The Florians Read online

  The first thing she did was to open my palm and dump half a dozen little metal pellets in it.

  “What’s that?” I asked her.

  “The lead they took out of your shoulder,” she said. “I thought you might like it as a souvenir of how close you came to being dead. You can get blood poisoning from that kind of thing, you know.”

  I weighed the fragments in my hand. They came to no more than a couple of grams.

  “They didn’t go very deep,” she added. “Insufficient thrust.”

  “How much did we take out of Jason?” I inquired.

  “About four times as much. A lot just distributed itself about the room. It was a big bullet.”

  “Is Jason alive?”

  “Oh, yes. On his way back to the hospital in Hope Landing. Scarred for life, though. And his hands will never be the same again. He’ll be booked for a sedentary occupation from now on...and he’ll likely run to fat.”

  “And the situation in general?”

  “Oh,” she said, offhand, “you saved that. All that melodrama didn’t go to waste. Ellerich decided there had to be a better way. The talk is already starting. It’ll go on for months. Very boring. Nathan’s not back yet. He’s got a lot of work in front of him.”

  “So have we all,” I said. “It’s time to start catching rats.”

  “You already caught a big one,” she said. “But using yourself for bait is kind of dangerous. It was an almighty fluke that you didn’t get your head blown off. You took one hell of a gamble shooting that line of neo-Christian cant...and you couldn’t have got any closer to losing it.”

  “True,” I admitted.

  “I already know you’re crazy,” she went on, “but for the sake of my curiosity will you tell me whether you were really prepared to get shot? Did you really believe it, or were you handing him a line that went wrong?”

  “On due reflection,” I answered, “I haven’t a clue. Ask Mariel. She may know whether I meant it or not, and what I meant if I did, but I don’t.”

  “You sure as hell weren’t a neo-Christian before we came here,” she said.

  “Or they’d never have let you on the ship.”

  “As Pietrasante himself said to me,” I replied vaguely, “it isn’t illegal.”

  “Just crazy.”

  “Maybe.”

  “It seems to me,” she commented, “that you have so many beliefs they get more than a little tangled up.”

  “Mixed motives,” I told her, “are the best kind.”

  “I suppose they’ll raise a statue to you,” she said dryly. “Right out there in the farmyard. The man who saved Floria. Twice. You reckon you really pulled it off back there, don’t you? You think that because you were lucky at the crucial point you might have made Floria safe for pacifism forever?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think that at all. The rebellion has started...it’ll go on forever...maybe just a little more slowly. But as Jason said...what choice did I have? Yes or no. The same choice everybody has, every time. And it’s always there, having to be taken again and again and again. I’ll just take my choices, and the world—this world or any world—can take its own. My business is catching rats.”

  “Coming from you,” she said, “that’s almost cynical.”

  “I’m not a cynic,” I said. “I’m a realist. Only cynics think there isn’t any difference.”

  I felt curiously self-satisfied as I rallied myself to think about it all. I suppose it was a sort of exultancy...the sort you get when you find the fifth empty chamber in a game of Russian roulette. I wasn’t really prepared to care anymore about what the hell I’d been playing at. I just wanted to get on to the next move.

  I took hold of her hand, turned it right side up, and gave her back her souvenirs.

  “You keep them,” I said. “You need them more than I do.”

  “Why?”

  “To remind you that even if Goliath was the better man, David was luckier.”

  “If David had stood still and let Goliath knock his head off,” she said, “history might tell a different story.”

  “As to that,” I pointed out, “only time will tell. In the meantime, there are months of hard work in prospect. We have to identify the plasticity factor, and figure out a way to bring it under control—by force or persuasion or whatever damn way we can. It’s not going to be easy.”

  She clenched her fist around the metal pellets, and nodded absently. “You know,” she said, “it’s strange that even here, where things looked to be so good and so healthy, and where the people have built a nation, there’s still something lurking in the background which could destroy the whole thing. When you think back to Kilner’s reports, about the way every single hospitable, Earth-like world had discovered some way to be implacably hostile, you have to wonder whether there’s more than luck involved. Maybe this whole scheme, the whole idea, is too ambitious. Maybe there never can be another human world.”

  It was an uncharacteristically sober thought, for her. It revealed, perhaps for the first time, a depth of uncertainty underlying the glib carelessness.

  But I had the answer.

  “The gods are always against you,” I quoted. “But sometimes you can cheat them.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Brian Stableford was born in Yorkshire in 1948. He taught at the University of Reading for several years, but is now a full-time writer. He has written many science-fiction and fantasy novels, including The Empire of Fear, The Werewolves of London, Year Zero, The Curse of the Coral Bride, The Stones of Camelot, and Prelude to Eternity. Collections of his short stories include a long series of Tales of the Biotech Revolution, and such idiosyncratic items as Sheena and Other Gothic Tales and The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels. He has written numerous nonfiction books, including Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950; Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence; Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia; and The Devil’s Party: A Brief History of Satanic Abuse. He has contributed hundreds of biographical and critical articles to reference books, and has also translated numerous novels from the French language, including books by Paul Féval, Albert Robida, Maurice Renard, and J. H. Rosny the Elder.

  BORGO PRESS FICTION BY BRIAN STABLEFORD

  Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations

  The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales

  Beyond the Colors of Darkness and Other Exotica

  Changelings and Other Metaphoric Tales

  Complications and Other Science Fiction Stories

  The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies

  The Cthulhu Encryption: A Romance of Piracy

  The Cure for Love and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  The Dragon Man: A Novel of the Future

  The Eleventh Hour

  The Fenris Device (Hooded Swan #5)

  Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future

  Les Fleurs du Mal: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  The Florians (Daedalus Mission #1)

  The Gardens of Tantalus and Other Delusions

  The Great Chain of Being and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  Halycon Drift (Hooded Swan #1)

  The Haunted Bookshop and Other Apparitions

  In the Flesh and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels

  Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First-Century Ghost Story

  Luscinia: A Romance of Nightingales and Roses

  The Mad Trist: A Romance of Bibliomania

  The Moment of Truth: A Novel of the Future

  Nature’s Shift: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  An Oasis of Horror: Decadent Tales and Contes Cruels

  The Paradise Game (Hooded Swan #4)

  The Plurality of Worlds: A Sixteenth-Century Space Opera

  Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine

  Promised Land (Hooded Swan #3)

  The Quintessence of Au
gust: A Romance of Possession

  The Return of the Djinn and Other Black Melodramas

  Rhapsody in Black (Hooded Swan #2)

  Salome and Other Decadent Fantasies

  Swan Song (Hooded Swan #6)

  The Tree of Life and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  The Undead: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  Valdemar’s Daughter: A Romance of Mesmerism

  The World Beyond: A Sequel to S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below

  Xeno’s Paradox: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  Zombies Don’t Cry: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution