Imperial Stars 2-Republic and Empire (9 page)

"You never grew bitter? You never cursed me for your years in prison?"

She glanced at the floor, seemed uncomfortable, and moved in her chair with a tired nervousness. "It's because of you that our race has advanced to its position. You led us in the exploration of alien cultures. If my imprisonment helped humankind—and it did, or you wouldn't have put me there—then I have lived my life just as I always wanted."

With one finger, Stattor wiped the sweat out of the fold of skin beside his mouth. "I had forgotten how devoted you were. Tell me what life in prison was like."

"In camp, we got news every week," she said, "so I know what you've accomplished in all these years." She cleared her throat and ran the back of one hand across her temple, as though she were pushing back her short bristly hair. "I was in a support camp on Perda, 37th Sector. It's a cold place." She held out her left hand for him to see the missing fingertips. "We had aliens working in the chromium mines nearby. In my camp, we sewed shirts and pants for them, and in the last six years, we made shoes once every two months. Since we got heaters in a year ago, I could cut out ninety-six pairs of soles a day." She reversed her folded hands. "I have friends there. . . . I haven't been lonely. But it is cold. The ground is frozen most of the year." Her face brightened momentarily. "There're birds there." She shook her head as though chastising herself. "They were insects, but they were so big we thought of them as birds. Two weeks a year, in the warm season, they migrate south, and they sing." She looked weakened, haggard and old, but she did not look unhappy. "In ways I don't understand, my imprisonment served the higher destiny of mankind. I'm not bitter."

"You suffered," Stattor said.

"Everyone suffers."

"Have I suffered?" Stattor said, spreading his arms at the stars.

"You guided us." Her voice was firm. "Without you, we would still be in our provincial human backwater, weak and struggling for any step of progress."

Stattor leaned forward on his desk. He was smiling. The desk creaked under his weight. "You no longer have to suffer, Usko. I've set up a physical rehabilitation program for you, and when you've recovered, you'll be given living quarters on the world of your choosing, transportation privileges wherever you want to go, and an allotment of 500,000 credits a year."

She stared at him, and it seemed that for a full half minute she did not register what he had said.

"How much did they pay you on Perda?" he asked. She swallowed heavily, her chin dipping as she did so. "They put 200 a year into an account for each of us."

"And how much have you earned so far?"

She shook her head helplessly. "I can't figure like that anymore."

"You may not know," Stattor said, "there's a severance tax of 28 percent. A prisoner who completes his sentence is required to pay for the food he has eaten." He smiled. "The severance tax was my idea."

"If it hadn't been necessary for our cause, you wouldn't have done it."

Stattor shook his head. This was the Usko Imani of his memories. When he had doubts, he had only to speak to her; her vision was intensely single-minded, sincere, and idealistic. She was unique. In part, that was why he had sent her to Perda.

"Would you like a drink?" Stattor asked suddenly.

"I haven't had a drink in—"

He pressed the call button and said to Zallon, "Bring Ms. Imani a gin and lemon." Stattor turned back to Usko and said, "That was your favorite drink. I remember. Perhaps you'll still have a taste for it." He leaned back in his chair. "No one was ever more dedicated to our cause than you. I admired you. I envied you for that. I remember a justice named Kudensa, a skinny, reactionary low-grade. . . . Do you remember him?"

She shook her head.

"You volunteered to bed him, to get information, although we all knew what he would put you through."

Still, she was shaking her head.

"I remember it took eight weeks for you to recover."

She looked blank. "Did I get the information?"

Stattor nodded. "You did." He thought he saw her face start to relax.

Zallon entered with a tray, from which he took the cloudy yellow drink and placed it in Usko's hands with a linen napkin. Without a sound, the aide left the office.

"It was very loyal of you to do that." Stattor said.

"I don't remember it. It couldn't have hurt me badly. The good of humankind is important. I've served that."

"You're the only person who could say that that I would believe. That's why I put you in prison."

She had her drink halfway to her lips—her gnarled hands stopped there.

"Because of your idealism," Stattor explained. "That's why you spent twenty years in prison."

"I don't understand."

Stattor shrugged and sipped his drink. "Let's talk about the old days for a minute. Do you remember the Setback? When we lost nearly all of our secret council?"

Her face went suddenly grim. "I remember. On Perda, every year, we have half a day off to remember and study the works of those we lost. And to read the story of Kenda Dean, the informer."

"You knew Kenda well, didn't you?"

"I never suspected he could do such a thing—or that the government had been paying him the whole time. I accept it now, but I never understood it."

"You never understood it because he didn't do it.
I
did it.
I
informed."

She looked at him as though he were still speaking. Then, suddenly, she laughed, and he remembered how, long ago, she had laughed. He remembered her lips as she had come up from the lakeside. He remembered her hands and he remembered the morning they had awakened in each other's arms.

"It's true," he said. "I informed on them all."

"You didn't. You couldn't have."

"The government police had been paying me for almost a year prior to that. I used the police to eliminate opposition to my chairmanship of the movement."

"You couldn't—"

"I did it for myself. I have always done everything for myself."

"This is some kind of test," she said. "You're testing me in some clever way. You could never do such a thing. You've led the human race to dominance in the galaxy. You've devoted your life to—"

"To the acquisition of power," he said. "I did it for myself."

"I won't believe this."

"Believe it. I did it because I wanted everything, and everything is mine now." He grinned. "Everything. You're mine."

"That isn't true. It's a lie, a test."

"It isn't wise, Usko, to tell Supervisor Stattor that he is lying. Normally, those who accuse me of lying are thrown into the core of the station." He smiled a bit more fiercely. "Then we can turn our thermostats up a few degrees."

"You couldn't have done that."

"If you don't tell me that you believe me, Usko, you'll be back cutting out your ninety-six pieces of shoe leather before the day is over. You'll do it till you die." He paused. "By the way, do you know where your 'leather' comes from?"

"Animals," she said tentatively.

"If you think your supervisor is incapable of betrayal and cruelty, I'll tell you where your shoe leather comes from." He waited for her response, but she said nothing. He leaned forward and the desk creaked under his weight. "Do you believe me?"

"Whatever you did, you did for the advancement of knowledge and for the security of the human race."

"I did it because I don't like competition, either from humans or trashlife. I had your friends butchered because they were in my way."

"You can't make me believe this," she said firmly. She sat up straighter and reached forward to put her drink on the edge of his desk. "We all sacrificed for our people, not for ourselves. I knew you well."

"You never knew me," he said. He leaned back and laced his fingers over his rolled stomach. For a moment, he seemed to be chewing something. "You're overburdened with misinformation. Let me clarify your situation. You have a choice. You can tell me that you believe me—that I informed on your friends and as a result they were sliced. Then you can walk out of here, have a warm place to live, and 500,000 credits a year. Or you can believe that this is a test, that Supervisor Stattor is lying to you, and
that
, Usko, is treason. For treason, you will spend the rest of your life dying on Perda, cutting shoe soles out of 'leather'."

Whatever small thing Stattor had sucked out of his teeth, he swallowed. "Well?" he asked.

Her age, her fear, and her dread pushed her deeper into her chair. She had lowered her head and Stattor could see the dry frizzy hair that grew there in erratic patches.

She looked up. Above the mouth that was twisted by paralysis, her eyes sparkled as though they were filled with chips of silver. "You brought me here to offer me comfort and disgrace or a slow death for a wasted life. Why?"

"I'm an insecure man. I sleep better when I know that others operate from self-interest. Your idealism makes me . . . uneasy." Stattor smiled. "When you accept my offer of generosity, you'll be as corrupt as the rest of us. There's no reason for you to go back to prison now, because the ideal you sacrificed for was an illusion."

"You're taking the one thing . . ."

Stattor smiled even harder. "And we used to think human nature was so damned mysterious." He pressed the call button on the autovox and Zallon entered immediately. "See that Ms. Imani has priority transportation to the rehabilitation center. Her welfare is of special importance to me."

"I understand."

"That's gratifying," Stattor said.

As Zallon helped her out of her chair, she said, "If I were strong enough to use these hands—"

"We mustn't let our lives be spoiled with regrets," Stattor said pleasantly.

As Zallon helped Usko through the door, she looked back once, it was just a glimpse, and Stattor was reminded of the other reason he had sent her to prison. It happened so many years ago, when they had awakened in each other's arms. She had slept so beautifully, her smooth, translucent eyelids closed over her quiet eyes—and then she had awakened and her eyes had opened suddenly and she had looked at him. There, wrapped in the sheets, with the morning sun streaming across the room, she had looked at him with that same expression—a kind of horrified surprise.

The door irised shut behind them, and Stattor nodded to himself. Yes, it was probably at that moment, with the sun filling the room—and he remembered there was a bowl of oranges on a table, radiant with sunlight—it was at that moment that he decided that some way, somehow, he would do this to her, and not long after that he began giving information to the government police.

So now it had all worked out. The loose end was tied to everything else.

He swept his hand across the lower part of his stomach. He did not feel so bad now. Neither his arms nor his legs ached, and his stomach did not seem filled with bile.

Stattor turned in his chair and gazed out the transparent bubble at the churning hub of the galaxy and then at his globular cluster. But beyond those stars, in the textureless black, there was what drew his eyes. When he looked into it, he almost felt his soul drawn out of his bloated and diseased body and sent into a place where there was neither light nor matter nor decay nor care. The autovox chirped.

"Supervisor," Zallon's voice said gently, "there is the matter of the dispersal list."

Stattor grunted and spun his chair to face the desk again. The list lay there, face up, awaiting his final decision whether or not to exempt any of the condemned. He thought of Aros waiting in some detention cell, old, haggard, half dead, and then he thought of himself and Usko, there beside the lake, so long ago. She had brought a bouquet of colored weeds up from the shoreline, and Aros had stood up, laughing, his arms wide to receive her—

His eyes stopped on the autovox.

Zallon had overstepped his limits. Stattor could barely see the green blossom of his nebula behind it. His emotionless aide, that sunken-eyed reptile, never revealed his feelings about anything, so how could he be trusted? He was an unknown.

Excepting no one from execution, Stattor pushed the list away from him. He had never liked Aros. Nor Zallon. With his fatted hand, Stattor retrieved the list and entered Zallon's name at the bottom. One way or another, so many people tried to stand in his way, to annoy him, or to prevent the grand and mysterious thing that was about to happen to him. It was very close. He could feel it come nearer every hour.

For a moment, his stomach did not burn and the beta-blocker made his life easier. He leaned back in his chair and again turned to face the absorbing blackness beyond the galaxy, and he was content to know that soon, so very soon, his flesh would turn to myth.

Whitaker Chambers says of his education at Columbia:

"Nothing that I can remember was said about the Russian Revolution. No one in Contemporary Civilization parted the curtain of falling snow to show me Petrograd with a cold rain blowing in from the Gulf of Finland on a day in November 1917. The tottering republican government of Russia had ordered the drawbridges over the Neva River to be raised."

Of course, Chambers had this advantage over our generation: at least he knew there had been a Republican government of Russia. Nowadays, everyone is taught that the Bolsheviks overthrew the czars, and no one remembers Alexander Kerensky and the Social Democrats who, for a few months, gave Russia the only republican rule it has ever had.

Chambers continues his story.

"The great spans tilted slowly through the air. The Red Guards and the Communist Party resolutes had begun to execute that careful plan, the brainchild of Comrades Trotsky, Podvoisky, and Antonov-Avseenko, which proved to be a master technique for the revolutionary seizure of a modern city. The Communists were occupying the public buildings, the ministries, the police stations, the post office, newspaper and telegraph offices, the telephone exchange, banks, powerhouses, the railroad stations. To cut off the working-class Viborg quarter from the other bank of the Neva, and to prevent its masses from re-enforcing the insurgent Communists, the falling republican government had raised the bridges.

"In from the Gulf of Finland steamed the armored cruisers of the Baltic fleet, whose crews had already gone over to the Bolsheviks. The cruisers nosed into the Neva within point-blank range of the bridges. Their slender guns rose with mechanical deliberateness, and, as they rose, the spans of the bridges slowly dropped again. The masses streamed across into the central city. This was the crisis of the uprising and one of the decisive moments of history.

"The upraised guns of the cruisers—one hopefully renamed
The Dawn of Freedom
—did not lower. They swung and lobbed their shells into the Winter Palace, which stood next to the Admiralty on the river bank. Inside, the rump of the government was in its final, dying session. Outside, fierce fighting was going on. Directing it was one of history's most grotesque figures, Antonov-Avseenko—the Communist mathematician and tactician, the co-contriver of the
coup d'etat
, the man with the scarecrow face and shoulder-long hair under the shapeless felt. Antonov rushed toward the guns at the head of the steps. His armed rabble followed him. They stormed the doors. The Winter Palace fell. With it, in that vast, snow-afflicted sixth of the earth's surface, fell the absolute control of the destinies of 160 million people."

—Whitaker Chambers,
Cold Friday