IX

The submarine docked at an indescribably lovely bay in the south of

Ireland. Orsino asked Grinnel whether the Irish didn't object to this,

and was met with a blank stare. It developed that the Irish consisted of

a few hundred wild men in the woods--maybe a few thousand. The stupid

shore-bound personnel couldn't seem to clean them out. Grinnel didn't

know anything about them, and he cared less.

Ireland appeared to be the naval base. The government proper was located

on Iceland, vernal again after a long, climatic swing. The Canaries and

Ascencion were outposts.

Orsino had learned enough on the voyage to recognize the Government for

what it was. It had happened before in history; Uncle Frank had pointed

it out. Big-time Caribbean piracy had grown from very respectable

origins. Gentlemen-skippers had been granted letters of marque and

reprisal by warring governments, which made them a sort of contract

navy. Periods of peace had found these privateers unwilling to give up

their hard earned complicated profession and their investments in it.

When they could no longer hoist the flag of England or France or Spain,

they simply hoisted the Jolly Roger and went it alone.

Confusing? Hell, yes! The famous Captain Kidd thought he was a gallant

privateer and sailed trustingly into New York. Somewhere he had failed

to touch third base; they shipped him to London for trial and hanged him

as a pirate. The famous Henry Morgan had never been anything but a

pirate and a super-pirate; as admiral of a private fleet he executed a

brilliant amphibious operation and sacked the city of Panama. He was

knighted, made governor of a fair-sized English island in the West

Indies and died loved and respected by all.

Charles Orsino found himself a member of a pirate band that called

itself the North American Government.

More difficult to learn were the ins and outs of pirate politics, which

were hampered with an archaic, structurally-inappropriate nomenclature

and body of tradition. Commander Grinnel was a Sociocrat, which meant

that he was in the same gang as President Loman. The late sub commander

had been a Constitutionist, which meant that he was allied with the

currently-out "southern bloc." The southern bloc did not consist of

southerners at this stage of the North American Government's history but

of a clique that tended to include the engineers and maintenance men of

the Government. That had been the reason for the sub commander's

erasure.

The Constitutionists traditionally commanded pigboats and aircraft while

surface vessels and the shore establishments were in the hands of the

Sociocrats--the fruit of some long-forgotten compromise.

Commander Grinnel cheerfully explained to Charles that there was a

crypto-Sociocrat naval officer primed and waiting to be appointed to the

command of the sub. The Constitutionist gang would back him to the hilt

and the Sociocrats would growl and finally assent. If, thereafter, the

Constitutionists ever counted on the sub in a coup, they would be

quickly disillusioned.

There wasn't much voting. Forty years before there had been a bad

deadlock following the death by natural causes of President Powell after

seventeen years in office. An ad hoc bipartisan conference called a

session of the Senate and the Senate elected a new president.

It was little information to be equipped with when you walked out into

the brawling streets of New Portsmouth on shore leave.

* * * * *

The town had an improvised look which was strange to Orsino. There was a

sanitation reactor every hundred yards or so, but he mistrusted the look

of the ground-level mains that led to it from, the houses. There were

house flies from which he shied violently. Every other shack on the

waterfront was a bar or a notch joint. He sampled the goods at one of

the former and was shocked by the quality and price. He rolled out, his

ears still ringing from the belt of raw booze; as half a dozen sweatered

Guards rolled in, singing some esoteric song about their high morale and

even higher venereal rate. A couple of them looked at him appraisingly,

as though they wondered what kind of a noise he'd make if they jumped on

his stomach real hard, and he hurried away from them.

The other entertainment facilities of the waterfront were flatly ruled

out by a quick inspection of the wares. He didn't know what to make of

them. Joints back in Syndic Territory if you were a man, made sense. You

went to learn the ropes, or because you were afraid of getting mixed up

in something intense when you didn't want to, or because you wanted a

change, or because you were too busy, lazy or shy to chase skirts on

your own. If you were a woman and not too particular, a couple of years

in a joint left you with a considerable amount of money and some

interesting memories which you were under no obligation to discuss with

your husbands or husband.

But the sloppy beasts who called to him from the windows of the joints

here on the waterfront, left him puzzled and disgusted. He reflected,

strolling up Washington Street with eyes straight ahead, that women must

be in short supply if they could make a living--or that the male

citizens of the Government had no taste.

A whiff from one of those questionable sewer mains sent him reeling. He

ducked into another saloon in self-defense and leaned groggily against

the bar. A pretty brunette demanded: "What'll you have?"

"Gin, please." He peeled a ten off the roll Grinnel had given him. When

the girl poured his gin he looked at her and found her fair. In all

innocence, he asked her a question, as he might have asked a barmaid

back home. She could have answered, "Yes," "No," "Maybe," or "What's in

it for me?"

Instead she called him a lousy bastard, picked up a beer mug and was

about to shatter it on his head when a hand caught her and a voice

warned: "Hold it, Mabel! This guy's off my ship.

"He's just out of the States; he doesn't know any better. You know what

it's like over there."

Mabel snarled: "You better wise him up, then, friend. He can't go around

talking like that to decent women." She slapped down another glass,

poured gin and flounced down the bar.

Charles gulped his gin and turned shakily to his deliverer, a little

reactor specialist he had seen on the sub once or twice. "Thanks," he

said feeling inadequate. "Maybe you better wise me up. All I said was,

'Darling, do you--'"

The reactor man held up his hand. "That's enough," he said. "You don't

talk that way over here unless you want your scalp parted."

Charles, buzzing a little with the gin, protested hotly: "But what's the

harm? All she had to say was no; I wasn't going to throw her down on the

floor!"

It was all very confusing.

A shrug. "I heard about things in the States--Wyman, isn't it? I guess I

didn't really believe it. You mean I could go up to any woman and just

ask her how's about it?"

"Within reason, yes."

"And _do_ they?"

"Some do, some don't--like here."

"Like hell, like here! Last liberty--" and the reactor man told him a

long, confusing story about how he had picked up this pig, how she had

dangled it in front of him for one solid week while he managed to spend

three hundred and eighty-six dollars on her, and how finally she had

bawled that she couldn't, she just hated herself but she couldn't do

anything like _that_ and bang went the door in his face, leaving him to

finish out the evening in a notch joint.

"Good God!" Charles said, appalled. "Was she out of her mind?"

"No," the reactor man said glumly, "but I must have been. I should of

got her drunk and raped her the first night."

Charles was fully conscious that values were different here. Choking

down something like nausea, he asked carefully: "Is there much rape?"

The little man signalled for another gin and downed it. "I guess so.

Once when I was a kid a dame gave me this line about her cousin raped

her when she was little so she was frigid. I had more ambition then, so

I said: 'Then this won't be anything new to you, baby,' I popped her on

the button--"

"I've got to go now," Charles said, walking straight out of the saloon.

He was beginning to understand the sloppy beasts in the windows of the

notch joint and why men could bring themselves to settle for nothing

better. He was also overwhelmed by a great wave of home sickness.

The ugly pattern was beginning to emerge. Prudery, rape, frigidity,

intrigue for power--and assassination? Beyond the one hint, Grinnel had

said nothing that affected Syndic Territory.

But nothing would be more logical than for this band of brigands to lust

after the riches of the continent.

Back of the waterfront were shipfitting shops and living quarters. Work

was being done by a puzzling combination of mechanization and

musclepower. In one open shed he saw a lathe-hand turning a gunbarrel

out of a forging; the lathe was driven by one of those standard 18-inch

ehrenhaft rotors Max Wyman knew so well. But a vertical drillpress next

to it--Orsino blinked. Two men, sweating and panting, were turning a

stubborn vertical drum as tall as they were, and a belt drive from the

drum whirled the drill bit as it sank into a hunk of bronze. The men

were in rags, dirty rags. And it came to Orsino with a stunning shock

when he realized what the dull, clanking things were that swung from

their wrists. They were chained to the handles of the wheel.

He walked on, almost dazed, comprehending now some cryptic remarks that

had been passed aboard the sub.

"No Frog has staying power. Give a Limey his beef once a day and he'll

outsweat a Frog."

"Yeah, but you can't whip a Limey. They just go bad when you whip a

Limey."

"They just get sullen for awhile. But let me tell you, friend, don't

ever whip a Spig. You whip a Spig, he'll wait twenty years if he has to

but he'll _get_ you, right between the ribs."

"If a Spig wants to be boiled, I should worry."

It had been broken up in laughter.

_Boiled!_ Could such things be?

Sixteen ragged, filth-crusted sub-humans were creeping down the road,

each straining at a rope. An inch at a time, they were dragging a skid

loaded with one huge turbine gear whose tiny herringbone teeth caught

the afternoon sun.

The Government had reactors, the Government had vehicles--why this? He

slowly realized that the Government's metal and machinery and atomic

power went into its warships; that there was none left over for

consumers, and the uses of peace. The Government had degenerated into a

dawn-age monster, specialized all to teeth and claws and muscles to

drive them with. The Government was now, whatever it had been, a

graceless, humorless incarnate ferocity. Whatever lightness or joy

survived was the meaningless vestigial twitching of an obsolete organ.

Somewhere a child began to bawl and Charles was surprised to feel a

profound pity welling up in him. Like a sedentary man who after a

workout aches in muscles he never knew he owned, Charles was discovering

that he had emotions which had never been poignantly evoked by the bland

passage of the hours in Syndic Territory.

Poor little bastard, he thought, growing up in this hellhole. I don't

know what having slaves to kick around will do to you, but I don't see

how you can grow up a human being. I don't know what fear of love will

do to you--make you a cheat? Or a graceful rutting animal with a choice

only between graceless rutting violence and a stinking scuffle with a

flabby and abstracted stranger in a strange unloved room? We have our

guns to play with and they're good toys, but I don't know what kind of

monster you'll become when they give you a gun to live with and violence

for a god.

_Reiner was right_, he thought unhappily. _We've got to do something

about this mess._

A man and a woman were struggling in an alley as he passed. Old habit

almost made him walk on, but this wasn't the playful business of ripping

clothes as practiced during hilarious moments in Mob Territory. It was a

grim and silent struggle--

The man wore the sweater of the Guards. Nevertheless, Charles walked

into the alley and tore him away from the woman; or rather, he yanked at

the man's rock-like arm and the man, in surprise, let go of the woman

and spun to face him.

"Beat it," Charles said to the woman, not looking around. He saw from

the corner of his eye that she was staying right there.

The man's hand was on his sheath knife. He told Charles: "Get lost. Now.

You don't mess with the Guards."

Charles felt his knees quivering, which was good. He knew from many a

chukker of polo that it meant that he was strung to the breaking point,

ready to explode into action. "Pull that knife," he said, "and the next

thing you know you'll be eating it."

The man's face went dead calm and he pulled the knife and came in low,

very fast. The knife was supposed to catch Charles in the middle. If

Charles stepped inside it, the man would grab him in a bear hug and

knife him in the back.

There was only one answer.

He caught the thick wrist from above with his left hand as the knife

flashed toward his middle and shoved out. He felt the point catch and

slice his cuff. The Guardsman tried a furious and ill-advised kick at

his crotch; with his grip on the knife-hand, Charles toppled him into

the filthy alley as he stood one-legged and off balance. He fell on his

back, floundering, and for a black moment, Charles thought his weight

was about to tear the wrist loose from his grip. The moment passed, and

Charles put his right foot in the socket of the Guardsman's elbow,

reinforced his tiring left hand with his right and leaned, doubling the

man's forearm over the fulcrum of his boot. The man roared and dropped

the knife. It had taken perhaps five seconds.

Charles said, panting: "I don't want to break your arm or kick your head

in or anything like that. I just want you to go away and leave the woman

alone." He was conscious of her, vaguely hovering in the background. He

thought angrily: _She might at least get his knife._

The Guardsman said thickly: "You give me the boot and I swear to God

I'll find you and cut you to ribbons if it takes me the rest of my

life."

_Good_, Charles thought. _Now he can tell himself he scared me. Good._

He let go of the forearm, straightened and took his foot from the man's

elbow, stepping back. The Guardsman got up stiffly, flexing his arm, and

stooped to pick up and sheath his knife without taking his eyes off

Charles. Then he spat in the dust at Charles' feet. "Yellow crud," he

said. "If the goddam crow was worth it, I'd cut your heart out." He

walked off down the alley and Charles followed him with his eyes until

he turned the corner into the street.

Then he turned, irritated that the woman had not spoken.

She was Lee Falcaro.

"Lee!" he said, thunderstruck. "What are you doing here?" It was the

same face, feature for feature, and between her brows appeared the same

double groove he had seen before. But she didn't know him.

"You know me?" she asked blankly. "Is that why you pulled that ape off

me? I ought to thank you. But I can't place you at all. I don't know

many people here. I've been ill, you know."

There was a difference apparent now. The voice was a little querulous.

And Charles would have staked his life that never could Lee Falcaro

have said in that slightly smug, slightly proprietary, slightly

aren't-I-interesting tone: "I've been ill, you know."

"But what are you _doing_ here? Damn it, don't you know me? I'm Charles

Orsino!"

He realized then that he had made a horrible mistake.

"Orsino," she said. And then she spat: "_Orsino!_ Of the _Syndic_!"

There was black hatred in her eyes.

She turned and raced down the alley. He stood there stupidly, for almost

a minute, and then ran after her, as far as the alley's mouth. She was

gone. You could run almost anywhere in New Portsmouth in almost a

minute.

A weedy little seaman wearing crossed quills on his cap was lounging

against a building. He snickered at Charles. "Don't chase that one,

sailor," he said. "She is the property of O.N.I."

"You know who she is?"

The yeoman happily spilled his inside dope to the fleet gob: "Lee

Bennet. Smuggled over here couple months ago by D.A.R. The hottest thing

that ever hit Naval Intelligence. Very small potato in the Syndic--knows

all the families, who does what, who's a figurehead and who's a worker.

Terrific! Inside stuff! Hates the Syndic. A gang of big-timers did her

dirt."

"Thanks," Charles said, and wandered off down the street.

It wasn't surprising. He should have _expected_ it.

_Noblesse oblige._

Pride of the Falcaro line. She wouldn't send anybody into deadly peril

unless she were ready to go herself.

Only somehow the trigger that would have snapped neurotic, synthetic Lee

Bennet into Lee Falcaro hadn't worked.

He wandered on aimlessly, wondering whether it would be minutes or hours

before he'd be picked up and executed as a spy.