Star Song and Other Stories Part 25

"Suppose we don't choose to roll over and show our throats," Kulasawa interrupted. "Suppose we decide we're not going to feed your megalomania."

Peter's eyebrows lifted, just a bit. "This has nothing to do with megalomania,"

he said. "Or with me."

"Then what does it have to do with?" Rhonda asked quietly.

"The fact that if the Expansion learns where we are, they'll want to bring us back," Peter said. "We don't want that."

Kulasawa frowned. "You must be joking," she said. "You'd kidnap us for that?

Do you seriously think anyone in the Expansion cares a pfennig's worth for any of you?"

"If you think that, why are you here?" Peter asked, regarding her thoughtfully.

"And please don't try to tell me it was in the pure pursuit of knowledge," he added as she began to speak. "The more I study you, the more I'm convinced you're not actually a scholar at all."

Kulasawa favored him with a thin smile. "One for two, Your Highness," she said.

"You're right, I'm not a scholar."

I looked at Rhonda, saw my own surprise mirrored in her face. "Then who are you?" I demanded.

"But on the other point, you're dead wrong," Kulasawa continued, ignoring my question. "Pure knowledge is exactly the reason I'm here."

"I see," Peter said. "Any bit of knowledge in particular you're interested in?"

"Of course," Kulasawa said. "You don't really think I care about your little world and your quaint little backwater duck-pond monarchy, do you?"

"Yet you were willing to pay three hundred thousand neumarks to come here,"

Rhonda pointed out.

"Don't worry, I intend to get full value for my money," Kulasawa a.s.sured her coldly. "By the time I'm finished here, I'll have completely changed the shape of Expansion s.p.a.ce travel."

There was a sort of strangled-off gasp from the other end of the couch. I turned that direction just in time to see Peter put a restraining hand on Suzenne's arm. "What do you mean by that?" the king asked, his voice steady.

"It should be obvious, even to you," Kulasawa said, regarding both of them with narrowed eyes. Clearly, she'd caught the reaction, too. "I want those ion-capture engines of yours."

"Of course," I murmured under my breath. It was obvious, at least in retrospect.

The current limit on s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p size was due solely to the limits in the power and size of their drives; and those limits were there solely because the Jovians' unique engineering genius had died with their bid for independence from Earth. Examination of the Freedom's Peace's drive would indeed revolutionize Expansion s.p.a.ce travel.

As I said, obvious. And yet, at the same time I felt obscurely disappointed.

After all of Kulasawa's lies and manipulation, it seemed like such a petty thing to have invaded an entire world for.

But if Peter was feeling similarly, he wasn't showing it. In fact, I could swear that some of the tension had actually left his face. "I presume you weren't planning to disa.s.semble them for s.h.i.+pment aboard your transport," he said.

"Or did you think we would have the plans lying conveniently around for you to steal?"

"Actually, I was hoping to persuade you to come back with me," Kulasawa said.

"Though the engines are my primary interest, I'm sure there are other bits of technological magic the Jovian engineers incorporated into the design of this place that would be worth digging out."

"I'm sure there are," Peter agreed. "But you already have our answer to that."

"But why don't you want to come back with us?" Rhonda asked. "We have true interstellar travel now-there's no need or reason for you to stay out here this way."

"She's right," I put in. "If you want your own world, I'm sure the Expansion could provide you with something."

"We already have our own world," Suzenne pointed out.

"I meant a real world," I said.

"So did I," Suzenne said. "You think of a world as a physical planet orbiting a physical sun; no more, no less. I think of a world as a group of people living together. I think of the society and culture and quality of life."

"Our ancestors left Sol for reasons involving all of those," Peter added.

"Don't forget, we've had three other visitors from the Expansion, from which we've learned a great deal about your current society. Frankly, there are things happening there we'd just as soon not involve ourselves with."

"Typical provincial thinking," Kulasawa said contemptuously. "Fear of the unknown, and a ruthless suppression of anything that might rock the boat of the people in power. And I presume that if I wanted to put my proposal to the whole colony you'd refuse to let me?"

"There would be no need for that," Peter said. "The decision has already been made."

"Of course," Kulasawa sniffed. "The glories of absolute monarchy. Dieu et mon droit, ex cathedra, and all that. The king speaks, and the people submit."

"The Citizens' Council agreed with the decision," Suzenne told her. "All the citizens understand our reasoning."

Kulasawa shrugged. "Fine," she said. "As I said, I'd hoped to persuade you.

But if you won't come willingly, you'll just have to do so unwillingly."

Peter's forehead furrowed slightly. "An interesting threat. May I ask how you intend to carry it out?"

"As I said, I could start by addressing the people," Kulasawa said. "Give them a taste of real democracy for a change."

Peter shook his head. "I already said you wouldn't persuade them."

"Then why are you afraid to let me try?" Kulasawa countered. "Still, there's no reason to upset your well-trained sheep out there. All I really need to do is explain to you why you can't make me disappear as conveniently as you have all the others. Why there will be people who'll come looking for me."

I frowned at her, a sudden hope stirring within me. Up until that moment, it hadn't really sunk in on an emotional level that what we were discussing here was a permanent-and I mean permanent-exile to this place. If Kulasawa had some kind of trick up her sleeve that could get us home...

"By all means," Suzenne invited. "Tell us what sort of clues or hints you left behind."

"No clues or hints," Kulasawa said loftily. "Merely a simple matter of who I am."

"And who are you?" Suzenne asked.

And at that moment, the double doors behind Peter swung open again. I looked that direction to see Jimmy come into the room, his hair looking even more unkempt than usual. He must have missed seeing Peter and Suzenne, with their backs mostly to him; but he spotted me instantly. "Captain!" he said, bounding toward us as the doors closed again behind him.

I hissed under my breath, trying to gesture his attention to Peter without being obvious about it. Talk about your oblivious bull in a china shop- But he was bubbling too hard to even notice. "Guess what?" he called, a huge grin plastered across his face as he came around the end of the couch. "These people can talk to the flapblacks!"

I froze, my gesturing hand still in midair. "What?"

"Yeah, they can talk to-" He broke step, suddenly fl.u.s.tered as he abruptly seemed to focus on the rest of the people seated in front of him on the couch.

"Oh. Uh... I'm sorry..."

"No, that's all right," I said, throwing a hard glance at Peter. But his face was unreadable. "Tell us more."

Jimmy's eyes darted around, his throat working uncertainly. "Uh... well, I was talking to one of their musicians," he said hesitantly. "And he said..."

His voice trailed away. "He said we can communicate mentally with the beings you call flapblacks," Peter said. His voice was calm again, and with a flash of insight I realized that this was the secret he'd thought Kulasawa had stumbled on earlier when she'd spoken of revolutionizing s.p.a.ce travel. "We would have told you about it eventually."

"Of course," I said. "How about telling us about it now?"

He held his hands out, palm upward. "There's not much to tell," he said. "Our first hint was a few years out, when we began to realize that the supposedly imaginary friends our first-born children were telling their parents about were not, in fact, imaginary at all. It took awhile longer to realize who and what the beings were they were in contact with."

"And Jimmy said you talked to them?"

"A figure of speech," Peter said. "It's actually a direct mental contact, a wordless communication."

"Why didn't you tell the Habitats?" Kulasawa put it. "You must have still been in contact with Jupiter at that point."

"We were already beginning to fade," Suzenne said. "By the time we'd figured it all out, it would have been problematic whether we could have gotten enough of the message through."

"And besides, you thought it might be a useful secret to keep to yourselves?"

Kulasawa suggested, smiling thinly.

Peter shook his head. "You don't understand," he said. "In the first place, it's hardly a marketable secret-any child who's conceived and brought to term away from large planetary ma.s.ses will have the ability. Everyone aboard has it now, except of course for the handful of recent visitors like yourselves."

"That doesn't change the fact that it's an enormously useful talent,"

Kulasawa said. "You people don't need a musicmaster to get where you're going, do you?

You just order the flapblack to take you where you want to go, and that's it."

"It's not like that at all," Suzenne protested. "They're not servants or slaves we can order to do anything. It's more like..." She floundered.

"I sometimes think of it as similar to those dolphin and whale shows they have on Earth," Peter said. "You train them by giving them a reward when they do something you want, but you aren't really communicating with them. In this case, you provide the reward-the music-concurrently with the action, but you have no real understanding as to who and what you're dealing with-"

"Let's put the philosophy aside for a minute," Kulasawa cut in brusquely.

"Bottom line: you can tell them were to go and they take you there. Yes or no?"

Peter pursed his lips. "For the most part, yes."

He looked back at me. "You see now why we can't let even a hint of this get back to the rest of the Expansion. If they knew we could move their transports between the stars without the uncertainties and complications of the music technique, they would carry every one of us away into slavery."

Kulasawa snorted. "Give the melodramatics a rest, Your Highness. What you mean is that you've got a platinum opportunity here and you're just afraid to grab it."

"Believe whatever you wish," Peter said. "For you, perhaps, it would be an opportunity. For us, it would be slavery.""You really think they would just take you away like that?" Rhonda asked. "I can't believe our leaders would allow that."

"Of course they would," Peter said, gesturing toward Jimmy. "Just look at your own musicmaster. The musicmaster on the first transport to find us was a forty-six-year-old former professor of composition. How old is Mr. Chamala?"

"Nineteen," I said, looking at Jimmy. "He has the right kind of mind, and they hustled him straight through school."

"Did he have a choice?"

I grimaced. "As I understand it, there's a great deal of subtle pressure brought to bear on potential musicmasters."

"Do you think it would be any different with us?" Peter asked quietly.

"There's a virtual explosion in the volume of interstellar travel and colonization-just comparing the Sergei Rock's planetary charts with those of our earlier visitors makes that abundantly clear. If they knew we could feed that appet.i.te, do you really think they would hesitate to press us into service?"

"And do you have any idea what prices you could command for such service?"

Kulasawa demanded. "That's what Smith's 'subtle pressure' mostly consists of: huge piles of neumarks. Play your cards right and your world could be one of the richest in the Expansion."

"And who would be left to live there?" Suzenne countered. "Children under

five.

and elders over ninety? They'd take everyone else."

"Now you're being ridiculous," Kulasawa growled.

"I don't think so," Suzenne said. "But whether I am or not is irrelevant. The decision has been made, and we're not going to change it."

"Fine," Kulasawa said. "If you won't bring freedom to your people, Jimmy and I.

will have to do it for you."

Jimmy, who'd been largely frozen in place ever since planting himself near Peter's end of the couch, came unstuck in a rush. "Who-me?" he gulped, his eyes turning into dinner plates.

"You're the only one who can help them, Jimmy," Kulasawa said, her voice abruptly soft and earnest. "The only one who can free them from the prison King Peter and his power elite have locked them into."

"Wait just a second," I protested. "If the people have decided-"

"The people haven't decided, Smith," Kulasawa cut me off scornfully. "Or haven't you been paying attention? What proportion of the people here, do you think, would jump at the chance to get out of this flying coffin and see the Universe?"