supposed to appropriate it for his own use. If he was going to be reinstated to Society, though, it would help if he didn't get caught borrowing it. He would have to be careful. Oh, so very careful.
He assumed that the new birdwatcher would be reliable as to schedule, not having found out yet that wilderness living sometimes called for adaptations, or that experience sometimes allowed for shortcuts. Still, to be on the safe side, he planned his run to the haystack for a time the man should be inside, at his carefully arranged table, taking a Foundational Lesson.
As expected, there was no sign of his replacement as he worked his way around to the haystack. The bow and arrows were still there. He strapped on the quiver, grabbed the bow and some food, and headed back to his cave. En route, his curiosity got the better of him. He snuck around to the back of the cabin, to a window that would let him look in on his successor without being seen, if the man was seated at the table.
He was. He was sitting at the table, in a precisely positioned chair, talking to his Informer, answering the same automated Judge that Renzo had answered for as long as he could remember. The furniture was just as it was supposed to be. The bed coverings were the same ones that had kept Renzo warm during the winter.
The window was open a crack, as it should be during an afternoon in spring. Renzo heard a bit of the questioning, and some of the answers. His eyes nearly bugged out of his head. This man, who looked the same age as himself, if not slightly older, was only to Level 22, and was having trouble with that!
He. Had. Been. Replaced. By. An. Inferior. Man.
Stanley Charbonneau knocked on Lt. Ott's door and stuck his head in. "Got a minute?" he asked.
"Come in."
Stanley closed the door behind him, and took a chair facing Ott. "You don't want to hear this, boss," he said.
"Now what?"
"We just received a message that suggests we're going to have to make some adaptations in how we're going to communicate with everybody else on our side."
"What sort of adaptations?"
"Let me put it this way. Do you know anybody who likes to make paper and has whatever he needs to do it?"
"Stop playing, and tell me what's up."
"Yes, sir. What's up is that regional directors have decided that electronic transmissions are too dangerous right now to justify their use. They didn't divulge why they thought so. They did say, by way of encouragement and inspiration, that other areas, like all of Northeast Northam, have done without phones or radios and such for more than a generation now. Sometimes several generations."
"Yes, but they're in populated areas that are more heavily monitored. And we're already careful not to use electronics for anything classified. And they – oh, never mind. You know as well as I do that Subterra is an amazingly diverse association. So, they're proposing a blackout, are they?"
"Announcing one might be the better way of putting it. Whatever spooked them seemed to call for semi-immediate action. As in 'this is the last you'll hear from us via this channel.' They ended with a Code North Pole, if that clears anything up for you?"
"Oh, boy," Ott said.
"That's a yes?"
"That's a yes with a great, big 'our enemies have been smarter or luckier than we have' attached. It's borrowed from a humiliating mess during what our ancestors called World War II, before people had any idea what a real world war looks like."
"Not to be repetitious, but 'oh, boy.'"
"So we're down to paper and word of mouth? All right, we'll just have to learn to deal with it."
"Sir, the paper might be in short supply very soon. Greenley has declared a war on paper, apparently. Blew up three paper factories, at last count. That's about all there were that were left, as I understand it. Topside has found paper records rather inconvenient, you know, since they have a nasty habit of saying the same thing year after year. It drives historical revisionists nuts."
"So you weren't joking about starting up paper making?"
"I'd say I was only half joking, sir. We do have Subterran paper manufacturing, just not enough to make up for the loss of topside supplies that we've been diverting to our own use. In any case, if I were in charge, sir, which I'm not, of course, I think I'd be getting more men into the habit of taking nice long jogs. That way, when we've got messages to send, we've got enough messengers with the legs to get the job done, whether we're doing it by note or by rote."
"I think we'd better assemble the troops for a group briefing."
"Yes, sir. When?"
Ott checked the time. "Three hours. Send word to those town sentries that will get relieved before then to join us."
"Yes, sir. Since we have enough time for it, I'll have the messengers walk the last bit, to be on the safe side."
"Not funny, Charbonneau."
"No, sir. I guess it wasn't."
Renzo found a place out of sight of the birdwatcher's cabin, and out of sight of the birdwatcher's usual observation spot. For good measure, he also made sure he couldn't be seen from the herder's hut across the river, or from the haystacks. There was no sign of a replacement herder, but who knew when the government – the stupid, stupid, unreliable, despicable government – might, on a whim, decide it needed a cattle herder again?
Once he found a good site, he set up an archery range. He found shooting a bow was fairly easy, for him. It used different muscles than he was used to using, though. He thought it might take a week or two of careful, studiously managed, slowly increased shooting, to get into proper shape.
This didn't bother him until he realized that he didn't have food enough to make it a couple of weeks.
He went in search of deer or pronghorn or rabbits. He found a small rabbit. When it saw him, it froze under a sagebrush. He shot at it and missed. It ran for its life, and got away.
Not wanting to overuse his muscles, thus making them too sore to shoot properly, he headed home to his cave, and his stolen government rations.
The thought of being dependent on the government provisions upset him. The more he thought about it, the more unbearable it became. He turned around, found a good spot along the river, hid himself, and shot a young deer as it came down to drink.
He'd noticed that there were often morning breezes and evening breezes. Morning breezes generally went one way, evening breezes the other. Not having been taught much about foothills and mountains, he wasn't quite sure how or why that happened, but he had noticed it, so he timed his cooking fire for when the wind was blowing away from the birdwatcher's cabin.
As he ate his venison, brought down by his own effort, dressed out by his own effort, cooked by his own effort at a time of his own choosing, he felt pretty pleased with himself.
The pleasure gave way to increased frustration with the government, and with the man they'd sent to replace him. Here he was, good at his job. But they'd replaced him. Here he was, a man who got top scores on tests. But they'd replaced him – with an intellectual inferior! Here he was, clever enough to learn on his own how to shoot a bow, clever enough to learn how to hunt with it, how to butcher an animal, how to cook it over a fire. And they had replaced him with an inferior man. It wasn't just embarrassing, it was devastating. His entire life, he'd been taught that the government's role was to oversee the perfection of both man and society. And now someone in government had made the horrendous blunder of declaring a talented marksman, a loyal birdwatcher, a smart man – him! – an experson.
It was unbelievable.
It was unsupportable.
It should never be allowed to stand. For the good, not so much for himself, but for the good of society, a good Citizen Officer should not be replaced by someone of less quality.
He worked his way up the hill and peeked through a cabin window. The man who only superficially resembled himself was asleep in bed. His bed. It was a mockery. In the morning, the man would go out and do the bird counts that he had been assigned. That was also a mockery. Renzo was no longer convinced that the bird counts were important, but that w
as beside the point. They were his bird counts. His.
He went to the cabin door, meaning to burst in and shoot the man dead as he slept.
At the door, he changed his mind. He might have to impersonate the man, at least in the short term. It would pay to spy on him another day or two, to see if there were any quirks he hadn't noticed yet, that he'd have to emulate to come across as the cretin.
His mind wouldn't stop making comparisons, relegating the replacement to lower status, and lower. The cretin. The idiot. The subhuman posing as a Pac-Nor Progressive.
Abandoning reason, Renzo notched an arrow, burst through the door, and shot his innocent replacement with one arrow, and another, and another, until the man was without question dead.
Harvey couldn't remember the last time he'd had extended time to think, at least not while he was in a place where it was safe to think. Topside, there'd been lots of time to think, but a man had to guard his thoughts relentlessly, not letting any of them go too deep, lest they spill out in facial expressions or words or actions that didn't fit the party line. When he'd been underground, it had been on business, hurried, intense; he hadn't dared fall too far out of character, for fear, again, of not being seen as the perfect little party animal when he went back topside.
A voice broke into his musing. "Is this a good time to visit? I could come back."
It was a gentle, loving voice.