Masters of Everon (25 page)

Jarji, hearing their voices, also came over. She stood looking down at them for a second; then, almost reluctantly, sat down herself.

"Back to normal, are you?" she said to Jef. "Yes. Thanks," he told her. She looked a little disconcerted.

"Nobody did anything special for you." But her tone was a good deal softer than her words might have indicated.

"I'm not surprised Mikey was able to find you," Jef said to both of them. "But how did you get here? And what are you doing together?"

"Well, now!" said Martin. "Is there some law against our being in the same place at the same time?"

"Never mind," said Jarji to Jef. "We're together because I flew out of Beau's camp with him."

"True enough. No plan of mine, either," said Martin. "I reached my flyer and found her already there, waiting for me."

"But I thought you were in the bunkhouse—" Jef stared at her.

Jarji snorted.

"Did you think I was just going to sit there with them all around me, so that I couldn't do a thing?" she said. "I told them I wanted to go to sleep early. Then, when they weren't looking, I left a blanket rolled up under my covers and slipped out. But Beau's got some woodswise people among that group of his. One of them heard me going and came after me. I had to take the first chance to get clear—which was Martin's craft."

"That doesn't explain why you're both here, though," said Jef.

"Waiting for you, of course," said Jarji.

"Waiting for me?" Jef stared at her. "But how could you know Mikey would bring me here..." He ran down into silence.

"Ah, you've touched it, haven't you?" Martin said. "Your Mikey knows we're friends of yours—on a world where you've few of them, as I don't need to point out. We're in the only pass to the high country in either direction for a few hundred kilometers. You had to come this way; and when the maolot found us waiting here, he brought you to us."

"How'd you know I'd be keeping on toward the high country?"

"It's your stubborn nature, now," said Martin. "How could we doubt that having started for that place called the Valley of Thrones, on that map you told the Constable and myself about, you'd keep on in spite of all?"

Something about this answer woke a feeling of suspicion in Jef's mind, though he could not exactly identify what about it should so affect him. He tried to remember when he had told Martin and the Constable about the Valley of Thrones. Yes, it had been on the morning he had left for the upcountry. His hope then had been that the Constable might have a more correct map he could use to find the Valley; but Armage had evidently never heard of the place, and he had dismissed it as being any one of a thousand of such areas in the Everon wilds, which might have one name or several, depending on the number of humans who had passed by them.

If it was not the reference to the Valley of Thrones, then what had bothered him in what Martin had just said? Jef could not think what it might be. But something had.

"Why would Mikey bring me to you, even if he knew you were here?" He looked over at Mikey and felt a wave of reassurance, broadcast by the maolot—which was heartwarming, but hardly informative.

"You came in pretty chewed up," Jarji said almost sharply. "He may have thought you needed some of your own kind to keep you alive."

Jef switched his attention to her.

"Why are you still here?" he asked bluntly. "I'm all right now."

"With Beau and his people blocking my way back down-country, where can I go but to the mountains?"

Looking at her, he suddenly had a strong feeling that there was at least a chance she had stayed because she was concerned about him; but of course there would be no hope of getting her to admit anything like that.

The memory of the nighttime drive and the counterattack of the maolots passed over his mind like the smoke of the campfire.

"On the way here I saw the wisent ranchers clearing forest and trying to move a herd into it," he told them. A gust of his rediscovered ability to anger shook him suddenly. "This whole planet's at war! The wisent ranchers on one side, Beau and the woods-people on the other!"

"Don't go thinking Beau and his bunch speak for all of us woods folk," said Jarji energetically. "And if it comes to that, even what Beau is, he was driven to."

"Do you know he's trying to import an illegal shipload of eland embryos?" Jef looked over at Martin. "You know about that. Tell her."

"Tell me nothing!" flared Jarji. "I'm no part of what Beau does. I just said he was driven to it in the first place. And he was! But what he's doing now's no part of me, or my family, or anybody else in the forest that I know. The trouble with you, Jef, is you've never been on a new world, never gone out to a new world, never probably even thought what it's like to go out to a new world. There's no going back to Earth from someplace like our Everon. Even if you could go back, you wouldn't. It's live or die with what you have—and that makes things different. It also makes it our business, not yours."

"No," said Jef, almost to his own surprise. "I'm hooked to Everon, now. Whether it's something more than my connection with Mikey I don't know. But I'll tell you this—I may be closer to what Everon really is than you or anyone else, even if I did just get off the ship a few days ago. Maybe I haven't lived here; but I'm willing to bet neither of you've ever seen what I saw, between the time I left Beau's camp and when I ended up here!"

On a surge of unexpected emotion he pulled himself out of the sleeping bag and stood up in his rumpled pants and shirt to tell them about the wisent drive and his long ride on Mikey.

"...But it's more than that, between me and Everon," he wound up. "On my first day here I stood on the Constable's porch and watched a shower that turned into a hailstorm; and, even then, I was feeling something. Maybe it was those eight years of growing up with Mikey, as I say. I don't know. But this world and I can talk to each other, in a way I can't even explain to you."

He paused, almost as surprised by his own words as they must be to hear them. Suddenly self-conscious, he wound up the lecture hurriedly.

"So," he said, "it's my business, too, what the wisent ranchers and the woodspeople and the officials down in Everon City are doing. I couldn't be outside it and leave it alone, if I wanted to."

He stopped, aware of having more or less run down rather than wound up with a strong, crashing statement. He half expected to find Jarji on top of him the minute he closed his mouth, ready and eager to cram his words back down his throat; but she did not, only stood frowning at him.

"That's a fine sensitivity you have there. Very fine," said Martin after a very short moment of silence. "Now maybe you'll tell us how it briefed you on all the economic and political struggles involved in this same matter with the woodspeople, the wisent ranchers and all those other fine gentlemen and ladies in government down in Everon City. Indeed, maybe this insight of yours is just the thing to cut through all that tangle of enmity and competition that's been keeping us baffled here, and produce an immediate solution, acceptable and fair to all!"

Jef opened his mouth, then closed it again. But Jarji turned on Martin.

"Why don't you tell him, then," she demanded, "instead of standing back and crowing over him because he doesn't know?"

"It's not something he could learn in a day—let alone in a few minutes," answered Martin.

"How do you know?" She swung back to face Jef. "I just told you it's not everybody! Most of the woodspeople can get along with everyone else. So can most of the wisent ranchers; even if they mostly haven't taken the trouble to think beyond their own side of things. But it's Beau and his group, it's the sell-out ranchers, the politicians, and others like that who keep all this trouble going, and make more when this starts to die down. Sure, you'd have to live here ten years to learn all the ins and outs and who's with who, and for what, just like
he
says—"

She jerked a thumb at Martin.

"—But all you really need to know is that it's not the real planters, not the ones who look to see forty generations of their descendants here. It's the sell outs that go messing it all up for everyone else."

"Sell outs?" Jef said. The word was awkward on his tongue.

"It means what it says. You don't know anything, do you?" Jarji told him. "You think nobody ever went out to plant a new world with anything but stars in their eyes and a noble pioneering spirit, don't you? Of course you do. That's what they all think, back on Earth; because that's what all the ads and the articles say. Well, let me tell you—no one ever pulled their life up by the roots and went out to make it all over again in a howling wilderness just out of some noble feeling. My folks came out here because they couldn't breathe in Earth air, because they couldn't—even with both of them working—have anything more than a third-rate living place. They came out here because they saw there was no place decent for me and my brothers and sisters to grow up in, back on Earth. They came out and went through all the hell it took to stay alive and build something here, just so they could live for some purpose—and we, their kids, could live for some purpose, too."

She stopped.

"I see," said Jef.

"No, you don't. You just think you do. Now, listen," said Jarji. "That's us—what we are, we Hillegases and the rest of the real planters. But besides us there's other people who came out, with other things they wanted. Some of them, like the Constable and—well, maybe even Beau; though, as I say, he had reason for what he did, to start with—came out here wanting to run things. They didn't have what it took to run things on Earth, but they figured to run things big, here. Others came to get rich, figuring to stay just to build up something, sell out and move on."

"Sell out? But you can't transfer planetary currency off-world and have it worth anything," said Jef, "except maybe for some of the strong Earth currencies, and interstellar credits—and private parties can't use interstellar credits. Only a bank or a government—"

"How thick is that head of yours?" said Jarji. "There's a few million ways to cash in, if you've really got something to cash; and the longer you hold something you've developed from the raw planet state, the more you've got to cash in. For every one like my folks, there's a thousand who haven't got the guts to be in the first wave of immigration; but they do have the wealth—in Earth and other world currencies—to lay back and wait until a planet is developed and safe.
Then
they buy in, in comfort, and the more they have to buy with, the longer they can wait to use it. Hell, didn't you know there're regular underground exchanges on Earth, where you can make illegal currency transfers, or get immediate quotes on any land or development you want, on any planet, anywhere? And with something like that going you think there aren't some who come in with the first wave, just planning to build up and sell out, then go on to the next new world they can find ready, and do it again? Do something like that three times over, Mister, and make it pay; and you can end up like a king on the last world you hit."

She paused to look at him narrowly.

"Of course," she said, "that takes guts—more guts than the late buyers have. But is it any wonder that we've got some people here who don't give a damn for anyone but themselves and their own profit, and are willing to tear everything apart for everyone else just to make their property here as rich as they can, before comes time for them to sell out?"

"No," said Jef. She was right, of course.

"Certainly," said Martin, "that's it, in principle. But it's not by principle that situations like this have to be dealt with. It's by the effects of that principle—and those are none so simple." Jef turned on him.

"You're still claiming to be a John Smith, are you?"

"That's what I am." Martin met his gaze dead-on.

"The Constable doesn't seem to think so. Beau seems to have an entirely different picture of you. And what they both think matches with that other set of identification papers I saw."

"In my luggage, that is, with never an apology or a feeling that you had no right to look," said Martin. Jef felt uncomfortable.

"You've got to admit you don't look or act like a John Smith."

"So you said once before," said Martin softly. "But what you mean is, I don't look or act as you imagined a John Smith. And both Jarji and I have just been pointing out how little your picture of things has to do with the facts."

"If you're one of the E. Corps top representatives, why don't you do something about what's going on, instead of hobnobbing with Armage and tangling yourself up with Beau, pretending in both cases to be something you're not?"

"Because," Martin said, "as I continue to tell you, matters are not that simple. Not just matters here on Everon. Matters on Earth. Matters wherever our race of humans are to be found."

"You've got the authority and the power—"

"That's just what I don't have," said Martin, "in fact."

Jef stared at him.

"Oh, to be sure, the powers are there for me and those like me, in theory. But have you any idea what would actually happen if I was injudicious enough to actually recommend quarantine for a world like this, with billions of credits tied up in it—back on Earth as well as here? In theory I've the power to right any wrong. But in fact I have to sail by the available winds in all I do. Did you think we were heroes, as the advertising legends say, we John Smiths? Just the opposite. We're trained villains, indeed we are, and measure our success by the depths of our villainies, performed in what we believe—but can never be sure—are good causes."

The emotion that had brought Jef up out of the sleeping bag to his feet, had begun to drain out of him. His knees felt weak enough to begin trembling.

"I've got to sit down," he said. He looked around. "Why don't we sit down by the fire?"

He led the way over to the fire and dropped down cross-legged next to it. It was good to be sitting, and the heat of the fire felt good to a body that had grown used to the cocoon of warmth provided by the sleeping bag.