Battlefield Earth (121 page)

     They burst out of the forest and rushed toward the palace and then Windsplitter made a huge show of how hard it was to stop- it wasn’t- and reared and pawed the air.

“Show-off,” Jonnie accused him.

It hadn’t been all that much of a run-only half a mile. But Windsplitter was content. The row that was going on in the middle of the ten-acre lawn attracted him.

Stormy, the lame Blodgett’s colt- he looked just like Windsplitter even with his much-too-long legs- and a huge tan dog that had recently trotted out of the forest and adopted Chrissie, were romping and plunging and racing away and pretending to stomp and bite, always missing. Blodgett was looking on without much concern and Windsplitter walked over to her.

Jonnie slid off and raised his hand to the Russian in the control turret hidden in the right-hand tower. A flick of a white sleeve as the guard waved back.

This place had really changed. The only trouble with it was, it looked too new and shiny and it certainly now would never age. The Chinese engineers had understood, but the Chatovarians just couldn’t grasp that a place should show a little age.

Jonnie remembered when Chrissie had first spotted the place. They were in a small plane and Jonnie, having just bought the duchy, was trying to get some idea of its layout. Chrissie had all of a sudden leaned out the window and shouted, “There! There! There!” and nothing would do but that he land and let her look at the place. She had still been gaunt and he couldn’t refuse her much.

The building had stood in the middle of a wilderness that might have once been parks. Hard to tell. Hard to tell even that the piled ruin of stone had ever been much but rocks.

Chrissie had raced around, heedless of the briars that plucked at her buckskin leggings, shouting back at him in wild excitement. She pointed to a fifty-acre plot crying, “And that’s just the place for a cattle yard!” And to another place, “Ideal for your horses!” And spreading her arms, indicating some pits, “Perfect for tanning vats!” And then tracing a stream that was bubbling along minding its own business, “And this can be diverted to run right by the kitchen door and we can have running water all the time!”

She had gone tearing around on the cracked remains of what might have been room floors and pointed to outlines Jonnie could not see, “A fireplace here. And one here! And another there!”

Then she had stood in front of him and said, “Here we will never be hungry, we will never be snowed in, we will never be cold!” And then defiantly, as though he might say no, “This is where we are going to live!”

Jonnie got the Chatovarian chief engineer who had arrived with the two-hundred-Chatovarian first construction contingent and told him to build something modern on the site. He thought he was rid of the problem but the following day he found himself confronted by a very irate Chatovarian architectural team.

When a Chatovarian became incensed he sort of whistled through his teeth, quite distinct from the gurgling sound, like air coming up through a water bottle, when they laughed. The leading architect was whistling his indignation.

It didn’t matter whether Jonnie owned the company, but Jonnie was really a Chatovarian, proven by the fact that he had his title direct from the Empress Beaz. And he had to be told that he should know better!

Completely at sea, Jonnie was treated to a dissertation on architecture. They had studied Earth forms and many were all right. Classic Greek and Roman were known in other systems and, if impractical, were still acceptable. Gothic, neo-Gothic, and Renaissance architecture they actually thought quite novel. They could even strain their artistic sensibilities by going along with Baroque.

But modern? They quit. Send them back to Chatovaria. Send them back even though they would starve there. Some things one just couldn’t do!

It was only then that Jonnie found that “modern” had been a type of architecture prevalent on Earth about eleven hundred years ago; that it consisted of plain, straight up-and-down walls on a rectangular base; that it often was a vast expanse of glass windows; that it had been conceived by somebody dedicated to stamping out all indigenous architecture of an area. In short, “modern” was an architecture that wasn’t architecture but just a cheap way to throw rubbish in the air and get paid for it.

The Chatovarian, with a quivering, pointing finger in the direction of the old city of Luxembourg and backed up by the serious nods of five assistants, wailed that that whole town had been built in modern, and on his artistic soul, no such abominations would be perpetuated while he lived!

Jonnie had apologized. The Chatovarian said maybe it came from having to talk in Psychlo. And Jonnie asked what they recommended.

Five assistants presented a huge plan instantly.

This building, they said, had been the palace of the Grand Duke of Luxembourg in ancient times. And even though Jonnie did not think so, he didn’t say so.

The indigenous architecture, from the castles that lay about, probably had been Gothic and neo-Gothic. And this palace should be like this. Jonnie had delayed long enough to ask Chrissie, but all she gave him were the items she had found that made the place charming, and he had made sure those were included and had told them to go ahead.

Chrissie and he had camped out in the woods, happy to be away from the din, cheerful in a buckskin tent and eating good food cooked on an open fire.

The Chatovarians had cleared the site and erected an armor steel shell. They had then flown down to a couple of marble quarries north of Leghorn in Italy and operated a ferry of ore freighters until they had piles of green and rose and other colored slabs. They had spliced them together into an exterior and interior of polished, armored rock. They had underplated the stream so that it did what it was supposed to do. But they had also installed full plumbing. The fireplaces would burn wood but since this was a waste of good food they also put solar driven infraheaters in them and a simulated flame.

It was a palace all right. And it might be Gothic. But it sure was colorful! Chrissie had been enthralled with it.

Jonnie, as he walked to the arches on the other side of the drawbridge, could hear in the distance the crash and bang of the Chatovarians ripping the old city of Luxembourg into chips. They had gone through it with historical and artifact survey teams and then the rams had been turned loose. That was the one piece of modern that would not survive.

The bank had already moved back to Zurich and Jonnie would have liked to live there too because of the nearby mountains.

Jonnie halted. Dries Gloton must have been here today for there was a burned spot in the lawn. Dries, after turning over his sector branch office, had been appointed Galactic Bank Liaison with the Earth Planetary Bank. He had been the finder of the “one,” but a bank executive couldn’t accept such rewards- they would undermine customer confidence- and Voraz had raised Dries’ salary to a hundred thousand credits a year- quite enough to maintain his yacht and anything else. Dries had left the yacht here and teleported home, and while he was gone his Selachee crew had been teaching the Chatovarians gambling games and winning a lot of their pay. But the Chinese engineers had been winning it back from the Selachees so Jonnie had kept out of it.

Dries rambled all over in his yacht- an oddity to use a space craft to go to the corner store for a bottle of schnapps, but that was Dries. He had taken the job on the condition that he would have long weekends and he seemed to always be going to northern Scotland. He said he was starting a “peppermint industry” on the side, but Jonnie didn’t believe him. He was sure some thing else was involved. Today he had probably brought Chrissie some butter or something.

On the other hand, he might have been settling some accounts with Mr. Tsung. Dries kept certain customers and Mr. Tsung was one of them. Jonnie’s account was cared for by fifteen Selachees who worked down at the minesite, and Dries had nothing to do with that- it ran about a trillion a day income now and was growing. Mr. Tsung’s account was, however, somehow interesting to Dries: Jonnie had offered Mr. Tsung a salary and Mr. Tsung had been very surprised for he said a chamberlain usually paid his boss, from which Jonnie got the explanation of how some guests were always invited and some weren’t. But it was Mr. Tsung’s daughter that was making money. She was named Lu, after the last Empress of the Han Dynasty, and she was becoming famous. She worked in a little pagoda-like structure out back that was really a disguised antiaircraft pit, and she turned out pictures of tigers in the snow and birds flying and things like that on both silk and rice paper, and they were collector’s items, bringing in a thousand credits at a crack. She also worked around the house and helped Chrissie and cut hair.

Jonnie decided he’d better have a metal pad installed for Dries to land on. He got along fine with him now. No use to tell him off.

He couldn’t get through the courtyard. Lin Li, Mr. Tsung’s son-in-law, had all the banquet hall furniture out and was working it over with molecular metal spray. The young man had an audience of a couple of awed Chatovarians. He could “paint” pictures, freehand, with a metal spray gun and a piece of card board to catch the splatters. He was very quick. Right now he was doing a scene Jonnie knew he must have gotten from pictures of tapestries- a lot of knights. He was putting it on the huge banquet tabletop.

He had stopped doing dragon medallions by hand. As they were all the same, a couple of Chatovarian mechanics, awed by his ability, had gotten him to do a perfect one and then had made a machine to turn them out at about ten thousand an hour. The demand out in the universe was such that they were back-ordered even so.

Jonnie couldn’t get through without interrupting Lin Li. So he stood there watching. Chrissie and Mr. Tsung had been talking about the possibility of some of these Chatovarians getting out of hand at a party and eating up the furniture. That must be what this metal plating was all about! They had to suit the dwelling to the many guests they always had.

The vague feeling of disappointment hit him again. He had been certain, when he rose, that this was a sort of special day. That something wonderful was going to happen. It hadn’t.

Lin Li had just started on a ferocious figure of a charging knight. He was using a scarlet metal, putting blood on a blade. It made Jonnie think of the red ink coming in so far on the Chatovarian company, “Desperation Defense.” If he could just unravel motors he could put them over into passenger transport. But he was condemned if he would continue with reaction engines.

Lin Li was guiding the molecular spray, now gray, to make the armor. The Chatovarians were looking on with awe. One of them was holding a spare gun, ready to hand it to Lin Li. They weren’t assistants. They just wished they could do things like that. The Chatovarian closed the trigger of the gun to test it.

Suddenly Jonnie knew it had happened. The nice thing!

He sped back out the arch and raced all around the palace side and jumped the creek and popped into the back door.

Chrissie, hair tied back, was filling a big bowl, held by Mr. Tsung, from a pot on the fire.

“Chrissie!” said Jonnie. “Get your things!”

Pattie was sitting over in the corner. Pattie never said anything these days. She just looked down. Tinny, the Buddhist communicator, had been trying to talk to her as she often did.

“Tinny!” said Jonnie. “Call the minesite! Get me a marine attack plane on the pad in twenty minutes! Call Dr. MacKendrick in Aberdeen and tell him to come right away to Victoria!”

“Pattie doesn’t feel well,” said Chrissie.

“Bring her along!” said Jonnie.

“Is it a diplomatic conference or a scientific one?” said Mr. Tsung, monotone through the vocoder.

“Medical!” said Jonnie.

Mr. Tsung put down the bowl and raced off to put a white coat and a pair of spectacles- which had no glass in them- in a sack. That was proper dress he had seen in ancient pictures.

“Jonnie!” said Chrissie. “This is venison stew!”

“We’ll eat it on the plane! We’re headed for Africa!”

     Jonnie headed the marine attack plane slightly east of south and turned on his viewscreens. This copilot was new, from the French refugees in the Alps, named Pierre Solens: he was quite young, recently trained; he still had a little trouble speaking Psychlo. Usually his duties consisted of simply shifting the minesite planes about, but as compound duty pilot it had been up to him to deliver the ship to

Jonnie’s house; he had not dreamed that in the next few minutes he would be flying copilot to the Tylerand heading for Africa. He had started out all right but when he saw how Jonnie took off he had become overawed. He had never seen a plane lofted that way, like firing a bullet! And now they were flying hypersonic at only fifteen thousand feet. Would they clear the French and It alian Alps?

“We’re awfully low,” he timidly offered.

“People in back,” said Jonnie. “Can’t let them get too cold. Get to work with those viewscreens so we won’t be running into any drones.”

Drones, drones, drones! All his life Jonnie had been being looked at by drones! It was no exception now. The Chatovarian defense system was only half-complete: despite buying the company, it was an expensive system, almost three times as costly as the one the small gray men had described, but it was about ten times as good. Automatic blast cannon that fired fifteen hundred miles into space could shoot down a space fleet with one salvo; atmosphere drones that fired; space drones that patrolled orbits; probes that scanned anything moving within ten light-years. Real armor cable would make every city untouchable.

As the system was incomplete, a lot of emergency stand-in drones were about and they were attracted to anything flying. A huge green flashing light was going on top of the plane, and the box there, newly installed, was sending out the “code of the day,” which was so fast and so scrambled and changing microsecond to microsecond that an attacker could not hope to duplicate it. If the drones didn’t see and hear it, they’d shoot.

Ah, yes, here came the Mediterranean emergency drones, three of them, shooting over to “have a look.” The copilot was slow and Jonnie tuned a knob to focus them.

Chatovarian drones, all right. Each one had a big eye painted on its nose. But those big, staring eyes were not a Chatovarian fixation on decoration: a pilot would instinctively shoot into the center of them, and if a pilot did, the drone used the shot as a return carrier wave to send a surge back that blew up the attacker’s own ammunition and thereby his ship. Don’t shoot at one of those eyes!

Nevertheless they were a bit disconcerting, glaring out of the viewscreen. They nudged in like sniffing dogs, and then satisfied by automatically cross-verifying with each other, they fell away and returned to their patrol sectors.

The French pilot was looking back at the Alps. They hadn’t hit any!

But Jonnie had his screens on the orbit drones now. They seemed to be disinterested, satisfied by the code of the day.

And what was this? He had a space probe on the screen. He hadn’t known you could see one. Was it hostile?

Like any star drone or probe, these things had a “lens” that was made of a “light magnet.” This reacted on light beams and pulled them in from a zone many miles in diameter and concentrated them, magnetically corrected for aberration, into a spot smaller than a dot on paper. In effect, it made a lens many, many miles in diameter. The problem was too much light rather than too little, and they had blinders or filters that dropped into place to keep them from burning out their receivers or recording discs should they turn toward a sun too close. In that way one could get magnifications into the tens of trillions.

One of the contractors had drilled Jonnie in on command controls and a box of these existed overhead. Jonnie flipped a switch and tapped the probe’s receiver and shifted the image to his own central viewscreen.

It was their own space probe all right.

He was looking at the copilot and himself behind their own viewscreen. Yet that space probe was over ten thousand miles away. It must be at the near end of a run. Friendly, so he threw the tap off.

He didn’t really think anybody would attack Earth now. The peace treaty had gone in, as promised, with claws! Very, very popular. The delegates had even taken home copies of the end of Psychlo and the death of Asart.

The bank was shoveling out food loans like a waterfall. Consumer products had not yet begun to roll. That would take time. He hoped he could get at the secret of how one built a teleportation motor: that would open the door to a lot of consumer products. And even more important, keep the vehicles they had here operating. These planes wouldn’t last forever.

“Take over,” he told the French pilot,

Pierre, and went back into the body of the plane.

Chrissie stirred herself and unwrapped a bowl. “I’m afraid the venison stew might be cold now.”

Jonnie sat down in one of the huge bucket seats. Pattie was down at the back of the plane, just sitting there, looking down. It worried him. Sometimes she went for walks at night. Sometimes he could hear her in her room, crying. Because she was only ten he had thought she would recover. But she hadn’t.

Mr. Tsung, he saw, was going to use this time-space to catch up with his diplomatic and social duties, for here he came with about ten pounds of paper. Jonnie put his attention on the stew. It wasn’t cold.

“The week’s dispatch box came in from Snautch,” he said.

So that was what Dries was doing coming down from Zurich. “Send the business matters down to the minesite office; it’s their job.”

“Oh, I did, I did,” said Mr. Tsung. “These are all social and diplomatic. Invitations to weddings, banquets, christenings. Requests to address meetings-”

“Well, thank them or tell them no,” said Jonnie.

“Oh, I have, I have,” said Mr. Tsung. “We don’t have any trouble. We use a vocoreader, a vocoder, and a vocotyper. We can handle correspondence in about eighteen thousand languages now. But this is going to get heavier.”

Here it comes, thought Jonnie. Mr. Tsung’s elder brother had been appointed chamberlain to the court of the Chief of Clanfearghus. His younger brother was busy starting up a diplomatic college in Edinburgh.

“You got another brother?” said Jonnie around a mouthful of stew.

“I am sorry that I don’t,” retorted Mr. Tsung. “I’m talking about the nephew of Baron von Roth. He wants to apprentice as a diplomat in my office.”

“Fine,” said Jonnie.

Mr. Tsung adjusted the vocoder volume higher as the plane was roaring more with Pierre at the console. “I want to hire about thirty more Russian and Chinese girls to train as clerks and vocotyper operators. It ’s really very simple. One reads invitations with a vocoreader into one’s own language and then one uses a vocoder to talk to the vocotyper and it types the answer back into the tongue of the original letter-”

“Go ahead,” said Jonnie.

“I think there should be a new building to take care of all these people and files. Something more on a Chinese-”

“Go ahead,” said Jonnie.

“There was one letter that I pulled out that you should see,” said Mr. Tsung. “It’s from Lord Voraz to MacAdam with a copy to you, and Dries said MacAdam had to hear from you before he answered.”

Trouble, thought Jonnie.

“Voraz wants a formula to determine the validity of a commercial loan.”

“That’s not diplomatic or social,” said Jonnie.

“It’s kind of diplomatic,” said Mr.

Tsung, “Voraz and MacAdam being who they are, one does not wish to see tensions. The whole problem is consumer products should arms companies convert to. If they convert to the wrong ones, the whole program will fail and the bank will have granted useless loans.”

His own problem in a different dress, thought Jonnie. He thought of the red ink of Desperation Defense.

“Intergalactic Mining,” said Mr. Tsung, looking at the Voraz letter, “was sitting on hundreds of thousands of inventions that were on file in the Hall of Legality to prevent other nations from using them. I know this isn’t diplomatic, but it could make a big diplomatic mess if the bank lends money to make the wrong products. Also, all the invention formulas are in Psychlo math.”

Jonnie had finished the venison stew and he gave the bowl back to Chrissie. There was something in the old man-books about this. What was the subject?… Marketing as a factor in profit. “You tell MacAdam to have banks get out survey teams- people that go around and ask people questions- and find out what people in each planetary area think they would want to buy: not what they should buy, but what they want to buy. Don’t offer suggestions. Just ask them. For all they know it might be as little as a…”- he recalled his own discovery that glass would cut-’…as something to skin hides more easily. The subject is ‘marketing surveys.’

And I’m working on Psychlo math right now.”

Tinny had been listening. She was already punching phone buttons. This was a new system. But it was kind of overdone. The smallest exchange the Chatovarians made for a planet had two billion individual radio channels, and since the war, they only had about thirty-one thousand people. There were radio phone printers everywhere. She was on to the Zurich bank, plugging in the recording she had just made of his voice. Tsung saw Jonnie wasn’t going to say more and nodded to her and she let it start. The printed reply would be rolling off onto MacAdam’s desk right now. She fed in the reference letter Tsung gave her.

“Dries left you this,” said Mr. Tsung. He handed Jonnie a little blue disc with a pin on the back of it. It said “Galactic Bank” on the front of it. When he saw Jonnie looking at it but not taking it, he added, “The Chatovarian deadly-device officer passed it.”

Jonnie took it. “He give you anything else?”

“Oh, you know Dries,” said Mr. Tsung. “He said there was an excess supply of butter up in the Highlands now and he brought Chrissie a whole bucket of it. Some old woman has fifteen Holstein cows and he says he’s financing a butter business.”

Jonnie laughed. There had been no Holstein cows in Scotland that he knew of. Dries must have persuaded a pilot to fly them up from Germany or Switzerland where they roamed wild. Another “peppermint industry.” “Do we give him anything in return?”

“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Tsung. “We always feed him a tub of fried rice. He loves it! And my son-in-law found a book of colored plates offish and he made up some fish medallions and we give him one of those each time. He says they’re valuable.”

“And you pay Lin Li,” said Jonnie, wise to the ways of commerce and the Chinese.

“Of course. From your social petty cash.”

The term “petty cash” could be pretty general. The Earth Planetary Bank was paying for Earth’s defense system out of petty cash.

But Mr. Tsung was going on. “That button is a pre-run of prizes they are giving out in their new neighborhood bank program all through the universes- you know, to people who open up accounts. It will in each case be in the local language. You put it on your color tab or a place like that and then you hum a note and as long as you move your mouth, the button will sing. They are gathering up all the folk songs of each local region.”

Jonnie got a kit out of his bag. He had brought it to help the project he was on right now. He took a microannealer and opened the button up and looked at its insides with a microviewer. It was just a molecular-sized set of storage cells with little triggers and relays. A tiny battery charged itself from room heat. An electron vibrating prong set atmosphere molecules in motion to make sound. Simple, rather cheap.

But that wasn’t what Jonnie was looking for. He often suspected the bank acquired information in peculiar ways and he checked vocoders and suchlike to make sure they didn’t contain a radio mike or a recording thread that could be taken back later. He had never found one so far. But that was the world he now lived in.

He microannealed it back together and hung it on his buckskin collar.

“That isn’t a standard one, he said to tell you,” piped Mr. Tsung through his own monotone vocoder. “He collected some old records of American ballads and put them in it. There aren’t very many Americans, so it won’t be manufactured for them.”

Jonnie cleared his throat and moved his mouth. The button hummed a wordless tune. Hadn’t he heard that tune before? Scottish, German? Ah…it was called “Jingle Bells.” Then the button sang:

Galactic Bank!

Galactic Bank!

My friend so tried and true.

Oh what fun it is to have

A neighbor such as you!

And then in a proud voice it said, “lam a customer of the Galactic Bank!”

Well, that certainly wasn’t any “American ballad!” Was Dries having a joke? He never joked, really. A very serious, small gray man.

Jonnie was about to take it off. But his laugh started it up again.

Home, home on the range, Where the deer and the buffalo

Jonnie remembered you had to keep moving your jaws to make it sing. Saliva pops or muscle tension or something. He started moving his jaws again.