down. HMK was near-ideal. Few except the Spaceborn ever felt truly comfortable in freefall but he had decided that only an idiot would ever want to return to full gravity.

The main Sidon chamber was an old, worked-out mine site, which had been worked into the near-universal system of stepped-back tiers. It was largely residential, with a small commercial and convenience area serving mainly the local residents. Near the center of the public plaza, Thor saw a group of schoolchildren playing a complicated game involving a great deal of high jumping and somehow involving the capture of various colored kerchiefs, all under or above the eye of a stern-looking supervisor. With a shock, Thor recalled Shaw's inflammatory speeches. If the man wasn't exaggerating, these children might have to be evacuated to obscure mining rocks, perhaps to spend the bulk of their childhood amid the grim, bleak surroundings of the little mining operations. It was a depressing thought.

They ascended to the highest tier, a level where the encircling terrace was broader and the doorways fewer. If there could be said to be an exclusive housing district in Avalon, this was it. They stopped before a door bearing the plum-blossom motif and Caterina placed a palm against its lock plate. The door hissed open and Thor saw that it was a massive, vault-like construction, suitable for withstanding a major disaster or a siege. They went in and it hissed shut behind them. Beyond was a short hall and another, similar door. Thor spotted sensors everywhere, along with the snouts of gas projectors and shortbeam lasers.

"No wonder there's no welcome mat out front," Thor said.

"Our ancestors believed in castles," Caterina told him, "and so do we. This isn't the only one, though it's the biggest and best-known. Other Taggarts and Cianos and McNaughtons and Kurodas and Sousas have come up here from Earth in the past. Not all of them have made it past these doors. Come to think of it, you haven't yet."

"If they don't laser me down," Thor said caustically, "I'll consider it an honor." Just then the inner door slid open and they entered the inner sanctum. The foyer was the largest living area Thor had seen since leaving the Moon. It was sparsely furnished but the walls were beautifully polished and there were many beautiful art works and tapestries to relieve the austerity. In the center, a small fountain sent up a multicolored, slow-motion spray. A woman came into the room and for a second Thor's heart paused. She was Fred Schuster come to life. Then he saw that this woman looked no older than her mid-fifties.

"You must be Thor," she said, extending her hand graciously. "Robert spoke of you often in his messages. I'm his sister, Brunhilde."

Thor took the hand. He had to cant his head slightly to look her in the eye. She was well over six feet tall. "Bob was a good friend and a brave man," Thor told her. "You've heard about his death?"

"Yes. Let's not mourn. Few of us get to choose the manner of our death, and Robert picked the one he wanted. We should all be so fortunate." She turned to Caterina. "Tomás and Saburo are in the great hall. Most of the inner family are here, and the collateral branches are gathering. The meeting begins at 1900. You'd better report to Saburo and pay your respects. I'll take charge of Thor." To Thor's utter astonishment, the younger woman bowed deeply.

"It's good to see you again, Elder Aunt," Caterina said. Then she turned and left the room.

"Come along to my place, Thor. We must get better acquainted." Thor followed her. Brunhilde walked with the snakelike grace of the Spaceborn. She was wearing a black, diaphanous gown, the first such garment Thor had seen here. They passed through a narrow tunnel and into another foyer, this one cluttered with all manner of objects, souvenirs and memorabilia. There were pieces of scientific apparatus, a few weapons, two space-suits of antiquated design, holographs and oil paintings. The eccentricity and indiscipline had Ciano written all over it.