Paulsen began closing up his own datapads and-an incredible anachronism-paper notebook. "It's a very good advertisement, gentlemen," Paulsen said. "Very good indeed. I see no reason to withhold Bureau of Information approval for its distribution."
Paulsen stood, looking down at them as he rebuttoned his jacket. "We've a lot of work ahead of us in the years to come. These riots and roundup measures are effective, from a bulk point of view. But the best colony worlds are getting the best citizens. BuReloc's getting the dregs of humanity, and that simply won't do if we're to build real worlds out there." Paulsen looked back at the blank screen, his smile almost wistful. "Something like this will encourage the brighter ones who can't afford citizenship on the better colonies to take a chance on the more marginal ones."
Callan was frowning, puzzled. "Excuse me, Mr. Paulsen; but what kind of person even remotely worthy of the the term 'bright' would willingly go to a place like Tanith, or Folsom's World, or Haven?"
Paulsen shrugged. "Oh, someone who saw your ad and thought it a transparent lie. Someone who thought they could go to those worlds and organize a union, or form a political party." Paulsen smiled down at him, and the dithering bureaucrat's tone was so innocently matter-of-fact that Callan was chilled to the bone.
"You know the sort, Mr. Callan," Paulsen concluded. "Troublemakers. Smart troublemakers have always been the most difficult to deal with productively. But Professor Alderson's contribution to society has changed all that. My sincere congratulations, gentlemen," Paulsen shook their hands as he prepared to leave. "This film is going to be a big help."
Callan watched Paulsen walk up.the aisle. Saintz was next to him, babbling in relief at his ad having been approved. "Boy, that was a close one," Saintz said. "I thought we'd lost the account for sure. Times are tough in the ad business these days; seems people change their agencies like they change their socks."
Callan nodded distractedly. "Everyone is expendable, after all. That's what BuReloc's all about."
Saintz didn't respond to that one, just excused himself to join the other celebrants. Callan sat looking at the blank screen for a long time.
Maenads' shrieks from Lilith, dedicating a song to "brothers, sisters, and citizens!" tore through Wyn Baker's lecture yet again.
"You must think of the Fifth Book as more a dialogue than a history," she said anyhow. "Think of two speakers, a voice of Melos and a voice of Athens."
"Equality now. EQUALITY NOW!" brayed from a bullhorn in the square below.
Eight thousand students disentangled themselves from bottles, borloi, and each other to bellow agreement. Then electronic guitars and keyboards clamored, and Lilith shrieked once more.
A few notetakers, clustered near the front of the hall, recorded her statement. No doubt they were intent on grades, on winning scholarships they hoped would lift them from Citizens' status to a post like hers: visiting scholar and Personage. Wyn was too well controlled to wrinkle her nose. She had, she knew, her tenured chair because her family had endowed it generations ago, long before people were divided into Taxpayers and Citizens. She had been born near the top of her world and had dutifully thanked God for that, for good health, and a powerful mind.
People like her might teach in a university in taxpayer country, fiscal and intellectual aristocrats. These days, the best a Citizen-turned-scholar might hope for was a position as major domo, a kind of nanny for adults who wanted culture on the hoof. And did she do well to encourage them?
"Awright, bros and sisters. We're gonna bring you a golden oldie from way-way-back-when. 'Be true to your school-' For the People's University of Los Angeles!"
Another orgasmic scream from the students lying on the green four floors below. Hell of a way to nave to teach. Her mind fleeted longingly to the dark wood and stained glass of Harvard's Memorial Hall.
Her colleagues would laugh at her if she gave up and went back in mid-semester. "What did you think, Wyn? That you could pretend you were doing settlement house work? This is LA, not Phillips Brooks."
No matter. It was her duty to teach them, and no Baker or Winthrop (her father had wanted two sons) shirked duty. "Think of it as tri-v, in which characters. ." she had wanted to say "disclose and reveal themselves" but she revised fast. . "tell you how they feel." Her voice sounded reedy even to herself, lacking all conviction against Lilith's passionate intensity.
"Two voices," Wyn had lectured. "The voice of Athens, harsh, authoritative. . 'For we would have dominion over you without oppressing you, and preserve you to the profit of us both. .' and the voice of Melos, a lesser state threatened with war unless it paid tribute. . paid a bribe not to be attacked. 'But how can it be profitable for us to serve?' "
Outside, an amplifier malfunctioned. The bleeding electronic scream forced a groan from the protestors. The students nearest the window flinched.
That did it. Never ceasing her practiced flow of speech, Wyn stepped down from her platform, stalked to the window-her soft-soled shoes and long, jogger's stride eating up the distance-and reached for the catch, which hadn't been closed (or cleaned) in years. In the grimy surface, she confronted herself: tall, with what would have been a scholar's stoop if she permitted. Cropped, pale hair and an old suit that firmly resisted the Angeleno craving for the new and violently colored.
Wyn exerted the strength that forty summers of tennis and sailing had built into her arms and forced it closed. Amps, Lilith, and protestors faded to the sea-roar of a conchshell held to the ear.
She thought of black ships, armored Athenian marines landing at Melos and ringing it. Hopeless, hopeless, as the Melians knew; hopeless to lecture at these students; but she' read out the passage anyhow. "Men of Athens, our resolution is none other than what you have heard before; nor will we, in a small portion of time, overthrow that liberty in which our city hath remained for the space of seven hundred years since it was first founded." And more hopelessness in their counteroffer-"But this we offer: to be your friends, enemies to neither side."
To her surprise, the students nodded. But then, they knew from gang warfare: to be neutral was to be dead.
"Think of it as if it were today," Wyn said, her voice falling out of the trained, platform speaker's cadence she had learned almost as soon as she was allowed to join her parents at the dinner table or their friends when they sat at night and argued. "Of the people out there, who is Athens, and who Melos?"
The Sovworld? The CoDominium with its marines and its expatriates and its weight of distrust? Or her own life in the rearguard of privileged Cambridge? Answer that yourself, she ordered herself, and came up with no answer. She wondered what answers her students might have, if they dared to speak, or bothered.
Heads raised from the desks, and the notetakers laid down their styluses and recorders. Attention flashed to the windows, then back to Wyn.
"I made a mistake shutting the window," Wyn told them. "You don't study history by shutting out the world. Go and open it again. Look out there, listen-and tell me! Who is speaking with the voice of Melos now?"
She saw the way their eyes kindled with hope. Am I doing this right? Does this all mean something that I can understand?
The boy nearest the window sprang up to obey her. Wyn felt a shiver as she always did when her instincts told her she had caught a class's attention. The shiver deepened. The boy cried out in Spanish and leapt back as the window shattered and the building shook.