A Dark and Hungry God Arises (32 page)

His heart jumped as if the two events were connected.

Angus was fatal, of course. Morn had implied as much.

And Nick had called him a pirate and a butcher and a petty thief. He was the kind of man Morn - and Davies with her - had dedicated her life against.

But he was still Davies' father.

His arrival now meant something.

Davies couldn't afford to ignore the Bill's demand -

or betray what he thought and felt. With an effort, he crushed down his distress. Almost meeting the Bill's gaze, he breathed, 'I didn't know my father was here. I thought he was in lockup on Com-Mine. I wasn't sure he was still alive. '

That, ' the Bill rasped, 'doesn't answer my question. '

'Yes, it does. ' Davies let himself sound truculent. 'I've never met my father. I can't remember him. How should I know what he and Captain Succorso are doing together?' But he didn't stop there. The Bill's companion had given him the hint he needed. More bitterly by the moment, he continued, 'Maybe it's what she said. Maybe Succorso is using him to plant the story that you've got an antimutagen for sale. '

Like a kid experimenting with profanity, the Bill retorted loudly, 'Damnation! Damn both of you! You're making me dizzy. How many conspiracies and plots do you think you can find in situations you know nothing about? You' - he jerked his long head at his companion

- 'are pinning everything on what you hear from a scared, force-grown child who probably isn't even sane. And you'

- he poked a finger at Davies - 'admit you've got holes in your head where you should have facts. You want me to believe you can't remember anything Morn Hyland knew or saw between Starmaster's destruction and your own birth a few days ago, and at the same time you want me to take you seriously while you speculate about things you can't remember.

This isn't an interrogation. It's a farce. '

Davies blinked as if he were on the verge of tears. The woman didn't reply.

In a whirl of joints and limbs, the Bill turned back to her. 'I'm leaving this with you, ' he said through his teeth.

We agree Captain Nick is dangerous. And we agree he wants to get even with you. So you're at risk here at least as much as I am. It's your job to learn the truth.

Torture him' - the Bill indicated Davies - 'if you want to. The Amnion will accept damaged merchandise, even if Captain Nick won't. As long as he's human, they won't worry about the details. Or capture a few people from Captain's Fancy and torture them. I don't care how you do it. Just find out the truth.

'Come talk to me when you've got something we can count on. '

Without waiting for an answer, the Bill left the cell.

The woman fixed her attention on Davies again. Her hand rested lightly on the handle of her stun-prod.

He glowered back at her, as belligerent as his father.

As she regarded him gravely, she said in a contralto murmur, 'You may be wondering why Captain Succorso wants to "get even" with me. It's simple, really. I gave him those scars. But when I see you glaring like that, I can't help thinking that if he'd ever looked at me the same way I wouldn't have cut him. I would have killed him where he stood.

'I'll be back as soon as I figure out how to get the truth out of you. '

She left Davies alone.

The door closed behind her. He heard it lock.

The monitors watched him as if his interrogation were still going on.

Sick at heart, and determined to reveal nothing, he stretched out on the cot, covered his eyes, and pretended to rest.

In some ways, the Governing Council for Earth and Space was a haphazard organization. No one designed it: it simply grew over time. And as it grew it suffered mutations and grafts, like a burdock which a group of bio-geneticists had arbitrarily selected for an experiment in whether weeds could be made to bear apples.

Like most haphazard organizations, the GCES was protective of its position. In reaction to the fact that there was nothing organic or inevitable about its form - or indeed about its actual existence - the Council took itself extremely seriously. Its members debated policy, passed legislation, imposed charters and reviewed jurisprudence as if they had the authority of their entire species behind them; as if the survival and integrity of humankind were in their care.

As a bureaucratic entity, the GCES was blind to the realities of both history and politics.

The reality of history was that the Council came into being as a reaction to rather than as a control for events.

It was a fact long since forgotten by most GCES

members that their political body began as a minor subdivision of another governmental entity.

During the period of Earth's history in which commercial enterprises and quasi-commercial conglomerates began to put research facilities and industrial platforms into space, most of the planet's sovereign nations slowly came to recognize the need for an agency to coordinate launches, trajectories, and orbits - to ensure, for example, that corporations such as SMI and SpaceLab Inc. didn't build stations which would interfere with each other's activities, or which might - at worst - collide someday.

The original Agency was constituted as nothing more than a clearing-house for launch-and-orbit related information; as a means for avoiding disasters.

In a short time, however, it naturally took on a corollary function: it became a mechanism for processing disputes. Its advisory papers and proposed protocols accreted until they had the force of law. This development was considered beneficial because it permitted conflicts to be resolved without the unwieldy expedient of involving Earth's vast array of sovereign governments.

From that small seed, the eventual weed sprouted.

As the competition for Earth's last great resource -

space - grew more and more desperate, the Agency came to be seen as increasingly vital: sometimes as a means to gain advantage; more commonly as a means to prevent the opposition from gaining advantage. There began what might be called the hybridizing process. Sovereign nations and commercial enterprises alike began to insist on 'representation': they wished to have their own people assigned to the Agency so that their interests would be protected.

This was predictable, even though it was not foreseen when the original entity was created. Because space was a political as well as physical vacuum, chaos threatened to render the Agency useless as nations and corporations clamored to seat their representatives.

The danger was averted, however, when the Agency itself was conceded the right to choose whom it would represent, which interests and organizations were empowered to supply it with members. An eminently sensible solution in many ways, this development nevertheless had the effect of making the Agency much more powerful - as well as considerably larger - than the bureaucracy of which it was technically a subdivision.

Soon, therefore, the Agency - now called the Governing Council for Space - succeeded at re-chartering itself as a separate, independent organism.

Still the pattern of responding to events rather than anticipating them held sway. Space was Earth's only effective future. Even before the development of the gap drive, with its concomitant influx of resources and opportunities, and certainly before contact with the Amnion, with its strange admixture of wealth and peril, Earth had no hope which did not derive from space. And the GCS

was responsible for space. Therefore the GCS was almost responsible for Earth.

Predictably - and yet almost accidentally - the Council found itself unable to meet its responsibilities unless it expanded its function to include overseeing the conduct of its constituent nations and corporations on Earth as well as in space.

By this time, Earth was in no position to protest the shift of authority from individual sovereign nations to the Council. Rationalizing their dependency on space, Earth's governments elected to view the shift of authority as a change in semantics, not in substance. Where did the Council's members come from? From Earth, of course; perhaps by way of one station or another, but always from Earth. Therefore Earth's nations had suffered no fundamental loss of primacy. Their leaders were simply called members rather than presidents or dictators; the only real difference was that they exercised their powers in a wider arena.

As a practical matter, however, relatively few of Earth's nations and corporations were literally represented on the Council. Their numbers would have been too large to be effective. For that reason, the Council spawned its own subdivisions, on Earth as well as in space. Earth's nations were somewhat artificially combined to form six distinct bodies: the United Western Bloc, the Eastern Union, the Pacific Rim Conglomerate, the Combined Asian Islands and Peninsulas, Continental Africa, and one quaintly named Old Europe. In contrast, each space station outside Earth's solar system represented itself: Valdor Industrial, Sagittarius Unlimited, Com-Mine, Terminus, Betelgeuse Primary, SpaceLab Annexe, New Outreach, Aleph Green, and Orion's Reach. However, in recognition of Earth's vastly greater population, each of the planet's six units was authorized to supply the Council with two members; the stations seated only one apiece.

By accretion rather than by public choice or policy, the Council became the Governing Council for Earth and Space.

The reality of politics was that the Council had been invested with authority solely and squarely on the assumption that this authority would never be effective.

The corporate leaders who precipitated the inception and encouraged the growth of the Council did so to secure their own enterprises, not to impose restrictions on themselves.

Consider the position of a man like Holt Fasner, in the days when SMI was young, and Earth was dying of its complex self-strangulation. Unless he were gifted with prescience, he could hardly have forecast the development of the gap drive - or the discovery of the Amnion.

On the other hand, he could easily have grasped that Earth represented the single biggest obstacle to his own future, the single biggest threat to his company's growth.

Driven by planetary hungers, Earth would suck dry any development or discovery which occurred on a scale smaller than interstellar travel or alien species. And the prejudices and constraints of Earth-bound thinking -

genophobia, for instance - would work to block any researcher, or any corporation, from developments or discoveries large enough to outsize Earth's hungers.

From the first, men like Holt Fasner understood the need to separate space from Earth's control.

This goal they achieved by mutating and grafting the original Agency until it became the GCES. At every stage in the process, they supplied the ideas - as well as the votes - which enabled the Council to take charge of Earth, rather than allowing Earth to retain authority over space.

On the other hand, men like Holt Fasner had no intention of simply replacing one set of governmental obstacles with another. The power which had been gradually accreted to the GCES would become a threat rather than a benefit if it were allowed to exercise itself unchecked. Precisely because the Council solved so many problems for men like Holt Fasner, it was dangerous to them.

Therefore the number of members had to be kept small, manageable. And it was necessary to own a significant proportion of the Votes': it was necessary to guarantee that enough members would speak for the men they truly represented, rather than for the people who elected them. In some cases, this necessity was easily satisfied.

For example, since Com-Mine Station belonged to the United Mining Companies, the Member for Com-Mine Station naturally defended the UMC's interests. In other cases, pressure was required. And in still other cases, the

'votes' had to be frankly purchased.

Regardless of how the Votes' were obtained, however, the purpose of obtaining them remained the same: to ensure that the real power on Earth and in space belonged, not to the GCES, but to men like Holt Fasner.

The seriousness with which the Council performed its functions was in direct proportion to its refusal to recognize the realities of its own position.

Therein lay Holt Fasner's greatest strength — and perhaps his only weakness.

No more than two hours after Warden Dios'

video conference with the Governing Council for Earth and Space, Min Donner, sometimes called his 'executioner', rode a UMCP shuttle down from UMCPHQ to Earth; to Suka Bator, an island in the Combined Asian Islands and Peninsulas archipelago, where the GCES had built the sprawling complex from which it presumed to defend and govern the human species.

The shuttle's logs and manifests made no mention that the UMCP Enforcement Division director was aboard.

She was recorded as one of a platoon of data clerks and legal advisers sent by Dios to supply substantiation - or obfuscation - for the things he'd revealed during the conference. No one announced her arrival; no one met her. Apparently UMCP officers stationed on the island as support for GCES Security failed to recognize her: certainly they failed to react when they saw her. Instead she was waved through the checkpoints and past the guards as casually as the rest of the platoon.

There was no particular cause for caution. The shuttle had been tracked continuously from the moment it left UMCPHQ to the instant of its touchdown on Suka Bator. The GCES worried about many things, but treachery that arrived by shuttle from UMCPHQ was not among them. Attacks on the Council's authority, like threats to the Council's safety, came not from the police, but from disenfranchised political groups on Earth - libertarians who opposed both UMC and UMCP hegemony; genophobes who opposed all dealing with the Amnion; pacifists who opposed the 'militarization' of human space; 'native Earthers' who opposed the planet's dependence on space. Any number of those groups were capable of terrorism in the name of their beliefs. On the other hand, the UMCP worked hard to help GCES