“Not as questionable as trusting a Draka’s word on allowing the New America to leave peacefully.”
I’ve won, Eric thought. It brought a workman’s satisfaction, if no joy. “We don’t expect that. What I’m asking is fo’ you and I to work out a way which doesn’t require that you trust us.” He spread his hands. “To be absolutely frank, we don’t really have the capacity to stop y’all, only to make the best departure orbit unworkable and slow you down. Which you can send observers to verify. In any case, my offer has split you community. To the brink of civil war, if you refuse this option.”
Slow minutes of waiting. He felt the chill; it was colder than it should be, here in Archona, much colder. Not too much. Near the edge, but we pulled back in time. Our Mother is wounded, but she’ll recover, if I can buy her time. Eric used the opportunity to study the other’s face while the message arrived. That is a dangerous man, he decided. Am I doing the right thing?
“We accept, pending the details,” Lefarge spat. “And your sympathy isn’t worth shit, Snake.” He recovered an icy possession. “Tell me, though. Why not just offer admission to the Snake farm to our traitors?”
Eric spread his hands in concession. “Two . . . no, three reasons, Brigadier Lefarge. First, many mo’ will take the offer, if they can salve they consciences by knowin’ y’all have a place to go.” He smiled.
“Sun Tzu said that one should never totally block an enemy’s retreat; retreatin’ refugees are less troublesome than a last stand, at the moment. Second, and this I used with my colleagues, what are the Draka without an enemy, however distant? We won’t be able to follow y’all anytime soon—that’s anothah thing we can arrange to verify—but we’ll know that you there. Third, fo’ my private consumption . . . Well, let’s say that the Domination . . . forecloses certain options, as a path of human development. Better that not all the eggs be in one basket fo’ Earth’s children.”
A curt nod and the screen blanked. Eric sat in thought, watching the chill non-summer rains beat against the window. Then he keyed the office com again.
“Put Arch-Strategos Ingolfsson on,” he continued. There was work yet, before he could sleep. “Secured Channel Seventeen, and leave me, please.”
Yolande looked up from her desk, her hand shaking as she took another stim and swallowed it dry. Got to watch these, she thought.
“Excellence.” Wotan, he looks worse than I do. Of course, he’s eighty.
“Arch-Strategos. This is on Channel Seventeen, you can speak freely. In brief, you are relieved and ordered to return to Archona.” The starved eagle face leaned closer to the pickup. “Seven hundred million dead,” he continued quietly. “Includin’ millions of our own people. How does it feel, bein’ the greatest mass murderer in human history?”
Yolande squeezed thumb and forefinger to the bridge of her nose. “If this is victory, perhaps defeat is preferable,” she said. “I’m ready fo’ you firm’ squads, Excellence.”
“I’ve seen defeat just recently, and you’re wrong,” Eric said and laughed; she shivered slightly. It was the laugh a hanged man might make. “And I’m not lettin’ you off so easy as that.”
She looked up, and he was grinning at her.
“A third of the human species dies, and Louise Gayner survived; accordingly, I can’t spare the ‘Hero of the Tunnels.’ And y’are kin, aftah all . . . I ought to send you to Australasia to pacify it.”
A pause. “No, I’m givin’ Gayner that joy; it’s butcher’s work, she’ll enjoy it. And hopefully do it badly enough to give me an axe-swing at her neck . . . No, you, dear niece, are comin’ home to put the remnants of our space capacities together. We need them, if we’re to get this planet back on its feet.”
Another corpse smile. “Just to help, I’m goin’ to be sendin’ you lots of qualified personnel. We’re goin’ to be handin’ out Citizenship fairly liberal; some millions, as many as I can swing. Awkward to have them around here—off to you. Now you can really learn how to handle Yankees.” Flatly: “And that firin’ squad is in abeyance, not dismissed.”
She looked up sharply. “Think about it, niece. I just ‘won’ the Final War. I’ve got a decade at least in which to use that, politically, and I intend to use it. And you . . . you troubles are just gettin’ under way.”
Yolande nodded. It was difficult to care, when you were this tired. “Was that smart, lettin’ the New America go?” she said. And are the Lefarges escaping me, or have I taken the most complete vengeance any human being has ever achieved?
“I think so,” he said, nodding heavily. “Keeps us on our toes, makes sure the Race goes to the stars as well. And . . . maybe this victory”—his mouth twisted at the word—“means Earth is goin’ down a dead end, much as we try to see otherwise. The New America means an insurance policy fo’ our species, at least. See you soon, partner in crime.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Could things have turned out otherwise? My father went to his grave blaming himself for the Fall. Some others who should have known better still do so. Yet how far can any individual be blamed or praised for a historical event so large and complex? Here on Samothrace we have developed an exaggerated idea of what one person can do, perhaps. An entire solar system with less than a quarter-million inhabitants will do that. We are on our own, on a frontier whose homeland has been eaten by time and history. And our heritage is one of belief in individual responsibility, the sacredness of choice, in the human being as the embodiment of humanity. Rightly so: even to the extent of renouncing the temptations of the trans-human, whether electronic or biological. We make our own destiny here.
So we see our history-become-myth in terms of heroes and villains. My father was a very great man; the New America’s completion is his monument, for without his driving will it might well never have been ready to carry our saving remnant. This world is his monument, as much as any single man’s, for his leadership in the first terrible years of the Settlement. Yet in those final months around Sol the lovely and the lost, how many separate acts—of cowardice, heroism, treachery, honor, love, hate, stupidity, inspiration—went into the making of the Fall? The past we do not know, the future we cannot. I knew the living man, and know he never did less than his utmost. Perhaps that should be added to our new Republic’s proud motto: Ad Astra et Libertas.”
A Heritage of Liberty
by Iris Lefarge Stoddard
Adams University Press
New Jerusalem, Planetary Republic of Samothrace
Alpha Centauri
2107 ad (109 Dispersal)
Epilogue I
CLAESTUM PLANTATION
DISTRICT OF TUSCANY