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realtime solar. But tomorrow you head for home, girl."
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"That's tomorrow's problem," she replied.
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- Chapter 35
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2
As she hit the fringe of Jopat's atmosphere her shieldscreen stiffened
automatically, protecting her body from air friction. At the same time the
screen bulged out to act as braking wings. A few minutes later her breathing
went exterior. After five days with nothing to do, her nose sniffed the fresh
smell of Jopat's air with appreciation.
She holstered her gun as she approached the location the general had given
her. There she detected only one barb waiting for her, hovering at five
thousand feet. She swooped to a halt six feet in front of him and saw that it
was Nathel Gromon.
He grinned at her. "Well, well, Skinny Hips." He chuckled. "Come all this way
because you can't live without me. Right?"
"Meatheads aren't my type," she retorted.
He chuckled some more. "And you're not old Spart Dargow's type, chicken. He's
mad enough to skin you."
"This conversation reminds me of how hungry I am, for some reason," she said.
"Okay. Follow me down."
The barb dropped groundward, leveled off sharply just above the treetops and
headed westward.
Gweanvin trailed him closely.
"One thing puzzles me about you, Nathel," she said.
"What's that?"
"Most of you idiots came to Jopat because the econo-war back home was
fizzling, and out here you and the Lonnies could have a little war of your
own. That made a primitive kind of sense under the circumstances. There was
nothing for genetic barbarians to do at home, and nobody seemed to know how to
get the econo-war heated up again. I even dropped out myself for a couple of
years . . ."
"I remember."
"But you stuck out the doldrums at home, Nathel. You didn't leave until three
months ago. That was after our Bauble telepathic communicators had been
developed to put the Commonality back on even terms with the Lontastans and
their telepath, Monte. The econo-war was coming to life again.
Guardsmen were needed especially for planets where Baubles were being
installed. There was the prospect of plenty of action for you. And that was
precisely when you pulled out. Why?"
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Nathel Gromon grimaced. "You said the dirty word. Bauble."
"What does the Bauble have to do with it?"
"It opened my eyes," he grunted. "It showed me how other people really think
of us barbs."
"How do they think?"
"Oh . . . that we're stupid."
"Hell, did you need telepathy to find that out?" She snorted. "I've called you
stupid a hundred times! Did you think I was kidding?"
Gromon frowned uncomfortably. "It's not the same thing. You and me mentacommed
once, if you recall,
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after they got the Bauble on Prima Gran."
Gweanvin nodded. "How could I forget?"
"Well, the way you thought about me was okay. You think kind of hard and
snotty about everybody, did you know that? But all them pencil-pushers . . .
it's like I'm some kind of animal, the way they look at it."
"Aw-w-w," Gweanvin cooed mockingly. "Did the mean old pencil-pushers hurt
Nathel's tender little feelings?"
"Go to hell," the big man grunted. "It's just that who needs it! The econo-war
is a pencil-pusher's war. It fits them, not us. Hell, they outnumber us a
million to one. It has to be their kind of fight. So I say, let them have it
their way, and we'll stay on Jopat and have ours our way."
Gweanvin shrugged. "Prima Gran sent twenty doctrinists out here a few weeks
ago. They were supposed to try to reason with you lunkheads. If they couldn't
talk you out of such fallacious attitudes as that, far be it from me to even
try." After a moment, she added, "All those doctrinists suddenly went
out-comm.
What happened to them?"
Gromon grinned. "Oh, we listened to them, till they started repeating
themselves. That got too boring, so we field-stripped them and grounded them
on a semi-tropic island. They're safe enough. The insects here don't like the
taste of humans much, and we parleyed with the Lonnies to keep the fighting
away from that island."
* * *
Gweanvin was not especially fond of doctrinists but she failed to share
Gromon's amusement. Field-
stripping a man was as ugly a crime as horse-thievery had been on an earlier
frontier, and for the same reason. A man lived and moved by the life-support
devices implanted in his body: power packets, shieldscreen generators, inertia
nullifiers, propulsors, communicators and so on. To field-strip him to cut out
those devices that could be removed by simple operations was the dirtiest of
dirty tricks. In the econo-war not even captured frontliners were subjected to
such treatment.
But Gweanvin saw no point to making an issue of the transgression. She could
guess that the barbs had made it to put everybody on notice that on Jopat the
game was played by barb rules, and outsiders had better not try to interfere.
"Getting back to the way pencil-pushers think of barbs," she said, "that's
something the doctrinists, being pencil-pushers themselves, could hardly
explain to you. They take that attitude toward all frontliners toward me the
same as toward you idiots. And it boils down to the fact that they just don't
dig killing or being killed. They can't play, or even appreciate, a game
played on that level."
"They're narrow," growled Gromon. "Killing is just bodies. If I get killed,
all I got to do is find me a new one. And that ain't hard, because babies are
being born every second."
"Right," Gweanvin agreed. "You know, all through history the most atheistic
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societies, the ones that didn't believe in the survival of the ego-field, were
the most squeamish about killing."
"But that don't hold any more," objected the barb. "People don't have
ignorance as an excuse now."
"No, but they have other reasons. Killing is destructive, wasteful and the
whole point of the econo-war is to have hard competition that is essentially
constructive. It can't be all one way, true. But the vast majority of
participants, the pencil-pushers, have to view conflict as a motivator for
non-destructive activities."
Gromon grunted noncommittally.
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"Also," Gweanvin went on, "killing and being killed are both traumatic. They
were basic to the anatomy of unsanity. Pysch-releasing removed that problem
quite a few centuries ago, of course, but the old association with unsanity
gives killing an ugliness that's still remembered."
"Well, I can see all that," Gromon conceded, "but you ain't talking me into
going back, girl. I like it here."
"Hell," Gweanvin grunted, "if twenty glib doctrinists couldn't talk some sense
through your thick skulls, I'm not going to try. Propagandizing's not my
line."
Gromon turned his head toward her briefly to study her emo-pattern. "Old
Dargow figures Prima Gran sent you out here to bring us home," he said. "Do
you say different?"
"No. That's what I'm here for."
"Well, how can you do it, if you don't talk us into it?" he demanded. "You
can't force us to go back."
"I'll be damned if I know, Nathel," she replied, flashing annoyed frustration.
"I'm flying blind on this stupid mission, and that's the disgusting truth."
Gromon considered this information with surprise for several seconds before
chuckling. "I guess we really got the high brass running in circles back at
Prima Gran HQ," he said smugly.
"Maybe so," murmured Gweanvin.
She had puzzled over the question for hours during her flight to Jopat, and it
still made no sense to her. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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