The Florians (17 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I lay in my bed, having abandoned the attempt to sleep. My eyes were open but I could see nothing. A heavy curtain cut out such light as might have crept in through the window, and the corridor outside, with the nearest stairwell some distance away, was too dark to make a rim of light around the ill-fitting door.

I heard the door open and close again, but though I was fully conscious I did not react. I waited, while whoever had entered moved across the carpet to my side. I was conscious of the presence only a foot or two away from my face, but still I waited.

A hand groped for my shoulder, and a voice whispered, “Mr. Alexander.”

I was surprised to hear my name given thus. I had assumed, though without any real reason, that the invader was either Karen or Nathan. I was so prepared to hear one of their voices, in fact, that I couldn't put a name to the voice I did hear. I knew that I knew it, but I couldn't place it.

I felt the hand gripping my shoulder and stirring me gently. It was a large hand.

“Wake up, Mr. Alexander,” said the voice.

And then I recognized it.

I sat bolt upright with a suddenness that must have startled him.

“Rondo?”

“Quietly, Mr. Alexander,” he said. “I'll turn on the light.” After a pause, the light came on. It was, indeed, the youngest of the Planners. The devil's advocate.

“What do you want?” I demanded harshly. But I kept my voice low.

He came swiftly back to the bedside, and knelt down. “You know that I had to question you this afternoon,” he said. “It is my function. There was nothing personal. Perhaps your colleague told you that I was, myself, disposed to be sympathetic?”

“So?” I said.

“I want your help, Mr. Alexander,” he said.

“What kind of help?”

“I want to go to the mainland. Tonight.”

I didn't say anything. I just stared at him, completely out of my depth.

“You have a boat, Mr. Alexander,” he said. “The one you used in order to get here. You have hidden it somewhere on the island. I think you have probably contemplated using it yourself.”

“It had crossed my mind,” I admitted. “But there's a moratorium on bull-in-a-china-shop tactics. And I have blisters on my hands.”

He smiled. He didn't look like a Planner. He was younger than Jason, but built along the same lines. Immensely strong...it was hard to imagine him as a die-hard pacifist.

“I'll row,” he said.

“You want me to go with you?”

He nodded. “I need your help,” he said again.

I looked briefly at the door. “Very quiet help,” I said, with slight sarcasm.

“Very quiet,” he agreed.

There were a hundred questions, chief among which was, “What the hell are you playing at?”—but I didn't ask them. I got out of bed. Whatever he wanted to do, it was action, and I felt the need for action in every muscle of my body. I'd had a rough time, and I'd gone distinctly short of sleep these last few days, but I needed little urging. The compulsion to do something—
anything
except wait in silent helplessness—was irresistible.

He seemed slightly amused by my readiness, but he was also pleased. When I was dressed, he turned out the light and opened the door. I followed him, on tiptoe, as he led me through the maze of passages to a small door on the inland side of the building. Once outside, he brought forth a small lantern—not an electric torch but a candle mounted in a glass case. It seemed oddly out of place here, at the very heart of Florian technological expertise. But there are no such things as levels of technology: only matters of convenience and priority.

“Where's the boat?” he asked.

“At the foot of the cliff,” I said. “We'd better take the long way around.”

He shook his head. “I know a safe path.”

I wasn't sure. The light cast by the sheltered candle was too faint to light our way adequately. But I followed him, and took great care to tread exactly where he trod. He preceded me, so that if I did slip I would have to fall past him.

It took no more than ten minutes to get down to the pebbled shore, and only five minutes more to find the boat under the ledge where I'd left it.

We pulled it out, and maneuvered it into the water. Rondo took both oars in a single massive fist, and held the boat steady while I stepped in. He was about to follow me when the sound of footsteps on the loose stones made us both look back.

It was, inevitably, Karen Karelia. We'd passed her room in the corridor. She had, it seemed, been no more asleep than I. She seemed surprised and alarmed to recognize Rondo. She had known, obviously, that it was a Florian I was with, but this must have been the first opportunity for her to see his face. He, however, seemed both unsurprised and unperturbed by her arrival.

“What's going on?” she asked—of me.

“I don't know,” I told her.
“He's
in charge.”

“Get in the boat,” said Rondo calmly.

She got in the boat. Rondo pushed us away from the shore and then began to put the oars into the rowlocks. We took up a position in the stern, facing him as he began to pull us around in a semicircle, and then, with a few casual strokes of the oars, sent us shooting away from the island.

“The others aren't going to like it when they find out,” I commented.

“I think,” he said, “that this is one of those times when it's better to act first and discuss the matter later.”

“I'm astonished to find one of the Planners believing that there ever could be such a time,” I said.

“Where are we going?” asked Karen. “And why?”

“I know Arne Jason,” said Rondo smoothly. “I know him better, perhaps, than anyone else. The others, you see, are all older than he. When they knew him as a boy, they were already adult. When I knew him as a boy, I was his junior. That can be a very different viewpoint. The others think that Jason is unimportant, dispensable. They look down upon him from their lofty place and they only see that in the long run he can achieve very little. They have toyed with him too long. They're right, of course, about the long run. But in a more immediate sense, Jason is a dangerous man.”

It came as a blessed relief to know that someone had noticed.

“So what do you intend to do about him?” I asked.

“Find him,” replied the Planner. “Stay with him, if I can. And try to prevent him from doing any real harm.”

“By force?” asked Karen.

The candle was on the floor of the boat, and we could not see his face by its light. I could not guess what kind of expression he might be wearing. But his voice, when he answered, was nothing like the voice he might have used to react to such a question in his capacity as the spokesman for the Planners.

He simply said, “Not by force.”

“I don't see what you think you can achieve,” she said bluntly.

“We'll see,” he said, in neutral tones.

“Why bring us?” I asked. “You wanted me along, and you didn't send Karen back. But if you're so afraid of the consequences our actions may have—pollution of your cultural values, or however you want to put it—why invite us to the party? You didn't just volunteer to bring me so that I'd show you where the boat was.”

“I want you to guide me to your ship,” he said. “And I want you to come to an agreement with Jason.”

“A deal?”

“If you like.”

“What
kind
of deal?”

“An honest deal, Mr. Alexander. You have to make him see the kind of sense which you threw at us this afternoon. You have to make him realize that there are things more important than his personal ambitions.”

“Sweet reason?” I said, without conviction. “What makes you think he'll listen? What makes you think he'll care?”

“He's a Florian,” said Rondo. “The son of a colonial culture.”

“He didn't stay to listen today,” I pointed out. “He isn't in a mood to believe the truth. He might not be ready to see reason; in fact, I'd say he's almost ready to react against it. He's a desperate man.”

“In that case,” said Rondo, again with quiet confidence, “then we must show him up for what he is. We must let those he commands—and those with whom he has allied himself—see him for what he is.”

I could still hear Nathan's mocking advice ringing in my ears.
Be realistic,
he had said. And I had rejected, inwardly, his brand of realism. But how realistic was Rondo's belief that force could be opposed without force? How realistic was the conviction that Jason, Vulgan, and men like them could be turned aside from their objective with nothing more than words? They were, as Rondo had said, colonists and the sons of colonists. Men of Floria, who must, in their hearts, feel something of the ideals that had motivated their forefathers. But how much? To what extent had that idealism been eroded and repressed by the kind of cynical detachment which came so easy to us, the invaders from Earth? How powerful, I wondered, are time and circumstance?

There was no way of knowing. We were at the mercy of the unpredictable, with only Rondo's faith to guide us. Faith, I knew, can be a very unsatisfactory guide. Ask any of its victims.

“For some time,” said Rondo, “we have anticipated this moment of rebellion. We had not expected it so soon; perhaps, unconsciously, we hoped that it would never come, or believed that we could hold it at bay forever. Now that it is here, we are afraid, anxious, hesitant. We are not really attuned to the acceptance of new information—we live on the assumption of our virtual omniscience. What you have tried to make us see is something we are, for the most part, reluctant to confront. We are confused. I don't know how you think of us, but you must make allowances. You must try to realize the extent of the effect your coming here has had. It has been a shock.”

While he spoke he continued to haul on the oars with a steady rhythm. He seemed quite tireless. His voice remained perfectly level and composed. He breathed easily.

“You arrive,” he continued, “at an awkward time. It is not so long ago—perhaps only a generation—that the rebellion you have touched off could not have happened. For six generations, the measure of a man on Floria was the measure of what he could make with his hands. Everything that a man had in the world was made directly by his own hands, or bought with the produce of his own hands. But over the years this has become gradually less true. What one generation has built, the next has inherited. Needs have, over the years, been supplied...and the means to supply them have been sophisticated to the point at which it is no longer necessary for every man to spend his life making things in order to supply the needs of the people. As we have made our wealth, so we have allowed control of that wealth to pass gradually from the men who make it to the men who distribute it. The power of that wealth can be acquired, concentrated...and the measure of a man changes from what he has made and can make to what he has bought and can buy. And because of this the absolute command enjoyed by the Planners has steadily declined. We are no longer directly responsible for sustaining the life of the colony. The people can live their own lives, supply their own needs. Do you see what I mean?”

“I see what you're getting at,” I told him. “At first, life was hard. You came out of your tin cans with nothing but the clothes you stood up in and a few domestic animals. Ever since then you've been battling to survive. But now, you're surviving. You've built what you set out to build. Your plans go much further into the future, but people like Vulgan now have the latitude to make their own plans...The devil finds work for idle hands.”

“Not the devil, Mr. Alexander,” he said gently. “It's not evil we have to face, but opportunism. What's happening is quite natural.”

“Then what makes you think you can stop it?” said Karen. “They never managed it back on Earth. Not in three thousand years.”

“We began life here with little more than our bare hands,” said Rondo. “But we did not begin as savages. We began as intelligent men and women—the product of a civilization which had equipped our minds, if not our bodies. The first colonists were in a position to learn and recognize not only the value, but the
necessity,
of cooperation and coordination.”

“Never mind that crap,” said Karen, lacking in subtlety but cutting to the heart of the matter. “Just tell us how, without the use of force, you intend to put down this rebellion.”

“We don't,” he said. “Not in the sense that you mean.”

“What other sense is there?” she demanded.

“There's no reason at all why we should try to stop Ellerich and Vulgan claiming new titles and setting up new structures of government,” said Rondo. “We're not interested in that kind of exercise. What is going on at the moment is that all the men we have educated on the island—and perhaps half a dozen that we have not—are sorting themselves out into those who are prepared to join Ellerich's challenge and those who are not. I presume that those who are not will be placed under arrest. In order to be successful Ellerich needs to win the greater number to his own side—but the more he wins the more dilute his cause becomes. The more support he tries to win, the more compromises he will have to make. And he is working, you must remember, with men that we have trained, men that we have tried to infect with our ideas. No matter how many ideas of their own they have acquired, they remain, at heart, our men, accepting our aims if not our methods.

“The more success Ellerich's rebellion wins in recruiting supporters, the less powerful will be the force of his own self-seeking determination. We can't stop this rebellion...but we have been working to subvert it for more than a hundred years. We will allow Ellerich to prepare his demands, and we will give in to some of them from the very start. Then we will begin to talk about the rest. And we will keep talking, preserving and acting within a slowly changing balance of power...for a hundred years, and a thousand. We don't need totalitarian control in order to direct the course of history. All we need is to preserve something of the monopoly we have on knowledge. That monopoly will be eroded, but very slowly. By the time it has gone completely, it will no longer be necessary.”