Rebellion (14 page)

“I must tell you now, however, that a grave danger to our mutual well-being on this world has forced upon us the need for drastic and far-reaching action. The Xenophobes, which have begun surfacing at diverse points on Eridu, threaten to destroy the Hegemony colonies on this world and render moot such relatively minor questions as how to administer an autonomous republic within the Hegemony, or whether or not it would be wise to terraform the planet.…”

“Kuso,”
Creighton said. “Old Oh-my-gosh’s been dangling that ‘autonomous republic’ carrot in front of our noses for a couple of months now.”

“Quiet, please,” Sinclair said. “Listen.…”

“Now is the time to drop our differences,” Omigato continued. “We are faced with an alien plague, a danger that threatens dissident and loyalist, Imperial and Hegemony colonist alike. Acting in my capacity as representative for His Majesty the Emperor himself, I have this date directed that nuclear weapons be released for use against deep concentrations of Xenophobes identified underground in the area near Karnak. The operation has already been carried out and has been judged a complete success.

“However, for the common safety of the citizens of the Euphrates Valley, I am directing that an evacuation program be started, effective seven days from now. Special refugee centers are being constructed now at sites closer to Winchester, where Hegemony and Imperial forces can offer full and complete protection from these enemies of Humankind.…”

“My God,” Simone said, her eyes very wide. “They’re actually going to do it.”

“That’s always been our biggest worry here,” Sinclair explained to Katya and the other Thorhammers. “That the Imperials might use the Xenos as an excuse to exert more control over the populace. Since the first Xeno surfaced here a few months ago, there’s been talk about bringing in depth charges, and the need to relocate large parts of the population for their own protection.”

“They didn’t do that on Loki,” Katya pointed out.

“Loki’s population isn’t as dispersed as Eridu’s,” Schneider said. His face looked gray, and his voice was weak, as though he was having trouble getting the words out. “And here… here those weapons are aimed at the people as much as at the Xenophobes. Excuse me.” Abruptly, he rose and left the room.

“You have to understand,” Simone said quietly after he’d gone. “His daughter is stationed in Winchester. With a Hegemony strider unit. This… this latest declaration almost certainly means war, and he’s wondering if he’s going to be meeting his own daughter in combat.”

“I still don’t understand,” Katya said. “Nukes worked against the Xenos on Loki. What’s the problem here?”

“The Imperials’ biggest worry on Eridu isn’t the cities so much as it is the little outlying communities, the places where the Heggers can’t maintain control.” Sinclair’s eyes flicked to Creighton, who was sitting at the table with his hands folded before him. “Places like where Vince’s wife is hiding. The nuclear option gives them the excuse they need to eliminate that problem. They’ll call for all the outlying plantations and towns to be shut down… ‘for the duration of the emergency.’ The populations will be transferred to camps ‘for their own safety’ and interned in some sort of protective area.”

“How do you know this?” Hagan asked.

“We’ve seen the plans,” Simone said.

“And Simone should know,” Creighton added. “This is the lady who hacked them from HEMILCOM’s Babylon AI files.” He shook his head slowly. “If they pull this off, we’ll never be free of ’em. It’ll be rules and regulations, ‘Where’s your internal passport?’ and ‘Let me see your link ID.’ ”

“Do any of you know what it’s like in the big metroplexes on Earth?” Sinclair asked.

Katya nodded. “Dev—Lieutenant Cameron—was from BosWash,” she said. “He told me about them.”

“Then you know about the system that feeds and houses the majority of Terra’s population.” He sighed. “Sometimes I think that the government wants nothing more than to reduce the entire human race to
fukushi.
Put every man, woman, and child on social welfare. Take care of all their needs. Give them free implants so they can work and pay taxes and stay happily linked to their sims. Feed them, educate them, entertain them. Number them, watch them, tax them,
control
them.”

“I guess the control part follows, huh?” Bondevik asked. “If the population depends on you for everything—for food, security, whatever—then you’ve got them right where you want them.”

“Government thrives by growing at the individual’s expense,” Sinclair said. “Unless it’s pruned back from time to time, the state’s power only grows. That’s what the New Constitutionalists are all about. We’re gardeners.”

“Unfortunately, many people prefer the security offered by the state,” Lee Chung said. “They don’t want… pruning.”

“We have no argument with those billions on Earth happily vegetating in their metroplex towers,” Sinclair said. He was speaking quickly now, the anger sharp in his words. “We
do
object to the Hegemony telling us how to run our lives, harassing our citizens, demanding ever bigger bites of our lives, of our
souls.
No government as ponderous as the Hegemony can speak on behalf of all of the citizens living in one small nation or colony. To try to force one government on every citizen on seventy-eight worlds is absurd, a monstrous exercise in applied megalomania. What does some bureaucrat in Singapore Orbital know about me living out on New America, about how I live, about what I think of ViRdrama sex or the Imperial cult or how I want my kids educated? Damn it, he
can’t
know, and he has no business putting his nose in my affairs.”

His vehemence surprised Katya. Sinclair’s reputation was that of a philosopher—quiet, studied, rational, perhaps a little on the eccentric side. But he was visibly furious now.

“You’re still going to have a hell of a time getting most people to understand that,” Lee said. “Or getting them to care.”

“Fortunately,” Sinclair said, “revolutions don’t involve
most people.
At least, not at the beginning.…”

Later, Katya and the others were taken on a tour of the underground facilities, and they met some of the people living there. Katya was frankly astonished at the range of people joined together under the rather all-inclusive banner of the Eriduan Network.

On Eridu, the environmentalist movement had been the catalyst for rebellion, but there were as many different approaches and agendas to what they perceived as Eridu’s problems as there were groups advocating them. Over a year before, the Hegemony had first announced the plan to terraform Eridu, promising a world of abundance where breathing masks wouldn’t be needed for out-of-doors, where homesteaders could live where they wanted without being forced to huddle together in transplas domes. The plan had generated a bewildering melee of envie and dissie factions.

One group, the Scientific Rationalists, suggested that studies be undertaken to find a means of helping the Eriduan ecology adapt to changing conditions, genetic nangineering on a planetary scale. Several offshoots of the old Green Party held that Man had no moral right to interfere with an alien ecology simply because it was different. Universal Life held that view and added that even tampering with prebiotic worlds like Loki was robbing whole worlds of their evolutionary destinies. They suggested that Man should restrict himself to totally dead worlds with the heat, gravity, and water appropriate to human settlement—rare—or to planets like New America that were more or less compatible to Terran biochemistry—rarer still. Perhaps most extreme were the Weberites, named for their founder, who advocated a wholesale return to Earth, with the Imperium footing the bill. Man had never been meant, they insisted, to spread beyond the boundaries of the perfect blue world created by God for Man.

The environmentalists might have started the dissident movement on Eridu, but the issue had grown far beyond environmentalist concerns. Fungus prospectors and grennel harvesters feared that there would be no more work with the wholesale extinction of Eriduan life. Antimonopolist activists pointed out that terraforming Eridu would grant more power to Japanese space-based industries, which disliked competition from nonsynthesized raw materials imported from worlds like Eridu and New America. Anti-Hegemonists feared greater control over private lives, while every Eriduan colonist feared the higher taxes that would be levied to pay for planetary engineering. Large segments of the populations at Eridu’s north and south poles pointed out that a reduction of planetary temperatures might well bring on extensive glaciation, even an ice age, and force the migration of most of the population to warmer, ice-free zones. A few doomsayers pointed out that glaciation would lock up all of Eridu’s limited surface water and divide the planet between ice caps and barren desert.

“It’s amazing that so many different factions have found a home with you,” Katya told Sinclair. They were walking along one of the Babel Underground’s tunnels. “You can’t possibly keep all of them happy.”

“We’re not in the business of making people happy with us, Katya. It just happens that, no matter what their background, all of these groups see the same problem—the government. The Confederation doesn’t promise to make things better, but it does promise to let them have a crack at fixing what they think is broke. Ah! Listen!”

They stopped in the passageway, and Katya could hear music. Sinclair gestured toward an open door farther along the passageway and she stepped through, entering a large circular room that had been made over into a lounge.

Perhaps thirty men and women were gathered there, most of them young. They sat in a circle around a woman with somewhat Amerind features, straight black hair, blue eyes, and a red headband. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor and she was playing a mentar, its curved sounding board resting in her lap as her hand caressed the slick black glossiness of an implant ’face. Music danced and wavered in the air, weaving chords and rhythms called from the woman’s mind through her link with the instrument.

Those in the room seemed linked as well, though not physically. Their voices blended with the mentar’s as they sang along. Katya recognized the tune at once, an old, old folk song she’d known on New America and not heard for years.

Worlds grow old and suns grow cold

And death we never can doubt.

Time’s cold wind, wailing down the pass,

Reminds us that all flesh is grass

And history’s lamps blow out.

But the Eagle has landed. Tell your children when.

Time won’t drive us down to dust again.

“It’s called ‘Hope Eyrie,’ ” Sinclair murmured during the bridge between verses. “Know it?” Katya nodded, listening.

Cycles turn while the far stars burn,

And people and planets age.

Life’s crown passes to younger lands,

Time brushes dust of hope from his hands

And turns another page.

But the Eagle has landed. Tell your children when.

Time won’t drive us down to dust again.

But we who feel the weight of the wheel

When winter falls over our world

Can hope for tomorrow and raise our eyes

To a silver moon in the opened skies

And a single flag unfurled.

For the Eagle has landed. Tell your children when.

Time won’t drive us down to dust again.

The people in the room singing along or listening seemed totally caught up in the music. Katya saw several faces, men’s and women’s alike, with wet eyes. Chung was in the group, she noticed, nodding with the beat, and Hagan too, a far-off smile on his lips.

One of the handful of popular folk classics surviving since the earliest days of space exploration, “Hope Eyrie” was popular on New America, where something like sixty percent of the population was descended from American colonists. In haunting, minor chords it recalled both the glory of Apollo and the bitterness of lost opportunity.

Irrationally, the song tugged at old memories, making her almost homesick. Her Ukrainian mother, years before, had told her a story about “Hope Eyrie,” how translated first into Russian, then into Polish, it had become an underground song for
Solidarnosc,
a revolutionary underground in late twentieth-century Europe very much like the Network. The Eagle, she gathered, had been a totem of powerful nationalistic imagery for the Poles.

We know well what life can tell:

If you would not perish, then grow.

And today our fragile flesh and steel

Have laid their hands on a vaster wheel

With all of the stars to know

That the Eagle has landed. Tell your children when.

Time won’t drive us down to dust again.

From all who tried out of history’s tide.

Salute for the team that won.

And the old Earth smiles at her children’s reach.

The wave that carried us up the beach

To reach for the shining sun.

For the Eagle has landed. Tell your children when.

Time won’t drive us down to dust again.

There was no applause when the last chord sparkled into silence, only a long, collective sigh. “That piece has a very special meaning for Americans,” Sinclair told Katya in a low voice. “I suppose it reminds us that
we
were first, before the Japanese, before the Terran Hegemony. We were great once. We will be again.”