They didn’t respond immediately. “What’s it like here, away from home for three years? Ship out the prisoners; bring some back. Two weeks or so going out; the same coming back. Then off a month, then back out again. Holidays, sure, but only if folks come to see you here.”
He paused for a few moments. “Yes, duty to your clan and to your planet. Select duty, no less. Automatic promotions.”
“I’m going to take it all away.” He let that sink in for a moment.
“What makes a man do his duty for three years, such hard duty, such upstanding men guarding us all – then throw it away like this? The Council – your very own sheikhs – ordered me to come here and shake things up. They gave me this fancy robe and said to do whatever I like.”
“I’m the last man who wants to put you on those ships as prisoners. But you know? It won’t be straight north from here where you’ve been going all this time. No, we will have those ships going south and around the central continent, to the northern islands thousands of kilometers from here. How long would such a voyage take? I’ll bet the trip out is a lot worse than a single month on an island.”
A very long pause, as he looked down, resting his chin on the back of his left thumb. Then he began dramatic gestures, drawing his idea in the air. “The other plan I had in mind was to fix this mess by making sure rangers always worked with their own kin. I never liked mixing clans randomly and taking you away from family. I have a wild dream of this island being fully developed, with men rotating on duty with their own clans, family members and so forth.” He looked up at his hands in the air in front of his face.
Finally one of the men spoke. “What do you want, Judge?”
He dropped his hands and looked mildly at the man who spoke. Leaning forward, he rested his left hand on his knee, and placed the index finger against his upper temple. “What happens when you pass the rocks on that northeastern shore?”
Somehow, Fortis was not really surprised with the answer. Young men on such duty, and on such a planet as Misty, never faced naked women who offered to exchange their bodies for food and supplies. And it really wasn’t hard to convince them to drop their prisoners closer to that area, though they had no idea why. It surely shortened the trip and helped avoid having to explain a day lost, anchored there near the rocks with the lovely young maidens. There were always enough to go around. Not all the men participated, but they all had agreed to remain silent.
Apparently the commander was not aware of this, remaining on the base island his entire tour. His family was there, of course, since his duty was six years. They had their own section of the island. That was not the problem, but that his family was isolated from the clan. Were the entire garrison from the same clan at the same time, there would be precious few shenanigans. Men create an artificial loyalty when the kinship is absent, sharing only the experience of common misery. That also means sharing the secret ways they relieve the misery. But changing that meant changing how rangers were chosen, trained, and so forth. Most of the rangers already felt isolated from the rest of the planet. It would mean assigning each clan to provide themselves a full ranger village, choose an extended household much as a bodyguard was formed. It would mean raising the tax rates just a bit, but with the impending trade, perhaps it would balance out.
Either way, Special Magistrate Manley ordered it so.
He granted a limited amnesty to all the rangers if they would fully cooperate in ending this fiasco. Thus, he ordered a crew to make ready for sailing, and took all volunteers. By the end of the second day, the men were ready.
He had one more task before he removed the black robes.
Chapter 35: Hidden Home
The Captain was amused to see a half-dozen racing kayaks tied up behind his and the ranger ship. He was much less amused at the idea of crossing the equator. That’s not to say he didn’t believe his ship could, but didn’t like the risk of taking his family into such danger. George shrugged. “Then don’t go.”
The Captain almost took him up on it, but then decided he would regret that more than any losses doing it. So it was they found this fancy cruise liner skirting the eastern shore of the passage. At some point, the winds would catch the tops of the sails as they edged into the zone where the wind ran down the desert slope to the sea. It wasn’t just a cross wind; any sailor could handle that. It was a stiff cross wind with little room for error as the currents and wind together drove them west while they traveled north. If it worked, it would still put them very close to the rocky zone at the northwestern corner of the passage, driven into them by wind and tide.
The ranger ship was narrower, lighter, and without the usual load of prisoners, made it just fine. The bigger ship ended up near the western shore too soon, so the sails were dropped, as were the anchors. With the winds still rather high, the captain turned the ship into the wind. “Now what?” he asked George over the dull roar of the winds. They were just a few meters from dragging bottom at the stern.
Fortis had an idea. “How hard would it be to create a kite big enough to lift a man?”
“Which man?” The Captain and George spoke in unison.
“I’ll go,” Fortis said, feeling sure he would regret it later. He remembered a popular sport on some worlds called para-sailing. Within an hour, spare sail panels were rigged to a frame with a long thin line on a reel. Fortis climbed up to the top of the bridge cabin and easily caught the wind, suspended below this kite in a makeshift harness. It took a few minutes for him to get the feel of tipping the sails up and down, but he managed to do it reasonably well as they let out the line slowly. He was lifted with good clearance from the rather steep, craggy rise of the shore. Slowly, he drifted up the shore, until eventually he was even with the crest. He turned his neck to see what was behind him. He was stunned by what he saw from his high altitude, just down the shore a couple of kilometers or so where it turned back west. So stunned he changed his mind and signaled to be reeled back down.
He was utterly exhausted by the time he crashed gently just off the rear of the ship into the water. He had come in too far behind the ship and lost the wind. Once they fished him and his kite out of the water, he ignored the wetness in his excitement.
“George! It’s a crater. Sometime in the far past of this planet, something struck the surface right at the edge of the land. The rocks along the shore are the debris thrown out by the impact. I caught just a glimpse of the depression with water in it. The whole thing is well below sea level, and I saw the reeds growing in it, I’m sure.”
“We thought maybe the southern pole was something like a crater,” George agreed.
“Probably so, maybe a vertical strike, but this one is very pronounced, the unmistakable signature of a linear impact crater.”
Meanwhile, the Captain didn’t want any more silly experiments. He broke out some long poles and had his crew stand on the rear deck. Pushing off, they were able to shift the boat northward just a bit. With a little judicious anchor lifting, they made some slow headway. Taking turns, they moved a few hundred meters before dark.
The next morning, they applied themselves again to the grueling work. The ranger ship remained where it was in safe water, unable to help. However, at some point they saw the big ship was in range, and sent a man over in a kayak.
George first ascertained what was the angle of view when the girls usually showed themselves, then explained the plan to the ranger, who promptly headed back. It was slower progress for him returning against the wind, but not out of reach for a strong rower. Meanwhile, the ship continued slipping slowly sideways along the shore. Finally they were as close as they dared be and stopped.
At dawn, it was the captain himself who manned the reel when Fortis went up with the makeshift kite. He almost missed the first time, but recovered and set himself on top of the cliff with a single step to spare. The landing was solid. Seeing that, the twins manfully joined him. Each taking their own flight, they managed to place themselves, with help from Fortis grabbin
g whatever part came within reach, on the same spot. They each had water and weapons. Fortis had seen the approach from the table land down to the crater was relatively easy back of the cliff face. They had just a bit more light than the bottom of the crater. As they made their way across the rugged surface and began down the slope, the kayaks from the ranger ship set out. George worked his way along the shore in a kayak alone from the big boat, and then angled around to join the rangers’ approach.
Fortis and the twins picked their way down, while the rangers and George threaded their way through the rocks. The latter eventually found a low rock ledge where several battered rafts and reed canoes were pulled up out of the water. George and the rangers worked their way up to the lip of the depression, spread out along the rim, and caught a handful of men by surprise. The rangers with George carried Gauss weapons for this occasion, almost the entire ranger armory. Resistance never really formed. The men were herded together, marched down the side of the deep bowl, and simply sat down on the shore. There were reed huts all along the edge of the bowl. It was quite warm, almost swampy down inside, with almost no wind. George loudly ordered the women to stay inside their huts. His voice carried quite well across the wide bowl.
The eastern end down close to the water line showed extensive mining scars, with glints of light reflecting from exposed silica. Reed ladders and makeshift mining equipment were scattered around. From the narrower end far in the other direction, steam rose from where the water seemed to be boiling up from the ground. There were stacks of reeds up on the rim. Hot springs were not unheard of, but rare on Misty. The waters were not toxic. The bowl was a long slash in the ground, and the waters managed to cool somewhat before reaching the other end.
Finally, someone obviously older than the rest waded around to meet them. The man wore a sleeveless tunic.
“So, you finally found us.” His voice was raspy. “I’m called Charley.”
George noticed everyone was looking just a bit undernourished.
“Nice place here, Charley. I’m Judge Manley.”
“Hooo, a judge, even. Gonna kick us out, Judge? Take us out to exile on the islands? Kill us, even?” Charley was mocking broadly.
“No, Charley, I just wanted to talk.”
The old man bent over in rage and yelled. “Talk?! All this just to talk?!”
George remained mild and conversational. “I had to make sure you were listening.”
Fortis guessed what he heard next was obscene language, but it was clearly colloquial expressions he didn’t recognize. Then Charley snapped, “I guess now I’ve earned at least a good beatin’ for cursing a judge.”
“No, nothing like that. I’m just checking out where our rangers’ resources were going. Looks like you haven’t been getting enough food.”
“What do you care?” Then something inside simply died and he slumped, eyes cast down. “Been bad times lately. Our regular supply ship quit showing up. I suppose it didn’t help we couldn’t produce enough silica to make him happy. We’ve been hanging on by our fingernails.” He pointed at the mining scars, and a small pile of silica on the rim.
“What happened, Charley?”
“Well, to make a long story short, it took everything we had to send my boy Freddie out. He managed to hitch a ride with the supply ship on a load of silica. Took our best glider, some nice clothes and our only real weapon. There’s fish out there, and we can eat some of the shoots off the cane growing here. But we used up all our next two loads of silica paying off the price demanded for the risk in helping Freddie sneak into the Bradley Clan. That meant no extra food.
“Back when my granddaddy started here, the silica was all over the ground. All he had to do was pick it up. We eventually had to start digging it out. Now, I reckon you know a few men and a bunch of girls can’t mine much silica and do everything else at the same time. That stuff is stuck hard in that ground.” Charley’s hands said as much as his words. “No, we been enticing some of the prisoners off their islands for some years with the extra food we bought with the silica. Gave `em some good education, too. Taught `em all about democracy and proper organization. Let `em learn to vote. Then we got behind on food after Freddie left. We didn’t have any way to persuade them to come work for us. Mine ain’t played out; just the miners.” He produced an odd, horse laughter, coming in gulps.
“I’m sorry to hear that. You’ll be sorry to hear Freddie didn’t succeed. He ended up on Johnston Island where you had a few followers among the probates; they were all caught in criminal acts. Now they are all dead, and so is Freddy. Crashed his glider into the sea.”
Charley dropped to his knees in the water, blubbering. George waited for him to recover. It took awhile, and the young men moved to comfort him.
By that time, Fortis had come around with the twins, walking along the east rim. They had in custody two more of the skinny men dressed like Charley. They stopped a few meters from the scene. “Looks like hot water comes in from a spring in the west, drifts across the bowl, then drains back into the ground in the deepest part of the crater here,” pointing behind him where the bank was steeper. “Probably struck the planet from the west, which stands to reason, cutting against the direction of rotation. This crater was once far deeper, so a lot of deep material was plowed up.”
Charley finally regained a measure of composure. “So what you going to do with us now?”
George looked back at him. “Your only real advantage was secrecy, and that’s gone now. And you can’t teach any more democracy nonsense” – Charley’s eyes glared at the choice of words – “but just to make sure, we are going to order all shipping to avoid this area. We’ll move prisoner operations to the ranger base over on the other side of this continent and double up on the number of islands out there for detention.”
“What about food? You gonna leave us here to starve?” Charley was angry, if powerless.
George remained utterly calm. “You could trade. Not just silica, which you could contract out easily, and at a fairer rate than you got in the past, but the reeds. I see you have here a natural heat-treating plant. Like every other woody product on Misty, it hardens that way. Very nice.”
George rose to his feet. “I could even declare you folks a clan, give you full rights and all.” Charley had just a hint of hope in his eyes. “But you’ll have to adopt our way of life. You’ll have to understand why we don’t tolerate democracy, capitalism, militarism, centralized government, and everything that goes with it. You can join us and be a part of the community, or you can rot here in the middle of nowhere.”
“That’s blackmail!” Charley growled.
“Maybe. It’s also not democracy. You can be Sheikh of Northland, or you can be Starving Charley. You can train your girls to be respectable wives instead of prostitutes, marry them to men who will come and stay. We’ll send you whatever you need, but you’ll have to learn more than just a brief period of history on Terra. You’ll need to learn the whole history of mankind so you’ll understand why democracy was a lie from the first.”
George started walking away, as the others followed. Charley began blubbering again. George turned back, “We’ll send someone back in a couple of weeks to see what you think about it.”
They signaled the ranger ship to come closer and start picking them up.
Eventually the bigger ship caught a random helpful current and managed to pull away from the shore. The rangers towed extra kayaks out for Fortis and the twins. They also ran some food back into Charley’s clan, then turned their lighter ship to follow the bigger one in the currents which took them north. By the end of the day, they had circled back around to the far side of the narrow sea between the two continents, and anchored for the night. The next morning, southbound through the gap, they made it on the first try, clearing the harsh winds of the channel before the opposing shore closed in on them.
Chapter 36: Loose Ends
Fortis finally got to see a message bird. It came low across the water, surpr
isingly fast. In front of the harbor house it tipped upward, stalled, then simply dropped slowly to the ground. The Harbor Master walked with George over to retrieve it. George pressed his pocket device to a tiny thick spot in the fabric. It took only a couple of seconds to synchronize the data, and then upload various judicial decisions.
They sat on the dock of Clan Bradley’s main harbor, having arrived with the warrant for Charley’s supplier three days before. The man had quickly admitted his family’s role in shipping the silica in exchange for food and supplies. He also showed them the small shop which made the tiny cylinders, with the homemade rig for fracturing water using ancient salvaged scrap metal. There was a compressor which had required two modified wind turbines. He had it engineered and built it all within his own household, using profits from the silica trade. He admitted charging far more than was fair. After turning over all his logs, George had calculated the tonnage and compared with other known shipping data. After conferring with Sheikh Bradley, it was decided the man would continue the shipments, but be assessed a much higher rate until someone else took over the franchise. Keeping the silica flowing was more important than punishment.
The updated report on this day confirmed George’s suspicions. Charley’s clan got together and simply voted him out of office for refusing to give into their desire to join civilization. Stories were a bit confused, but near as the rangers could determine, Charley was the grandson of the original technician. He had killed off several cousins and uncles and resented the necessity of enticing rangers and other prisoners to prevent too much inbreeding. The few surviving men in his household were those who didn’t challenge his rule – so much for his devotion to democratic government. After deposing Charley, they all decided to leave and enjoy the relatively light service as probationers preparing to covenant with other clans. Two large households volunteered to explore the possibility of occupying the crater area. While living initially on houseboats, they had already created a harbor which gave access to a slender grassy shelf just west of the area.