Inferno: A Chronicle of a Distant World (The Galactic Comedy) (12 page)

President-For-Life Labu was shocked by the death of his friend, and had announced that if Christianity could make otherwise reasonable being commit so perverse a crime, then from this day forth Christianity would be banned on Faligor. Oglipsi himself would receive a hero's funeral tomorrow afternoon; the President-For-Life regretted that affairs of state prevented him from attending, but he would send one of his wives, not Batisha but one of the older ones, in his place as his personal representative.

Cartright stared numbly at the holograph of the jason he had seen just the previous day, and the image remained in his mind long after he had shut off the holovision. The dead eyes seemed to be staring directly into his soul, saying,
I told you so, Arthur. He is not a madman, but a clever barbarian, and once more he has gotten what he wants.

I will pray for your soul, my friend, answered Cartright silently.

Why?
Oglipsi's image seemed to ask.
It is you who are in Hell, not I.

12.

Gama Labu knew better than to leave Faligor and pay state visits throughout the galaxy. After all, that was how he usurped power from William Barioke. But there were things out there that he wanted, and he set about trying to obtain them.

Canphor VI and VII, known as the Canphor Twins, had developed all kinds of weaponry over the centuries in their continual wars with Mankind's Republic. Most of the weapons were obsolete, but only because the Republic had learned how to counter or negate them. They would still function on Faligor, where the most powerful weapon that could be mounted against the government was a laser rifle, and so Labu played host to a delegation of Canphorites, both the tall blue beings from Canphor VI and the short, burly, tripodal, red-hued beings from Canphor VII. They dined sumptuously, were entertained lavishly, and in the end they consented to supply Faligor with a few hundred weapons in exchange for the next year's production of silver and platinum from the mines. They never asked if the mines were still fully operational, and Labu never told them that eighty percent of them had been shut down due to his inability to pay for labor or replacement parts. By the time they found out, it was too late to reclaim the weapons, all of which had been strategically dispersed and most of which were already in various stages of disrepair.

Labu then confounded the remaining Men on Faligor by publicly converting to Judaism, and offering the world of New Jerusalem an embassy in Remus. He unconverted just as quickly when it became apparent that no Men of any faith were going to supply him with weapons simply because he professed to share their faith.

His conversions and unconversions became a public joke, until he hit upon an arcane idol-worshipping faith practiced by the Domarians, a stilt-legged race that spent most of their lives following their sun as it receded over their horizon. The Domarians supplied him with weapons and hard currency, and
Rainche
, their religion, soon became the official state religion of Faligor. It was just as well that the Domarians were chlorine breathers who were physically unable to visit Faligor, or they might have noticed that not a single religious edifice or idol had been constructed.

While Labu had been amassing his weaponry, Romulus and Remus had been spared any serious disruptions. True, two or three jasons turned up missing every day, and some moles vanished while on a picnic, and a number of local business were looted and burned, but no weapons of mass destruction had been turned on the populace, there were no massacres such as had occurred in the past, the cities continued to limp along. When Labu put his soldiers to work repairing the highway between the two cities, a handful of the remaining Men came to the conclusion that now that he had his military toys and was the unquestioned leader of Faligor that he might actually have decided to try to do something constructive, if not to assure an honored place in the history books, then simply because there was no more power to be grabbed and he might as well put that which he had accumulated to use.

That conclusion lasted until the morning that his troops surrounded the Republic's embassy in Romulus, trained their most powerful weaponry on the building, and demanded that the ambassador and his staff of seventeen present themselves for arrest on a charge of subversion. For proof, Labu went on holovision and furiously waved a captured message from the ambassador to Deluros VIII, calling him a tyrant and suggesting that he was responsible for the genocide of a minor tribe in the far north, where his soldiers had secretly been testing their weaponry.

The Republic responded by demanding the release of all embassy personal. Labu refused.

And three days later the sky of Faligor was black with ships, some six hundred in all, as the Navy delivered an ultimatum: release our people within twenty-four hours or suffer the consequences.

Labu made no reply for fifteen hours, then went on holovision again to point out that he had never intended to
keep
the ambassador and his staff incarcerated, but simply refused to let them return to the embassy. He had no desire, he continued, to go to war with the Republic, which had completely misinterpreted his motives, and if the Commander of the 43rd Fleet would agree to take the undesirables off the planet, he would release them forthwith.

The Navy did not answer, and four hours later, screaming his imprecations before the cameras, he ordered the immediate release and deportation of his prisoners, proclaiming to his people that only his willingness to humiliate himself before the warmongering Republic had saved the planet from total devastation. The ambassadorial personnel were released two hours before the deadline, rushed to the spaceport at Remus, and flown up to the flagship. The next morning the skies were empty again, and Labu looked about for some way to reestablish his authority.

He didn't have to look far.

It was obvious to him that he could not confront the Republic. It was just as obvious that most of his people were aware of that fact. He had shown weakness, and that had to be countered with a show of strength. He needed an enemy, a race—unlike Man—that he could dominate, and he just happened to have one on his planet: the moles.

What were they doing here in the first place, he demanded. Why were they taking jobs and running businesses that by rights should have been owned by jasons?

You think, he pointed out, that they have been trying to assimilate themselves into our society by learning our language and respecting our customs, but you are wrong. Their sole purpose is to subvert and control our economy. They have infiltrated every level of our society except the government, hoping that if they were quiet enough we wouldn't notice what they were doing. But I have noticed, said Labu, and I have seen enough.

The government's propaganda machine, which heretofore had existed only to praise Labu, soon began attacking the moles. Were their children in the schools? They were taking up space that should have been occupied by jason children. Throw them out. Were their houses bigger and grander than the jasons'? They built them with jason money. Throw them out. Did they practice their own religious rituals, read their own books, keep to themselves? They were mocking the jasons, trying to show that they were superior to them. Throw them out.

Colonel Witherspoon waited until the propaganda began working, then turned his soldiers loose in the major cities across the planet. Moles began disappearing with the same regularity as jasons. Government buildings, most of them standing empty and useless, were put to the torch, and moles were arrested and executed for the fires.

Finally Labu took to the air once more to announce what he called his Mole Policy: all moles had sixty days to leave the planet. They could take nothing with them—not possessions, not food, not money. Any mole remaining on Faligor past the appointed day would be in breach of the law and summarily executed for high treason.

The moles protested as vigorously as they could. Many of them had been born on Faligor. They had lived there, worked there, paid their taxes there, put up with discrimination, and now they were being thrown out with nothing more than the clothing on their backs. Even if they wanted to obey the law, there weren't enough commuter ships to begin to accommodate them, and since Faligor's currency was worthless anywhere else in the galaxy, they could not charter ships from other worlds.

Finally some of the alien embassies, seeing a chance to win the moles' home world to their cause, arranged for a contingent of rescue ships to come to Faligor and begin taking the moles off the planet. Labu decided to make their lot easier by systematically rounding up the moles from all over the planet and transporting them to detention camps until they could be transported offworld.

It was a remarkable operation for a relatively undeveloped world. In less than sixty days some seven million moles were transported to the detention camps; all but four hundred thousand were taken off the planet, and Labu allowed the ships an extra week to rescue the remainder.

When the last of the moles had gone—the few who steadfastly refused to leave were being systematically hunted down by Witherspoon's troops—Labu addressed his people again.

Faligor, he informed them, is pure for the first time in a generation. With all our external enemies gone, like the moles, or held at bay, like the Republic, it is almost time to start building our Utopia.

Just as soon, he added, as we eliminate the enemies within.

13.

Cartright was preparing his morning coffee when there was a knock at the front door. His first inclination was to hide, but he knew it would be useless. If they had come for him, they'd find him.

His second inclination was to get his gun, but there was always a chance they just wanted him for questioning, or to inform on a neighbor, and the sight of a gun in his hand might result in an instant retaliation from one of Labu's thugs.

So he finally settled for sighing deeply, taking a deep breath, and walking to the front door. There was no sense commanding it to open, since there was no power, as was the case more and more often these days, so instead he reached out, grabbed the handle, and turned it—and found himself facing Susan Beddoes.

"Arthur, are you all right?" she asked, quickly stepping inside and steadying him. "You look like you're about to collapse."

"A nervous reaction," he said, quickly shutting the door behind her. "What in the world are you doing here, Susan?"

"Didn't you get my message? I sent it via subspace radio two days ago."

"I haven't gotten any subspace messages in more than three months."

"I sent one."

"I believe you," replied Cartright, leading her into his shabby living room. "Please, come in and sit down. How are you?"

"I'm well, thank you. That's more than I can say for Faligor."

"Why have you come back?"

"Ezra and Martha Simpson died. I'm here for their funeral."

"That was stupid, Susan, just plain stupid. They died four weeks ago."

"I just got word of it two days ago. I sent a message asking when the funeral would be held, and they responded that it would be tomorrow."

"Whoever you contacted doesn't even know who the Simpsons were," said Cartright wearily.

"But why would they say—?"

"You had to pay 200 credits for your visa, and there's a 100-credit exit fee," said Cartright. "Faligor is desperate for hard currency. You're worth 300 credits to them. More, in fact, since no other world is allowed to land commercial spaceliners here, so you unquestionably paid one of the government-owned ships at least another thousand credits to get you to Faligor." He paused. "Where are you staying?"

"I have a room at the Imperial Remus Hotel," answered Beddoes.

"For which they will not accept payment in local currency unless you're a jason," said Cartright. "As long as you're here, you'll stay with me. At least that's some money that Labu won't get his hands on."

Beddoes was silent for a moment. "How bad is it here, really?" she asked at last.

"I don't know how it can get much worse," replied Cartright. "You heard about the moles?"

She nodded. "How could he get away with that?"

"At least they're alive," said Cartright, ignoring her question. "He's been methodically decimating the minor tribes for the past year. There's no way to know the actual body count, and of course the government denies any responsibility, but I'd be surprised if he hasn't killed off at least a million jasons."

"A million?" said Beddoes unbelievingly.

"At least."

"I knew he was insane, but I had no idea . . ."

"For the longest time I believed what a jason friend told me, that he wasn't crazy at all, that he was just a barbarian exercising maniacal power on behalf of his tribe," said Cartright. "But now . . . I just don't know." He paused. "I do know that whether he's insane or not, he's committing genocide on a scale that hasn't been seen since the heyday of Conrad Bland."

"How about
you
, Arthur?" asked Beddoes seriously. "Are you safe?"

"Nobody's really safe, but at least he's still leaving most of the Men alone."

"What about the Simpsons?"

Cartright shrugged. "I don't know."

"How did they die?"

"Their house was broken into, and they were bludgeoned to death by the looters."

"Then he
is
responsible."

"Possibly, possibly not," said Cartright. "He's got half a million soldiers who loot so many places and kill so many beings that it's possible they murdered the Simpsons on their own. After all, it's what they've been trained to do."

"Isn't there any way to find out?"

Cartright shook his head. "We don't have a police state here, Susan. We have a state of terror. You don't ask questions in a police state; you don't even think about them in a state of terror." He stared at her for a long moment. "When's the next flight out of here?"

"Three days," she replied. "Faligor's not getting a lot of traffic these days."

"I want you on it. You can stay here until then."