Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds (3 page)

Alacrity whirled instantly, without bothering to wonder how they'd rigged the displayer. The crowd was ringing him in. No cops were in sight.

An old woman came forward, her face gaunt and loose-skinned—smoothing collagen treatments were not for the Terran masses—but her eyes vigorous with hatred. As the lieutenant had, she spat at him, a pitifully weak attempt, the spittle barely clearing her lips. Somewhere behind her, a man yelled in vehement Terranglish, "You're not getting away that easily,
alien
!"

There were snarls of agreement, an unintelligible shout or two. Alacrity put his shoulders up against the wall of the station. On the peacers' HQ a displayer now read: temporarily unmanned—use emergency com-box. He wasn't surprised to see that the security monitors were dimmed and motionless, deactivated.

A snarley-ball sailed out of the crowd in his direction, as did a bottle. The bottle was no trouble to dodge; he'd been star-trained. But the snarley-ball, used by naturalists and hunters on many worlds to snare small game, exploded into a puff-sphere of wavering, sticky streamers.

Alacrity ducked as the blossoming, translucent strands drifted toward him, scooped up the fallen bottle, and underhanded it into the snarley-ball. Attracted by microfields, the adhesive streamers gathered around, enfolding it. The snarley-ball looked like a feeding anemone.

The cloud of strands was carried to the dust by the weight of the bottle, and Alacrity kept clear of it, as did the crowd, but still it hemmed him in.

They taunted and jeered him in the same language the peacers had used. He evaluated his chances of charging back up the road or plunging into the undergrowth, but decided that neither plan held much promise. The locals were used to the terrain and altitude. And even if they didn't run him down, he had nowhere to go.

So he stood erect, facing them. They froze, suspicious, hands curled into claws or balled fists, or clutching makeshift weapons. He swung his gaze around the arc of angry faces.

"I've done nothing wrong. Why would I want to come light-years and light-years just to desecrate your sacred places? And alone, and unarmed? Does that make sense to anybody here?"

They'd heard him out, but showed no belief or inclination to listen further. The tallest among them, a burly man with thinning, sandy hair, hefting an excavator in two huge hands, took a step toward him.

Alacrity reconsidered running for it. He'd been in quite a number of hand-to-hand combats, had lost what he considered to be far too many of them, and hated the possibility of having that happen again.

The Earther gave an upswing of his head, pointing at the breakabout with his chin, to address him.

"We have heard from … we've heard what you did. We
know
."

"Someone misled you. Who told you these lies?"

"
You're the liar, alien
!" the man grated.

"Alien?
Alien
?"
Alacrity roared, as much for fury at the unbelievable stupidity of the word as in reaction to the danger of the moment. "I'm as human as you are! I paid a small fortune for this jaunt; I fought your hidebound Earthservice for weeks for my visa! Who would do that just to desecrate
his own
ancestors' birthworld
?"

They still showed him their resentment and malice, but held back from attacking. He took a step away from the wall, then another. It was like being in the eye of a hurricane, and for a moment the breakabout and many others there thought that violence had been averted. Then a stone was hurled by someone to his left. Alacrity caught the forward sweep of the thrower's arm, just at the edge of his peripheral vision.

He threw himself sideways, and the missile glanced off the station. A wiry, crazed-looking Earther darted toward him and clawed at the breakabout's wraparound glasses. They went flying as Alacrity shoved the man away. His burning glare held the others at bay. "You blind, idiotic damned Earthers!"

A low sound of shock and amazement went through them; he realized that they could see his eyes.

The words were muttered:
alien; offworlder.
He gazed at them with wide, oblique eyes, their huge irises an unearthly, radiant yellow streaked with red and black.
"Mutant!"
he heard.
"Freak!"

Then they were closing in on him. The excavator raised, the tall man advanced. "Earth is for
humans

!"
he said harshly. The implement hissed through the air.

Alacrity bobbed, leaning away. The Terran's weight and the momentum of the swing carried him off balance; Alacrity helped him along with a shove.

Terran hatred of non-Earthers had been nurtured by Earthservice psychprop and by the hardships and deprivations of the two centuries following the Human-Srillan War. Earth, which had only remained livable by accepting the charity of other worlds, was humiliated by their condescension. And so the Homeworld had withdrawn into galled isolationism and brooding nostalgia for its vanished glories.

With an assortment of shrieks, gnashing of teeth, and various obscenities, the crowd closed in on Alacrity, fanning out to forestall his escape. They inched toward the breakabout warily, having seen that he was quick.

Alacrity straightened all at once and, ripping open a compartment in his bag, jammed his hand in, groping. He plucked out a metallic object, a thing of tarnished metal with a tubular barrel and bell-like mouth.

"All right, just get back," he ordered menacingly, "or I'll blow the whole sad lot of you into dog fodder, or whatever the phrase is!"

They wavered, intimidated by his tone and manner, and the lethal, dull shine of the object he held. But the wiry man yelled, "They told us he wouldn't be armed! It's a trick!" and whipped a jimbo-wrench at the offworlder, who managed to evade it. Alacrity's hand squeezed convulsively on the object it held, which filled the air with a soulful honk!

Alacrity smiled in a sickly fashion, lowering the antique automobile horn he'd managed to persuade an old woman on Pitcaim Island to sell to him. He'd hoped to be able to take it offworld with him. The wiry man charged Alacrity, as did his neighbors, bashing and belaboring the offworlder. Many of them got in one another's way, and one even became entangled in the strands of the fallen snarley-ball.

The remainder, though, swung and kicked at him, reaching for handholds, dragging at him. He bucked and spun, hammered and kicked, trying to plunge free. One of the villagers landed a blow squarely to his back, a young woman of considerable beauty with heavy, blue-black hair and high cheekbones. She wielded a forced-air excavating tube with some skill. He lurched, nearly falling.

Two more tried to pile on to bring him down. They only succeeded in pulling away his shoulder bag and serape and ripping down Alacrity's hood.

Seeing his hair, some of them cried out in surprise and even greater wrath. It was long and thick, growing in slate-gray waves, shot through with silver strands. It grew halfway down his spine, like a mane. The mob took it as further proof of his nonhumaness, and redoubled its zeal.

The wiry man ran at him again. Alacrity somehow freed a hand to keep the fellow at bay with a fistful of his own uniform. Fumbling, the Terran, brought up a force-probe, its tip crackling with a full charge.

The breakabout chopped at the wrist holding it, missed, and spun as he was borne to the ground by the combined weight and efforts of the Earthers. The writhing mass turned as it went down; the force-probe spat and sizzled as it struck the left side of a tall, sandy-haired man.

He screamed as the probe flared and blazed. Alacrity struck the plaza's surface with a thud, but heard the sounds. Then a fist struck his cheek a glancing blow, and another skimmed by his right ear. Boots, sandals, and bare feet thumped at him as he did his best to protect himself. People threw themselves across his legs to immobilize him, and then he heard the faraway chirpers of the Peaceguardians jarring the air.

The wiry man was still trying to reach Alacrity's chest with the force-probe, but the breakabout yanked a hand free and slammed the heel of it up under his chin, then chopped at his throat. As the Earther fell aside, the chop missed and the black-haired woman came into view again, raising her forced-air tube high. The peacers' chirpers were nearer, sounding at ear-splitting intensity.

Alacrity somehow deflected the woman's blow, and she lost her footing, toppling toward him.

Through the gap in the melee, he saw for an instant part of the station's displayer: terra for terrans. These less-than-animals were welcome to it, as far as Alacrity was concerned.

When the young woman clawed at his face, he gripped her to him in a clumsy headlock, causing her neighbors to relent in their attack, fearful of hitting her. He took the opportunity to knee the wiry man in the jaw.

Then, as if by divine intervention, the peacers were at the outskirts of the brawl, breaking it up, pulling people away. But before they could work their way in to Alacrity, a youth, practically a boy, brought a millennia-old mean stone pestle, a smooth stub of rock, down on the breakabout's head.

CHAPTER 2—THE CHOSEN

The message had been etched into a rock at the side of the pressbounded roadway by some anonymous cyclist now generations dead: 2 km upgrade.

Sweating over the randonneur handlebars, Floyt didn't let it deceive him; he'd pedaled the route before and knew that the warning was nearly a full kilometer shy of the mark. An error or a bit of mischief by one of the ancients; that, or the lay of the land had been changed when the Srillans brought havoc to Terra in their final raid, two hundred years before.

Lowering his head, Floyt settled into a practiced, determined cadence, the muscles of his legs working easily even though he was tired from a long afternoon's tour. It was the first time he'd gotten to do any cycling in two months.

Having slept later than intended on his precious rec-day, he'd expected to find only tired, leftover bikes remaining at the Earthservice Recreation Bureau substation. Not at all interested in the sport, he'd forgotten that everyone who could get to a screen or projector was watching the Earthwide Soccer Cup game (Antarctica vs. Truk Islands, a grudge match).

So Floyt had been able to check out a gleaming new machine, a true joyride; he'd changed from his planned route, an easy one, to a challenging afternoon's travel.

The incline grew more pronounced and his breathing harder as he churned up the hill. The road was better than most, uncracked and therefore uncluttered by weeds or grass, even though rural highways received no maintenance from Earthservice. Little surface travel took place between population centers, except for a few hikers and cyclists, amateur naturalists, and similar eccentrics.

Floyt was just over 175 centimeters tall, rather stocky, with green eyes and the powerful legs of a lifelong bicyclist. He had close-trimmed brown hair and beard, with a good deal of gray in both. He wore cycling shoes, shorts, and singlet, with safety helmet and fingerless gloves. He was not known for standing out in a crowd.

The perspiration seeped down from his sweatband, into the scabs covering the scrapes on his cheek and temple put there by Arlo Mote during a party two days earlier. Mote worked in the same data management center with Balensa, Floyt's contracted spouse—Floyt preferred the ancient term "wife," but it was very much out of vogue just then—and was a Hemingway revivicist, the most ardent and overbearing Floyt had ever met.

Floyt's leg muscles began to complain at the workout he was giving them, but he persisted. Cycling was the only real exercise he got, his only chance to push his body to its limits and get in some solitary thinking time. He dug in, pressing down on a pedal with one foot, lifting against a toe clip with the other, then reversing the procedure. Though he'd resolved not to think about it, his mind strayed back to the fight two days ago at the data center's semiannual rapport/morale mixer. Balensa had insisted that Floyt accompany her to what had actually started out as a rather modest affair. Nevertheless, Arlo Mote and a few other buffs had come costumed as their chosen personae, a not uncommon practice on preterist Earth.

Only a few light intoxicants were served; no limited-use drugs or severe mood-alterers. Still, Mote had somehow contrived to become belligerently drunk. Dressed in ersatz safari clothing, he'd paid elaborate attention to Balensa, quoting Papa's writings at some length, with a good deal of slurring, as though they were his own.

Mote lived in a role-playing commune centered on the "Lost Generation" between the first two world wars. The commune provided activities and facilities to the Earthservice Rec Bureau on a part-time basis; Mote was involved in many of the dramatic reenactments and roundtables, and Floyt supposed that that gave the man a certain romantic patina in the workplace. Balensa herself had been raised in an extended-family/academic-group concentrating on the Italian Renaissance; occasionally she alluded to the great passion in her soul.

Floyt had already concluded that some of it had been vented in Mote's direction but, in his easygoing way, made no issue of it. Overreaction in such a situation was frowned upon by Terran society in general and Earthservice psych-counselors and Peaceguardians in particular. Floyt was surprised at the intensity of the resentment he'd had to suppress, though.

But at length even the good manners and restraint required by the close quarters in which most Terrans lived had worn thin. Objecting to Mote's pawing of Balensa, Floyt reflected that it was too bad he couldn't mail the ersatz Hemingway a gun, so that the man could consummate his impersonation by blowing his brains out.

Coming up the long hill toward the crest, legs trembling, Floyt felt satisfaction in the fatigue he'd worked up, but the memory of the fight still made him wince.

Mote had further goaded him with barely veiled insults to his avocation, the tracing of genealogies.

More, the man had provoked him with what was ostensibly a manly embrace, but in reality a humiliating mauling, and everyone there understood it.

Mote's revivicism had led him into antisocial behavior; it also sparked, in some fashion, a like response from the usually mild-mannered Floyt. It was as if some Terran ancient out of his genealogies were reacting, rather than Floyt himself.