Visions of Liberty (20 page)

"Kiff!" she whispered. "I've always been afraid they'd come after you. Can't we help?"

I stood there an endless time trembling in her arms, too sick to speak. Breathing at last, I muttered that I was sorry, terribly sorry. I kissed her. Sobbing, she clung to me.

"I never meant—never meant to hurt you." The words stuck in my throat. "But I'm a spy. In the service of Cleon III and the Terran Republic."

She gripped my arms and stared at me, her wide eyes strange with shock. Blind with my own sudden tears I pulled out of her grasp, blundered on toward the admiral, and stopped to give him a stiff salute. Smiling, he returned the salute and came on to shake my hand. The little crowd had fallen silent, waiting till he turned and spoke.

"I am Terran Space Admiral Acton Gilliyar."

He paused for a moment before he went on, his mellow eloquence echoing off the long stone wall. He came in peace, to bring President Cleon Stawhawke's most cordial greetings and a heartfelt welcome into the Republic. I hardly heard the booming words. I was watching Laurel.

Her face white and stiff at first, she flushed pink. Her small fists clenched. Glaring at me with a look that changed from shock to scornful contempt, she spat on the ground.

"The President regrets your long neglect," his polished voice rolled on. "I understand that you are trying to survive here in a stare of lawless anarchy. I have come to bring you the law and order of Terran civilization. President Starhawke has appointed me the first governor of the planet Lucifer."

Muttering, people stared at one another and back at him.

"Sir!" Laurel's voice rang loud, heated perhaps by her anger at me. "We want none of your Republic." She looked around at those beside her, saw them nodding with agreement. "We need none of you!"

"Madam." He raised his voice, his tone grown harder. "With all due respect, I must inform you that your planet has belonged to the Terran Republic since the discoverers landed here and raised our flag."

"Non—nonsense, sir!" She caught her breath and lifted her quivering voice. "You threw us out of your wicked empire, and left us here to die. We've earned our freedom and we'll die to keep it."

"You may die. You'll never keep it."

"We'll never give it up."

"I must warn you, madam, that your words are a reckless incitement to treason." His voice slow and grimly solemn, he looked around at the little crowd and fixed his eyes on her. "If you want to die, the choice is yours. In modern times, suspected traitors are no longer merely exiled. The penalty now is death."

I heard a stifled outcry from her mother, a furious oath from her father. Friends gathered around them in a muttering group. The admiral turned to lift his hand at nose of the lander. The martial music rose again. He ordered his rifle squad back to the ramp. Laurel darted past them to the flag, pulled the staff out of the ground, and hurled it against the side of the lander. She stood staring at him and then at me, breathing hard.

"We witnessed that outrageous act of open treason!" he shouted at her. "What is your name?"

"Laurel Greenlaw." She tossed her head. "What is yours?"

"Acton Gilliyar." He grinned at her bleakly. "We'll be meeting again."

He beckoned to me. I followed him and the riflemen aboard. A warning siren screeched. Looking down from the control turret, I saw people scattering. Laurel stood closer, shaking here fist, dwindling to a defiant doll as we lifted.

The admiral landed us at half a dozen towns up and down the Avalon, at the ski lodge below the volcano, the oasis down on the desert, at a lumber camp on the headwaters of the Styx. At each stop he went off with his rifle squad to read his proclamations. A few people hooted. Nobody cheered.

We climbed back to the geosynchronous point. He broadcast an ultimatum demanding unconditional submission. The colonists must accept the rule of the democratic Terran Republic, swear allegiance to President Cleon III, welcome Terran landing forces, pay Terran taxes, obey orders from him as their newly appointed governor. Unless he received a signal of surrender within three days, he would be forced, however unwillingly, to take whatever measures the situation might require.

"There will be no signal," I warned him. "There is no government, nobody with authority to surrender."

"I expected opposition from the like of that Greenlaw woman." He shook his head, his jaw set hard. "These people were condemned and sent here as outlaw enemies of the state. They are enemies and outlaws still. If they want a lesson in Terran power, I'll give them a lesson."

Waiting three days in orbit, he received no signal of surrender. His lesson was a volley of guided missiles.

"I'm remaining on the flagship," he told me. "It will be my official residence. Captain Crendock is going down as my executive secretary with orders to secure the planet and establish administrative control."

He was startled when I wanted to go back to Benspost.

"Why?" He gave me a hard look. "You won't find friends there."

Uncomfortably, I tried to explain my own torn feelings.

"I'm still loyal," I told him, "bound by my duty to the Republic. But I did make friends there. People were generous to me. I was fascinated with their history. I want to write it for the whole Republic."

"Forget your pet traitors," he advised me. "That Greenlaw woman is no friend now."

"Yet she is making history. History worth recording."

"Better get back to Terra while you can." He gave me a stiff half-smile. "You were warned to expect no public recognition, but we will surely find something for you."

He called me a fool when I shook my head.

I had to go back to find Laurel, to try to explain what I had done, to beg her to understand. I didn't tell him that, but in the end, he replaced my lost radio and holo camera and let me go back down to Benspost with Crendock. A missile had struck there, and little remained of old Ben Greenlaw's trading post.

Yet life went on. I saw camels loaded with lumber and tile to repair shattered buildings. Bart was back again from some Terran planet with another illicit cargo. We found his skipcraft undamaged, standing on the pad near the ashes and fallen walls.

"Leave him alone," Gilliyar had ordered. "I hope to legalize the trade and impose excise taxes.

Camels were tethered around his ship, the drivers loading them with goods he had brought. His crew was loading it again with exports: nuts and dried fruit from the desert lowlands, rare hardwoods and balls of raw rubber from the rain forest.

His parents had set up a new barter center in a tent on a vacant lot. His mother burst into tears when she saw me, and ran back into the tent. His father sat in his wheelchair behind a rough table, surrounded with whatever his clerks had been able to salvage. I thought he seemed sick, the splotches of his old jungle fever infection livid and swollen.

He looked up at me with an enigmatic expression.

"Well, sir?" He shook his head. "I never expected to see you again."

"I'm a historian," I said. "I came back to write the history of the colony. And I want to see your daughter."

"You've turned our history to tragedy." He spoke with a harsh finality. "You'll never see Laurel."

He turned to deal with a farmer who had come with a basket of eggs to trade. I saw Bart himself, stooping in the ashes of the store, filling a bag with scraps of fused and blackened metal. He met me with a quizzical grin and handed me what was left of my gun, the magazine shattered when the ammunition exploded.

"I think this was yours."

I asked about Laurel.

"Gone." The grin vanished. "I don't know where." His gaze grew sharper. "If your Terran friends are looking for her . . ."

He shrugged and stooped again into the ashes.

A few days later he came up to me while I was out with the camera to shoot a group of workers with spades and wheelbarrows, refilling a crater that one of Gilliyar's missiles had left in the road.

"Let's talk." He offered his hand. "I've heard about your history. I want our Terran friends to know our story. Will you let me take you back to tell it?"

I thanked him.

"But the history isn't finished. And I want to stay till I can see your sister."

His face grew bleak. "You'll be here forever."

Before he took off, I gave him a draft of my unfinished narrative, copies of my holos of the ruins, and a shot of Crendock strutting off a lander to repeat Gilliyar's ultimatum. I kept digging into the records I could find, asking people for their recollections, shooting the damage from the bombardment and the efforts at reconstruction.

And longing all the time for a glimpse of Laurel.

Crendock set up his headquarters on a hilltop above the ruins. His landers were busy for a time, bringing down temporary buildings and equipment. He tried to employ civilian labor, but nobody wanted his money or wanted him there. The few people left in the town were clearing the streets, rebuilding their homes, replanting gardens. Some of them let me join the labor teams, gave me food and shelter in return. I asked and asked again for news of Laurel, receiving blank or hostile stares.

Crendock's officers were just as determined to find her, but no more successful.

"It's frustrating," he told me one night when he had asked me to his quarters for a Terran dinner. "There's nobody with authority, no way to get control. Gilliyar says this Laurel Greenlaw has to be our first target. She openly defied him. He wants her caught and tried for treason."

He asked for anything I knew. That was nothing at all.

"My investigators have been looking everywhere. Broiling themselves down in the desert. Freezing on the slopes of that volcano. Not a clue. I hear that she was once employed down in the jungle. She may have returned. Nowhere we can follow, but we're posting a price on her head."

With no better lead, I found Marco Finn, the top driver of a camel train returning to the lumber mills, and begged him for a ride down to the jungle.

"Don't go." He turned to spit green fluid from the angel cud that bulged his bearded cheek. "You ain't fit for it."

He was a raw-boned, short-spoken man, scarred from hell fever, his wild beard stained bright green from the angel wood bark he chewed. He frowned and squinted at me. I tried to explain that I wanted to see the jungle, get the history of the lumbermen, the silvernut and rubber plantations, the barges on the Styx.

"Who will give a damn?" He shrugged and spat again. "Nothing but poison vines and devil bugs and rain that never stops. We call it hell country. No place for a Terran."

"But you're going back."

"We hell rats ain't quite human." He gave me a ferocious scowl. "We toughen up and take it like it is. Sometimes it kills us, but people need the timber and the rubber and the silvernuts. And we get double barter points. If I'm alive ten years from now I can use my last timber load to build a cabin up in sky country. Grow a garden. Keep chickens and a cow. What you ought to do."

Yet he let me climb to the hard seat beside him.

The east rim of the upland is higher and steeper than the west. None of the convicts dropped into the jungle ever reached the highlands until rescue teams from the top found and cleared the trail. The ride down took us three long days.

Finn and I sat together every day on the pitching seat. We shared meals when we squatted around the cook fires, shared space in his little tent when we camped. He knew who I was. He must have wondered about Terra and my life there, wondered how I became a spy, but he never inquired.

Listening for Laurel's name, I never spoke of her.

The first day we wound through sunless gorges that old glaciers had cut, and came out into blinding sun on ledges so narrow I hardly dared look down at the endless ocean of glaring monsoon clouds, a mile and more beneath us. The second day we were still in them, in a fog so dense I could hardly see the beast ahead. The third day we came out of the clouds, down into ceaseless rain and suffocating heat. Still far below, the jungle was a featureless dark-green sea. The fourth day we were in its dismal twilight, breathing the reeks of wet decay and the rank musks of strange life.

Still the road ran on. Sometimes it was made of logs, laid side by side. Sometimes it was flat rocks, laid to crown a thin clay dike. More often it was only a ditch of thick red mud, splashed and churned by the camel's wide-splayed feet. Undergrowth walled it and arched overhead, most of it a tangle of thick-leafed fungoid stuff the driver had no name for when I asked. The rain never stopped.

The days were endless nightmares. Stinging insects hummed around us. My face and arms itched and burned. My bones ached. My appetite was gone. My strength drained away till I had to tie myself into the bucking seat. I tried to chew the angel bark Finn shared when he saw I had the fever, but the bitter stuff burned my mouth and knotted my stomach and seemed to do no good.

Sweating and gasping for breath though the endless nights, I dreamed and dreamed again that I had found Laurel. Sometimes we had been swimming together in that little lake at the desert oasis, sometimes we were skiing on the old volcano, sometimes we had been back in bed together. She was always beautiful. Longing for her to love me, I tried to tell her how sorry I was. The words always stuck in my burning throat and she coldly turned away.

I lost the count of days. I don't know when we reached the lumber mills or how I got to Hell. That was the name of a settlement on the swampy shore of the Styx. Dimly, I remember the patter of the endless rain on the tent, the coughs and stinks of the men on the cots around me, the days when all I wanted was death. I remember dreams of Laurel, bathing my body in angel seed tea when my swollen throat wouldn't swallow.

A morning came when my head seemed clear. The tent was silent, except for the murmur of the rain. The other cots were empty. The epidemic was over. Feeling well again, I lay waiting until Laurel came in. She was real, alive and smiling, lovely in a white uniform somehow spotless in spite of the mud. She helped me sit up and gave me a mug of the angel seed tea. Magically, its burning bitterness was gone. It had almost the taste of a good dry wine.