Patriots Page 8

  Rather than argue—because this much of Yerby's operation seemed sustainable—Mark said, "I was surprised that Yerby wanted to bring Alliance soldiers to Greenwood. On Quelhagen, we're trying to get rid of them. And not succeeding."

  "That was his friend's idea," Amy said. "Jesilind." She made the name sound like a curse. "On Kilbourn the Protector only has a few soldiers, but she's threatening to bring more in. She's claims she's taken over the planetary finances, but the elected council keeps meeting and says her decrees aren't valid without their approval."

  She looked at Mark and grinned. "Which means that most people don't pay taxes to either side. That suits ordinary folk well enough, and since the council's mostly rich people it suits them even better. But the Protector doesn't have anything to pay her staff with, and it doesn't suit her at all."

  "All right, let's head north!" Yerby called across the hundred yards separating his flyer from the other. "I'll show you a place prettier than anything you ever seen!"

  They flew north at thirty miles an hour, the best speed the heavily laden flyers could manage in still air. Amy stayed five hundred feet up, so the flight seemed more leisurely than it would have if the trees had been closer.

  "There's no need for Alliance troops anywhere in the Digits," Amy added. "Anywhere at all, really. There'll never be another war. The Treaty of Cozumel has held for twenty years, and there's no reason it shouldn't hold forever."

  "There sure aren't any troops on Dittersdorf," Mark said in what he meant to sound like agreement.

  He'd had too good an education to believe that peace between the Atlantic Alliance and the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere meant peace for all time for all men, though. Particularly with the trouble brewing between Earth and the settlers of most colonized worlds.

  8. Living Toward Tomorrow

  As the sun rose, the motors gained power and the flyers became noticeably more agile, though their speed didn't increase greatly. Yerby continued to lead them north.

  Mark drew Amy out about Miss Altsheller's Academy. At first, Amy was embarrassed to discuss her education with a Harvard graduate. Mark did his best to convince her that she had no reason to feel ashamed. Sure, the General Knowledge curriculum was scant and dated by Earth standards, but Miss Altsheller's emphasis on deportment made her students as civilized and cultured as anyone raised on Quelhagen.

  Mark had been taught to learn. Amy had been taught to believe that humans could make themselves better. Not just richer: everybody on the frontier believed that or they'd have stayed where they were born.

  Mark wasn't even sure he could define "better." His education had taught him that you had to look at matters from every side, that every viewpoint was valid.

  The thing was, an ivory tower attitude meant that the viewpoint of four Zenith thugs was just as valid as that of the innocent traveler they were going to beat the hell out of for fun. Mark didn't feel neutral at all about that concept.

  The flyers sailed over a rugged crest. Before them spread a broad valley. Trees were scattered sparsely among much lower vegetation. It was the first natural open space of any extent that Mark had seen on Greenwood.

  "Here we go!" Yerby called. "But watch where I land!"

  He brought his flyer around low to the far side of a cliff jutting from the ridge like an axe blade. Amy followed her brother, but she was frowning and her hands tightened minusculely on the control yoke.

  Mark concentrated on looking relaxed. He figured that was the most help he could give at the moment. Besides, he'd learned that sometimes when you faked an attitude, you tricked yourself into making it real.

  It wasn't real this time. He was still scared.

  On the other side of the cliff, a waterfall leaped a hundred feet from the top of the crag. Yerby brought his flyer in to a jittery landing on the area fringing the creek that formed at the base of the falls. The frontiersman's boots and the flyer's wheels kicked up sand as he braked to a halt, then turned in to the vegetation to give Amy a clear approach.

  "Sometimes," Amy said, visibly relaxing, "Yerby shows better sense than I give him credit for."

  Amy landed them easily on the sandbar, though in the moment before the whole wing lifted in a huge aileron Mark thought they were going to do an endo on the soft sand and come to rest upside down. "Oh!" he said, amazed at how relieved he felt to be safely on the ground. Above them the propeller whirred softly to stillness.

  The leaves of the nearby vegetation were broad, but they sprouted directly from the soil the way those of Terran grasses did. What looked like a smooth carpet from the air was actually a varied mixture of species, but only a few grew more than three feet high. A tree rooted in the cliff face had a trunk like wires twisted together rather than a single stem.

  "Take a look to your left, both of you," Yerby said in a quiet voice. "Easy, now."

  A creature the size of a large dog poked its head out of a burrow twenty feet away. Its eyes extended on short stalks. They swept the creature's immediate surroundings, then focused on the flyers. Mark held very still. The creature snapped back into its hole as if pulled by an overstretched rubber band. Its feet immediately drummed a warning underground.

  "We call them pooters," Yerby said. "They do love a tree, near as much as my logging crew does, but mostly they eat this short stuff."

  He plucked a clump of "grass" from the soil. The taproot was eighteen inches long at the point it broke. "Any place the ground's soft enough they can burrow, you're likely to find them. Cute little beggars and they're pretty good eating."

  Mark noticed that the frontiersman hadn't bothered to unstrap the flashgun from his flyer's rack. "Aren't there any predators on Greenwood?" he asked.

  "Sure there is," Yerby said. "Nothing we need to worry about, though. They're mostly birds—that's why the pooler was scared of our flyers. Some of the really biggest ones, they run on the ground, but even they used to be birds before they got too big to fly. You'd need to go a good five hundred miles south to find any of them anyways."

  "I was just curious," Mark said. It wasn't entirely a lie.

  "Yerby, you're right," said Amy, looking up at the waterfall sliding through the air in rainbow splendor. "This place is beautiful. The whole planet is."

  Yerby beamed as though she'd praised him personally. "Ain't it, though?" he said. "You know? I'd like to keep it like this."

  "This corner?" Amy said. "This waterfall, you mean."

  Yerby shook his head and grimaced. "Look, I know it don't make sense, but I'd like to keep Greenwood pretty much the way it is. You know, I just come back from Kilbourn and the way it's built up—that's too many people."

  "How big is Kilbourn?" Mark asked sharply. He was trying to connect this Yerby Bannock with the man who let freshets flush his garbage into the river.

  "About a million and a half," Amy said. She looked surprised also. "The population's been growing fast all through my lifetime, ever since the Treaty of Cozumel."

  "And yeah, I know what you're thinking, Mark," Yerby said. "I could do a better job keeping things neat than I do. But hell, people ain't perfect, and the more of them you put together the worse they each of them gets. There's cities on Kilbourn so crowded I wouldn't board a dog there."

  And how would you feel about Landingplace or Zenith's capital, New Paris? Mark thought. Aloud he said, "You know, I think a recycling plant could pay for itself in a year or two. A few years."

  "Have you talked about this with Dr. Jesilind?" Amy said. "His vision for Greenwood is huge city-buildings, arcologies, like they have on Earth. Everything self-contained, everyone living in identical boxes with identical parks and artificial rain at programmed times."

  Yerby shook his head glumly, looking out over the savannah. "I know," he said. "He's a smart man, the doc is, educated like I'll never be. Only . . ."

  The big man leaned down and thrust his hand like a spade into the hole from which he'd plucked the grass. He crumbled the loam through his fingers. "Thing is,"
Yerby said softly, "there's plenty of planets. No reason to put a lot of folks on every one of them. And there's plenty already built up now, like Kilbourn. Some folks, that's how they want to live."

  He scattered the last of the black dirt at his feet and straightened. "Kilbourn, it's not going to go away. Earth's not going to go away. People who want to live tight together already have plenty of places to do that. There's other folks who need to be able to stick their fingers in the dirt and look at a waterfall with just a couple friends. I'd like Greenwood to stay a place you could do that."

  He laughed uncomfortably. "Well, I guess I sound pretty silly to a couple educated people like you, don't I? Don't know what came over me to talk like that."

  "I didn't hear anything silly," Mark said quietly. He squatted and rubbed bare dirt between his thumb and forefinger. "You know," he added, "it could be that more people need the chance to sit with a few friends and a lot of nature than know they do."

  The pooter stuck its head out of the hole again. Mark winked at it. After a moment, the creature snipped off a clump of grass and began to ingest it, bite by bite.

  As they watched the creature eat, Yerby Bannock said, "Where d'ye suppose a man would find one of them recycling plants you talked about, Mark lad?"

  9. Another Country Heard From

  As the flyers rose above the ridgeline, their motors running strongly in the midafternoon sunlight, the tiny radio attached to the hub of Amy's control yoke crackled, "—need help soonest. I got a gang of Zenith surveyors and their ship parked in my soybeans. Anybody who can hear me, come lend a hand. This is Dagmar Wately and I need help! Over."

  "This is Yerby Bannock, Dagmar," the speaker resumed instantly. Mark could hear Yerby's voice faintly from the flyer ahead of them a beat or two after the same words had arrived over the radio. "I'm about ten minutes out. Anybody who can hear my signal, grab a persuader and come help Dagmar Wately talk to some Zeniths in her soybean field. That's southwest of her compound. Out!"

  Yerby banked his flyer, swinging west by northwest from the south heading he'd set to go home. He bellowed over his shoulder, "You kids get back to the compound. Send George and Elmont out to Dagmar's soybeans if they haven't already gotten the message."

  Amy continued to pull her craft around to follow her brother. She looked at Mark in an unspoken question.

  "I don't know what I can do to help him," Mark said, "but I wouldn't feel right not to try."

  Amy smiled. "Thanks," she said. "For not telling me I'm a girl."

  "You are a girl," Mark said. "But I don't see that you can be much more useless than I am."

  Amy's laugh trilled merrily across the sky. She held station a little above and behind her brother's flyer, just as she had on the way north. Yerby looked back at them and glared, but he didn't waste his breath shouting further orders.

  Nearly a thousand acres of soybeans filled a valley similar to the one from which Mark and his friends had just come. The Terran crop was a green with less gray in it than the native vegetation growing near rock outcrops that hadn't been plowed. The starship sat like a troll in the midst of the rolling field on four great outrigger pontoons.

  Frequent heating and cooling by magnetic eddy currents colored the upper surfaces of the ship's spherical hull. The lower curves were blackened by carbon not from the rocket fuel—that was surely hydrogen and oxygen—but from the loam and vegetation that the exhaust had incinerated as it blew a crater in the field on landing.

  A handful of air-cushion jeeps, each holding two people in orange coveralls, drove across the field. One of them was nearly a mile from the starship. The survey party was setting fluorescent white rods in the ground at intervals of several hundred yards.

  The starship's main hatch was lowered to the ground. A flyer like the Bannocks' sat close by. A figure in Greenwood leather waved as she argued on the boarding ramp with three figures in tailored white uniforms. Several other flyers approached in the clear sky, but none of them were as close as the Bannock craft.

  Yerby landed at the edge of the ramp. Amy came down a fraction of a second behind him, dropping from the sky with a verve that left Mark's stomach fifty feet behind. The flyer's frame flexed dangerously. Mark tried to take some of the shock on his own legs and managed to bury his feet ankle-deep in the soft field.

  "Amy, child," Yerby said as he got out of his flyer's space-framed cockpit, "why don't you stick by the radio and relay things to the neighbors flying in. I'd like them to stay in the air just for now."

  He didn't look back at the other flyer. Mark hadn't seen Yerby unstrap the heavy flashgun from his rack, but it was cradled now in the crook of his left arm. The weapon's squat barrel, a Cassegrain laser, was six inches in diameter and only a foot long.

  Mark stayed a pace behind and to the left as Yerby strolled up the ramp toward the four waiting figures. "'Lo, Dagmar," Yerby said. Even standing below them on the slope, he was as tall as any of the three Zeniths, two men and a woman. "Like you to meet Mark Maxwell, a friend of mine. Gather you've got a problem here?"

  Dagmar Wately was younger than Desiree but of similar build. She wore leather breeches and a jacket whose loops and pockets were full of tools. She thumbed toward the uniformed trio. "I come out when I heard them land," she said. "Thought they might be in trouble. Seems they're from Zenith and they think they got a right to be here."

  "We do have a right to be here," said the younger of the two men. His epaulettes were orange, like the garments of the survey crewmen in the jeeps. "We're laying out a city of fifty thousand here. The construction crews will arrive as soon as we've completed our end. The first of the immigrant ships from Earth will be landing before the year is out."

  "There's no mistake about our landfall," said the older man. "We're right in the center of the grant. You can come with me to the bridge and check the navigational data if you like."

  Yerby grinned. He looked as cheerful as he had the moment before he knocked the heads of two Zeniths together in the caravansary. "You know, Dagmar," he said, "I'd always thought this was part of your grant."

  "You know damned well it is, Bannock!" Dagmar said. "We fought long enough over our boundary lines that we know where each other's property lies, don't we?"

  "You're talking about Hestia grants," the woman in uniform said. "We're employed by Vice-Protector Finch of Zenith under Zenith grants. If you've got a problem, take it up with him."

  "Ah, but you lot are closer than Finch, ain't you?" Yerby said. "Amy, love, tell the boys to start picking up them spikes, will you? I reckon there's not much of a survey without markers."

  The Zenith with orange surveyor's tabs reached into his pocket. Dagmar kicked him in the crotch. The Zenith gasped and bent forward. Mark dipped a gun out of the pocket, then stepped clear so that the overbalanced man could tumble down the ramp. Dagmar kicked him in the ribs as he fell past.

  The uniformed woman took a step backward. She touched her own jacket pocket.

  "Please don't do that," Mark said to her politely. "I won't hit you, but Ms. Wately will."

  The flyers were dipping down across the soybean field. One buzzed an air-cushion Jeep. While a man piloted the flyer, the woman slipped from the other saddle and stood on the lower frame to snatch a surveyor's cap.

  Another flyer pivoted around a survey stake—the white rods contained transponders to provide precise measurement to the satellite the ship would have dropped in orbit—and the pilot himself snatched it out of the ground. Mark wouldn't have thought that was possible.

  Yerby continued to smile at the two Zeniths still standing. Mark looked at the gun he'd taken from the groaning man. It was a nerve scrambler like the one the baggage handler had carried. No way Mark could rip the weapon apart the way Yerby'd done the other one, but . . .

  The upper surface of the ramp was made of plates welded to an internal framework. There was a slight gap between the edges of the two plates at Mark's feet. He stuck the needle point of the pistol's muzzle between th
em and snapped it off with a quick twist.

  "You can't do this!" the older Zenith cried.

  "Now," said Yerby, "there's another difference of opinion."

  The jeeps were rushing back toward the ship, jouncing high at every bump and grounding jarringly as the plenum chamber spilled air. For a moment Mark wasn't sure he should have destroyed the nasty little gun, but it was pretty obvious that the surveyors were fleeing rather than coming to help their officers.

  All the survey stakes were gone. Generally flyers landed nearby and took off again from the field as soon as the pilot had pulled up the trophy, but one fellow managed to blast a rod with his flashgun while his buddy flew from the other saddle.

  "You have no right to do this!" the older Zenith shouted. He must be the ship's captain. "You have no right!"

  Yerby stepped off the edge of the ramp so that the first of the jeeps could race aboard past the officers. Mark and Dagmar Wately jumped down beside him. A flyer banked away from the hatch as the pilot cried, "Yee-hah!"

  "I have all law and justice on my side!" Yerby said. "And besides that—"

  He pointed his flashgun at the undersurface of the starship. Mark turned and covered his eyes with his hands. The laser fired with a hisscrack! The target clanged like a huge bell. A little of the intense saffron pulse leaked through Mark's flesh.

  "What are you doing?" screamed the female officer from the edge of the hatch where the jeep's passage had pushed her. "You're shooting at us!"

  "I just blew out one of your nozzles," Yerby said calmly. He unsnapped the charging mechanism from the flashgun's butt and spread the sail to the sun. "You got seven more, that'll get you up well enough. But—"

  The big frontiersman had never stopped smiling.