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  "Five thousand a month," Yerby repeated nonchalantly. "The first six months now, in cash. Later payments paid quarterly into my account on Kilbourn."

  "That's absurd!" the Vice-Protector said. "Mr. Bannock, that's absolutely absurd!"

  Yerby chuckled, eyed the level in the liquor bottle, and took another mouthful. "Is it, laddie?" he said after swallowing. "Well, I'll tell you what I think is absurd. That's you figuring that because you got a hellacious lot of people on this planet, that you can put enough of them on Greenwood to chase out the folks who're there already. If you really believe that, you're even dumber than you look."

  Finch drew himself up stiffly. Biber glared at him, then said in a would-be reasonable tone, "There's a level of truth to what you say, of course, Mr. Bannock. That's why we're talking with you. The actual figures involved, however—"

  "You heard the figures," Yerby said. He hadn't shown a sign of anger or anxiety during the whole discussion. "You can pay me and I'll do what I can to bring my neighbors to what I think's the right attitude. Or you can come to Greenwood yourselves and try to talk folk around. But I recommend if you do that—" He smiled like a crocodile. "—you not wear such fancy clothes as you got on now. Because chances are that people are going to give you a guided tour of cesspools and manure piles."

  Vice-Protector Finch swore, softly and bitterly.

  Mayor Biber's face was as black as a thundercloud for a moment. Finally he shrugged and said, "All right, we accept your terms. We'll have the money for you tomorrow, as soon as the banks open at ten."

  Yerby laughed with the same thunderous abandon as he'd been singing in the hallway. "Ten o'clock?" he said. "Well then, laddies, why don't we go out and find what bars are still open, shall we? We got some celebrating to do!"

  "Oh God," moaned one of the Zeniths. Those were the first words any of the aides had spoken since they entered the suite.

  Yerby waved the Zeniths out ahead of him with a flourish and banged the door closed behind him. Mark stood up, feeling a little dizzy from the way the awkward posture had cramped his legs.

  Amy got smoothly to her feet again. Her face was flushed. "Thank you for being willing to help," she said primly to Mark. "I think you'd better go now, though."

  "Right," said Mark. He waited until the elevator closed on the strains of "Fanny Bay" before he went out into the hall.

  "It was very foolish of me to worry about my brother being in physical danger," Amy said in a bitter voice. "And obviously it was far too late to worry about his morality—or the lack of it!"

  "Good night, Amy," Mark murmured. He half believed that he'd dreamed the whole business. It just couldn't be true . . .

  17. The High and the Mighty

  The palace of Guillaume Giscard, Protector of Zenith, was on a mountaintop 270 miles from New Paris. Eastward through the glass walls of the anteroom to Giscard's office Mark could see a breathtaking sweep of bare ridges plunging thousands of feet toward the foothills.

  To the immediate south, Alliance troops bundled in winter uniforms like so many gray snowmen were being drilled in a courtyard two stories below. The site was a barracks as well as a palace. Judging from the number of corrugated-plastic huts, there must be several thousand soldiers quartered here.

  Very uncomfortable soldiers, too. It was only fall in this hemisphere, but the palace was high enough that snow already drifted around the shelters.

  A servant so gloomy that he could have been a basset hound threw open the doors to the office. "His Excellency will see you now, Mr. Maxwell," he said, as if he were reading the burial service for a very sinful man. Mark entered behind his father.

  There were seven people in the large room. Four, including both women, wore Alliance military dress uniforms. Protector Giscard was a tall, stooped man. He rose from behind a desk littered with papers, recording chips, and three different styles of hologram projector. The remaining civilians were an older man across the desk from the soldiers and a supercilious-looking youngster.

  "Mr. Maxwell," Giscard said, extending his hand, "I'm seeing you out of respect for those who recommended you, but there's absolutely no way that I can interfere in the matter you raise. Or would want to."

  Lucius shook hands politely; Mark bowed in Quelhagen style, feeling very tense. He didn't worry about the Alliance officials, but he didn't want to embarrass himself in front of his father.

  "Well, I appreciate your position," Lucius said. "However, I thought—"

  "I mean, my own Vice-Protector's involved in the matter, I understand," Giscard interrupted. He played nervously with the papers on his desk. "With all the trouble going on here, I'm certainly not going to get him and the rest of the local council stirred up."

  "Stirred up, hell," said a heavyset officer with close-cropped, iron gray hair. "If you took my advice, Finch would be in jail right now."

  "And if he resisted," added a woman of similar age and physique, "he'd be under the jail. He's a prancing little prick."

  Giscard forced his face into a smile. "Paris thought if I associated responsible local people in the government, things would . . . there'd be less trouble," he said to Lucius apologetically. "So I appointed Mr. Finch, but—"

  He broke off and waved a hand, frustrated at his own dithering. "Anyway, I can't interfere. I'm sorry you had your trip for nothing, but I'm sure my secretary warned you you were wasting your time."

  "Many times," said the young man. He couldn't have stuck his nose farther in the air if there'd been a turd on the carpet. "But Mr. Maxwell absolutely insisted."

  "I thought it only fair that I give you a chance to cover yourself before the matter goes to Paris," Lucius said. His nonchalance made Mark shiver with its glacial perfection: polite but at the same time utterly superior and dismissive. It was the tone that Mark had expected the Protector to be using on them.

  "Paris?" Giscard said. "You can't—"

  "I'm afraid that in some quarters your decision to let planetary courts invalidate Alliance grants won't be very well received," Lucius said. This time he raised his voice enough to override the Protector's.

  "Those Hestia grants are invalid!" said the elder civilian.

  Lucius cocked an eyebrow. "That's certainly the position a Zenith court took," he said. "Very possibly a commission set up by the proper Alliance authorities might agree. But I very much doubt that officials in Paris will believe that a Zenith court had authority to make that decision on its own."

  Giscard swallowed. He looked at the aide who'd just spoken. That fellow cleared his throat and said, "There are no grounds for appeal of a local decision to authorities in Paris." Mark could almost hear the question in his voice.

  "Grounds?" said Lucius. "Oh, I think if the proper people in the Protectorate Office learn of what's happened here, they'll find grounds at least to recall His Excellency—"

  Lucius bowed to Giscard.

  "—to explain why he allowed local authorities to overrule the actions of an Alliance protector. But of course that's your decision, Your Excellency. Thank you for your time."

  "Wait!" Giscard said.

  Lucius raised an eyebrow. "Yes, Your Excellency?" he said, as if he were only vaguely interested in what the protector had to say.

  "I can't invalidate my own grants," Giscard said, wringing his hands. "I just can't."

  One of the military officers sneered and ostentatiously turned her back.

  "Why, of course not," Lucius said. "This is clearly a case that a commission from the Protectorate Office has to decide. It seems to me that a responsible official in your position would freeze all proceedings in local courts and refer the question of validity back to Paris for determination. That's what a strong and responsible Protector of Zenith would do."

  "That could take years," said the civilian aide, apparently Giscard's legal advisor. "That could take a decade."

  Lucius smiled more broadly than he had before during this discussion. "Yes, it could well defer the question of enforcement unti
l long after Protector Giscard has been appointed to some distant post."

  "Yes, that's right," Giscard said. "Yes!" He bobbed his head three times as if shaking the point down into his consciousness. He looked at his legal advisor and said, "Candace, see what you can do, will you? And quickly, this has gone on long enough."

  "As a matter of fact, Mr. Candace," Lucius said, "I happen to have a draft right here that you might like to look at."

  He took a recording chip from his breast pocket and offered it to the advisor. Lucius' smile had the same authority Mark had seen on the face of Yerby Bannock as he surveyed the unconscious thugs on Dittersdorf.

  The limousine Lucius had borrowed from Daniels purred softly at a thousand feet. The land below showed few marks of human involvement: a road, scattered farms; a village of thirty or forty houses. Before he visited Greenwood, Mark would have thought of this as wild country.

  Before Greenwood . . .

  "Dad," Mark said. He forced himself to look at his father as he spoke. If one or the other of them had been driving, there'd have been an excuse to avoid eye contact.

  Lucius waggled a finger toward the ground. "I suppose you find this a change from Earth," he said. "And Greenwood, on the other end of the scale."

  "I was thinking about Greenwood," Mark explained. "It's—Dad, what do you think would happen if the plaintiffs offered Mr. Bannock a bribe to, to see things their way?"

  Lucius laughed wholeheartedly. Since most of his actions were muted by calculation, this loud amusement was like seeing the sun come out in the middle of a blizzard. "Oh, surely they wouldn't be that stupid, would they?" he said at last.

  Mark felt an enormous sense of relief. "You think he'd turn them down even if he sounded tempted?" he said.

  "No, no," his father said with a dismissive sweep of his hand. "That kind, the Yerby Bannocks—they'll never turn down a franc, a drink, or a woman. But he'll weasel-word his promise and then he'll go right ahead and do exactly what he intended to do from the first."

  "Ah-h-h," Mark said as the light dawned. He thought for a moment and went on, "So Yerby's a type, then? I've never met . . ."

  "Yerby Bannock's a type in the same sense that the Mars Diamond is a type," Lucius said. He studied Mark with an intensity Mark didn't understand. "There are many other diamonds, but the rest aren't flawless and don't weigh thirty-seven pounds."

  Lucius looked at the ground out his side of the clear compartment. After a moment he turned back to Mark and said, "Ah . . . sometimes there might be a situation where soldiers were required to destroy an enemy automatic weapon."

  Mark looked blank. He didn't have any idea of why his father had changed the subject. For the first time in Mark's memory, he thought he saw embarrassment beneath the normal cool expression.

  "Generally, almost always, there's a better way to deal with the gun than charging straight at it," Lucius continued, holding eye contact. "But every once in a while there's a case where you really do have to go in head-on. Then it's useful to have a Yerby Bannock around."

  "Ah!" said Mark. He was glad to have a context, though he knew there had to be more in the explanation than he was seeing at the moment.

  "The odd thing is," Lucius continued, "the Bannocks survive that sort of activity more often than you'd imagine. But it's not a good idea to stand very close to them. Unless you have to."

  "I see," said Mark. And now he did.

  18. Plotting Against the Enemy

  The Ishandlwana Suite was slightly less hideous with daylight streaming through the west windows. Mark still didn't envy Dagmar Wately, seated in a chair around which a fake python coiled with its jaws open to engulf her head.

  Yerby stumbled out of the bedroom, holding his temples. He was the last to join the gathering of defendants, investors, and attorneys, even though they were meeting in his suite as arranged.

  "Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior," he muttered, holding his head with both hands. "I think there was something wrong with the booze I got last night at . . ."

  His voice trailed off. Mark figured the reason was that Yerby couldn't possibly remember the names of all the places he'd been drinking the past night and this morning.

  "I believe we're all present," Lucius said. He stood with his legs spread slightly and his hands crossed behind his back. "Elector Daniels, would you care to proceed?"

  "Go on, Maxwell," Daniels said. He'd been noticeably more deferential toward Mark's father since they returned with the Protector's order taking jurisdiction away from the Zenith courts. "You've brought us to this point, after all."

  Lucius eyed the room. The Greenwoods looked either cowed or hungover, though nobody else appeared to have tied one on quite as tightly as Yerby had. Amy, seated primly in a corner, had been staring at her brother with smoldering anger. When Daniels spoke she raised her camera to record the meeting.

  "Simply put, mesdames and gentlemen," Lucius said, "the question of your grants' validity has been referred to the Paris bureaucracy. I'll be traveling to Earth to put your side—our side—to the authorities there. I'm an attorney, not a fortuneteller, but I believe your claims will receive a fairer hearing there than here on Zenith."

  Dagmar snorted. "You mean they'll give us blindfolds before they shoot us?" she said.

  "Perhaps a little better than that," Lucius replied. His smile was like the sun reflecting from a glacier.

  "This doesn't mean that you can let your guard down on Greenwood," Ms. Macey said. "Finch and the others know that their best chance of success would be to seize possession before the Alliance commission has time to act. The risk of an actual invasion is even greater than it was before."

  "But that wouldn't be legal, would it?" Amy asked from behind her camera. She looked at Lucius. "If Protector Giscard's ruled in our favor?"

  "He hasn't ruled in anyone's favor, Ms. Bannock," Lucius said. "And Ms. Macey is quite correct. Possession isn't nine points of the law, but it certainly tends to be nine-tenths of any political decision. Politics, not laws, are the matter at issue in the case from now on."

  "Don't worry about us keeping up our end," Yerby said. He was still wearing his fancy jacket. Mark saw rusty stains on the right cuff and lapel. Blood, he thought, but not surprisingly it didn't seem to be Yerby's blood.

  "I don't believe there's anything more to say," Lucius said. "I've booked passage to Paris for later in the week. As Ms. Macey suggested, it might be desirable for those of you who are defendants to return to your homes as soon as possible."

  He smiled, nodded to Yerby, and added, "To make sure that they remain your homes. Despite the attractions of urban entertainments."

  "If I never take another drink, it'll be too soon," muttered Buck Koslovsky. "There's some green stuff, absinthe, in the bar and I figure, one of these sweet liqueurs. I tell you, a bottle of that and I didn't know what hit me."

  "What did you do last night, Yerby?" Amy asked in a cold, clear voice. "Was there anything interesting that you ought to share with the company?"

  "Huh?" Yerby said. He looked surprised but not really furtive. "No, I wouldn't say that. Partied, you know. Did a bit of drinking."

  He reached into the side pockets of his jacket. He brought out a room key in one hand and a lipstick-smeared bar napkin in the other.

  "Nothing else, Yerby?" Amy said. "You're absolutely sure of that?"

  The others in the room looked at her oddly. Mark wished he'd had an opportunity to tell Amy what Lucius had said about the chance of bribery succeeding.

  "There was another thing," Yerby admitted. He peered, then fumbled into his breast pocket. "I found a poker game and didn't do so very bad."

  This time his hand came out with a sheaf of currency. It looked impressive even before you realized that the top bill was a thousand Zenith dollars. He waved the cash to the room.

  "Krishna saves!" Dagmar shouted, hopping up from the threatening chair. "How much is that?"

  "Well, I don't really think of it as my money," Yerby said
with a broad smirk. "Seeing's I won it here where we come for the case, you see. So I figured I'd use it to pay the boys, the Woodsrunners, for training. I don't worry about folks showing up when there's real trouble, but it's a pain in the ass to drop everything when you know it's just playacting. Sound good?"

  "I think that's an extremely good idea, Mr. Bannock," Lucius said. He looked at Mark and winked.

  Amy looked from Lucius to Yerby to Mark. She picked up the connection a good deal faster than Mark thought he'd have done if their roles were reversed.

  Amy threw herself into her brother's arms and said, "Yerby, I can't tell you how good that sounds!"

  Among a herd of elephants molded on the walls of the Safari House's lobby, Lucius turned to his son and said, "I could use an aide on Earth, you know. Would you care to come? I don't believe you've seen Paris yet, have you?"

  "I wasn't much use to you here with the Protector," Mark said. He was buying time while he thought about his real answer.

  "Don't you think so?" Lucius said. He sniffed. "I think you underestimate the disadvantage a lone man is at in a group of his opponents. In any case, your usefulness is a matter for me to determine. Your decision is whether or not to accept the offer."

  "Dad," Mark said, forcing himself to meet his father's eyes. "I think I'd rather go back to Greenwood. I think . . ."

  He wasn't sure if he was going to finish the thought. He wasn't even sure it was true. But it was what he believed.

  "Dad," he said, "I think they need me there."

  Lucius gave him a thin smile. It was very hard to tell what was behind the older man's eyes. "Yes, I was rather of that opinion too. Well, I'll take my leave now."

  He nodded formally to Mark. Then, almost as an afterthought, he said, "We both want the same thing for you, Mark: that you become a man worthy of your upbringing. So far, so good, I believe."

  Lucius turned and walked through the doors onto the street. Slim, erect; every inch a gentleman.

  What I really want, Mark realized, is to become a man my father can respect. And I guess that's what he just said.