War World X: Takeover (59 page)
Ellie followed her new employer out the door. “…gave away a fortune, and you ought to see the stuff she’s still got hidden in that green thing she carries.…”
Silence. The tiny room seemed suddenly cold, echoing. Wyn was relieved when the guard escorted her back to the holding pen. Quickly, she stuffed her new lucky charm into the green bag. At some point, she might be able to sell or trade it. And there was no sense in being a walking target.
There were no windows in the pen. It smelled like every other pen in which Wyn had been deposited with a grunted “wait here.” It shouldn’t, Wyn thought. This was an alien world; somehow, she had expected it would look and feel different. She wanted out, to fight for whatever future Haven might offer her; she wouldn’t get that future sitting here.
“Ms. Baker?” Not a guard this time, but a man dressed almost drably, in what Wyn was suddenly sure was “solid citizen” clothing. Once again, she trotted down the hall to the interview cubicles.
“Ms. Baker, I am Richard DeSilva. He waited for her to acknowledge his family name and to take the hand that he—a vast concession—held out to her.
“How do you do?”
“I assume that your trip here was rather trying.”
Wyn inclined her head and nodded again when DeSilva waved her to a seat. A DeSilva of Kennicott here on Haven? Must be from a minor branch of the family. Not old enough to be a failure, shipped out to the frontier; not young enough to be an heir, proving himself. Probably just old enough to be desperate to make one last push to better himself here, if not lift himself off-world.
“The Consul General alerted me when your file crossed his desk. Yours was marked for two reasons: politics and high intellect.”
“The charges against me were false,” Wyn said levelly “All of them except terminal folly.”
And you can’t file an appeal back on Earth for that.
“Most unwise to launch a frontal attack against entrenched authority.” He steepled his fingers. Recognizing the tone of Official Pronouncement from many dinner parties, Wyn nodded: Y
ou expert; me, unworldly professor. So tell me, Mr. DeSilva, have you bought my contract? And what do you need me to do?
“I would not do it again,” she said.
“So you have learned from the experience?”
“A very great deal, sir,” she said. She had learned to study those in power, to figure out their weaknesses and survive by playing upon them. She had been a trusting fool, and then she had been helpless. She would not willingly be helpless again.
“It is your knowledge of Earth that I could find useful.…”
“My knowledge of Earth?” Wyn allowed herself to smile. “Mr. DeSilva, I left Earth more than a year ago on what I fully expected to be a one-way trip. And I think neither of our families would say I knew much about the real world when I lived on it.”
“Still,” he said. “Your family’s contacts. Your education, the way you speak.”
She glanced at his hands. He wore a wedding band. That told her:
outpost mentality.
“Do you have children, Mr. DeSilva? School-aged children perhaps? And the local schools—are they adequate to those children’s needs?”
Years of faculty/parent conferences and student advising made him easy to read. Shipped out from Earth or maybe born here: an early marriage to a local woman unable to keep pace with his ambition or supply their children with whatever polish he thought they ought to have.
He’d bought her contract for politics. But teaching them could be her insurance policy once he’d mined out her few Earth names and networks.
His face lit. “I have taken up your contract.”
Wyn inclined her head.
“Please think of it merely as an employment contract. My children, of course: and we could use an executive assistant, discreet, cultivated.”
In short, a major domo, their resident status symbol from Earth.
You won’t get a better offer
, she heard Ellie’s voice.
No doubt, he would pump her for details of Earth politics, out-of-date as they were. No doubt, he would mine what connections he thought she had about as thoroughly as Kennicott went into the hills by Hell’s-A- Comin. And in return?
Maybe, just maybe, I can strike back.
The idea did not provide the angry pleasure it once had. She had learned something, after all. If DeSilva was a power here and relied on her, she too would have power of a sort, even a chance to shape a place that was not already hopelessly corrupt.
Even her tie to Ellie and Carmichael at the mines might be worth something. Exiles made what choices they had to: anything to cease being “the weak” Anything they could stomach. Ellie’s and Carmichael’s work might be cleaner than the game she was offered.
She thought she could manage. Life on board a BuReloc ship toughened her to the point where she thought that maybe, just maybe, her ancestors—who had
not
been pampered aristocrats—might not find her a weakling. She was well up to this game, she thought. In fact, even if DeSilva could produce passage back to Earth, she thought she would spurn it in favor of the promise she saw for herself on Haven. She would not always be “the weak,” fated to suffer what she must.
It was not often a person got a second chance. Hers sat across from her, folding up the contract of her indenture and tucking it into his jacket.
DeSilva rose, and she rose with him. “We would be obliged if you would begin at once. Tonight, we have an important dinner.… You will, of course, join us.” He looked pained. “There is the matter of suitable clothing….”
Hadn’t Dan Carmichael said the same thing to Ellie? No, Wyn didn’t think she’d stop speaking to Ellie.
“When I earn it,” Wyn said. She had a sudden crazed vision of stripping open the seams of her faithful green bag, extricating the pearls she had sewed within it, and wearing them with the coverall that was the convict’s badge.
He flinched. “Consider it a condition of employment. You must appear…presentable. One of the Hamiltons will be there.”
Well, thank you, sir! She was a Baker; of course, she was presentable. Then she thought about what else his statement might mean. She intended to teach. But there was always that other way. Marry one’s way up and out.
At her age?
Why not even that? After all, when Great Aunt Phoebe had gotten thrown out of China, she’d come back to Boston and she’d married (
which branch of the family was it?
).… But DeSilva was waiting for her reply. Wyn copied Ellie’s, even to the downcast look and the breath held long enough to let her blush.
Decent clothes, fabrics that didn’t chafe. And chances to stop being “the weak.” She could hope. It was dignified to hope.
Count no man happy until you have seen the hour of his death.
She recalled the old caution from Herodotus.
But don’t write him off till then either. Or her.
DeSilva escorted her through the Processing Center and onto the launch bound for Castell City. A light snow was falling, and the fresh air filled her with new hope as she gazed at the huge, feline primary reflected in the water. When the launch docked, DeSilva made half the dockyard stare by handing her, dressed as she was in convict’s gray, down from the boat. She nodded thanks, then followed him out into her future.
“And the town being now strongly besieged, there being also within some that practiced to have it given up, they yielded themselves to the discretion of the Athenians, who slew all the men of military age, made slaves of the women and children, and inhabited the place with a colony sent thither afterwards of five hundred men on their own.” (Thucydides,
The Peloponnesian War
, translated by Thomas Hobbes, University of Chicago Press, Book 6, page 372)
Bureaucracy
Luna, Co-Dominium Offices: 2073 A.D.
A
fter twenty minutes of preamble, Maldonado, the Minister for Sports, was framing his closing argument as any good bureaucrat would: In the form of an opening statement.
“The problem, Mister Chairman, is that the whole justification for holding the games at all is at risk of being invalidated.”
Chairman Vladimir Serafimov of the CoDominium High Council had been listening to his guests for nearly twenty minutes and his boredom threshold was, by his own estimates, about three sentences away and closing fast.
“I disagree,” came the rebuttal from Voorhees, representative from the Colonial Athletics Committee and appointed to serve as an advocate of his colony world of Sauron and its participation in the CoDominium Olympic Games. “If one colony fields superior athletes, it should stimulate the other worlds to increase their efforts on behalf of their own sons and daughters to rise to the challenge.”
Voorhees turned to Serafimov and addressed him directly. “It is neither Sauron’s fault, nor its responsibility, to accommodate the other colonies’ lack of commitment for an event to which Sauron’s young people dedicate themselves for years beforehand.”
“Mister Chairman,” Maldonado said, “in the decades since the CoDominium nationalized the Olympics, they have steadily regained their stature and dignity as contests of amateur athletics held in a spirit of comradely competition.”
“Sauron’s athletes
are
amateurs,” Voorhees interjected in an icy tone, “They receive no state funding or support whatsoever, and the CoDominium Olympic Organizing Committee verifies this on a yearly basis. A rather insulting process, in fact, which, I hasten to add, no other colony is required to undergo.”
Maldonado clenched his teeth. “By the very nature of Sauron’s militaristic governmental structure,” he began, but never finished.
Serafimov raised his hand, a gesture he rarely used. Anyone who had ever dealt with him in the political arena soon came to regret seeing it. “That is quite enough from both of you.” He leaned forward, interlaced his fingers and held the silence for a moment, regarding both men carefully.
“This has gone from a tedious debate to a rather ominous allegory about nationalism. I would remind you both that when the Olympics were confined to this world, my own country often received the same criticism being leveled at the Sauron System. That’s one of the very good reasons the Olympics are not held between nations any more, but between colony worlds, each of them far more varied in their cultural composition than any one nation of Earth ever was.
“Now,” he sat back and looked at his desk clock, “I require that you, Minister Maldonado, come to the point and make your proposal. Representative Voorhees, do not interrupt.” He nodded to Maldonado. “Proceed.”
Maldonado sighed. “I wish to bring a proposal before the CoDominium Olympic Organizing Committee that Sauron be banned from future competition in the CoDominium Olympics.”
Voorhees opened his mouth, but Serafimov stayed his words with the barest lift of a palm in his direction.
“On what grounds, Minister Maldonado?”
Maldonado spread his hands. “On the grounds that in previous Olympics, Sauron athletes have consistently increased their medal winnings at a steady rate, until the last Olympics, when Sauron took medals—gold, silver, or bronze—in
all three hundred and eighty-six events!
In addition, virtually all CoDominium athletic records are now held by Saurons! Given the trend of Sauron dominance of the games up to this point, there is every reason to assume that within forty years, every medal will go to a Sauron!”
Voorhees did interrupt at that. “You refer to our athletes as ‘Saurons’, not as ‘Sauron citizens’, not even as ‘people from Sauron’… aren’t they human anymore, Maldonado?”
“Only Sauron’s government could answer that, Representative Voorhees,” Maldonado’s answer was a condemning hiss, and the silence following it was long and ugly.
“That is a despicable thing to imply, Maldonado,” Voorhees finally declared in a low voice. “Even for you.”
Maldonado shook his head. “It is no secret how I feel about Sauron eugenics policies, and if they are willing to oversee marriages with genetic screening, who can say how far they will take such practices on a larger stage?”
Serafimov decided he had had enough. “Minister Maldonado,” he said, “You may see fascist, racist regimes hiding under every bed, and you, Representative Voorhees, may be excused for your passionate advocacy of your colony world in the face of perceived insults to its character. But I do not have time to provide you two with an audience while you try to drum up support for your silly games.”
Both men stared.
“Yes, you heard me correctly. If either of you had the slightest idea of the problems we face in administering the day-to-day
survival
of the CoDominium and its colony worlds, to say nothing of just keeping the government in operation, you would hang yourselves in shame for having wasted my time on this petty nonsense.
“We are witnessing something like the first period of real stability the CoDominium has ever known, and already it is being threatened by renewed nationalist factions that have forgotten why the CoDominium came about in the first place. That stability is precious, and crucial to the continued peace and the very survival of life on Earth. I will not have it jeopardized by the likes of you two turning a frivolous sports party into yet another divisive exercise in colonial issues to further erode CoDominium authority.”