Visions of Liberty (29 page)

Duggan shook his head. "Not me." He gave her a squeeze, savoring the touch of her body through the light dress she was wearing. "My future's cut out right here. Everything I want."

"So Zeeb will probably get that promotion you told me about. I hope he'll be pleased."

"Oh, I'm sure he'll fit right back in," Duggan said. Brose had as good as come out and said that he favored Duggan for the subsection supervisor position and would back him. Duggan had seen it as a pretty transparent ploy to recruit support in the political maelstrom that Brose knew they'd be heading back to, and had no doubt that Brose had told Zeeb the same thing, and for the same reason. It felt like a reprieve from a life sentence to know he was out of all that. "In any case," Duggan added, "I wouldn't have gotten the job. The screening application that Brose made me put through was turned down." Brose had been as stunned as Duggan was pleased when the assessment back from Earth read:
Doesn't display the competitiveness and aggressiveness that success in this appointment would require.
It meant that Duggan had done something right.

"I'm surprised," Tawna said, sounding defensive on his behalf. "I'd have thought that even if you decided . . ." She caught the amused twist of his mouth. "Dug, what happened? What did you do?"

"I filled it in the Tharlean way," he told her.

"What way's that?"

"
I
have to tell
you
?" Duggan frowned in mock reproach. "I said I didn't need as much pay as they were offering, and I told them I could do more than they were stipulating. I guess they couldn't hack it." He shrugged. "But Zeeb will do okay. He, Brose, and the System are made for each other."

Tawna pulled close and nuzzled the side of her face against his shoulder. "And you'll do just fine here too," she promised.

For that was the simple principle that underlay the entire Tharlean worldview and way of life:
Give a little more; take a little less
. At least, with those who reciprocated. Anyone who didn't play by the rules wasn't treated by the rules. That was how they curbed excess. But how did a Tharlean
know
when enough was enough? By being a part of the culture they had evolved and absorbing its ways and its values from the time they first learned to look at the world, walk around in it, listen and talk.

Every one of them.

That was why nobody from Earth had had any success finding lawmakers—at least, if what they were looking for was a few making rules to be forcibly imposed on the many. The government had been there all along, everywhere, staring them in the face. For on Tharle,
all
made the law, and all enforced it. Every one of them, therefore, was government.

Now Duggan would learn to become a member of a planetary government too. And that sounded a much better promotion to him than anything the Colonial Affairs Administration was likely to come up with, even if he were to carry on fighting and clawing his way up the ladder for the next hundred years.

Dr. Lloyd Biggle, Jr., Ph.D., (1923–2002)
was a musician, author, and internationally known oral historian. He began writing professionally in 1955, and became a full-time writer with the publication of his novel,
All the Colors of Darkness
, in 1963, a profession that he followed until his death. Both Dr. Biggle's science fiction and mystery stories have received international acclaim. He was celebrated in science fiction circles as the author who introduced aesthetics into a literature known for its scientific and technological complications. He published two dozen books as well as magazine stories and articles beyond count. His most recent novel was
The Chronicide Mission
. He was writing almost to the moment of his death. "I can write them faster than the magazines can publish them," he once said, with the result that even though his writing has been stilled, his publications will continue until his backlog of stories is exhausted.

Robert J. Sawyer
won the Nebula Award for best novel of 1995 for
The Terminal Experiment
; he's also been nominated six times for the Hugo Award. He has twice won Japan's top SF award, the Seiun, and twice won Spain's top SF award, the Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficción. His twelfth novel,
Calculating God
, hit number one on the bestsellers' list published by
Locus: The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field
, and was also a top-ten national mainstream bestseller in Sawyer's native Canada. His latest novel,
Hominids
, a June 2002 hardcover, was the third of Sawyer's novels to be serialized in
Analog
, the world's number-one bestselling SF magazine. Visit Rob's website at sfwriter.com.

Mike Resnick
worked anonymously from 1964 through 1976, selling more than 200 novels, 300 short stories and 2,000 articles, almost all of them under pseudonyms. After a more than ten-year hiatus to pursue a career in dog breeding and exhibiting, he returned to fiction writing. His first novel in this "second career" was
The Soul Eater
. His breakthrough novel was the international bestseller
Santiago
, published by Tor in 1986. Tor has since published eleven more of Mike's novels and the collection
Will the Last Person to Leave the Planet Please Shut Off the Sun
? Mike's most recent novel is
The Return of Santiago
for Tor Books. His work has garnered fans around the world, and has been translated into twenty-two languages. Since 1989, Mike has won four Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, a Seiun-sho, a Prix Tour Eiffel (French), two Prix Ozones (French), 10 Homer Awards, an Alexander Award, a Golden Pagoda Award, a Hayakawa SF Award (Japanese), a Locus Award, an Ignotus Award (Spanish), a Futura Award (Croatian), an El Melocoton Mechanico (Spanish), two Sfinks Awards (Polish), and a Fantastyka Award (Polish). In 1993 he was awarded the Skylark Award for Lifetime Achievement in Science Fiction.

Tobias S. Buckell
is a Caribbean born speculative fiction writer who now lives (through many odd twists of fate and strangely enough to him) in Ohio with his wife Emily. He has published in various magazines and anthologies. He is a Clarion graduate, Writers of the Future winner, and Campbell Award for Best New SF Writer Finalist. His work has received Honorable Mentions in the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. His first novel, Crystal Rain, will be out from Tor Books in July of 2005. You can visit www.TobiasBuckell.com for more information.

Brad Linaweaver
has worked frequently in the alternate history subgenre, producing stories such as "Destination: Indies," an alternate telling of Christopher Columbus's journey across the Atlantic, and "Unmerited Favor" which takes a more militant approach to the story of Jesus Christ's life. He is also the author of the books
Moon of Ice
,
Clownface
,
The Land Beyond Summer
, and
Sliders: The Novel
; and was a co-editor of
Free Space
, a collection of original libertarian SF short stories. Winner of the Prometheus Award in 1989, he lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Michael A. Stackpole
is the author of eight
New York Times
bestselling
Star Wars
novels. He's the author of thirty-seven novels, including
Fortress Draconis
, the second novel in the
DragonCrown War Cycle
of fantasy novels. "According to Their Need" is the fifth story set in his
Purgatory Station
universe.

New Zealand has held a special place in
Jane Lindskold
's heart since she visited there some years ago. The opportunity to celebrate that lush green land along with its interesting and varied people gave her the setting of this story. Currently, Lindskold resides in New Mexico, a place unlike New Zealand in every way except in its variety. She is the author of a dozen or so novels, including The Firekeeper's saga, beginning with
Through Wolf's Eyes
and
The Buried Pyramid
, along with fifty-some short stories. She is at work on another novel.

Jack Williamson
has been writing science fiction since 1928, with more than fifty novels published. The most recent is
Terraforming Earth
. One section of it, "The Ultimate Earth," received the 2000 Hugo Award as the best novella. He lives in New Mexico, where he arrived with his parents and siblings in a covered wagon when he was seven years old. He is still writing, as well as teaching occasional courses at Eastern New Mexico University, his hometown school. His new novel,
The Stonehenge Gate
, will be published in the spring of 2005.

Mark Tier
is an Australian who lives in Hong Kong partly because, as he puts it, "paying taxes is against my religion." A long-time SF fan and hard-core libertarian, he was a co-founder of the Australian equivalent of the Libertarian Party. He published and edited the investment newsletter
World Money Analyst
from 1974 to 1991.

James P. Hogan
began writing science fiction as a hobby in the mid 1970s, and his works have been well received within the professional scientific community as well as among regular science fiction readers. In 1979 he left DEC to become a full-time writer, and in 1988 moved to the Republic of Ireland. Currently he maintains a residence in Pensacola, Florida, and spends part of each year in the United States. To date, he has published twenty-one novels, including the libertarian classic
Voyage From Yesteryear
, a nonfiction work on artificial intelligence, and
two mixed collections of short fiction, nonfiction, and biographical anecdotes entitled
Minds, Machines & Evolution
and
Rockets, Redheads & Revolution
. A new nonfiction work,
Kicking the Sacred Cow
, will be released by Baen Books in June 2004. He has also published some articles and short fiction. Further details of Hogan and his work are available from his web site at www.jamesphogan.com.