Carnival On Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 5) Read online

  “Our Empire has been deteriorating for millennia,” Matilda replied. “Some of our sisters who fled to other species in the past have reported that we are perceived as incapable of advancing in any way because we are all clones. While it’s true that our science and technology have been stagnant for a long time, the problem isn’t with a lack of creativity on the part of our researchers. The main thing holding us back is our leadership, which rejects every new idea without consideration.”

  “But what about that nutrition drink I saw at the embassy, the one that allowed the Empire to stop farming, and even to give up this ag deck that was formerly used for local produce?”

  “That’s the exception that proves the rule,” Sue interjected. “It’s easier and more efficient to make food in factories than to grow it. But the real reason for the nutrition drink, from the standpoint of the Gem elites, is that it reduces the possibility that the food we eat tomorrow will be different than the food we eat today. The leaders of the Empire are so fanatical in their belief that the Gem system is perfect, they’ve come see any change as intolerable. If they could figure out a way to insert the personalities of old sisters into new clones, they would do so.”

  “Does the Empire still have widespread support among the Gem, or is it a sort of military dictatorship?” Kelly asked. “We really have very little information about what goes on in your society.”

  “It would be strange if you knew more about it than we did, and until recently, we knew very little ourselves,” Matilda replied grimly. “You have to understand that to be Gem in recent generations meant, for the vast majority of us, to arise in the morning, work all day, and go to bed at night exhausted.”

  “Don’t forget watching Gem Today,” Sue reminded her.

  “Oh yes, Gem Today. The propaganda ministry’s answer to reality and our only source of information beyond rumors,” the green-haired woman concurred. “Of all the changes in my life since I escaped to Union Station, the freedom from constant surveillance, the opportunity to work and learn as I please, even the chocolate, the best thing is not being compelled to watch Gem Today.”

  “I’m sure that most of our sisters who aren’t members of the elite feel the same way, but there were always those who were trying to work their way up the ladder by informing on dissidents,” Gwendolyn explained, in an attempt to answer Kelly’s original question. “There isn’t an organized resistance within the Empire because of the informants. Instead, we took chances independently, turning our heads when we saw a sister violating the rules, never saying anything positive about the Empire outside of the mandatory group conscious-raising sessions.”

  “It almost sounds like the only thing keeping the current leadership in place is the inability of the working class Gem to coordinate with one another,” Kelly said. “If you could just all get together one night while the elites are sleeping, you could choose new leaders and avoid a terrible war.”

  “How can forty billion of us get together?” Matilda asked. “It would take two or three good-sized planets just to have places to gather. And besides, the leaders of the Empire have better sense than to all go to sleep at the same time.”

  “I know that,” Kelly said, sounding for a moment like her daughter. “I was just thinking out loud and trying to understand. You said you were involved in Gem Internal Security. Would it be possible to hack into the system I saw Ambassador Gem use to do a security check on a random-numbered Gem in order to demonstrate the superiority of your system? Could you contact all of your sisters at once that way?”

  “That technology is more for intimidation than practical use,” Matilda explained. “Both transmission and reception require exact addressing, so only a single channel can be active at any time.”

  “You mean, Gem Internal Intelligence can only spy on forty billion Gem one at a time?” Kelly asked in surprise.

  “It does tend to reduce the intimidation factor, doesn’t it?” Gwendolyn agreed. “None of us could have gotten away otherwise. And sisters of the same caste, like the janitors or the cooks, have ways of communicating privately, but contacts between castes are closely monitored.”

  “So what’s your next move?” Kelly asked, but then she reversed herself immediately. “No, it’s safer if you don’t tell me. But is there anything I can do for you that doesn’t involve a forceful confrontation with the Empire?”

  “Perhaps an introduction to the Stryx if our sisters agree,” Matilda replied. “I hate to admit that we suffer from the same stubbornness as the Empire elites, but we are all the same woman in a manner of speaking. Perhaps we have misjudged the Stryx and several of the other species, but given their acceptance of the Empire, we weren’t ready to gamble on it.”

  “I can’t help wondering who picked the current leadership of the Empire,” Kelly said, her mind flitting for an instant to the upcoming Carnival. “Do you stage elections, or is there a random drawing? If you all start out as the same individual at the genetic level, are your leaders trained from birth?”

  “I can answer that from the time I worked on the crèche world,” Gwendolyn replied. “Although we are genetically identical, there are minor differences in the environment after the baby is taken from the synthwomb, and even the random squirming of a fetus inside the synthwomb can lead to time spent in a physical position that is more or less beneficial to growth. By the year we come of age for career selection, there can be significant differences in development.”

  “So you’re saying that when you’re tested for job aptitudes, some score better than others, even though you’re all the same inside?”

  Gwendolyn and the other clones looked confused by Kelly’s question. The former Waitress Gem tried again.

  “There are no aptitude tests or other examinations,” she said. “We all go through the same schooling, but you can’t teach height.”

  “You mean, they measure you and the tallest of your sisters enter the ruling class?”

  “Of course,” Matilda interjected. “The tall girls are usually the same individuals who were chosen to be Big Sisters at an early age, because they ended up getting the best food in the generations before the nutrition drink was developed. Gem children had little else to trade with one another.”

  The rest of the meeting was spent comparing cultural notes, but Kelly felt that getting the Free Gem to consider asking the Stryx for assistance was a major victory. They arranged to meet again as soon as the initial two days of Carnival were over.

  Ten

  “Got any horses in there?” asked Brian’s father. He squinted past the visitors at the stubby tug, which still dwarfed the old control tower and everything else in sight.

  “No horses,” Clive responded easily. “They don’t travel well. Are you short on draft animals?”

  Although none of the records suggested that Kibbutz was intended to be a technology-ban world, all three of the humans had seen enough of such places to assume that they were standing on one now.

  “What’s a draft animal, Pa?” the boy asked.

  “You, if you keep on interrupting,” the man replied gruffly. His son waited patiently, and the man relented. “Draft animals are what hayseeds use to pull a plow if they can’t afford nothing better.”

  “So you’re not a technology-ban world?” Clive inquired.

  “What kind of idiots would ban technology?” Pa spat derisively. “Got enough problems without making stupid rules about things. So if you fellows aren’t bringing horses or power packs, what do you want?”

  “We represent a branch of EarthCent and we’re here to meet with your civil authorities,” Clive explained.

  “Don’t got none of them,” the man said shortly. “Don’t got all day to stand around talking nonsense with visitors who aren’t bringing horses or power packs neither.”

  “Maybe we’ve got something else you can use,” Paul offered. Unlike the two former mercenaries, Paul had many years of experience wheeling and dealing in the junkyard business. “What do you do
with the horses, if they aren’t for work?”

  “Do with the horses?” the man asked incredulously. “We don’t do nothing with the horses. Do we look like men of leisure to you?”

  “Then why do you keep asking about horses?” Paul said.

  “Because I get twenty creds a head for letting them run over my land to the river there,” he explained. “Crazy rich people from Earth ship them old horses out here in stasis. They think we’re running some kind of horsey retirement paradise.”

  “Why don’t they just put the horses out to pasture on Earth?” Paul asked. “I’ve never been myself, but my wife is from there, and she says it’s half empty.”

  “Crazy rich people,” the boy’s father replied. “They do say that Earth is so overrun with old horses that the wolves and the mountain lions have come back strong, and that can’t be any fun for an arthritic saddle horse. Here they got plenty to eat, plenty of room to run, no predators. We leave them alone, they leave us alone, and most of them move on south along the river.”

  “And you spend the horse passage money on power packs?” Paul continued.

  “Plow ain’t going to pull itself,” the man replied. “Alterian trader comes through here on a schedule, five hundred creds for a fresh pack after the core charge. I go through two a year on the wheat and potato fields. Rest of the work we do the old fashioned way. Now what have you got to offer?”

  “Actually, we came to offer help with planetary defenses,” Clive said, his patience wearing thin. “That’s why we want to know who’s in charge.”

  “Ha! You hear that boy?” the man said, though his son was standing so close that his shirt sleeve touched his father’s side. “What did your pappy tell you?”

  “Beware the military industrial complex,” Brian recited dutifully.

  “That’s right!” his father exclaimed, taking off his straw hat and slapping it against his hip with glee. “These fellers want to sell us a planetary dee-fence system. And how much will that cost, I wonder. A billion creds? A trillion?”

  “What’s a trillion, Pa?” the boy asked.

  “It’s a, it’s a, it’s a lot of creds, boy,” his father replied.

  “We aren’t here to sell you anything,” Clive protested. “I realize now that you people are farther outside of the galactic stream of things than we might have guessed, but there’s a sort of crisis taking place in the Gem Empire, and we’re worried that they might blame humans and try to take revenge on our off-network colonies.”

  “Them old gals?” the man asked, sounding even more doubtful than previously. “Shucks, they wouldn’t hurt a fly, if we had any flies, other than those damn Dollnick things that go around listening in on everybody. Bunch of them clones came through a couple months ago looking for a place to try to make it on their own. The old lady said, ‘Silver,’ that’s my handle by the way. ‘Silver,’ she says, ‘Why don’t we send these nice clones up to the old Smith place? They done pulled up and wandered off five years ago without sayin’ nothing, so I reckon they won’t care.’ So that’s what we did, and I’ll be tickled if they didn’t cut apart that old spaceship of theirs and use it for fencing. I’d say they’re good neighbors, but it’s a four-hour hike so we ain’t been up there since the first visit, and maybe they’ve gone by now.”

  Clive, Paul and Woojin exchanged looks at the end of this extraordinary speech, unsure exactly how to proceed. Jeeves, in his role as an observer of human behavior, found the account so fascinating that he had passed it on to the elder Stryx over their private communications network as soon as the man concluded.

  Thomas was left to ask, “Can we meet your, uh, old lady?”

  “Oh, you can meet her,” Pa replied with a grin. “Whether she can meet you is another matter.”

  “Ma’s gone to see her sister down a ways,” Brian explained, drawing an irritated look from his father, who evidently enjoyed stringing the visitors along.

  “Let me get this straight,” Clive said. “You have no government, no defenses, and your only source of hard currency is letting a bunch of old horses cross your land on their way to being put out to pasture.”

  “Hey, I’m the one stuck watching this old spaceport,” the man protested. “You think it’s fun having a farm next to a thousand acres of broken-up concrete when it rains? It’s used to be pitched to the west there, you can go and see the gulley the water cut out, but now it’s just a mess.”

  “And the other settlers all moved away?” Paul asked.

  “You think our pappies were all so stupid that they’d stay piled up here like seals when they had a whole planet to spread over?” the man responded. “Look, we may not be your idea of galactic role models, but we kibbutzniks get along here just fine. Now pay me fifty creds for using my landing field if you’re staying overnight, and if you want dinner, I can feed you all for another fifty, the humans that is. But I’ll warn you right now, won’t be no dessert with the old lady gone.”

  “Are you really socialists?” Thomas asked out of curiosity.

  “Hell no, boy,” the man replied, putting on an idiotic grin. “We’s farmers.”

  Clive fished around in his jumpsuit and came up with the hundred-cred piece Blythe had given him for “mad money” around eight hours earlier, assuming that the universe-hopping technology Jeeves had referred to didn’t involve relativistic effects.

  “How about fifty for dinner and another fifty for the straight story about what goes on here, without the phony dialect?” Clive offered.

  “Take it, Pa,” the boy exclaimed. “We can do the bumpkin act any time.”

  “Alright, you have a deal,” Pa said. He extended his hand for the money, and then stuck it out again to shake after the coin was transferred to his overalls. “I’m Sylvester Albrechtsson, you’ve met my son Brian. What is it you want to know?”

  “Is what you said about a government the truth?” Clive asked immediately.

  “Since our founding father died, it is, and even back then, nobody really paid him any mind. He was a social entrepreneur who traded his fortune to a Frunge merchant family for this place back when the Stryx first opened things up. Wanted to be remembered as a philanthropist, I guess. He took this world along with transport for ten thousand families and livestock in exchange for what I’m told was one of the biggest human fortunes. Supposedly, the Frunge spent it all on forests in the Northern Hemisphere back on Earth, set them aside as nature preserves or something. Go figure.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Paul protested. “I know a little about the planetary real estate market, and all of the money on Earth back then wouldn’t have paid for a terraform-ready rock, much less an occupation-ready planet of grasslands.”

  “Oh, Kibbutz is a nice enough world, in its way,” Sylvester said. “But it takes a certain type of flexibility to live here.”

  “More riddles?” Clive grunted.

  “No, sir,” the man replied, fingering the coin in his pocket. “When the smartest social entrepreneur on Earth came out to look at Kibbutz and make the deal, he didn’t stay on the surface but two days. I guess when he was doing business in the old networking age, speed was considered a virtue. It didn’t take long after the Frunge transports brought our grandparents out here and started shuttling them down to the surface to find that Kibbutz is, how shall I put it, geologically active.”

  “Ah,” Jeeves declared. “I thought there was something fishy going on under the surface, but it’s tough to analyze plate tectonics from space without specialized sensors that I don’t carry around with me. I’m off to have a look around.”

  “How often do the quakes come?” Woojin asked.

  “Little ones, every few days,” the man replied complacently. “Big ones, once a month or so. Of course, the days here are about nineteen Earth hours, and we just count for months, not having a moon or seasons to speak of. The Frunge didn’t lie about the weather. It’s an agricultural paradise, regular rains and all.”

  “Tell him about the
nets, Pa,” the boy said proudly.

  “So we build with corner poles and thatch on rope nets for roofing, hang a finer net below to catch the little stuff. Use hay bales for wall fill to keep the critters out, and we never make a fire inside for obvious safety reasons. About the worst that can happen is getting hit on the noggin by a corner pole if things get real bad, but since they come down on top of the thatching, I’ve never heard of anybody getting hurt too badly.”

  “I’m beginning to get the picture,” Clive said. “I don’t know anything about farming, but how do the livestock take the constant earthquakes?”

  “The ones that couldn’t all died out. We must have the most quake resistant cows and sheep in the galaxy,” the man boasted. “Of course, they’re not very big, that’s part of the trick to surviving getting tossed around. Animals are more sensitive than people, though. They sense the tremors coming, and if they’re in the shed, they get outside in a hurry.”

  “And you really don’t have a government?” Clive asked.

  “Place is so big, nobody sees each other unless they want to. We’ve got less than two hundred thousand people living on a world that has more land area than Earth, and all of it grassland or bamboo-like stuff. None of us have anything worth stealing, and most people end up related to their closest neighbors. When some young man doesn’t want to farm for a living, we make him the local sheriff until he grows out of it. Seems to be working so far.”

  “So there’s really nothing here to target,” Thomas commented. “Seems like a pretty effective defense plan to me.”

  “What happened to the rich guy who bought the place?” Paul asked.

  “Died of a broken heart,” Sylvester explained.

  “Over a bad trade?” Paul asked skeptically.

  “Literally a broken heart. He brought an old European castle out from Earth to live in, tried stabilizing the stone work with high-tech foam. It held together just long enough for him to move in and get crushed in the collapse. Broke every last bit of him.”