Wildeblood's Empire Page 7

  The exhilaration wasn’t the primary effect of the drug—it was a secondary effect made possible by the drug’s action. Most of my subjective responses were secondary effects, no doubt connected with the fact that this was my first encounter with it. People who used it regularly, were accustomed and addicted to it, would have different subjective responses. But what was basic to the whole experience, intrinsic, was the feeling of involvement with my physical being, the sensation of wholeness. I was self-confined, but also self-filling. I felt that I had a far clearer notion of myself as opposed to the universe which contained me, surrounded me and invaded me through my senses.

  The grass which bound the dunes, spiky and stiff, crackled beneath my feet. The dunes became looser and more undulating as we got nearer to the sea. Running up an especially steep one because I couldn’t be bothered to go round it I found my feet battling for hopeless purchase in soft sand that gave way and spilled me back in a miniature landslide. I fell forward on to the face of the dune, letting my hands drive into the sand. It felt suddenly still and peaceful, because we were in the lee of the dune and the sharp salt wind was gone.

  I turned over and relaxed, my breath coming in great gasps as my body fought to pay off the oxygen debt incurred by the muscles. I could almost feel the lactic acid cycle whirring away like some dynamic factory process in an automated plant.

  Karen sank to her knees in the drift of loose sand I’d spilled from the dune.

  “The least you could have done,” she panted, “was give me a dose too. Some pep pill!”

  “I offered,” I said. “Never say I didn’t offer. Guaranteed to turn a ten stone intellectual into an Olympic champion....”

  “I, too, could have a body like yours, hey?”

  “Quite so,” I said. “So be careful.”

  I felt waves of relaxation oozing through me while my limbs recovered, returning to metabolic ground state. The languor was delightful...but by no means delirious. I was still thinking clearly, still in control. I noticed that the spool was still going round.

  “It’s okay,” I said to the mike. “Results in. As expected. Confirm hypothesis.”

  “The natives are all on this stuff permanently?” asked Karen.

  “I’d bet on it,” I said. “Maybe even Philip himself, though that’s less obvious. It’s good stuff. Wildeblood must have discovered it, analyzed it, maybe even tried it out in the course of his routine experiments. To anyone else, it might have been interesting, maybe even significant. It has medical possibilities, though its synthesis from raw materials available on Earth would probably be incredibly expensive. If, in the far, far future there’s ever such a thing as interstellar trade, this stuff is worth money. But to Wildeblood, the medical possibilities weren’t even in the race. He saw others. And now we have a colony of addicts.”

  “How addictive is it?” she asked.

  “Fearsomely,” I told her. “Withdrawal would be extremely unpleasant...it wouldn’t kill, but this is one of those things where the disease is emphatically to be preferred to the cure.”

  “Could you help to break it gently?” she said.

  “Sure,” I told her. “I could treat the symptoms, get people through the withdrawal syndrome without too much hassle...no worse than a heavy cold. But where’s the demand? You have to remember that people like the damn thing. It’s good stuff. Offer a man a choice between a relatively easy way to break the habit and an assured supply for life and he’ll go for the second every time. What do the side effects matter to him, especially if he’s been on the stuff all his life?”

  “What are the side-effects?”

  “Shorter life-expectancy—the body wears out earlier. There’s no ripe old age on Wildeblood. Then there’s the damping of aggressiveness, lowering of intelligence. They’re not direct effects of the drug but they’re encouraged by it and are inevitable corollaries of long-term usage and physiological dependence. Another effect is lowering resistance to disease. That isn’t much of a problem here—yet. The original colonists were debugged as thoroughly as possible, and the infectious diseases they brought with them are relatively mild. At the same time, no micro-organisms in the local life-system have yet contrived an adaptive mutation which will make humans good hosts. The re-emergence of serious disease is a crisis just about all the colonies will face in time, and it will be deadly serious for all of them. This colony will have a problem of slightly greater magnitude than most. If the situation is touch and go, this colony will go where another one might have touched.

  “That’s bad, in its own way. But there are other, more subtle things...maybe insidious, if you’re of the mind to call them names. Because the drug is good, because it works, it breeds contentment. It breeds lack of ambition. All relative, of course, relative to Earth. It made the early generations amenable to Wildeblood rule, amenable to filling their allotted places in the fight to make the colony viable, establish its self-supporting systems. But it’s making the later generations—the now generations—satisfied with what they have. It’s not encouraging new drive, new ambition...and is probably inhibiting them. Wildeblood’s scheme has worked beautifully, but there’s still nothing outside that original scheme, and there may never be.

  “Now maybe that’s not bad. People tend to react in horror at the idea of a more docile human race, less aggressive, less ambitious...ready to settle for what they’ve got if they can possibly reckon it as enough. But maybe that horror is a bit less than justified. Maybe if things go a little slower, a little more carefully, they have a better chance of ending up where the people really want to go. I’m not sure. I can’t say. But those are the things that can be put down as effects of the drug.”

  “What does it actually do?” she wanted to know. “In crude and simple terms.”

  “Oh, that....” I shrugged, as if it wasn’t important, though of course it was—perhaps the most important thing of all. “It’s really very simple. It selectively stimulates a certain area of the hind brain, the area that’s connected with pleasurable sensations. What it does is to make internal nervous sensations—not the reception of sensory stimuli—more pleasurable. So that using your body—physical action and manual labor—becomes more pleasurable, and so does the range of sensations by which you actually feel your body...involuntary muscular actions like heartbeat. You see why it militates against purely cerebral activity? Why it breeds contentment with what we might consider a hard and unrewarding lot?”

  “So why is hard labor still a punishment in the legal set-up?” she asked.

  “It’s not the labor itself,” I pointed out. “It’s the conditions of labor. Not the doing itself but the where and the when and the how...see?”

  She nodded.

  “And so,” I said. “We leave them to it. We let them get on with it. They’ve made their bed, as the saying goes, and it’s not for us to tip them out of it. Nor is it for us to interfere with the politics of supply. My good friend Cyrano de Bergerac can whistle for his secrets, which I haven’t found out in any case. It’s all very clear and straightforward.”

  “But...?” she prompted.

  “What but?” I countered.

  “Come on, Alex,” she said. “I know you. I never heard you make a speech yet without a ‘but’ in it. When you say that it’s all straightforward you mean that it’s all straightforward but. So...but what?”

  “Well,” I confessed, “there is one thing that worries me.”

  “Which is?”

  “Nathan. In his eyes, this colony is a resounding success. I don’t suppose he likes Philip and his regime any better than I do. But Nathan’s a practical man. He’ll put up with it. And if that’s the price for a successful colony, that’s the price he’s willing to recommend to the UN. But if Nathan does go back to the UN to say ‘It can be done. It has been done. It can be done again...,’ and holds up this colony as his glowing example, he’s putting forward a prospectus for colonies with all the inbuilt vulnerabilities I talked about. Well, that’s a
s may be, but, and here it is, where does that leave me? If I say ‘No. This is not the way to mount successful colonies—it’s highly dangerous and suspect, and may lead to disaster’ I may be throwing away one of the best advertisements we have for the reinstitution of the colony program. It’s the double bind all over again. If I tell the truth—the whole, unblemished truth—I may subvert my own ends.

  “I believe—devoutly—that despite all these difficulties, all these dangers, all these exceptions and questions and problems, we must continue—or begin again—to send colonies into space. But it isn’t a matter of belief. It’s a matter of convincing the UN that it’s a politically viable and defensible move to do so. And as Nathan perpetually points out, to achieve that end politically we have to advertise, we have to make our arguments strong and beautiful. We can’t go back to Pietrasante and say: ‘Every colony is facing the possibility of disaster, and even the ones which have done well are still in trouble and are not examples to be copied.’ That would be instant death. We need to say: ‘Here are colonies surviving, and we have found the keys to their survival. As a result of what we have learned we can now promise that future colonies will have every chance of success.’ It may be a lie, but it’s a necessary lie.

  “The trouble is—if I collaborate in concocting an advertising fiction to sell the idea of colonization back to the UN, I become a party not just to selling the idea but also to selling the fiction. And that I don’t like. Not only because of the principle involved but because the fiction itself may be dangerous and none too palatable. See?”

  She saw. She’d seen it building up over the course of the mission. Maybe she’d even seen, right back at the beginning, that it was inevitable.

  “You spend too much time wrestling with your conscience, Alex,” she said. “Either be cynical or be stupid, but make up your mind. You’ve only two choices. Play it Nathan’s way or say goodbye—at least for another hundred and fifty years—to extrasolar expansion. For all the hoping you do and all the intellectual double-thinking there isn’t another way, and there won’t be.”

  I was going to thank her; with all due bitterness. But I only got to open my mouth before we were interrupted. A silhouette appeared on top of the dune. It was Nathan. He was looking all around, staring across the expanse of undulating sand and spiky grass. He was looking for something. Us.

  “We’re down here,” I said. I couldn’t help the fact that the remark was drenched with the acid that I’d been holding for what I’d intended to say.

  But he didn’t notice. He was slightly ruffled—which, for a man of Nathan’s temperament, signaled extreme dismay.

  “Back to the ship,” he said. “Quickly. There’s trouble.”

  We came to our feet immediately. “What kind of trouble?” I asked.

  Now it was he that sounded bitter. “Calm down,” he said. “We’re not under attack. Yet. No need for action stations. But events are under way...we have to talk.”

  “About what?” I asked.

  We were already walking back in the direction of the Daedalus. I looked round, trying to spot our cohort of shadows. But they were out of sight, for once. The dunes gave ample opportunity for discretion.

  “About a diplomatic incident,” he said. “Which, it will no doubt make your day to hear, I have provoked. Single-handedly. Foolishly.”

  His tone was so drastic in its self-condemnation that I almost felt disposed to sympathy. I didn’t, at any rate, feel amused. I wasn’t about to get sarcastic, either.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “I was set up,” he replied. “Zarnecki wants to fight me. With swords. Tomorrow noon.”

  It took a moment to catch on.

  “Are you trying to. say that you’ve been challenged to a duel?” said Karen, unbelieving.

  I could almost sense the way he gritted his teeth as he said: “Yes.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  By the time we got back to the ship I was feeling sober. The drug was still working its magic in my brain but I was using my strength of mind against it now. I clamped down on the urge to be moving, to be active, to be using all the muscles I had just got to know properly for the first time. It wasn’t too hard to do. I still had clarity of thought and strength of purpose.

  We assembled for conference—all four of us.

  “How did you manage to get yourself challenged to a duel?” demanded Karen. I could tell from the way she phrased the question that the opportunity to score a few cutting sentences off Nathan wasn’t going completely to waste, but even Karen was prepared to take things easier. She could have been even nastier.

  “Do you want to hear the pretext or do you want me to speculate about the reason?” he snapped back.

  “Both,” I said, in a calming voice. “Start with the one and work your way into the other.”

  “The pretext,” he said, levelly, “was that I besmirched the honor of the family by seducing Miranda.”

  “And did you?” asked Karen.

  Nathan hesitated. Karen raised her eyes as if in appeal to heaven. Nathan’s displeasure was intensified.

  “It wasn’t like that!” he said—not the kind of thing one would normally expect to find tumbling from his thin lips.

  “Don’t tell me,” said Karen. “It was love at first sight, right?”

  “Had I known that it was a set-up,” said Nathan, somehow recapturing his temper, “I would have been aware that my actions were...undiplomatic. However, I did not know. And because I took the circumstances...perhaps naively...at face value, it seemed to me that to act otherwise might have been...equally undiplomatic.”

  “You pays your money and you takes your chance,” I muttered. And added, silently: what price lust at first sight?

  “All right,” said Pete, trying to smooth things out. “Let’s not bother with the details. What are they trying to achieve? Presumably it isn’t just a private grudge on Zarnecki’s part?”

  “It might be,” said Nathan, “but no serious student of probability would bet on it. It was arranged. Staged.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “They’re trying to put pressure on us. It’s called letting us know we aren’t wanted here. On top, they’re smooth and nice and they’ve vacuumed the welcome mat. And Philip’s position isn’t prejudiced—outwardly, it’s nothing to do with him and he doesn’t know about it. Underneath, they want us to leave. They want to embarrass us. They want us to rush through whatever we came to do and then go home—without there being any long-term consequences with regard to Earth. They think they’re pretty clever. If we back out after this, it looks like our fault. Philip keeps his image as a benevolent father-figure. You can see the pattern—and the thinking behind it.”

  “And when we don’t take the hint?”

  Nathan shrugged. “I assume that tomorrow is just for show. Zarnecki will give me a scar—a warning. He isn’t disposed to homicide. But we all know what happens to people who don’t take hints. They get hinted at harder. People can get hurt, you know. Accidents, I believe, is the correct euphemism. Then again, maybe we could be attacked by dissidents or rebels—so that a very surprised and injured Philip can make profuse apologies and tell us that it shows how necessary law and order is.”

  “You make it sound like gangsterism,” said Karen.

  “The politics of intimidation,” he corrected her. “It’s only gangsterism when criminals do it.”

  “So what do we do?” asked Pete. “Pull out?”

  “Maybe,” said Nathan. “It could be the best course. On the other hand, there may be room for a little haggling yet. Zarnecki wants something from us before we go, if you remember.”

  “The code,” I said.

  “Precisely. So the situation is a little more complicated than simply wanting us gone. They’d like us out of the way...but they’d also like to use us, if they can. And while they’re trying to play it both ways, we have a breathing space.”

  “Now wait just a minute,” I said. “All
this is fine—but it’s also very speculative. You may see potential for doing a little double-dealing, but for the moment I can see potential for your getting yourself killed. How can you be sure Zarnecki only intends to put on a demonstration tomorrow?”

  “He’s not just a killer,” said Nathan. “And to him, a duel isn’t just an excuse for a quick burst of violence. To you, it may seem like a joke, but here dueling is meaningful.”

  “It’s still the twenty-fourth century here,” said Karen. “Even if the technology looks more like the nineteenth.”

  “That’s not the point,” said Nathan. “Technology has nothing to do with it. Dueling is a social institution linked to certain sociopolitical circumstances. On Earth, societies are integrated to the extent that the state takes over all the responsibilities of protecting the individual and his property. In case of assault or theft the police and the courts are the only legal channel of recrimination. But that’s only possible where there’s a high degree of social organization, whether the government is autocratic or democratic. Here, we have a population much more widely dispersed, with individual communities much less highly organized; Despite the elementary divisions of labor here villages and families are still in large measure divorced and independent from the support of the whole social organism. There’s a police force and there are courts, but to a large extent the responsibility for the protection of the individual, his family and his property rests with him.

  “In barbaric societies the principal instrument of restitution and revenge is the blood-feud. In societies more civilized that becomes ritualized and less deadly—it becomes a system of personal honor, where questions are settled by a contest whose outcome is final. The escalation of the blood-feud, with whole families being entangled in bloody conflicts down the generations, is subverted. What’s more, in a situation where a small aristocracy defined by family ties rules over a large commonalty, the dueling system may become a useful tool in social control. If dueling is accepted among the aristocracy as a means of settling disputes while disputes in the lower classes are supposedly to be settled by the courts, members of the aristocracy not being expected to demean themselves by fighting with those beneath them, then effectively the lower classes have no means of redress at all with respect to injuries sustained at the hands of aristocracy. In a situation such as we have in this colony...dueling means something. It’s very important.”