Patriots Page 9

  "—I'd suggest you take off before this fellow recharges in three minutes or so."

  A second jeep drove up the ramp and collided with the first, which was blocking the entrance to the hold. The third and fourth vehicles halted by the outriggers. The surveyors scrambled aboard on foot, glancing over their shoulders in panic at Mark and the Greenwoods.

  The starship's rocket nozzles were tungsten, forged hollow so that the liquid-hydrogen fuel could circulate within and chill them in operation. Yerby's laser bolt had blown a fist-sized hole in the outer jacket of the nearest nozzle. If it was used again, the uncooled metal would vaporize in a bright green flash.

  The fifth and last jeep skidded to a stop. The Zenith officers were already aboard. The last pair of surveyors ran up the ramp as it lifted.

  "I think," Yerby said in satisfaction, "we'd best put a little distance between us and them. They're going to tear up the landscape just as bad leaving as they did when they arrived."

  Mark's knees were suddenly so weak that he thought he was going to fall down. He didn't, but he was thankful for Amy's help as he climbed onto the flyer's saddle.

  10. Party Time

  Where floodlights on the eaves of the Bannock house illuminated the ground, two fiddles and a locally made double bass played tunes for several dozen dancers. Only about half the couples were a man with a woman. A number of men (far in the majority at the gathering) pirouetted by themselves.

  At the other end of the courtyard, vocal music wailed moodily from a recorder with over a thousand songs loaded into its memory. The selection keypad didn't work, so the unit repeated over and over a Zenith hit from twenty years before, "Apartment House Heart."

  Mark sat on a shed's flat roof, watching the festivities. Eighty or a hundred people ate, danced, and drank—especially drank—in general good fellowship. Flyers and dirigibles in profusion sat on the slopes surrounding the compound.

  Folk had gathered spontaneously at the Bannock compound in the aftermath of running the surveyors off. Those who'd been present in Dagmar's soybeans bragged about their heroism to neighbors come too late to take part.

  "Does this happen often?" Mark said to Amy beside him. "I'd thought life on the frontier would be, well, lonely."

  "There's more of a community here than there is in a Kilbourn neighborhood," Amy said. "They must have come from a hundred miles around, though. Yerby's grant is fifty miles square—that's twenty-five hundred square miles. Most of the neighbors have big tracts too."

  The impromptu party would go on at least overnight. The majority of visitors had come in flyers that couldn't take off again until daybreak. Most of the dirigibles had battery backup for their solar collectors, but navigation across the nighted landscape was too chancy to attempt without need.

  "I suppose that'll change when Greenwood gets settled," Mark said. "Funny that more people means less fellowship."

  He couldn't help sounding sad. It wasn't that folk here were friendly, exactly. Yerby and Dagmar had obviously had their differences over boundary lines, for example. Nevertheless, the two grant holders were members of a single community. Mark was sure that Dagmar would have come equally fast to Yerby's aid in a crisis.

  "Do you think that Greenwood has to be settled like Kilbourn, then?" Amy asked. "I think what Yerby's talking about is perfectly possible. There's a practically infinite number of human habitable planets, so why should any one of them have more than, say, ten thousand residents?"

  "Yeah, I agree," Mark said. "But how are you going to keep people from settling? You heard those Zeniths today. They were surveying for a planned community of fifty thousand. So long as somebody can make a fortune by putting up housing for immigrant drafts from Earth, that's what he's going to do. Maybe the immigrants would be happier scattered in little communities of a hundred or so like here, but that's not the way the planners in Paris arrange things."

  "Maybe it's time for Paris to stop making the arrangements," Amy said.

  "There's enough people on Quelhagen saying that the Protector's only in charge because she's got a couple thousand troops," Mark said. "But she does have the troops."

  Dr. Jesilind walked by the shed, peering at the faces of the folk he passed. Mark held himself very still, hoping Jesilind would continue on. With the same thought in her mind, Amy pulled her dangling legs up onto the roof.

  The motion drew Jesilind's attention. "Ah, there you are, Amy!" he said. "And, ah, Mr. Maxwell."

  The shed was seven feet high in front, where Mark and Amy sat, though it slanted lower in the back. The doctor mentally measured the effort needed to mount, then decided to remain where he was. "I'd been hoping to find you," he said. "Amy, could I bring you refreshment?"

  The trio began to play "Jimmie Crack Corn." The bass had a remarkably pure resonance for an instrument that looked as crude as a packing crate. The dancers formed for a reel, regardless of the sex of their pairings. More spectators joined the circle, many of them holding drinking jars of Bannock whiskey in one hand.

  Amy's fingers drummed on the edge of the roof, a ridged plate of cellulose plastic rather than boards of raw wood that would need shingles to be rainproof. "No thank you," she said. She turned her face deliberately toward Mark and continued their discussion with, "If Greenwood had its own government, it could limit density of development."

  "That's a fine idea, but it won't work, dear girl," Jesilind said from beneath them. The doctor's voice made it clear that he understood law and government. Amy was simply naive. "Since Mr. Maxwell and your brother failed in their mission to get troops from Dittersdorf—"

  Mark stiffened. He didn't speak.

  "—the only government Greenwood's going to get is some flunky from the Zenith bureaucracy. According to Yerby, the surveyors today said the investor they were working for was the Vice-Protector of Zenith. I don't imagine he's going to appoint a vicar who'll limit immigration."

  "I didn't have to hear Yerby," Amy said. "I was there, Doctor. While you were no doubt at your studies."

  "Amy," Mark said. He'd decided to ignore Jesilind's comments. "I agree with you, but people just don't do things the way they ought to."

  "We'd better start doing things the way we ought to," Amy snapped. "Because if it's mankind versus the universe, Mark, the universe is going to win sooner or later! We can't just go on turning every planet we settle into a garbage dump."

  "Well, Yerby's going to put in a package system," Mark said to soothe her. He didn't disagree with Amy, but he didn't see any point in getting worked up about what couldn't be changed.

  A woman peered closely at the recorder and began hammering at the keypad to get it to play another song. "Apartment House Heart" continued, but the singer's rich tenor voice shifted upward into a cheeping falsetto.

  "Amy dear," Jesilind said, "this is a frontier. You can't expect people to be as delicate as the residents of a settled world like you're used to on Kilbourn."

  "Did you look at the downwind side of the Spiker when we took off in the blimp?" Amy said bitterly. "There's a stockyard there. People drive herds to the port and slaughter them as outgoing cargo. They just let the blood and waste drain into the river."

  "Yeah, I saw that," Mark agreed unhappily.

  "Regrettable no doubt," said Jesilind, "but folk living so close to the edge of raw nature have no surplus for civilized amenities. Why, they can't even afford to pay a medical man properly."

  "Hey, lookee there!" bellowed a man standing on the upper deck of the house. "Look east!"

  He pointed. The bright lights directly above him threw the harsh shadow of his outstretched arm across the dancers in the courtyard. "There's aircars coming! Zeniths coming back, I'll bet you!"

  A good score of the Greenwoods hopped the low courtyard wall and trotted—sometimes staggered; a lot of Bannock whiskey had gone down the hatch—toward the vehicles in which they'd come. Folk hadn't brought guns into a neighbor's compound, but most had come armed when they answered Dagmar's appeal. Those hunti
ng weapons were strapped to the flyers' decks or racked in the cabins of dirigibles.

  Apart from that, the crowd didn't appear to be much concerned. People moved to where the house and other structures didn't block their view of the oncoming cars.

  Mark hopped down and offered a hand to Amy. Dr. Jesilind had vanished into the house. Perhaps it would have been better to say that except for him the crowd didn't appear to be much concerned.

  "Let's find Yerby," Amy said. "I saw him dancing."

  The aircars approached a hundred feet in the air. Their multicolored running lights glittered like Christmas ornaments, and a great floodlight in the bow of each vehicle slanted its beam down onto the treetops.

  "They're so quiet," Amy murmured as she led Mark through the milling guests.

  "I guess they are," he agreed. It hadn't occurred to him that the ducted fans' muted whine was in any way unusual. The racket made by the rented car on Dittersdorf would have been unthinkable on Quelhagen or Earth. Kilbourn, for all the Bannocks' talk of the planet being built-up and civilized, obviously didn't have strict ordinances against noise pollution.

  The cars hovered above the compound. Downwash from their powerful fans swirled dust and light objects. Folk moved naturally to the edges of the courtyard and let the vehicles settle.

  Yerby was coming out of the house when Mark and Amy met him. He'd put on a green cloth coat with fur lapels. The fabric shimmered and sparkled in the light. Mark didn't recall ever in his life having seen an uglier garment.

  "Hey Yerby!" a man called. "What do you want us to do?" Forty others muttered agreement.

  "Yerby, the aircars are Quelhagen manufacture," Mark said. He shouted to be heard. He had to push a man away to keep the press of locals from blocking him.

  Yerby gestured the crowd aside and put his big arms protectively around the shoulders of his sister and Mark. "Thank you, lad," he said. "I'd have guessed they were Zeniths. Well, anybody's welcome at my house if he knows how to behave. Let's us go talk to them."

  The cars were big eight-person enclosed vehicles. There were built on similar chassis, but one of them had utilitarian appointments while the other was a limousine. The latter had panels of inlaid wood and its metalwork was plated with wavy bands of gold and platinum. Metal itself hadn't been of any particular value since space travel brought asteroids within reach, but workmanship like this aircar's had never been cheap.

  The plain vehicle's doors popped open first. The first three men to exit wore beige uniforms. They trotted to the limousine to open the doors. Four guards in Quelhagen business dress followed the flunkies. They held fat, two-handed weapons of some sort. Their initial intention was probably to look tough. Mark grinned to see their bravado wilt when they took in the frontiersmen—and women—surrounding them; The guards looked like boats ringed by rocky cliffs.

  "'Tain't polite to carry a gun into another fellow's place unasked," Desiree Bannock said, stepping up to the nearest guard. She had a voice that would cut glass. "Where were you raised, anyhow?"

  She seized the gun. The man holding it resisted. Desiree kneed him between the legs. "That's the spirit, Desiree!" another woman shouted drunkenly.

  Desiree tossed the gun into the vehicle and eyed the other guards. They quickly obeyed the unspoken demand.

  A fussy-looking official got out of the front of the limousine while two men and a woman of obvious wealth were handed from the back by the uniformed servants. The official said—to Yerby; when Yerby was present, he was the focus of most attention, "my principals have come to meet with Mr. Yerby Bannock. Please have the goodness to summon him."

  "If your principals can't speak for themselves, they came a danged long way for nothing, didn't they?" Yerby said. The official wore a little round-brimmed hat. Yerby tweaked it down over the man's eyes and turned to the wealthy folk. "You lot are from Quelhagen, I hear. Who are you?"

  The trio looked nonplussed. One of the guards started forward. A Greenwood put a hand on the guard's shoulder, swung him around, and offered him a jar with six ounces of raw whiskey.

  "Madame, gentlemen," Mark said with a crisp nod, "you'll appreciate that Quelhagen caste distinctions are out of place on Greenwood." He smiled. He could hear his father in his mind, forming the words that Mark only had to speak. "Furthermore, you realize that you've intruded uninvited on a man's home and at the very least owe him a prompt explanation."

  "I'm Elector Daniels," said the man who appeared to be in his late fifties. "This is Ms. Macey—"

  The woman bobbed her head in formal politeness. The Macey family's various branches accounted for up to ten percent of Quelhagen's net planetary worth.

  "—and Mr. Holperin." Holperin was a little older than Daniels. He had a nose like a knife blade and steel-hard eyes. "We landed two days ago at Wanker's Doodle and came to here to meet Mr. Bannock when we heard reports of today's events."

  "They couldn't have come from the Doodle in no more time than that!" a Greenwood said in amazement. Wanker's Doodle was the community four hundred miles to the northwest of the Spiker. It was the only other port on Greenwood with both a full-sized magnetic mass and an automated ground-control transponder for hands-off landings.

  Mark knew that aircars like these could have made the run in an hour and a bit if the drivers pushed, as they surely had. The trio must have brought the vehicles with them. The cost would be enormous, but it bought the Quelhagens a mobility unmatched by anybody else on the planet.

  "Well, you met me," Yerby said. He stuck his thumbs under his waistband and stood with his arms akimbo. He wasn't exactly being hostile, but he wanted the outsiders to be very clear of his superior status.

  Mark glanced at the crowd around him. He'd only been on Greenwood a few days, but he didn't feel like an outsider. To the local people he was Yerby Bannock's friend, and that was as honorable a status as any on a planet where equality was the universal religion.

  These folk from Quelhagen must have thought they'd just arrived in Hell's waiting room, though. The Greenwoods were rough men mixed with a few women who could only told apart by their lack of beards. All of them had been drinking; most were drunk by Quelhagen standards, and a fair number of those closest were armed. The locals were dressed crudely (or outlandishly, which was even worse to the muted taste of Quelhagen aristocrats), and the overhead lighting threw harsh shadows across their faces.

  The official whose job was to arrange protocol hadn't spoken since Yerby pulled his cap down. "Can we go somewhere private?" Ms. Macey said doubtfully. She looked as if she would have dived back into the car if she'd thought there was a chance of escaping from the compound.

  "Madame, sirs," Mark said. "You're in no danger, I assure you. You're just an interesting exhibit, is all."

  "Yerby," said Amy decisively, "why don't we take our guests into the house? They'd probably like something other than whiskey to drink after their journey."

  "Hmpf!" Yerby snorted. "Nothing wrong with my whiskey. But sure, you folks come in the parlor with us."

  He turned to the crowd in general and bellowed, "Boys, make sure the rest of our guests see what Greenwood hospitality's like. I don't want nobody sober enough to stand come dawn."

  The locally hand-crafted furnishings in most rooms of the Bannock house were solid, tasteful, and to Mark's mind extremely attractive. He suspected he could export similar pieces to Quelhagen and sell them at a profit despite the transportation cost.

  The parlor alone was furnished entirely with off-planet material. No two pieces were of the same style. Most of the furniture was badly copied from Terran antiques. On three of the four walls hung holoprints of fantasy castles. Yerby was so proud of the parlor's imported splendor that there was no possibility that he would bring his foreign guests anywhere else.

  Yerby probably didn't notice the way the visitors blinked as they walked into the parlor, but Mark did. He cringed in embarrassment for an instant before he realized that neither he nor anybody else in the room had a right to sne
er at Yerby Bannock. Yerby's taste was his own business.

  Yerby opened an extruded-plastic reproduction of a Queen Anne sideboard and displayed a double row of imported liquors. "Name your poison!" he said expansively to the Quelhagens.

  "Actually, we had refreshments on the flight from Wanker's Doodle," Elector Daniels said. "If you're Mr. Yerby Bannock, we have a business proposition to discuss privately."

  "I'm him," Yerby said. He took a glass for himself, picked a bottle of Chartreuse—apparently for the color—and poured. "That's my sister Amy—she's part owner here, so don't just take her for a girl—"

  Amy and Ms. Macey both stiffened as though they'd been goosed by broomsticks.

  Yerby didn't notice. He seemed surprised at how thick the liqueur was. "And the lad's Mark Maxwell, my legal advisor. He's a Quelhagen like you are."

  Dr. Jesilind opened the door from the hallway and peered at the gathering. He'd just decided the room was safe to enter when Amy deliberately slammed and locked the panel. Yerby raised an eyebrow, but he didn't comment on his sister's action.

  "Would that be Mark Lucius-son Maxwell?" Mr. Holperin asked. "Pardon me for a personal question."

  Mark bowed. "That's correct, sir," he said. "Perhaps you're acquainted with my father?"

  "He was representing the other party in a contract dispute," Holperin said with a wintry smile. "A most excellent attorney, your father. He cost me a great deal of money."

  He bowed to Mark in turn.

  "Money's what we're here about," Daniels said, taking charge of the discussion, "We represent the investment group that owns Greenwood. The undeveloped portion of Greenwood, that is."

  "You're the owners of the base grants issued by Protector Greenwood?" Mark clarified. He wasn't any sort of legal advisor, but he could translate Daniels's language into terms Yerby understood.

  "Yes, we bought the undivided tracts over a number of years," Daniels agreed. "The value of the investment should have risen sharply now that Greenwood is ripe for large-scale immigration. Recent Zenith agitation clouds our title, however."