Inferno: A Chronicle of a Distant World (The Galactic Comedy) (10 page)

I know I'm rambling, Susan, but it's not safe to say these things aloud. You never know who might be listening, and who might report you to Labu's thugs for money, for position, or—more likely—for the release of a loved one from the hundreds of prisons that have sprung up like weeds across the countryside.

I don't wish to unduly disturb you, but this may be the last letter I am able to write. Oh, not that anything will happen to me personally . . . but there is daily talk that off-planet mail service may be shut down, at least until Labu can set up a screening board to censor our letters. That's likely to take him a lifetime and then some, so few of his followers can read. The problem is that those who can read, and think for themselves, are not inclined to share their thoughts, at least not publicly—nor can I bring myself to blame them, since here I am, locked in my room with the windows covered, writing to someone who cannot possibly do anything about the situation.

I think about you often, and I miss you, as do we all. But this must not be construed as a plea for help, or for you to return. It's our problem, and we'll solve it. As for you, you're much better off where you are, and I hope by now you've found an insect bald and rotund enough to be named after me.

Love,

Arthur

9.

The morning after he wrote his letter to Susan Beddoes, a squadron of armed, uniformed jasons came to Arthur Cartright's house and placed him under arrest. Within an hour he had been taken to the jail in Remus, holographed, fingerprinted, retinagrammed, and placed in a cell. His demands to know why he was being incarcerated went unheeded.

His cell was eight feet by six feet, with a small bucket in the corner. There was a single barred window, from which he could look out over the main square of the city. There were no beds or cots, but he was given a pair of blankets so that he wouldn't have to sleep on the damp stone floor.

He spent three days alone in the cell. Each evening he was given a single plate of food that he could not identify and a cup of water, each morning the plate and cup were removed and a fresh bucket placed in the corner. Whenever a guard passed by he asked if his lawyer had been informed that he had been imprisoned, but he received no answer.

On the morning of the fourth day, the door was opened, the plate and cup picked up, the bucket replaced, and then a badly-beaten jason was tossed roughly onto the floor of the cell. Before Cartright could ask any questions, the door was locked once again.

Cartright examined the jason, whose golden fleece was streaked with dried blood, and tried his best to make the his new cellmate comfortable. There was no water with which to wash out the wounds, no bed on which to lay him, but he wrapped him in both blankets and, taking off his shirt, rolled it into a ball and used it as a pillow beneath the jason's head.

"Thank you," whispered the jason through bruised and bloodied lips. "You are Arthur Cartright, are you not?"

Cartright nodded. "Don't talk now. Just rest and try to regain some of your strength."

"For what purpose?" asked the jason. "We are doomed, you and I."

Cartright stared at the jason. "Don't I know you?" he said at last.

"We have met before," answered the jason. "I am the Reverend James Oglipsi."

"My God!" muttered Cartright. "If there was one jason I thought they'd be afraid to touch, it was you!"

"Why?" asked Oglipsi. "Because I am a Christian?"

"Because you've been standing up to Labu since the day he took office," said Cartright.

"Evidently I stood up to him once too often."

"He'll never get away with it!" said Cartright. "You've got tens of thousands of followers."

"He has already gotten away with it, Arthur Cartright. I am here, am I not?"

"But you've got all those devoted followers . . ." said Cartright.

"Who have been taught to turn the other cheek," answered Oglipsi wryly. "If I have done my job properly, then they will not try to free me or stand up to Labu. And if I have not, then I have failed and I might just as well die here as anywhere else."

"How did this happen?" asked Cartright. "You have been publicly denouncing him for half a year. Why did he arrest you
now
?"

"Two men from a nearby village were digging a well, when they came upon a dead body. The jasons do not bury their dead in unmarked graves, so the men dug further and discovered that they had unearthed a mass grave for more than two hundred corpses. The bodies had deteriorated beyond our ability to identify them individually, but we found several tokens of the Enkoti." The jason paused to catch his breath. "That was three . . . no, four . . . days ago. Yesterday morning I left my church and took my parishioners to the grave to pray for the souls of the poor butchered corpses. Colonel Witherspoon showed up with perhaps one hundred armed men, accused me of killing those people for supporting Gama Labu, and arrested me."

"And no one spoke up for you?" asked Cartright.

"The first forty to protest on my behalf were also arrested. The next handful were shot. After that, nobody said anything."

"But they know you're here!"

"These are farmers and peasants that I have converted to a religion of gentleness," said Oglipsi, shifting his position and trying unsuccessfully to get comfortable. "Surely you do not expect them to storm the jail and free me?"

"No," admitted Cartright. "No, I suppose not."

"Might I ask why you are here?" continued Oglipsi. "President Labu has usually gone out of his way not to offend the Republic."

"I'm not the Republic. I'm just a citizen of Faligor."

"But you are a Man, and the Republic protects Men wherever they may be."

"Not this time, Reverend," said Cartright. "First, they don't know I've been incarcerated. And second, even if they knew it, they wouldn't lift a finger to save me."

"Why not?" asked Oglipsi. "They have intervened everywhere else."

"Faligor is
my
experiment. When I was given charge of its development, I told the Republic I wanted no interference—so now they won't interfere even if I ask for help. This is their way of teaching a lesson to anyone who might emulate me." He paused. "Besides, Faligor has no ties to the Republic; legally they can't interfere in its internal affairs."

"But even if they cannot threaten military action, they can institute economic reprisals," suggested Oglipsi.

"Only if they know what's going on," said Cartright.

"How can they not know?"

"Who's going to tell them? I don't know of anyone, Man or jason, who's gotten an exit visa in the past two months. And it doesn't take much to jam subspace transmissions."

"Surely some word of what has transpired here must have reached the Republic," said Oglipsi.

"Oh, probably there have been scattered reports, a few letters—though I wouldn't bet on that—and maybe even a radio transmission or two. But I don't think you have any idea just how big the Republic is, or how many departments there are. It's almost impossible for them to put together enough data unless it's all been sent to one agency, and I'm sure it hasn't."

"Don't the agencies speak to one another?"

Cartright smiled. "The only thing worse than no one speaking is the sound of seventeen billion voices speaking at the same time, each with its own agenda."

"I don't understand," said Oglipsi.

"Although we claim Earth as our capitol, for all practical purposes Deluros VIII is the capitol planet of the race of Man. Now, not only is it half a galaxy away from Faligor, but it employs eleven billion bureaucrats, each charged with keeping some infinitesimal portion of the galaxy working. Not only that, but Deluros VI was broken up into some twenty-six terraformed planetoids, each housing a government agency: the Department of Alien Affairs completely covers one planetoid, the Bureau of Taxation covers another, and so on; the military has four of the planetoids and is already cramped for space. Add to this the fact that some of the departments, like Cartography, are tens of thousands of light years away, and it becomes increasingly difficult for the right information to get into the right hands in time to do any good."

"So we can expect no help from the Republic."

"Not until we can let the right members know what's going on here," replied Cartright. "And even then, their response would be limited by the fact that Faligor is neither a protectorate nor a member world." He sighed. "There's simply not a lot they can do, short of landing an army, and they're not going to do that."

"Do you think Labu has figured that out?" asked Oglipsi, wincing in pain as he gingerly shifted his position again.

"I doubt it. He's never struck me as being exceptionally intelligent."

"Let us hope you are right," said Oglipsi. "If he can do what he has done while acknowledging the possibility of reprisal, I fear to even think of what he might do once he knows there are no restrictions whatsoever on him."

"Amen," said Cartright softly.

10.

It was during their third week of incarceration that Cartright and Oglipsi noticed a sudden increase of activity outside their window.

"What the devil is going on?" muttered Cartright, staring down as a team of jason laborers began uprooting the gardens in front of a governmental building.

"I do not know," replied Oglipsi, peeking out the window when Cartright stepped away. "Surely he is not planning on burying his victims right in the city center!"

"It beats me," said Cartright.

By late afternoon they had determined that a statue was being moved to the location.

"Doubtless of himself," said Cartright.

"Are you surprised?" asked Oglipsi.

"No, I suppose not," replied the human. "But it does seem a bit egomaniacal."

"His ego is the least of our worries."

The statue was delivered during the night, completely covered with tarps. For three days it remained so, some twenty feet high, an object of curiosity to all passersby. During the third day a grandstand was hastily erected in the street opposite the statue and all traffic was diverted along other routes.

"It looks," said Cartright, as the sun rose the next morning, "as if we're going to be treated to a speech by Labu himself."

"Why should you think so?" asked Oglipsi, without bothering to get to his feet and approach the window.

"Because a couple of hundred soldiers with weapons just showed up. I don't know anyone else who needs that kind of security, do you?"

The soldiers quickly secured the area, rousting moles from their shops and sending them home, searching any pedestrians in the area. Finally a holovision team from the only operating station showed up and positioned their camera and sound equipment, and then a pair of buses arrived, disgorging their passengers in front of the grandstand.

"Nothing but Men," observed Cartright. "Not a jason or a mole in the bunch." He paused. "You don't think he's going to make them all swear fealty to him, do you?"

"What has that got to do with a statue?" asked Oglipsi.

Cartright shrugged. "I suppose we'll find out in good time," he replied.

He continued watching. Most of the men and women were obviously there against their wills, and were forced, at gunpoint, to take seats in the grandstand. They sat in the heat and humidity for the better part of an hour, until the sound of a siren could be heard in the distance. It got louder as it approached, and at last an armored vehicle pulled up and Gama Labu, now dressed in his general's uniform, got out and walked over to the statue.

"Look at him," muttered Cartright. "He must have three hundred goddamned medals on his uniform. I'll bet my pension he can't even count that high."

Labu looked at the holo crew, who nodded, and then he climbed a small dais that had been built that morning and faced the grandstand. The men and women stared at him in sullen silence until one of the soldiers said something that Cartright couldn't hear, and then a ripple of unenthusiastic applause spread through them.

"Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much," said Labu in Terran.

"I see he's learned three new words," said Cartright caustically.

"Thank you, thank you," repeated Labu, finally raising his hands to signal an end to the applause.

"I know," he continued in the Maringo dialect, "what some of you think of me." Again he held up a hand, against an anticipated protest. "No, no, it is all right. This is Faligor, where you are free to think as you please. We do not need a constitution to guarantee you that right."

He paused and smiled a very alien smile, his golden fur rippling in the hot breeze that whipped across the city center.

"Many of you think that Gama Labu has no love for your race, that he does not hear your protests, that he wants to rid his planet of you. I assure you, my good friends, that this is not true. There is much about the race of Man to admire. You are not like the moles, who seek only to get rich off the sweat of other races. You have a glorious history, with many great men and women in it. You have conquered half a galaxy, and while you have not conquered Faligor, that does not make your achievement any the less admirable."

"What the hell is he getting at?" said Cartright.

"I know that some of you think me ignorant, because I do not speak or read Terran, but I am not ignorant. I know your history well. My close associate, Colonel George Witherspoon, has told me your history, and has translated many of your books for me."

"Aloud, no doubt," muttered Cartright.

"There is no reason why we should not be friends. I know that many of your people have left Faligor, but that is because they did not make an attempt to understand me or my people. In my greatness, in my open-mindedness, I do not choose only jasons for my heroes. In fact, I spit on the memories of Disanko and Robert Tantram. I have chosen for my hero a member not of my race but of your own, and I have ordered a statue of him to stand guard over the city of Romulus. Surely this will cement the ties between Man and jason, and prove to you that I harbor no ill will toward your people."