The Florians (20 page)

“On Earth, every day—I don't know how many times—people get threatened with guns. A lot of them say
no,
because they believe it's the only way. A lot of them get shot, still believing that it's the only way. They believe that by getting shot they demonstrate that force has no power to compel...only power to kill. A lot of people think my son's ideas are crazy. The faith to which he belongs is opposed by authority, and lives almost on the fringe of legality. That's a compliment...an acknowledgment that it may just work. It may be stupid...every man a potential martyr...and it may not last out the century...and it may cost a hell of a lot of lives...but it may be the only way.

“If you're going to shoot, shoot. But what do you do for an encore?”

I thought I could talk him out of it. I really did. I thought I was being clever rather than brave. I couldn't believe that he was really so desperate.

“You're a fool,” he said, and raised the barrel of the gun slightly to aim at my ribs.

It's all so pointless,
I thought.
You made all this trouble for yourself, out of your own vanity, your own crazy pretensions. You could have kept all the power that ever really meant anything....

He pressed the trigger.

And the gun blew apart in his hands.

I had spun away, my face turned and my arms coming up reflexively to shield me from the shot. I felt tiny stings in my shoulder, as if I had been attacked by a host of wasps. I went down, not realizing what had happened. But I fell. I wasn't thrown backward by the impact.

I was hit...but Jason was screaming and clawing at his face. The wreckage of the gun had been hurled aside by a convulsive jerk. There seemed to be blood everywhere.
His
blood.

I was curling up, but still conscious. I realized that I was alive and likely to stay that way. I could have laughed.

Jason was still alive, too, but it seemed something of a miracle. He seemed to have taken most of the explosive force in his face and upper chest, although he had held the stock of the gun no higher than his waist. He was thrashing convulsively in the grip of some chaotic chain of reflex. He would be in pain for a long, long time to come.

I felt Karen's hands on my shoulders. She was trying to help me up. I resisted.

Nobody else had moved, but at least one other person bad screamed. I didn't know who.

I watched Lucas slowly relax the hands with which he gripped his own gun. The barrel drooped and fell. Then he dropped it, and looked down at it with offended horror.

“The trouble with homemade guns and ammunition,” I said, in a remote voice, “is that they can't be standardized properly. You're always likely to get a cartridge that explodes in the breech.”

There was another thought crossing my mind...something about the mercy of the unpredictable...but I couldn't form it. I had caught sight of my own blood, staining my sleeve deep red. It still hurt.

I fainted.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I woke up a couple of times before they finally got me back into the ship, but consciousness didn't seem like a good idea, and I wasn't sorry when Conrad finally put me out with a hypodermic. I think people kept reassuring me that everything was all right.

I slept for a long time, even after the drug had worn off. I was in a state of advanced exhaustion. A couple of days had gone by before I was eventually allowed to sit up and consume a little liquid nourishment by the conventional route. I was passed fit for visitors, but with the size of a star-ship cabin being what it is they had to come in one by one. It fell to Karen's lot to bring me up to date.

The first thing she did was to open my palm and dump half a dozen little metal pellets in it.

“What's that?” I asked her.

“The lead they took out of your shoulder,” she said. “I thought you might like it as a souvenir of how close you came to being dead. You can get blood poisoning from that kind of thing, you know.”

I weighed the fragments in my hand. They came to no more than a couple of grams.

“They didn't go very deep,” she added. “Insufficient thrust.”

“How much did we take out of Jason?” I inquired.

“About four times as much. A lot just distributed itself about the room. It was a big bullet.”

“Is Jason alive?”

“Oh, yes. On his way back to the hospital in Hope Landing. Scarred for life, though. And his hands will never be the same again. He'll be booked for a sedentary occupation from now on...and he'll likely run to fat.”

“And the situation in general?”

“Oh,” she said, offhand, “you saved that. All that melodrama didn't go to waste. Ellerich decided there had to be a better way. The talk is already starting. It'll go on for months. Very boring. Nathan's not back yet. He's got a lot of work in front of him.”

“So have we all,” I said. “It's time to start catching rats.”

“You already caught a big one,” she said. “But using yourself for bait is kind of dangerous. It was an almighty fluke that you didn't get your head blown off. You took one hell of a gamble shooting that line of neo-Christian cant...and you couldn't have got any closer to losing it.”

“True,” I admitted.

“I already know you're crazy,” she went on, “but for the sake of my curiosity will you tell me whether you were really prepared to get shot? Did you really believe it, or were you handing him a line that went wrong?”

“On due reflection,” I answered, “I haven't a clue. Ask Mariel. She may know whether I meant it or not, and what I meant if I did, but I don't.”

“You sure as hell weren't a neo-Christian before we came here,” she said.

“Or they'd never have let you on the ship.”

“As Pietrasante himself said to me,” I replied vaguely, “it isn't illegal.”

“Just crazy.”

“Maybe.”

“It seems to me,” she commented, “that you have so many beliefs they get more than a little tangled up.”

“Mixed motives,” I told her, “are the best kind.”

“I suppose they'll raise a statue to you,” she said dryly. “Right out there in the farmyard. The man who saved Floria. Twice. You reckon you really pulled it off back there, don't you? You think that because you were lucky at the crucial point you might have made Floria safe for pacifism forever?”

I shook my head. “I don't think that at all. The rebellion has started...it'll go on forever...maybe just a little more slowly. But as Jason said...what choice did I have? Yes or no. The same choice everybody has, every time. And it's always there, having to be taken again and again and again. I'll just take my choices, and the world—this world or any world—can take its own. My business is catching rats.”

“Coming from you,” she said, “that's almost cynical.”

“I'm not a cynic,” I said. “I'm a realist. Only cynics think there isn't any difference.”

I felt curiously self-satisfied as I rallied myself to think about it all. I suppose it was a sort of exultancy...the sort you get when you find the fifth empty chamber in a game of Russian roulette. I wasn't really prepared to care anymore about what the hell I'd been playing at. I just wanted to get on to the next move.

I took hold of her hand, turned it right side up, and gave her back her souvenirs.

“You keep them,” I said. “You need them more than I do.”

“Why?”

“To remind you that even if Goliath was the better man, David was luckier.”

“If David had stood still and let Goliath knock his head off,” she said, “history might tell a different story.”

“As to that,” I pointed out, “only time will tell. In the meantime, there are months of hard work in prospect. We have to identify the plasticity factor, and figure out a way to bring it under control—by force or persuasion or whatever damn way we can. It's not going to be easy.”

She clenched her fist around the metal pellets, and nodded absently. “You know,” she said, “it's strange that even here, where things looked to be so good and so healthy, and where the people have built a nation, there's still something lurking in the background which could destroy the whole thing. When you think back to Kilner's reports, about the way every single hospitable, Earth-like world had discovered some way to be implacably hostile, you have to wonder whether there's more than luck involved. Maybe this whole scheme, the whole idea, is too ambitious. Maybe there never can be another human world.”

It was an uncharacteristically sober thought, for her. It revealed, perhaps for the first time, a depth of uncertainty underlying the glib carelessness.

But I had the answer.

“The gods are always against you,” I quoted. “But sometimes you can cheat them.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian Stableford
was born in Yorkshire in 1948. He taught at the University of Reading for several years, but is now a full-time writer. He has written many science-fiction and fantasy novels, including
The Empire of Fear
,
The Werewolves of London
,
Year Zero
,
The Curse of the Coral Bride
,
The Stones of Camelot
, and
Prelude to Eternity
. Collections of his short stories include a long series of
Tales of the Biotech Revolution
, and such idiosyncratic items as
Sheena and Other Gothic Tales
and
The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels
. He has written numerous nonfiction books, including
Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950
;
Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence
;
Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia
; and
The Devil's Party: A Brief History of Satanic Abuse
. He has contributed hundreds of biographical and critical articles to reference books, and has also translated numerous novels from the French language, including books by Paul Féval, Albert Robida, Maurice Renard, and J. H. Rosny the Elder.

BORGO PRESS FICTION BY BRIAN STABLEFORD

Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations

The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales

Beyond the Colors of Darkness and Other Exotica

Changelings and Other Metaphoric Tales

Complications and Other Science Fiction Stories

The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies

The Cthulhu Encryption: A Romance of Piracy

The Cure for Love and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

The Dragon Man: A Novel of the Future

The Eleventh Hour

The Fenris Device
(Hooded Swan #5)

Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future

Les Fleurs du Mal: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

The Florians
(Daedalus Mission #1)

The Gardens of Tantalus and Other Delusions

The Great Chain of Being and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

Halycon Drift
(Hooded Swan #1)

The Haunted Bookshop and Other Apparitions

In the Flesh and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels

Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First-Century Ghost Story

Luscinia: A Romance of Nightingales and Roses

The Mad Trist: A Romance of Bibliomania

The Moment of Truth: A Novel of the Future

Nature's Shift: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

An Oasis of Horror: Decadent Tales and Contes Cruels

The Paradise Game
(Hooded Swan #4)

The Plurality of Worlds: A Sixteenth-Century Space Opera

Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine

Promised Land
(Hooded Swan #3)

The Quintessence of August: A Romance of Possession

The Return of the Djinn and Other Black Melodramas

Rhapsody in Black
(Hooded Swan #2)

Salome and Other Decadent Fantasies

Swan Song
(Hooded Swan #6)

The Tree of Life and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

The Undead: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

Valdemar's Daughter: A Romance of Mesmerism

The World Beyond: A Sequel to S. Fowler Wright's The World Below

Xeno's Paradox: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

Zombies Don't Cry: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution