Visions of Liberty

“Well, suppose I don’t want them telling me. What if I put my own guards on the place and keep ’em away?”

“That would be up to you, of course…. But why would anyone want to?” She looked at Duggan again and caught the resigned expression on his face. “Okay, don’t tell me, Paul. Back home they’re all like that. Yes?”

* * *

General Rhinde’s measures weren’t having the intended effect. In a closed-door meeting of the political and military chiefs aboard theBarnet, it was agreed that the citizens of Ferrydock were undergoing too little violation of their freedoms and rights to provoke whoever was supposed to defend them into coming out and doing so. Accordingly, since there was no set precedent at Tharle to say how far these things should be taken, the governor was instructed to issue a declaration stating that to facilitate improved control and efficiency, the Terran administration now owned everything in the name of everybody and was taking charge of manufacture, distribution, employment, and other services directly.

But the populace seemed happy to let them take it. A mood of festivity spread as virtually the whole of Ferrydock shut up stores and offices and took to the boulevards or sat back in the sun to await decisions and directions. Very soon, surface landers were shuttling frantically between the Barnet and Base 1, bringing extra details of planners and controllers to relieve the harried supervisory offices, now working around the clock. Meanwhile, ostensibly to bolster the security of all by setting up a centrally managed disaster relief agency—in reality, to get faster results through imposed austerity—huge stocks of food, fuel, clothing, materials, and other supplies were impounded and locked up in a large warehouse near the airport requisitioned for the purpose and officially renamed the “Federal Emergency Relief Repository.” (Use of the word “federal” was a bit premature since as of yet there were no political entities other than Ferrydock to federate with it, but the planners were already shaping up grand schemes and visions of the future.) The repository was duly furnished with a ten- foot wire fence, traffic barrier and checkpoint at the gate, and a billet of armed guards.

However, the harassed Terran administrators were like innocents in a Casbah bazaar before the demands of Tharleans taking them at their word that they were now responsible for everything, and in a short space of time just about everything of utility or value had vanished from the stores and the streets. By the terms under which the Repository had been established, the circumstances qualified as a disaster deserving of relief, and the officer in charge dutifully commenced handing back to the town, at enormous cost in overhead and added effort, the goods that had been confiscated at comparable cost in the first place. Eager to help Terran officialdom find satisfaction and self-esteem by the terms of their own morality, the Tharleans didn’t take long to exhaust the stocks completely. Since there was nothing in the regulations that said otherwise, the guards continued, befuddled but doggedly, patrolling outside to protect the contents of the empty warehouse. The only threatening incident they had to deal with, however, was when a small procession of trucks from some outlying farms arrived full of vegetables and other produce that the growers didn’t know what else to do with—only to be turned away again because there were no orders for dealing with anyone trying to bring things/n.

By this time, the political opponents of the mission’s incumbent regime, seeing ammunition here to unseat their rivals, formed a dissident faction to fire off a joint protest to Earth, giving all the facts and details. A directive from Colonial Affairs Administration terminating the Barnet’s mission and recalling the ship

forthwith arrived within forty-eight hours.

* * *

Base 1 was an abandoned shell, unsightly with the litter left by departing military anywhere. Children in makeshift helmets and carrying roughly fashioned imitation rifles marched each other to stations at the main gate guard posts. Duggan stood with his arm around Tawna’s waist among a crowd watching the last shuttle out climb at the top of a pillar of light through scattered, purple-edged clouds. If the figure he’d heard was correct, he was one of forty-six who would have been unaccounted for when the muster lists were checked, and whose compaks hadn’t answered calls or returned a location fix.

“No reservations or second thoughts, Dug?” she asked him. “No last-minute changes about everything, like Zeeb? I hope not. It would be a bit late now.” Stell hadn’t been among them at the end, after all. Driven to distraction under the pressures of trying to give things away, he had turned a complete about-face and stormed back up to the ship, berating anyone who would listen that he couldn’t get back to Earth fast enough.

Duggan shook his head. “Not me.” He gave her a squeeze, savoring the touch of her body through the light dress she was wearing. “My future’s cut out right here. Everything I want.”

“So Zeeb will probably get that promotion you told me about. I hope he’ll be pleased.”

“Oh, I’m sure he’ll fit right back in,” Duggan said. Brose had as good as come out and said that he favored Duggan for the subsection supervisor position and would back him. Duggan had seen it as a pretty transparent ploy to recruit support in the political maelstrom that Brose knew they’d be heading back to, and had no doubt that Brose had told Zeeb the same thing, and for the same reason. It felt like a reprieve from a life sentence to know he was out of all that. “In any case,” Duggan added, “I wouldn’t have gotten the job. The screening application that Brose made me put through was turned down.” Brose had been as stunned as Duggan was pleased when the assessment back from Earth readDoesn’t display the competitiveness and aggressiveness that success in this appointment would require. It meant that Duggan had done something right.

“I’m surprised,” Tawna said, sounding defensive on his behalf. “I’d have thought that even if you decided…” She caught the amused twist of his mouth. “Dug, what happened? What did you do?”

“I filled it in the Tharlean way,” he told her.

“What way’s that?”

“I have to tell you?” Duggan frowned in mock reproach. “I said I didn’t need as much pay as they were offering, and I told them I could do more than they were stipulating. I guess they couldn’t hack it.” He shrugged. “But Zeeb will do okay. He, Brose, and the System are made for each other.”

Tawna pulled close and nuzzled the side of her face against his shoulder. “And you’ll do just fine here too,” she promised.

For that was the simple principle that underlay the entire Tharlean worldview and way of life Give a little more; take a little less. At least, with those who reciprocated. Anyone who didn’t play by the rules wasn’t treated by the rules. That was how they curbed excess. But how did a Tharlean know when enough was enough? By being a part of the culture they had evolved and absorbing its ways and its values from the time they first learned to look at the world, walk around in it, listen and talk.

Every one of them.

That was why nobody from Earth had had any success finding lawmakers—at least, if what they were looking for was a few making rules to be forcibly imposed on the many. The government had been there all along, everywhere, staring them in the face. For on Tharle, all made the law, and all enforced it. Every one of them, therefore, was government.

Now Duggan would learn to become a member of a planetary government too. And that sounded a much better promotion to him than anything the Colonial Affairs Administration was likely to come up with, even if he were to carry on fighting and clawing his way up the ladder for the next hundred years.

About the Authors

Dr. Lloyd Biggle, Jr., Ph.D., (1923-2002) was a musician, author, and internationally known oral historian. He began writing professionally in 1955, and became a full-time writer with the publication of his novel All the Colors of Darkness, in 1963, a profession that he followed until his death. Both Dr. Biggle’s science fiction and mystery stories have received international acclaim. He was celebrated in science fiction circles as the author who introduced aesthetics into a literature known for its scientific and technological complications. He published two dozen books as well as magazine stories and articles beyond count. His most recent novel was The Chronicide Mission. He was writing almost to the moment of his death. “I can write them faster than the magazines can publish them,” he once said, with the result that even though his writing has been stilled, his publications will continue until his backlog of stories is exhausted.

Robert J. Sawyer won the Nebula Award for best novel of 1995 for The