She felt drained when she was finally able to sit by herself. She had worked on the speech endlessly, it seemed, and was never able to make it sound good. It seemed to her there ought to be ringing declarations in there someplace. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, maybe. But after a lot of thought, she realized there wasn't anything she believed in as a capital R "Right." Could any mortal claim a Right to Life?
So she had fallen back on pragmatism. It had served her fairly well through a long and pragmatic life. "This is the way it is, you poor silly suckers. Get in my way and you will be obliterated."
Even starting from the best of motives, that didn't taste so good in her mouth-and she was far from sure of her motives.
Life in Bellinzona was not what you could call dull. Violent death was all around and could happen at a moment's notice. For the well-connected, it was at best comfortable, and at worst nervous. One never knew when a particular Boss would be defeated and all one's careful preparations for the soft life come to nothing. Still, it was better than being down in the faceless masses. For them, Bellinzona was a special kind of hell. Not only were they constantly in peril of enslavement ... most of them had nothing to do.
There were always the needs of survival, of course. That kept people busy. But it was not like having a job. It was not like farming one's own fields-or even the fields of a landlord. In most neighborhoods people owed allegiance to a Boss, a Shogun, a Landlord, a Capo ... some local Mr. Big. For a woman it was even worse, unless she happened to have been taken in by the Free Females. Female slavery was rampant. It was more than the labor-slavery experienced by the men. It was old-fashioned sexual slavery. Women were bought and sold ten times as frequently as men.
And at the end of one's usefulness, there was the butcher's block.
Actually, there was relatively little killing for food. It happened, but with the manna and the bosses that sort of thing was fairly well under control. Still, with the meat shortage many of the corpses destined for the communal pyre were diverted to the hook, the knife, and the skillet.
Boredom was a big problem. It bred crime-senseless random crime-as if Bellinzona needed any more reasons for violence.
It would be fair to say Bellinzona was ripe for a change. Any change.
So when the blimp drifted over the city, things ground to a halt.
Bellinzonans had seen blimps, from afar. They knew they were large. Many had no idea they were intelligent. Most knew the blimps never came near the city because of all the fires.
Whistlestop apparently didn't care. He mooched up to the city as if he did it every day, and spread his gargantuan shadow from the Slough of Despond clear out to the Terminal Wharves. He was almost as big as Peppermint Bay itself. Then he just hung there, by far the largest object anyone in town had ever seen. His titanic hind fins moved languidly, just enough to keep him positioned over the center of town.
That in itself would have been enough to stop traffic. Then a face appeared on his side, and began to say the most amazing things.
TWELVE
Twenty revs after usurping power, Cirocco was wishing she had left Bellinzona alone. She had anticipated the squabbles, but it didn't alter the fact that squabbles bored her. She sighed, and kept listening. It was best, at this point, if those she hoped would be her allies accepted the fact without the sort of demonstration that had been so useful with Maleski.
More demonstrations had been needed, but she had expected that. Of the twenty-five she had named, eighteen were now dead. Seven had come in, weaponless, to pledge their fealty to the new Boss. She knew damn well she couldn't trust any of them with a brass paper clip, but it was best to let them sink themselves through their own greed, let them hatch their conspiracies and hang them with due process of law. One could be perceived as fair, even when the fix was in.
So, in that sense, the bad guys were no problem. As usual, it was the good guys who gave endless headaches.
"We cannot and will not give up our separate enclave," Trini said. "You haven't been around here much, Cirocco. You don't know how it was. You can't understand how bad it was-and is-for a woman to try to live in Bellinzona. Some of our women were subjected to ... oh, Cirocco, it would make you weep! Rape was the least of it. We have to remain separate."
"And we won't give up our weapons," Stuart said. Stuart was the man who had come in response to Cirocco's demand for a representative of the Vigilantes, just as Trini had come as an elder of the Free Females. "You talked about law and order. For seven years, we've been just about the only group that has tried to maintain a degree of decency for all humans in Gaea"-and here he glared at Trini, who glared back. "We have been and remain willing to protect even those who don't belong to our organization, subject only to the availability of manpower and weapons. I won't claim we've made the streets safe. But our aim has been decency."
Cirocco looked from one to the other. Oddly, both of them had summed up their respective positions in two minutes. It was likely that neither of them remembered they had been arguing and embellishing for ten hours without saying a hell of a lot more than they had just said.
At any rate, they shut up for a moment, and looked anxiously at Cirocco.
"I like you both," Cirocco said, quietly. "It would bother me a lot to have either of you killed."
Neither of them flinched, but their eyes looked a little hollow.
"Stuart, you and I both know my weapons policy couldn't last long. I have been given one very large break, and I intend to use it for all it's worth. To control all the ammunition in Bellinzona. There are plenty of guns around. I intend to round them up, with house-to-house searches, if necessary. Making useful guns is beyond Bellinzona's industrial capacity, and will be for quite a while. But you can and will make knives, more swords, and bows and arrows and blackjacks ... and so forth.
"I'm going to use this short time when everybody is disarmed to... to give the people a chance to breathe freely. There's going to be a lot of killing in the next few days, but it's going to be Titanides killing humans. If a human kills another human, execution will be swift and public. I want people to see that. My goal here is to get a social compact going, and I'm starting practically from zero. My advantages are superior force, and the knowledge that most of these people came from lawful societies before the war. They'll soon remember the ways of getting along."
"You're trying to make a paradise, is that it?" Stuart sneered.
"By no means. I have few illusions about what's going to happen here. It will be brutal and unfair. But it's already better than it was twenty revs ago."
"I felt safe twenty revs ago," Trini said.
"That's because you lived in a walled camp. I don't blame you; I'd have done the same thing, in your positions. But I have to tear down the walls. And I can't have a lot of sword-toting Vigilantes swaggering around until I know more about them." She turned to Trini.
"I have a couple things to offer you. After the disarmament, I'm going to have a period of time-possibly as long as a myriarev-during which only the police will be allowed to carry swords and clubs. And only women will be allowed to carry knives."
"That's not fair!" Stuart shouted.
"You're damn right it's not fair," Cirocco went on. "It also isn't fair that most of the women who arrived here after the war were knocked out and dragged away by some large hairy item and sold at public auction."
Trini was looking interested, but still dubious.