The travel-hall was a complete contrast to the broad lanes of the display region. It was low and narrow, the lighting was bad, the air was polluted. The fact was that RedSpot City was so congested, so overpopulated, that its recycling mechanisms were unable to keep up with the demand. The diameter of the main bubble was no greater than that of Nyork or Cago in North Jupiter, but its population was swelling so grotesquely that it was now the largest city of the planet, and soon it would be the largest of the entire System.
Amber coughed, unused to such foul air, and I was not enjoying it myself. In addition to the pollution there was a certain stench, suggesting that the sanitary mechanisms were also overcapacitated. But I held firm; I wanted to see the people of this nation as they really were.
We came to a park area, but it was no longer a park. Instead it was a grotesque conglomeration of junk. Old containers, crates, segments of packing material and things I could not quite identify were piled around haphazardly, filling the chamber.
“The park—is now a garbage dump?” I inquired, appalled.
“We shall send a crew to clean it up!” my guide promised hastily.
I knew this was more complicated than that. Remember, it is my talent to read people, and this man was excruciatingly eager to get me away from here. Therefore I resisted. “Let’s Lake a look at it now,” I said.
I helped Amber to get out of the vehicle, remembering as I took her hand the secret that lay between us. She was now in the Spanish mode, so could talk, but she had remained silent. Perhaps my insistence on extending this tour to the seamier side of the city was also a sublimation of my need to gain some sort of commitment from Amber, whatever its nature might be. As long as we were here, we were together without suspicion. Or perhaps it was more sinister: if she disliked this oppressive region, she would have to initiate some sort of gesture to inform me, and once she had done that, she might find it easier to inform me of the more important decision.
I studied her covertly as she stepped to the floor. She was slender but attractive enough in her public dress. For this occasion her outfit was in the style of RedSpot, a full skirt with a frilly border, and she had a flower in her hair. She looked completely Hispanic and completely innocent, a little girl just merging into maidenhood. I found her wholly desirable, and condemned myself for that. I had always had contempt for those older men who took very young mistresses; now I understood their position better than I liked.
As we approached the piled junk a small boy emerged. He spied us and retreated.
“Wait!” I called in Spanish. “Let me talk to you!” But the boy did not reappear. “Please, Señor Tyrant,” our guide said. “We must get clear of this region.”
“In a moment,” I agreed. I stepped to the crevice where the boy had vanished. Sure enough, there was a passage there.
This was no dump. It was a region of makeshift housing. The poverty-stricken masses of RedSpot had had to fashion their own residences, squatting in the park.
The odor was worse here, suggesting that these folk did not have proper access to sanitary facilities. I was appalled that such conditions should exist in the middle of a giant city-bubble of Jupiter, but not really surprised. I had verified what I had suspected. RedSpot really did need economic improvement loans!
Amber stood beside me, not reacting, so I pushed farther. I hunched over and entered the aperture, drawing her in after me. In retrospect I realize how foolish an act this was; I had been too long away from poverty.
“Señor! Señor!” the guide protested, horrified, and the guards strode forward.
But I moved on into the labyrinth—for so it turned out to be—of the slum village, Amber behind me. I found myself in a kind of twisting alley that wound through the jammed hut-chambers. There was literal garbage on the floor, and the passage was fraught with projecting ridges of plastic, for the chambers were not neatly fashioned.
I heard something behind and glanced back. A man had materialized, and he held a knife.
Now, belatedly, I realized my foolhardiness. I had left our guards behind and entered a largely lawless region. I could get myself killed before the guards could break through to rescue me.
But the man’s attention was on Amber, not on me. “Girl, come here,” he said gruffly.
Amber shrank away from him and toward me. “She is with me, señor,” I said.
Another man appeared on my other side. He, too, bore a blade. “What is your price for her?” he demanded. I was armed, of course. I had a laser, and I put my hand on it in my jacket. “Señors, I wish you no mischief,” I said. “But the señorita will not go with you. Now, if you will stand aside, we shall depart; I regret intruding on your territory.”
Both men closed on us, knives extended. I fired at one through my jacket, scorching him on the right ear, then spun to cover the other. He hesitated, so I seared him on the same ear. I knew better than to bluff with this type.
There was a stirring in the chambers of this region, and I knew we would soon have more company. I hustled Amber back, watching all around us. In a moment we were out, standing before the alarmed guards. I knew why they had not pursued us into the slum passage; they had feared this would only get us immediately knifed, and themselves as well. Their relief at seeing us unharmed was manifest.
We returned to the vehicle and moved on through the level. I saw that the two guards and the guide were tight with apprehension, despite our safe return, and in a moment I realized why. “I did a foolish thing,” I said to them. “You warned me but, of course, could not prevent me without causing affront. If you three will be so kind as to forget this embarrassing incident completely, it will be a great favor to me. I would not like to have to explain it to either my kind hosts or my own people; it would damage my image.”
The three exchanged glances, then smiled with relief. “It is forgotten!” they agreed emphatically. Of course, they would keep the secret; their own heads were on the line, for their neglect in protecting me.
“And the people of the slum—I wounded two in the ear,” I continued as an afterthought. “If they should appear with some complaint—”
“There will be no complaint,” the guards reassured me grimly.
Yes, I was sure of that. We had a minor conspiracy of silence, to mutual advantage. In the process I had been reminded of something I should never have forgotten: that it is not smart to attempt too boldly to mix with the disadvantaged. They may have been wronged by their society, but they are not necessarily nice or polite people.
Amber sat very close to me now. She, too, had been shaken, realizing how precarious existence can be for all of us. Perhaps that was a worthwhile side effect.
• • •
We docked at Callisto, winding up my Latin Jupiter tour. My people were nervous about this, because I had departed this planet as a refugee, not as a legitimate emigrant. But politics and power change things, and I suspected I would be safer here today than I was back on the colossus. I felt nostalgia for the home planet; my roots, however brutally severed, were here, and I wanted to walk the soil of Halfcal again. Also, I had a specific mission here, an ironic one, that was best handled personally and privately.
I took Amber to the city-dome of Maraud, my home turf. It was good to see the barren, airless terrain of Callisto again, with the great old ice mine and the hemisphere that sealed in the city, with the gee-lens above it that concentrated the sunlight twenty-seven-fold. How the old, once-familiar things tugged at my soul today!
But the neighborhood where my family had lived was gone, or at least changed. Increasing population had forced more crowded quarters, and the look of it differed. The street where my lovely sister Faith had been braced by the scion, setting off our ruin—I could not tell which one it was now. Our old domicile—impossible to tell exactly where it had been. Too much time had passed, too much recent history had intervened. It might have been easier to locate Amber’s root-origin, elsewhere in Halfcal, but she had no desire to do that, and I d
idn’t push it.
What of that scion, the young punk whose misshapen vengeance had so threatened us? I didn’t even inquire, knowing that today, if he lived, he would be nearing sixty years old, a completely different person. I was not here for this sort of retribution.
We were received at the domicile of the current leader, Junior Doc. The name had become a kind of title in an ongoing repression that had endured for centuries. Junior was actually about my age, which meant he hadn’t been in power when I departed Callisto; that helped. It made it possible for him to assure me that things had changed and that families like mine would not be forced to flee today.
“I am most gratified to hear you say that, señor, “I replied. “Because Jupiter is being overrun by illegal immigrants, and this is causing us considerable expense. I have talked to the authorities of RedSpot about this, and they have graciously agreed to take positive steps to restrict the flow of people from their border.” Because I had made it plain that no loans or financial guarantees would be extended otherwise and that the all-important rate of interest on the loans extant could be raised or lowered at my whim. Every point those rates increased was like a sledgehammer blow to the economy of RedSpot.
“But you are of Halfcal stock!” Junior protested. “Surely you cannot turn your back on your own kind!”
“Surely not,” I agreed. “But there are ways and ways.”
“As you know, Señor Tyrant, we are very poor,” he said cunningly. “A good loan would enable us to take better care of our poor.”
“Odd thing about good loans,” I remarked. “In the past the money has somehow found its way to the coffers of the richest class, while the poor have been benefited very little, and, of course, those loans are seldom, if ever, repaid.”
“Much of our budget goes necessarily to defense,” he continued almost without pause. “If we were to receive sufficient military aid, then more of the resources would be available for our basic needs.”
“Odd thing about military aid,” I remarked in the same tone as before. “Somehow it seems to have made the military commands of Latin nations so strong that they have then taken over the governments of their countries, replacing republics with military oligarchies or outright dictatorships.”
“There may be something to be said for an enlightened dictatorship,” he observed, glancing at me sidelong. “Certainly when conscientious reforms are undertaken. If Halfcal were to receive, for example, a preferred price for its coffee exports, I’m sure certain reforms—”
“Odd thing about reforms, señor. Either they fail to proceed far beyond the stage of rhetoric or they become too effective. An oppressive government that ceases to torture its citizens can be overthrown by those who are less concerned about human rights, so the effort is wasted.”
“Small danger of that here,” he murmured, but for some reason did not push the point. “However, direct economic aid should be effective.”
“Odd thing: the donations of food and machinery and materials we have made in the past have somehow turned up for sale on the interplanetary black market.”
Junior sighed. “You are a hard man to bargain with, señor! But surely we could find some accommodation?”
“If the bubble-folk were to stop arriving in our atmosphere, so that we were not constantly distracted by these unfortunates, we might be inclined to contribute somewhat to their betterment at home. Food, perhaps—the same as we use on Jupiter.”
“Yours is dosed to make your people sterile!” he protested.
“Temporarily infecund,” I agreed. “The antidote is in the hands of the government. Your birthrate would decline, of course. Is that too great a sacrifice?”
He considered. “Antidote available to the elite—assuming any of them used that food? No, I think we can accommodate that sacrifice.”
“We do expect most of that food to go to the poor.” That was the same pitch I had made to RedSpot: food that would not only help feed their impoverished but would drastically curtail the birthrate of that class—the class that was encroaching on the territory of the U.S. of J. If that food found its way to the black market, it would be easy for us to withhold the antidote; that enforced proper distribution. RedSpot had been similarly hospitable to the notion. Thorley and other commentators were to castigate me roundly for this device, but it seemed at the time to be the expedient course. I was, after all, the Tyrant; the hard decisions were mine to make.
His eyes almost glinted. “Certainly they would be more inclined to remain at home if their situation were bettered. I think it very likely that few, if any, would seek your skies.”
I nodded. Underlings would work out the details: aid for Halfcal, a cutoff of the flow of refugees for Jupiter. We parted with understanding smiles.
But on the ship, on the way home, Amber spoke up. She addressed me in Spanish, of course. “I do not know about these things, but I think Hopie would ask—”
“How can I torpedo my own kind?” I finished with a sigh. “I would just have to explain to my daughter that no matter how bad things may seem to the poverty-stricken natives of Halfcal, they would be worse in space. We cleaned out the pirates, to be sure, but space remains dangerous for those inadequately prepared, and the chances of any given refugee making it safely to Jupiter are only one in three or four. And what will he find there? Only unemployment, if he can’t speak English—and most of them can’t. He will hardly be better off than he was before.”
“She would say, ‘But you were a refugee!’”
“I would reply: ‘I am no longer a refugee. I am the Government of Jupiter. My loyalties have changed.’”
“She would say, ‘You have been corrupted by power.’”
“I am the Tyrant,” I agreed.
And it came home to me with special force now: I was, indeed, the Tyrant. Power had not corrupted me, it had merely changed my perspective. But how was any Halfcal refugee to perceive the distinction? I was now acting exactly the way any dictator did, with seeming callousness for the common man. Yet what else could I do? The rationale, as stated indirectly to my daughter, was valid. No single man could repeal the basic laws of economics.
“Who is Megan?” she asked abruptly.
I was not entirely comfortable with this question from this source at this time, but I answered. “She is my wife.”
“Why isn’t she with you now?”
“She cannot bring herself to participate in the Tyrancy.”
“But she loves you?”
“Yes.”
“How can that be?”
“She would say that it is possible to hate the sin but to love the sinner.”
She was silent. I was braced for questions about my relations with other women and with Amber herself, while I remained married to this great and good woman, but they did not come. Apparently Amber now understood as much as she needed to.
• • •
Amber came to me when I was alone in my room. I knew Shelia and Coral had arranged to provide us this privacy. My skin experienced a cold wash; I was abruptly afraid.
She stood before me silently. I forced open my mouth and whispered: “You are in English?”
She nodded. I would have to change her over to Spanish to have her talk. I was tempted to avoid the issue by declining to do that. I compromised.
“Amber, it is you in the helmet,” I said.
She nodded again.
“But there you can speak.”
Once more the nod.
“But not in life.” I sighed. “Amber, I am afraid of you now. I don’t know whether I should change you over to Spanish and let you talk.”
She remained mute and unmoving. I looked into her face and saw a shine in her eye. Tears were forming.
They melted me. “Oh, Amber!” I exclaimed, and stepped into her and embraced her. She hugged me back, and our tears flowed. No, I could not deny her!
But neither could I accept her—yet. “Amber,” I said gently into her hair as I held her. “I do n
ot truly love anyone, in the sense that love is normally understood. But you—what I feel for you is close.” I kissed her, and she returned the kiss, exactly as she had always done in the helmet. “But this—this is not yet right. There are things I—we—must clear first.”
She merely gazed at me. I thought again of putting her into Spanish mode but delayed it again. I knew that she would go along with anything I decided; I was the one who was hesitant. So I tried to explain, to myself as much as to her.
“Amber, I am fifty-two years old. You are fifteen. You have been placed in my charge. It is not right for me to do this with you.”
Again the tears formed in her eyes. She thought I was rejecting her.
I embraced her again. She was not Helse, and I knew that; she differed markedly in personality and abilities. But the way she looked—it was as if she were just coming into Helse’s range, physically. Perhaps all girls, all Hispanic girls, have a similar aspect at that age. Megan, who was Saxon, had also resembled Helse, and in that resemblance my fascination had been caught, though Megan was a totally different person. I knew better, but I knew I had to have this girl. Maybe it was a retreat to an impossible past, but it was necessary.
“Amber, I’ll do it,” I told her. “But you will have to help. We shall have to tell my daughter Hopie, and that will be the most difficult part. Then I must notify my leading critic, for reasons that you would not understand. But for you: Hopie will come to you, and then you must tell her how you feel. She may then become your enemy. Are you prepared to face that?”
Slowly Amber nodded.
I felt, almost, regret. This was going to complicate my life significantly. But my nature gave me no choice.
• • •
I talked to Hopie. It was every bit as bad as I had feared. I tried to come at it obliquely, but I suspect that there was no approach I could have made that would have avoided her reaction. “Hopie, I have ask you to do something that I fear you will not like,” I said.