Prisoners of Tomorrow (90 page)

Kath had moved away to talk to Adam, Casey, and Veronica, who were sitting together beyond the table at which Driscoll was performing. Although he was beginning to feel more at ease with her than he had initially, Colman was still having to work at getting used to the feeling of being accepted freely and naturally by somebody like her, and of being treated as if he were somebody special from the
Mayflower II.
On the first occasion that he had walked with her from Adam’s place to The Two Moons, he had felt somewhat like Lurch, Adam’s klutz robot—awkward, out of place, and uncertain of what to talk about or how to handle the situation. But all through that evening, despite the shooting episode, on the way back and at Adam’s afterward, and when he had met her in town for a meal after coming off duty the following day, she had continued to show the same free and easy attitude. Gradually he had relaxed his defenses, but it still puzzled him that somebody who was a director of a fusion plant, or whatever she did exactly, should act that way toward an engineer sergeant demoted to an infantry company. Why would she do something like that? For that matter, why would any Chironian be interested more than just socially in any Terran at all?

“Because she’s seducing you,” a voice murmured from behind him.

Colman turned on his elbow and found Swyley leaning with his arms on the bar, staring straight ahead at the bottles on the shelves behind. Colman raised his eyebrows. Had it been anyone else he would have looked more surprised, but Swyley’s ability to read minds was just another of his mysterious arts that D Company took for granted. After a few seconds Swyley went on, “They’re seducing all of us. That’s how they’re fighting the war.”

Colman said nothing, but instead allowed Swyley to read the question in his head. Sure enough, Swyley explained, “They don’t make bombs or organize armies. It’s too messy, and too many of the wrong people get hurt. They go for the grass roots. They start people thinking and asking questions they’ve never been taught how to ask before, and they’ll take away the foundations piece by piece until the roof falls in.” He paused and continued staring at the wall. “You’re an engineer, and she runs part of a fusion complex. If you want out, you’ve got a place to go. That’s what she’s telling you.”

Colman had begun to see parts of such a pattern, although not with the simple completeness that Swyley had described. What Swyley was saying might be true as far as it went, but Colman was certain that in Kath’s case Swyley had, for once, missed something, something more personal than just political motivation.

A hand descended on his arm and slid upward to tease the back of his neck. He turned round to find that Kath had come back. “You’re starting a bachelors’ party here,” she said. “I have to break that up before the idea catches on.”

Colman grinned. “Good thinking. We were starting to talk shop.” He inclined his head to where Veronica was still talking animatedly between Kath’s twin sons and evidently enjoying herself. “Somebody seems to be quite a hit over there.”

“Isn’t she a lot of fun,” Kath agreed. “She’s talking Casey into teaching her to be an architect. She could do it too. She’s an intelligent woman. Have you known her long?”

Colman smiled to himself. “I’ve only seen her around. This may sound crazy, but I never really met her before tonight.”

“After twenty years on the same ship? That’s not possible, surely.”

Colman shrugged. “Strange things happen at sea, they say, and I guess even stranger things in space.”

“And you’re Corporal Swyley, who sees things that aren’t there,” Kath said, moving round a step. “Your Captain Sirocco told me about your ability. I like him. He told me about the way you ruined the exercise up on the ship too. I thought it was wonderful.”

“If you’re going to lose anyway, you might as well win,” Swyley replied. “If you win the wrong way, you lose, and if you lose either way, you lose. So why not enjoy it?”

“What happens if you win the right way?” Kath asked him.

“Then you lose out to the system. It’s like playing against Driscoll—the system makes its own aces.”

At that moment one of the Chironian girls from the group in the corner took Swyley lightly by the arm. “I thought you were getting some more drinks,” she said. “We’re all drying up over there. I’ll give you a hand. Then you can come back and tell us more about the Mafia. The conversation was just getting interesting.”

Colman’s eyes widened in surprise. “Him? What in hell does he know about the Mafia?”

The girl gave Colman a funny look. “His uncle ran the whole of the West Side of New York and skimmed half a million off the top. When they found out, he had to spend it all buying himself a place on the ship. You didn’t know?” For a second Colman could only gape at her. He’d known that Swyley had been brought on to the
Mayflower II
as a kid by an uncle who had died fifteen years into the voyage from a heart condition, but that was about all. “Hey, how come you never told us about that part?” he asked as the girl led Swyley away.

“You never asked me,” Swyley answered over his shoulder.

He turned back, shaking his head despairingly, and looked at Kath again. Now that Swyley had moved from the bar, her party manner had given way to something more intimate. Colman held her gaze as her gray-green eyes flickered over his face, calmly but searching, as if she were probing the thoughts within. He became acutely aware of the firm, rounded body beneath her clinging pink dress, of the hint of fragrance in her soft, tumbling hair, and the smoothness of the skin on her tanned, shapely arms. Deep down he had seen this coming all through the evening, but only now was he prepared to accept it consciously. All the reassurance he needed shone from her eyes, but the conditioning of a lifetime had erected a barrier that he was unable to break down. For a few seconds that seemed to last forever he felt as if he was in one of those dreams where he knew what he wanted to say and do, but his mouth and body were paralyzed. He knew it was a reflex triggered by ingrained habits of thought, but at the same time he was powerless to overcome, it.

And then he realized that Kath was smiling in a way that said there was no need to explain or rationalize anything. Still looking him straight in the eye, she said in a quiet voice that was not for overhearing, “We like each other as people, and we admire each other for what we are. There isn’t anything to feel hung up about on Chiron. People who feel like that usually make love, if that’s what they want to do.” She paused for a second. “Isn’t that what you’d like to do?”

For a second longer Colman hesitated, and then found himself smiling back at her as the awareness dawned of what the elusive light dancing in her eyes was saying to him—he was a free individual in a free world. And suddenly the barrier crumbled away.

“Yes, it is,” he replied. There was nothing more to say.

“I only live at Port Norday during the week,” Kath said. “I’ve got a place in Franklin as well. It’s not far from here at all.”

“And I am on early duty tomorrow,” Colman said.

He grinned again, and she smiled back impishly, “So why are we still here?” they asked together.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Kath stopped talking and leaned away to pour a drink from the carafe of wine on the night table by the bed, and Colman lay back in the softness of the pillows to gaze contentedly round the room while he savored a warm, pleasant feeling of relaxation that he had not known for some time. It was a cozy, cheerfully feminine room, with lots of coverlets and satiny drapes, fluffy rugs, pastel colors, and homey knickknacks arranged on the shelves and ledges. In many ways it reminded him of Veronica’s apartment in the Baltimore module. On the wall opposite was a photograph of two laughing, roguish-looking boys of about twelve, who despite their years he recognized easily as Casey and Adam, and scattered about were more pictures which he assumed were of the rest of Kath’s family. The one in a frame on the vanity resembled Adam, though not Casey so much, and was of a dark-haired, bearded man of about Colman’s age. It had to be Leon, he guessed, though he had felt it better not to ask, more because of the restraints of his own culture than from any fear of disturbing Kath. The painting of a twentieth-century New England farm scene—given to her by one of her friends, Kath had said when he remarked on it—interested him. Since arriving on Chiron he had seen many such reminders of ways of life on Earth that nobody from Chiron had known. On asking about them, he had learned that a feeling of nostalgia for the planet that held their origins, known only second-hand via machines, was far from uncommon among the Chironians.

Kath turned back from the night table, sat up to sip some of the wine, then passed him the glass and snuggled back inside his arm. “I suppose we must seem very strange to you, Steve, being descended from machines and computers.” She chuckled softly. “I bet there are lots of people on your ship who think we’re really aliens. Do they think we walk like Lurch and talk in metallic, monotone voices?”

Colman grinned and drank from the glass. “Not quite that bad. But some of them do have pretty funny ideas—or did have, anyway. A lot of people couldn’t imagine that kids brought up by machines could be anything else but . . . ‘inhuman,’ I guess you’d call it—cold, that kind of thing.”

“It wasn’t like that at all,” she said. “Although, I suppose, I shouldn’t really say too much since I’ve had nothing to compare it with. But it was”—she shrugged—“warm, friendly . . . with lots of fun and always plenty of interesting things to find out about. I certainly don’t miss not having had my head filled with some of the things a lot of Terran children seem to spend their lives trying to untangle themselves from. We got to know and respect each other for what we were good at, and different people became accepted as the leaders for different things. No one person could be an expert in everything, so the notion of a permanent, absolute ‘boss,’ or whatever you’d call it, never took hold.”

“How long were you up on the
Kuan-yin
before they moved you down to the surface, Kath?”

“I was very young. I’m not sure I can remember without checking the records. Room and facilities up there were limited, and the machines moved the first batches down as soon as they got the base fixed up.”

“The ship’s changed a lot since then though,” Colman remarked. “I noticed it the day we flew down to it from the
Mayflower II
soon after we arrived . . . when Shirley and Ci met Tony Driscoll. The front end must be at least twice as big as it used to be.”

“Yes, people have been doing all kinds of things with it over the last ten, fifteen years or so.”

“What are all the changes around the back end?” Colman asked curiously. “It looks like a whole new drive system.”

“It is. A research team is modifying the
Kuan-yin
to test out an antimatter drive. In fact the project is at quite an advanced stage. They’re doing the same kind of thing back on Earth, aren’t they?”

Colman’s eyebrows arched in surprise. “True, but—wow! I had no idea that anything here was that advanced.” Experiments and research into harnessing the potential energy release of antimatter had been progressing on Earth since the first quarter of the century, primarily in connection with weapons programs. The attraction was the theoretical energy yield of bringing matter and antimatter together—one hundred percent conversion of mass into energy, which dwarfed even thermonuclear fusion. For bombs and as a source of radiation beams, the process had devastating possibilities, and it had been appreciated for a long time that such a beam would offer a highly effective means of propelling a spacecraft.

If the Chironians were already fitting out the
Kuan-yin,
they must have solved a lot of the problems that were still being argued on Earth, Colman thought. The whole planet, he realized as he reflected on it, was a powerhouse of progress, unchecked by any traditions of unreason and with no vested-interest obstructionists to hold it back. If the pattern continued until Chiron became a fully populated world, it would effectively leave Earth back in the Stone Age within a century. “Have you actually flown it anywhere yet?” he asked, turning his head toward Kath. “The
Kuan-yin . . .
has it been anywhere since it arrived in orbit here?”

She nodded. “To both the moons, and we’ve sent missions to all of Alpha’s other planets. But that was quite a while ago now. With the original drive. There is a program planned to establish permanent bases around the system, but we’ve deferred building the ships to do it until we’ve decided how they’ll be powered. That’s why the
Kuan-yin
’s being made into a test-bed. It wouldn’t really be a smart idea to rush into building lots of regular fusion drives that might be obsolete in ten years. There’s plenty to do on Chiron in the meantime, so there’s no big hurry.” She turned her face toward him and rubbed her cheek along his shoulder. “Anyhow, why are we talking about this? You told me I had to stop you from talking shop. Okay, I just did. Quit it.”

Colman grinned and stroked her hair. “You’re right. So what do you want to hear about?”

She wriggled closer and slid an arm across his chest. “Tell me about Earth. I’ve told you how I grew up. What was it like with you?”

Colman smiled ruefully. “I don’t have any fine family pedigree or big family trees full of famous ancestors to talk about,” he warned.

“I’m not interested in anything like that. I just want to hear about someone who lived there and came from there. Where did you come from?”

“A city called Chicago, originally. Heard of it?”

“Sure. It’s on the lakes.”

“That’s right—Michigan. I think I was something of a not-very-welcome accident. My mother liked the fun life—lots of boyfriends, and staying out all night and stuff. I guess I was in the way a lot of the time.”

“Was your father like that too?”

“I never found out who he was. For all I know, nobody else did either.”

“Oh, I see.”

Colman sighed. “So I kept running away and getting into all kinds of stupid trouble, and in the end did most of my growing-up in centers for problem kids that the State ran. Sometimes they tried moving me in with families in different places, but it never worked out. The last ones tried pretty hard. They adopted me legally, and that’s how I got my name. Later we moved to Pennsylvania . . . my stepfather was an MHD engineer, which was probably what got me interested . . . but there was some trouble, and I wound up in the Army.”