The First One's Free (3 page)

Tishla stumbled and had to steady herself a
moment. “I’m all right. The air in here has more nitrogen than
we’re used to. I just need a moment to adjust.”

And it smells like wet bird
, Kai
thought. “Do you need a breather?”

“No, papa,” she said, an edge creeping into
her voice. “And I didn’t forget my rain shoes, either.”

She looked down at the glove on her left
hand, reading a map that Kai had displayed on the launch’s console
as well. “If I’m reading this right, the hold is this way.” She
walked past the drone and toward a darkened section of corridor. As
she approached, lights flickered on ahead of her. “Well, nice to be
welcomed.”

After a few moments, she found her way to a
bulkhead that opened when she spoke the alien word
panra
.
The bulkhead split and separated into the walls. The lights inside
came on with loud clangs, indicating a primitive type of electrical
circuit. Just the thought of it made Kai nervous. How did these
people get around space without blowing themselves up or getting
shocked?

Tishla stopped at the entrance. “I’ve found
the hold.” After that, she just stood and stared.

“Tishla?”

Still she stared, saying nothing, her back to
the drone and, subsequently, Kai.

“Tish? What’s wrong?”

“If that alien isn’t lying about the roots,”
she said, “there’s enough here to feed the capital and its
environs. We can grow enough from the skins to feed the rest within
three turns.”

If
. That’s why he purchased Tishla’s
indenture contract. It paid for the education that would allow her
to determine whether the alien was telling the truth.

“That’s good,” said Kai. “Because if he is
lying, I will cut him down myself in Capital Square.”

4

“It’s starch,” said Marq as he and Kai walked
through the square. “All primate species, at least those we know
about, need starch. Most need protein as well, but in famine
conditions, starch will do as a temporary fix. I noticed no
livestock on this world. Did you not import them?”

Around them, workers (many of them rioters
only a few days before) labored to clean up the square. Never a
spectacular place to begin with, it had been reduced to a scarred
moonscape of shattered glass, scorched walls, and broken masonry.
Patches of red appeared on the pavement in places. Kai wondered if
Marq knew it was blood.

“Today is a rare day on Essenar,” said Kai.
“It’s not raining. The only places it does not constantly rain on
this world are the deserts, the polar caps, and out to sea. It’s
too damp to grow the grains and grasses needed to feed livestock,
or we would have planted them decades ago.”

“So places like the deserts and sea and ice
caps, I take it, can only be populated by normal citizens with the
resources to adapt there.” He looked around. “Our ancestral
homeworld once had an entire continent set aside for criminals.
Seems like a waste, really. If you despise someone enough to kick
them out of your homeland, why not dump them on an island somewhere
and let the criminal nature solve the problem on its own?”

“Welcome to the island,” said Kai. “Worlds
more hospitable are reserved for, as you term them, ‘citizens,’
though our society is not so egalitarian.” He watched as a man and
his daughter boarded up the window of a shop on the far side of the
square. The man did not own the shop, but had been one of those who
burned it.
What might that man have been capable of
, Kai
wondered,
if the weather on Essenar had permitted normal food
production?
With a large enough population, farming could be
automated to allow cities to grow. “We need more than these wonder
roots you’ve given us, Marq. We need grains that will grow here.
Can you do that for us?”

Marq laughed that strange alien laugh of his.
“Governor, this load of tubers was lost through an error in
logistics by my employers. I learned your world had a problem and
saw an opportunity to show you what Juno can do for you. But my
people have a saying, one that dates back to before we left our
ancestral world.”

“And what’s that?”

“‘Only the first one’s free.’ The tubers in
their present form can feed you. For that, I am deeply pleased. You
know how to grow more from the skins, and I will explain to you how
to pollinate the flowers so you can harvest seeds. All I require in
return is the data from your results of your efforts, which will be
of great benefit to Juno, and passage to Laputan space so I may
return to my people. If you are successful, I wish to do business
with you. Grain might be a good place to start.”

In a nearby alleyway, a woman used a hard
rake to push rubble out into the street for collection. Kai
recognized her as the owner of the shop where the man and his
daughter had boarded the window. The alleyway ran between two shops
some distance from the woman’s, the owners of both killed in the
riots. Kai may even have put one of them to the sword.

“As you can see,” said Kai, “business is not
the main focus of my people. These people were exiled here,
ostensibly to give them a chance to build a new society. But we
still have our wealthy classes, warriors of rank, legal experts,
clergy, and so on, who tend to hoard resources needed elsewhere.
And there is no profit motive to explain it. The market does not
dictate their position.”

“Heredity does,” said Marq. “I’m familiar
with the concept. Tell me, though, Governor. Aren’t you one of the
wealthy class?”

“Wealth has its own burdens. The difference
between a good man and an evil one often lies in whether he
recognizes that.”

“It’s often the hungry man who changes
things. What might these people do given a chance to feed
themselves and build something more than a few scattered
settlements?” Marq asked, echoing Kai’s earlier thought.

Kai watched the woman gather up what she had
swept in the alley and dump it in a canister that once served as a
fuel tank. Her shop, like the two flanking the alley, existed only
because someone of the Merchant Caste granted them a franchise to
sell imported wares. They were a captive market. “I suppose they
would throw off the caste system or force their way into the
various castes. As of this moment, they have no place in our
society. In some ways, neither do I.”

“And why is that?”

Kai looked around the square. It should have
been teeming with people enjoying the fruits of Essenar. Instead,
they simply moved around what little the established worlds would
send them. “My people, for all their vaunted nobility, are
warriors. I, however, did not so much
conquer
Essenar as
take it off the hands of another family. It’s not really an
admirable way to acquire property in our society.”

That made Marq smile is strange little smile.
Which unsettled Kai.

5

The slim black missile made a screeching
noise as it scraped against the side of its hole. Around it,
workers shouted at the crane operator to stop. The missile, really
a ship-mounted torpedo left in a cave for storage, swayed
precariously on the cables lifting it. Large rocks surrounded the
opening in the ground where it had lain hidden for decades.

Douglas Best put a wet handkerchief over his
face as the hot wind blew a cloud of dust up the mountain,
momentarily obscuring the missile from his sight. The crew foreman,
clad in a white desert suit and facemask, rushed over to him.

“I’m sorry, Minister,” he said to Best. “You
may want to leave. We think we punctured the fuel tank lifting it
out.”

Best would have sighed, but sighing would
have meant a mouthful of sand. “How many more of these things do we
have?”

“Including this one?” said the foreman.
“Seven. If this one blows, you’ll have to chase that warhead all
over the Mother’s creation to find it.” He smiled through his mask.
“At least it’s not armed.”

Best took little comfort in that.

The crane lifted again, and the missile made
a groaning noise that turned Best’s insides to jelly. He decided to
heed the foreman’s advice and walked back to the awaiting tracker.
Luxhomme was waiting inside.

“You could have been out there supervising,”
said Best. “Has this outfit ever handled weapons of mass
destruction?”

Luxhomme, a gaunt man with a pencil-thin
mustache, smiled that strange little smile of his. “I
am
supervising. It was you, Minister, who insisted on coming to the
site in person. By the way, until the crops begin to take, you
might want to carry a facemask with you next time you come.
978-0765309402d is not the most forgiving planet.”

Best marveled that Luxhomme had memorized the
planet’s name, a catalog designation from a forgotten survey some
forty years earlier. It sounded almost musical with the lilt in his
voice. He had told Best he was Etruscan, but the accent suggested
someplace else. Metis maybe?

“You heard what my colleagues have named the
star, haven’t you?” said Best.

“I believe an imam serving in your
legislature proposed the name ‘Hell’ as a joke,” said Luxhomme.
“Funny thing about legislative pranks. They sometimes get passed
into law.”

“Tell me about it.”

Luxhomme rapped on the glass partition
between himself and the driver. “Take us back to the inn.” To Best,
he said. “So here we are on a desert planet orbiting a star about
to be called Hell. Maybe they’ll call the planet ‘Perdition.’”

“That’d be original,” said Best. The Compact,
the loose confederation of human worlds and their colonies, had no
fewer than two dozen planets called “Perdition,” mostly airless
rocks or volcanic hells sharing a system with some more hospitable
and better named world. “Let’s go all the way back to our roots.
We’ll call the satellite ‘Moon’ and, just to keep it consistent,
this place ‘Planet.’”

Best watched the landscape change as the
tracker jostled down the side of the mountain, the broad expanse of
desert plain opening up before them. In the distance, Best could
make out dark patches in the sand, perfect squares of gray
interrupting the relentless tan of this world. “Mars won’t supply
us bots to tend the farms,” he finally said. “They want too much
money.”

“Strange how a socialist world wants money
when they supposedly have no use for it,” said Luxhomme.

“Socialism costs money,” said Best. “Even
where money ‘doesn’t exist.’” He leaned back into his seat and
closed his eyes. He really did not want to talk to Luxhomme. The
man made his skin crawl. Best only suffered him because it was
Luxhomme that had proposed the plan to convert old military
reserves into colonies. 978-0765309402d had been just such a
planet. Best’s native world of Jefivah had no colonies of its own.
The conversion of the military depots had provided a way to get
three of them for free.

Well, not
free
. Behind them, a company
contracted by Luxhomme’s JunoCorp struggled to keep an antiquated
missile from spewing chemical fuel all over the mountain peak he
and Best now descended. In the distance, the dark patches indicated
where desert kelp, an invention of JunoCorp itself, grew in
seemingly impossible conditions. Above, a ship hired by Luxhomme’s
employers waited in orbit to take the nukes off-world.

That last part bothered Best. “I still don’t
entirely understand. Why wouldn’t the Navy just establish a
presence here? It’d be cheaper, and the military could keep control
of the weapons without going to the expense of hauling them across
interstellar space.”

Luxhomme gave his thin little smile. “Oh,
come now, Mr. Best. We’ve been over this before. The Polygamy Wars.
Since then, no
colony
may keep weapons of mass destruction,
only the core worlds.”
“Jefivah is a core world,” said Best. “Humanity’s oldest
interstellar settlement.”

“With a low population and factional tensions
that keep it from becoming… How shall I put this?”

“A real world?”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like
that.”

But you’re thinking it
, thought Best.
He’d heard the jokes. Even Earth people made fun of the planet.
“The Appalachia of the Stars” they called it. How low was your
standing with Earthers made fun of your world?

The tracker descended the mountainside into
the settlement below. The town still consisted largely of “tuna
can” landers and quickly extruded buildings. However, one building
in particular caught Best’s eye, a white structure of concrete and
imported wood. It had to be imported. Best had seen the surveys of
this planet. Not a single tree existed here, not even near the
poles. However, it wasn’t really the building itself that caught
Best’s eye.

Out front, a headless statue rose thirty feet
into the air. Ceramic and painted, it depicted a curvaceous woman
struggling to keep her white dress from billowing up in some
phantom wind. A crane stood just to the left of the statue and was
hoisting the head into place, that of a blonde with the most
orgasmic look on her face.

“What are they doing here?” said Best.

“We have to have colonists to run this place
Best,” said Luxhomme. “You have a religious faction you want to
keep happy if you want peace on Jefivah. So I recruited some
Marilynists to be the vanguard settlers. All you have to do is sign
off on making this planet their own, and you’ll be their hero.”

Great. Luxhomme had just made Best a hero in
the tackiest religion in the Compact.

6

The humorless men in their dark suits showed
up at Best’s office on Jefivah six months after he witnessed the
missiles’ removal. They made no appointment, nor did any of Best’s
staff announce them. They simply strode into his office as if they
owned the place.