The Stone Dogs (23 page)

My, aren't we noisy today
, Stoddard thought.

The marching youth groups were past, the cheerleaders and bands, the cowboys and vaqueros and Hibernians… Troops now.

Squat tanks with their long cannon- swiveling in hydraulic pods above the decks, APCs, huge eighteen-wheeler tractors drawing suborb missiles on mobile launchers.

It's a good thing the infantry aren't marching,
he thought dryly.
Messy, after all those horses.

He took a sip from the coffee cup in his hands, thankful for the warmth. Thankful that he was inside, and not out there in the raw weather; it was damp and cold, the sky stark blue with streamers of cloud. An aircar went slowly by outside the window, down the length of the procession: a light open-topped model with ABS markings, and six ducted-fan propellers in swivel mounts spaced around the flattish oval body.

The drone of its engines hummed through the air between them, and he could see the blue tinge to the faces of the televid crew in the little four-seater.

"Better you than me, friends," he said.

"Sir?" Marya's voice, cool and neutral.
In a juster world,
maybe she would be my successor
, Stoddard thought.
She's…

not harder than Fred. Cooler, less of a closet romantic. This line
of work will do that for a woman. But then, in a juster world
she wouldn't have had the extra toughening.

Stoddard grinned at his proteges. "Just feeling each and every one of my sixty-eight years, Fred, Marya," he said. "And glad I'm not out there courting arthritis." The use of the first name had become a signal between them to drop formality.

They were all in the wolf-gray uniforms of the Alliance military today: high green collars and epaulets and the American eagle on their cuffs. Frederick Lefarge had a captain's bars, his sister Marya a lieutenant's. The older man a general's oak-leaf clusters, although his position here made his authority nearly equal to that of a member of the Alliance Combined Staff.

"Not missing the distinguished company?" Frederick had a little more accent than his sister's, Academy mid-American, with a slight trace of East Coast in the vowels; Stoddard noted absently that a linguist would immediately place him somewhere between New York and Baltimore. "The Pope's there."

"And all sixty-two State governors," Stoddard said, turning back to his desk.

It was severely plain, like the rest of the office. Plain dark wood, in-out baskets marked "hate" and "love" a telephone, a scriber, the screen and keyboard of a retriever terminal. There was a table and settees for guests, bookshelves that held a mixture of mementos, leather-bound volumes and color-coded ring-binders. Two paintings on the walls, New Hampshire landscapes by Fairish, the chilly perfection of his late period.

And two photographs on the desk: one of a plain middle-aged woman and three children standing beside a weathered saltbox home, the other of a young man in a flight suit. That was bordered in black.

Stoddard gave it a glance as he sank into the swivel chair and filled his pipe. "And the College of Cardinals," he continued between puffs. "The Chief Rabbi, Her Honor the Mayor, half the Alliance Grand Council, the Combined Chiefs, His Majesty Georgie the Fifth, the Prime Minister of Australasia… bit of a dog's breakfast. Not to mention the speeches."

"Bilingual, yet," the other man said, sitting by the table and reaching for a manila folder. "It would make more sense to have them in French or Yiddish, in this town. Or deep Yorkshire."

Stoddard nodded, blowing a cloud of aromatic blue smoke. A fifth of the United States was Spanish-speaking, but that was mostly in the states carved out of old Mexico. New York had always been a polyglot city; the great magnet during the immigrant waves of the 1890s and 1920s, then the primary center for the millions of European refugees just after the War, the lucky ones who made it out before the Draka had the coasts of Western Europe under firm control. The English were the latest wave all along the Atlantic coast; the British Isles were the Alliance's easternmost outpost, and not a very comfortable place to live, these days. It was a little embarrassing, for an old-stock Yankee. He could remember when a British surname was an elite rarity here; now every second waiter, hairdresser, and ditchdigger was a new-landed Anglo-Saxon. Not to mention prostitutes, pimps, street-thugs, and the gangs who were pushing the Mexicans and Sicilians out of organized crime…

"Well, India's patched up for the moment," Frederick Lefarge said, riffling the folder. "That little scandal about Rashidi and the hamburger killed the
Hindi Raj
party deader than Gandhi."

He laughed sourly. "Why didn't he smuggle something safe, like heroin? For a Hindi nationalist, running a clandestine beef trade…"

Marya frowned. "Well, I was mostly working with the
Indra
Samla
people," she said. "They were ready enough to believe the bad about Rashidi. Too many Moslems in his background, besides him being their main rival. Still and all, a lot of them had trouble believing he could make a blunder that big."

"Double-blind," Stoddard said. "He didn't. We framed him."

The captain sat bolt upright. "Jesus! If
that
ever gets out—"

Stoddard took another draw on his pipe. "You were the test, Fred. You took a first-rate team there for the investigation; if you couldn't find our sticky fingermarks, who could?"

The younger man shook his head and pursed his lips slightly.

"I don't… It's not what we're supposed to do."

"What's the alternative?"

"He would have won the election. And left the Alliance." A long pause. "How could he be so… stupid's an inadequate word.

Are the Snakes bribing him?"

The general gestured with the stem of his pipe. "Fred, Marya, when you've been in harness as long as I have, you'll learn two things: first, human beings don't have to be stupid to act stupidly, they just need to feel strongly about something. Second, conscious evil is actually quite rare, even rarer than deliberate hypocrisy."

He cradled the bowl of his pipe between the heels of his hands. "Rashidi is no fool, he's just convinced that American influences are sapping and undermining Hindu culture." A shrug. "He's right, too."

"Did he think the Snakes would be better?"

Stoddard smiled sourly. "Actually, there are some similarities between their system and the old Indian caste setup, and the doctrine of karma is the most diabolically effective mechanism for keeping the lower classes in order ever invented… No, the Hindi Raj people certainly didn't want a Draka conquest—they weren't insane. They thought a neutral India could stand off the Domination by itself—with unacknowledged help from us—and successfully industrialize behind tariff barriers without having to accept the, hmmm,
culture of individualist rationalism,
isn't that the way Rashidi used to put it?"

"
That's
insane."

"No, just wishful thinking. Actually, there are only two possible alternatives for human beings on this planet now. Us and the Domination. One is going to utterly destroy the other and incorporate everything else. It's one of the truths everybody knows and nobody says. The nationalists in India simply refuse to believe it, because believing that would mean that they
cannot
have what they most want."

"Stupidity."

Marya had leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes; now she opened one and chuckled. "Brother, while you were out playing astronaut,"—he winced slightly—"I've been doing more straight political work. Your training's made you overestimate the role of rationality." A wry grin. "Also, you've never had an observer's chance to see how stupid most men are with their pants down."

Stoddard nodded. "Not stupidity, humanity. Which means this is a battle won, not a war. The discontents continue, and they will find another vehicle."

Lefarge shook his head. "Hindi Raj is a dozen quarreling fragments; the Progressives will win the next three elections without trouble." A wolfs grin. "And some of those fragments were being paid off by the Snakes. We can use that if they start building momentum again. So much for deliberate evil."

"A rather petty evil. I've got the reports, and none of them were selling anything vital." He leaned back and blew a smoke ring at the ceiling. "Grafters like that are the political equivalent of tax frauds. They cheat, relying on the fact that most people don't, so they keep their money and get the benefit of the services, too… The Draka lose there by their own racial prejudices. They may not care about the color of the people they enslave, but they do when it comes to granting Citizen status.

Best bribe they have. That's the way they got Ekstein."

"The filthy little traitor," Frederick Lefarge said, flushing with anger. "Even so… I've never understood how he could do it. Why would anyone want to become a Snake?"

"Captain, now you're allowing prejudice to blind you." A gentle laugh. "If you don't mind me asking, when did you lose your virginity, Fred?"

He blinked in surprise, then smiled reminiscently. "Junior High. I was fifteen."

"Ekstein never did."

"I'm not surprised."

Stoddard nodded. "He was an obnoxious, ugly, sweaty little toad with all the inherent appeal of a skunk and an overcompensated inferiority complex as big as all outdoors.

Smelled like a skunk at times, too. No friends, and no female in her right mind would have touched him without being paid, which he was too terrified to do. Also one of the most unhappy and lonely young men I've ever met. It's the reason he went into electronics design; that was something he could do without face-to-face contact and get a certain degree of respect for. It was our fault the Draka were able to contact him; they gave him a palace in France and a harem. Not your idea of paradise or mine, but Ekstein's happy."

Marya made a
tsk
sound. "We should have fixed him up. I would have, if I'd been his case officer… even have volunteered myself, which shows you my devotion to duty." She raised an eyebrow at her sibling's discomfort. "Tool of the trade, Captain Brother Sir… Who did we have working on him?"

"A Sector Chief,
ex
-Sector Chief now, domestic surveillance.

Very sincere fellow. Baptist." They all winced. "It was slick, I must admit. Off to England for a design conference, and the next thing we know his bed hasn't been slept in."

"I suppose it's too much to hope he stopped producing over there in the Snake-farm," Fred muttered.

"Ayuh. Tapered off a mite at first, then better than ever. The Maxwell and Faraday Combines are rushing his latest microwafer designs into production on a maximum-priority basis, or so our sources tell us."

"Damn!" The younger man shook his head again. "It was our job to prevent it… and I always hate to see them get their hands on our technical secrets. Technology's our big advantage over them, after all."

"Particularly the sapphire-silicon and gallium arsenide stuff they're doing up on the orbital platforms," Marya put in. "And Ekstein was in that up to the zits on his earlobes."

Stoddard shrugged. "We're ahead in some respects. Those tanks out there,"—he pointed with the stem of his pipe towards the window—"
we
copied from Draka designs. Same with our small-arms. They're ahead in mining, ferrous metals, some machining, basic transport equipment. About equal in aeronautic power systems. Way ahead in biotechnology. We've got a commanding lead in agricultural machinery, synthetics, electronics, particularly circuit-wafers." He smiled sourly. "And in household appliances."

Fred flushed, opened his mouth to speak and paused, after a glance at his sister's relaxed form. "Wait a minute, general. I know your methods; you're trying to get me to think through something by pretending to defend the Snakes."

"Draka. That's one part of the lesson, son: calling them

'Snakes' is a way of denying that they're human beings. Which leads to underestimating them, which is fatal."

"They don't
act
like human beings."

"They don't act like
us
." Stoddard dug at the bowl of his pipe with a wire. Meditatively, he continued: "Ayuh. It's a handicap for you in the younger generations, growing up in so uniform a world." He shook his head. "Just the fact that you can go anywhere on the globe and get by in English makes it a different planet from the one I grew up on. It's made us, hmmra, not less tolerant, but less used to the concept of difference. One of the reasons I sent you to India was to meet people who were genuinely
alien
in the way they thought and believed, seeing as the rest of Free Asia's gotten so Westernized…."

Fred ran a hand over his crewcut. "It did that, general. Do you know, some of those Muslim types wanted to secede from the Alliance so they could declare a
jihad
against the Sna… against the Domination? Crazy."

"Just different; when you really believe that dying in battle gains you instant admission to Paradise, it gives you a different perspective. Also, they're quite right that nobody in the Western countries gave a… rat's ass—isn't that the younger generation's expression?—about them until the Draka attacked Europe. As long as it was niggers and wogs and chinks and ragheads going under the Yoke…"

The other man winced. "Ancient history, though try convincing those stupid bastards of that."

"Fred, Fred… historical amnesia is an American weakness.

Most people have a longer collective memory. The Draka certainly do."

"Quite true," Marya put in, without opening her eyes. I spent more time with Maman and the refugees, Fred, while you were out proving how assimilated you were. You wouldn't believe some of the things they raked up and threw at each other; stuff nobody but history professors knows here."

"Don't Draka have any weaknesses?"

Angry, but controlling it well, even tired at he is,
Stoddard decided. Good.

"Certainly," he said. "They don't understand us, not even as well as we—some of us—understand them." He laid the pipe down and leaned forward, laying his hands on the blotter. "They could have lulled us to sleep so easily, so easily… Fred, the great American public doesn't
like
being confronted with evil, or with a protracted struggle. We're not a people who believe in tragedy; history's been too good to us. Evil is something we conquer in a crusade, and then everybody goes home a hero."