21

 

"They know you. So you go first,” the thin, brown man, whose three names, Amory Eliot Neave, lettered across his chest betrayed lineage as much as the sigil he wore, told the Alliance marshal. Nodding brusque thanks, Becker strode down the Amherst's ramp before the smoke from ground cover ignited by the ship's landing could spin away to nothing. The woman behind Neave himself, a tall, pale virago from Abendstern, hissed under her breath as Neave gave him the precedence. But she was as well trained as the other Secess’ in the mixed crew, and neither fidgeted nor protested, not by so much as an indignant, choked-off “Sir!"

Even the smoky air was better than that on board ship, Neave thought as he watched Becker blink through the thinning smoke. He was probably trying to recognize in the small, shabby crowd circling the ship the people he had left here: Project Seedcorn. The Secess’ woman's eyes bored into his back as they had for the entire trip.

Only the Secess’ training—and the Alliance's—had kept former enemies from tearing apart the ship they now shared. The Secess’ had emphasized military virtues. And the Alliance, of necessity, had stressed discipline. Both sides had succeeded far too well. That was why the damned war had dragged on for so long, slagging planets, and gutting stations, and exiling Earth from her own.

Only exhaustion had finally allowed Earth forces to break through the blockade and regain an ascendancy that was as much moral as military. Remembering the first coded messages that announced Earth's release, Neave blinked hard once. If need be, he would blame it on the smoke.

Earth had seen the end of the blockade as freedom, but it had quickly turned to care. With production lines in place, a population undiminished by a war that relied as much on attrition as planet-slagging, Earth was in a position to dictate terms to the exhausted combatants, who—after many years of rebellion—turned back to the mother world with a relief that they fought not to show. As if they were runaway children, relieved at the approach of adults. What, Neave asked himself, would they think if they knew how scared we were when we saw what they had done?

Imperceptibly he tried to shift his shoulders, to ease the ache in them. His spine felt as if some demon interrogator had beaten each separate vertebra with a particularly hard club. I am too old to hop from world to world, dammit.

What could Earth do for these returning prodigals?

Never mind Earth. What can I do? It wasn't for a strong spine or iron nerves that he had been included on this mission, a fifty-year-old smiling public man who was neither that smiling nor that public, if the truth be known. A Franklin party member in philosophy as well as in politics, Neave had helped argue for a speedy reintegration of both sides into a systems-wide government. God help us all, he thought as he had thought every day since accepting this assignment. A pragmatist with a sense of ethics. Pragmatist that he was, he could understand why such a person might be valuable. The only problem was that he was the only such person of sufficient tact and seniority, and that he himself must bring the news to worlds isolated (some lacking ships with Jump capability, others actually—it was hard to believe—planet-locked) by a generation of combat without being killed as the messengers of ill fortune by militant holdouts. Still, it had been his duty; and he had agreed—just as they had known that he would.

And then, Becker had revealed his doomsday plan, this Operation Seedcorn.

Unlike many of the strategies he'd heard of, this one had even held a demented sort of promise. For one thing, it was nonviolent; and part of the Franklin party's political agenda was a highly pragmatic pacifism. You didn't fight, not from some lofty principle of nonviolence, but because you'd already lost more than you could bear. Earth ... Earth was weary, drained after a generation of what amounted to siege. As for the groups that called themselves Alliance and Republic ... perhaps our pacifism goes deeper than common sense, Neave had thought the first time his ship stood off from one of the slagged worlds.

He had insisted on an orbital flight: someone, he declared, had to witness. Had they gone closer to investigate, he learned, the entire crew would have had to undergo the painful, humiliating rituals of decontam.

And he had enough trouble with that crew already. Politics and safety decreed a mixed crew for Becker's pickup mission: and a very mixed crew it was, intimidated by vague threats to believe that not even God would help anyone from the Alliance who picked a fight with a citizen of the former Republic, or hoped to, by calling them Secess'.

It had not been an easy trip for Neave. The others were regular military, veterans with the strongest possible opinions on shiphandling and tactics, and who barely controlled those opinions when Neave ordered the weapons systems disabled. But it was hard on the regulars too, who were forced to live and stand watches with the very people whom they had tried to kill before the Armistice.

Now it was going to be hard on the marshal who found himself faced with people he had marooned and given the command: “Live and be human.” After all, he had told them to be human, and humans weren't all that forgiving, now were they? It remained to be seen whether this group would welcome Neave or throw rocks at him.

"You must remember, ladies and gentlemen.” In the best Franklin style, Neave had harangued the ill-assorted, ill-at-ease crew on board Amherst II each time someone quarrelled. “We must all hang together, or assuredly we will all hang separately."

Now, he would have to bring the glad tidings to yet another group.

It had been a hard trip, always waiting for the other shoe to drop, or the other crewmember to swing, or the other ship to shoot. He hadn't felt especially noble, the way people who used passive resistance were supposed to. In fact, he had been conscious of a furious irritation He—and Earth—were being used, he suspected, by factions whose weapons had scared them into temporary cooperation. So, for now, they would try it his way Then, once their fear subsided, they would probably revert.

As a Franklin, he wasn't averse to fighting, much though he preferred negotiations; it was just that it hadn't worked during the blockade ... and he had been assigned to this ship. In order to survive, most citizens of Earth had submitted themselves to the type of discipline that allowed a man like Neave to walk unarmed among warring parties: it created a moral, rather than a military, ascendancy. Or so he hoped.

Before he had been pried from his university with the damnable direct commission that put him in charge of veteran officers and a scar-sided ship, he had been a scholar whose passion for military, political, and legal history made him the perfect victim when his superiors looked for someone dispassionate to draft for this assignment.

"Anyone who wants this job deserves to get it!” he had protested, and been told that his reluctance only indicated how well suited he was to his new role as commissioner. Wonderful: he had used that line himself to inveigle people onto university committees, and never had realized how obnoxious it was.

He missed his university, his library, his peace. A generation living under blockade had been a generation turned inward: when Neave thought of exploration, he thought to explore the mind and spirit, not a galaxy barred to him by armed ships ... yet here he was, commanding just such a ship. Others would fly it, and fire—better yet, not fire—the weapons; Neave's job was to weld a fragile accord into a lasting peace, reconciling Alliance and Secessionist into one human—and one humane—government before there was nothing left to govern, and before the only peace that could be expected was the silence of slagged and wasted planets.

Accordingly, the woman behind him, seniormost of his Secess’ staff, would not push forward, indignant that a man of the Alliance had been granted precedence. Nor would the Alliance marshal take advantage of it. If Earth had been appalled by the war, so had the worlds who fought it. That was Neave's only hope: that former enemies would prefer Earth rule, Earth protection, to the desert they had made for themselves. It seemed to work for now.

So far, so good, thought Amory Neave, who had learned to be thankful for small mercies. He started down the ramp himself, slowly, so he might examine the thin, wary people who made up Becker's Operation Seedcorn on this world.

For civilians and refugees who had farmed, not fought, during the last suicidal war years, they weren't much, Neave thought. They looked as much like veterans as his crew. Many of the adults were still of an age to be in the service, though all but the man and woman heading toward Becker wore drab civilian gear.

But the eyes on them, especially the youngest! They glittered, flat, unreadable, almost ophidian. Barely out of their teens, many of the settlers watched the ship, not with the excitement or relief Neave had hoped for—here are your rescuers!—but with suspicion. Their hands twitched near belts bare, thank God, of sidearms.

Neave caught the eye of a thin, dark man, barely more than a youth. As soon as the boy perceived himself observed, he jerked up his chin and looked away. Don't trust us, do you? he asked silently. If I had been dropped here on Marshal Becker's bare word, I doubt. I'd trust us either.

"Lieutenant Yeager?” he heard the marshal greet the woman in uniform, a worn, sagging outfit she must have saved for years against just such an occasion. Small and alert, and browned from years of weathering, her eyes gazed at the ship with such longing that she must have been a pilot, Neave concluded. With really remarkable discipline, she turned from her loving scrutiny of the ship's lines to Marshal Becker.

"Where is Captain Borodin?"

"The captain ... he died our first season here,” said the woman. Her voice went hoarse, and she glanced up at the man at her side. He nodded encouragement, and she smiled faintly.

She's still young! Neave realized, and sighed at the weariness that her voice and glance betrayed. She limped forward, and her eyes flicked over him in a brief, shrewd examination. Then, again, she turned her attention back to Becker. He, at least, was someone she remembered.

Interesting, Neave noted, that she looked at nothing for very long, least of all at the newcomers. He tried to catch her eye again, and noted how she flushed and looked away, as if frightened or ashamed. Two children ran up to her and the man beside her, clutching them by the legs. Gently the woman disengaged their grips and nodded at a heavily pregnant woman little more than a girl herself to take them away.

Bless you, child, I'm not your enemy, he thought at her earnestly.

"Since I was next in chain of command,” the woman said, “I took over ... as best I could. I have the captain's log here for your examination. May I present Rafe Adams, lieutenant—Life Sciences? You may remember him,” said Lieutenant—no, better call her Captain—Yeager. It was always better, Neave thought, to assign a higher rank to a stranger. And this thin, strained woman would require gentle handling.

"Indeed, I do. You've all done well,” said Becker.

Had they? Though many of the adults and all of the many children (who had constantly to be kept away from the ship, the skin of which was still burning hot from deceleration and landing) looked fit and hale, there were others—two or three looked notably weak. One man with enormous shoulders balanced on crutches; he was missing a foot. And there was even one elderly woman, leaning on the arm of the angry, dark young man whose gaze had challenged him. Neave could already sense the restlessness of his medcrew, who would probably put her in sick bay's intensive care unit as soon as they got their sterile hands on her.

The settlement bore signs of fresh construction. One point in their favor. Acres of thriving fields stretched out behind it down to and along the riverbank—another point. But then there was a brown stretch of fallow ground heavily dotted with crude markers and flowers. Neave counted the graves and tightened his lips. "I had not thought death had undone so many," a line from an old verse flickered across his memory in ironic comfort. Too many dead for the colony whose records Becker had showed him, with its complement of young adults and children. This world of theirs looked friendly, even kind. Yet the graveyard was full. What had happened here?

But the Yeager woman was speaking again, shaking her head against Becker's words. “Begging the marshal's pardon, but we have not done well. We have merely done the best we could.” She took a deep breath. “I have added to Captain Borodin's log. And kept records of my own. An inquiry, you could call them. Here they are."

The tall man, Rafe Adams, gasped. “Pauli, you never told me..."

She hushed him with a glance that told Neave that these two were very close. “My husband, Raiford Adams,” she said, explaining.

"Secrets, Rafe? Command responsibility.” Her voice took on the singsong of memorization. “'Upon the receipt of charges or information that a member of his command has committed an offense punishable by the code, the commander exercising immediate jurisdiction over the accused will make, or cause to be made, preliminary inquiry into the charges or the suspected offenses sufficient to enable him to make an intelligent disposition of them ... ‘"

"Pauli, for God's sake!” the man called Rafe blurted She hushed him with a hand that, though callused and scarred, was very small.

The people behind began to mutter, and Becker gestured more quickly, more urgently, than any subordinate should to his commander. Neave hastened the rest of the way down the ramp.

"Commissioner Neave,” said Becker. “May I present Lieutenant—or is it Captain?—Pauli Yeager?"

"Sir,” the woman drew herself up and saluted. At Neave's gesture—he still was ill-at-ease among the spit and polish of military rituals—she relaxed into the slightly crooked stance enforced by the fact that one of her legs was shorter than the other, probably from a badly healed break.

Then her glance fell on the insignia he wore. “Earth,” she breathed. “Then the blockade's down."

Neave nodded, answering the question she left unasked. “We survived the war intact, and now—"

"And now you've come to take us all back into the fold, have you?” To Neave's astonishment, the plain, brown woman's eyes kindled, and her hands tightened on the records she had offered Becker. “Reunite the human race now, and clean up, is that it?"

"Pauli, don't lose it now,” said Rafe.

"I'm not going to, Rafe. So much for your seedcorn, Marshal Becker. You didn't really need us, did you?"

Becker shrugged. “At the time, we saw no other options."

The fight went out of the woman, and she held out the documents, not to Becker, but to Neave.

"Then I take it, sir, that you represent authority here. Accordingly, I must present the results of my investigation to you and to your legal officer."

He was not a soldier, had never been a soldier; and he knew he was missing something. “Why the legal officer?” he asked. “I should think that you might need medical officers more right now.” He gestured at the frail woman who staggered toward them, supported by the young man.

"She was my chief medical officer,” Pauli Yeager murmured, distracted. “Her anti-agathics gave out. If you could help her ... but don't distract me, sir. I need your legal officer because"—again came the tone of rote learning—” ‘no charge shall be referred to a general court-martial for trial until it has been referred for consideration and advice to the staff judge advocate or legal officer of the convening authority.’”

Neave looked around quickly. Some of the settlers had started forward, their hands raised. Neave's own guards hastened down the ramp, sidearms drawn to protect him.

"It's not fair!” shouted the man on crutches, who lurched in his haste to draw closer. An Earth officer blocked his path. “Becker, you dropped us on a world where survey had done a half-assed job, assuming it looked at Cynthia at all, with limited supplies, and no transportation. ‘Fend for yourself,’ you told us. ‘Keep alive; you're our only hope,’ you said. How could we know..."

"Know what?” Becker yelled back, goaded into anger in front of his commander and his former enemies.

"That Cynthia was inhabited!"

"Was inhabited,” gasped the medical officer who waved aside offers of help from her own people and Neave's staff to stagger between Pauli Yeager and Rafe Adams, whose grip, when she would have fallen, aided her to her knees.

"You're a perceptive man, Commissioner,” she gasped in a voice that would have been cultivated if there had been any life to it at all. “You recognize anger. They have a right. You see, we were left here, told to be human, remain human—and now, along you come ... the war's over, you say. We'll unite humanity,"—she gasped for breath, her pale face turning whiter than Neave thought anyone could turn and still live—"but not us,” she bent her head. “Not us."

"Get her inside,” the Yeager woman snapped the order at the young man and the heavily built, pregnant woman who stood close beside him.

But when they tried to lift her, she fluttered one hand at them, warning them off. “Have to ... stay,” she gasped.

If this went on much longer, Amory Neave truly thought that they might need another marker in that too-large graveyard. I haven't come all this way to die of curiosity, he told himself. Mutiny, assassination, or war, perhaps. But not curiosity.

He stared at the woman standing in front of him, proffering whatever records she had compiled and kept secret even from her husband. “A general court-martial, Captain?” he asked. If he achieved a properly military tone of voice, perhaps it would help her to speak.

"Quiet, everyone!” She turned and held up her hands at the settlers. “You know it has to be done. Now shut up and let me say it.

"Begging the comissioner's pardon,” she turned back to him, formality set at maximum. “These are the charges. Violation of the Genocide Treaty. Genocide. Conspiracy to commit genocide. Direct and public incitement to commit genocide. An attempt to commit genocide, and complicity in its commission against the native Cynthian race. Effective immediately, I place myself under arrest."

The shouting match that followed was the worst in Neave's memory; and he had had a lifetime of experience with faculty meetings, political negotiations, and a large, turbulent family. Hardly were Captain Yeager's accusations out of her mouth than her husband was demanding to be arrested, while half the colony either wanted to join them or to protest any action taken against them, then and there.

For all of his experience, he was afraid he would have to let them shout themselves hoarse. Becker tried bellowing into the crowd and was silenced wretchedly when a thin, intense black woman stalked up to him with a list of errors in the initial survey report. He could promise her a decent survey; he had a crew full of junior officers who would probably ambush one another to win seats on such a mission—and thank God, it took his mind off the self-accusation Yeager and Adams had made. Genocides. And they looked so ... so human and normal. Somehow, naive though it was, Neave expected genocides to bear some Cain's mark, some taint of bestial fury that set them apart from humanity.

The young man who had escorted the aged medical officer and who now knelt beside her raised his head. Satisfied? his lifted eyebrows seemed to ask. For a moment his face was hard, unforgiving. Then the woman he supported raised a hand, and his face gentled.

"Ayelet?” she asked.

"She's over with Dave, Alicia,” said the young man. Neave followed his glance and saw a barrel-chested man, his hair grizzled, standing away from the crowd, while the pregnant woman who was probably this boy's wife held his hands and tried to comfort him.

"Good,” breathed the medical officer. “I want ... want to see Pauli and Rafe ... through this one, but—” abruptly her lips went blue, twisting in a sudden spasm of pain.

"Get a doctor!” Lohr cried as he eased the woman down. Her hands clutched then, with appalling quickness, relaxed, palms upward, white against the vivid ground scrub. Where shouting failed, that movement silenced the colonists.

"Dead?” breathed Pauli Yeager.

A medical officer from Neave's ship pushed past her, scanners ready. “No,” he said, but the reassurance slipped out of his voice.

Lohr rose to his feet. “I'm calling in Thorn,” he said.

"No...” it was the merest thread of voice, but it stopped him in his tracks.

"Alicia, don't you want to see him?” asked the girl named Ayelet. “He's like your son."

"He ... is my son. Keep him ... keep him away..."

"He's got the right to choose what risks he takes,” muttered Lohr. “I think he'll take this one.” He loped off, and the people circling the dying medical officer hushed her.

Finally Pauli Yeager knelt beside her too, her log and whatever preposterous report she had prepared during years of isolation still clutched in her arms. “Lohr's right, Alicia,” she said, her voice wonderfully gentle. “Thorn's got to know it all. He's got a right."

The older woman sighed and closed her eyes. “Get her inside,” Yeager told Neave's physician, ignoring such niceties as chain of command, and the fact that she had recently placed herself under arrest.

Lohr came running back. “I reached Thorn!” he shouted.

Tears seeped out from under Alicia's eyelids.

"He's coming in, of course. On one of the newest fliers. He says they work fine.” He bent over the physician as she was being carried away.

"I wanted ... him safe..."

"You can't protect him from this,” Lohr said. “He's a man now, not a rehab case. And what's he going to do? Hide till these people go away?” Abruptly his face twisted, and he looked like a much younger, wilder person. “I wish to hell they had never come!"

"Thank God they did,” Pauli Yeager told him. “If they hadn't, it would have meant that there was nothing left ... up there.” She gestured at the sky. “That Becker was right, and we had to be seedcorn for the humanity that was no longer there."

"But what's going to happen to you and Rafe..."

"And David and all the others?"

"Pauli ... Captain,” Becker cut in, “you've spent the past years in isolation; your people are angry about inadequate reporting of alien life. I honor your wish to be scrupulous, but aren't you confusing self-defense with..."

"It was genocide!” Pauli snarled at him. “We had to kill the Cynthians to protect ourselves, but that makes no difference. If we'd had ships, we could have picked up and moved, but you took the ships. You grounded us. So we had to kill them."

Becker's hands and lips moved as he tried to silence the woman. Neave observed how the Secess’ officers had moved in and were listening avidly.

"Now you're here, the war's over, and everything is going to be wonderful: is that it? You've all been scared, and so now you're huddling together. The last thing you want is a trial for war crimes. It might open too many old wounds. But damn you, Becker, you dropped us on this world to be human for you. We haven't been, not since we killed the Cynthians. Do you expect us to like that?

"I want to fulfill my mission. I want to be human again. If that means a trial, all right, then. You cannot do worse to me than anything that's happened, that we've done to ourselves since you left."

Her husband laid his hands on her shoulders. She leaned her cheek against one of them.

"I know. The children. All of them, not just ours. I've been happy despite what ... the Cynthians, but I always feared that this day would come. That's why I prepared that report. We were put here to be human; and humans cannot do what we did and hope to escape the consequences."

She limped slowly toward Amory Neave, holding out her reports and log almost pleadingly. “The laws were written on Earth,” she told him. “'Persons charged with genocide or any of the other acts ... conspiracy, incitement, attempt ... shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed, or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction.’ You've got them all here, sir. Alliance, Secess', even Earth, after all these years."

Neave found himself shaking his head. The war is over. Let the dead be dead. Let yourself be welcomed back into a common humanity, like the crew of my ship, he implored her silently.

"I was put here to be human,” she repeated. “I can't let this go unnoticed and unpunished. I want to be clean again.” Her voice trembled uncontrollably. Neave sighed. Because he had no other choice left, he took the documents from her hands.