"A teacher who remembered that his own method was to question authority!" he finally replied. "A teacher who realized that he has killed the intellectual life he sought to nourish. Have you walked the streets, listened in the tavernas? Nobody argues politics, or questions their teachers, or speaks of anything important at all, because they are afraid of your spies, your minions. The city is full of people, but empty of opinions, and you are to blame!"
The guards looked shocked and shook their captive roughly. I addressed the senior of the two. "What is the crime?" I asked.
"Sire, inciting a riot, proclaiming that your kingdom should be abolished and resisting arrest," he answered crisply.
I looked at the captive again, at the sweat beading on his wide forehead. "Dear me, what should I do with you?" I asked him.
He looked back at me steadily as he replied. "Always more questions than answers, and always leading questions, questions that can only be answered the way you want them answered, until a man hangs himself with his words." He looked sad for a moment. "I believed in you once," he said softly. "I never thought it could come true, or that it could be so horrible when it did."
His leap toward me was completely unexpected, and I would have never thought that he had so much strength in him. His captors sprawled aside, and his hands were at my throat in a moment. I am not so feeble as I look, and I held him off long enough that my guards could recover themselves and club him into submission.
"Over the cliff with him, and onto the rocks," I croaked when at last I could speak.
"The philosopher-king's word is law," answered the senior of the soldiers. "Hail Socrates." He hesitated for a moment. "Sire, we shall need to know his name for the records."
"I have never known it myself," I answered. "Just his nickname. He was called 'Wide One' for his forehead?that is to say, Plato. It will do for the records."
They left and I drank some watered wine, rubbing my throat. It took a long time after that before I could find peace in my pastime of tossing stones. The actions of men are like stones that create ripples, and even someone so unimportant as that pampered aristocrat could interrupt the stillness of the great lake of my thought. I wish it were not so.
Gun, Not for Dinosaur
Chris Bunch
Now, Paul, you know I can't talk about that, even if you keep pouring til I'm wooden-legged.
Oh.
And what's this you're taking from under the bar, with that little smile?
M'god. I didn't know there was a bottle of Old Rare Jack Dann east of Sydney.
You're trying to bribe me.
And I know what you want me to do my tra-las about. That damned safari the hacks are calling the Mystery Death of Sir Peter Kilbrew, or Murder in the Pleistocene or Strange Time Hunter Killing or… or whatever other cockup labels they can come up with.
Sir Peter my arse. Born and bred a Texan, which is hardly one of my favorite sports, and getting that courtesy knighthood from King Willie just because he got the Royal Army's computer system to quit having the technicolor spits.
Damned glad you Americans beat hell out of the Brits back when, so when I'm here I don't have to worry about damned titles, theirs or mine.
I need another drink.
'Tis misfortune that I'm feeling bribable right now about Sir Peter, for the truth. Most likely it was that damned taxman, who wanted to look at all the records, and wouldn't let me get any real work done today.
I'm just a bit red-arsed about the bloody government, to tell the truth.
For it's not only their wandering about with their thumb up that kept proper sanctions from being put in place, which brought the whole bloody disaster to term, but now they're going to pass laws and regulations and call in air strikes for anyone who's not a proper civilized nation who even thinks about setting up a time machine.
You'd think it was the old days, when everybody who had a nuclear bomb was piss-scared somebody else, generally somebody of a darker complexion, might get one too.
But keep me off politics. I get into raving, and then my wife has got to take hell's own forever to calm me down.
But pour me about six fingers of that Jack Dann, and I'll tell you most, maybe even all, the truth.
I'll even start at the top, with the questions all of these hacks are running about, trying to find the answer to:
Why was Peter Kilgrew killed?
That one's very simple. The stupid git was trying to wipe out all of humanity, though he was too stupid to realize it.
And who killed him?
Everyone is saying I did it, and I'm content to live with whatever blame that brings.
But it's not the truth, and there's the story.
The disaster wasn't the first meeting, or contract, I'd had with Peter Kilgrew.
He'd come to me, about a year before, wanting to shoot an allosaur.
I knew who he was, of course. The third or fourth richest man in the world, depending on whether you included the current president of China.
I don't know if you remember all the press about him?only comparable to the late Bill Gates, the pirate who formed a computer company named Microsoft and then destroyed it. Except that Kilgrew had inherited most of his wealth, determined to build it early on, and in the process became one of the most publicized computer wonks in the world, building not only that stock monitor you've got over there to super-speed series blaggards, plus their software.
Kilgrew was slender, slight, balding, and would pass for any other computer wimbler if you didn't note the hard look of determination in his eye.
Maybe determination isn't the right word, since I've seen the same expression in paintings of Napoleon, and films of Hitler, Stalin, Cho Ke. More a look of power, power that should righteously be given to the eyes' owner.
If you look into the eyes of madmen, you'll see the same thing.
I had seen that look, over the years, but was too thick to take note of it in Kilgrew.
Possibly because I was getting ready to go into the standard speech?no, I won't take you back into the Jurassic to pot a big lizard, for you're too light in the bum, as the late Mister Holzinger proved rather thoroughly, almost getting me dead in the process.
He let me get about two polite sentences into my spiel, when he started shaking his head. I shut up, looked inquiring.
"I don't think that applies to me," he said.
I looked at him pointedly. He grinned, as if a synapse had closed in his brain, telling him what facial expression he should put on. It vanished in a second.
"I assume you have a range about?"
I told him of course, down in the basement.
"Then let me show you something."
He went out to his Bentley hovership, came back in with an aluminum guncase, and followed me down-cellar.
In the case was an almost impossibly ugly bolt action rifle. Most of the ugliness came from the bulky receiver group that looked as if it should have belonged to a military semiautomatic.
It didn't help that the stock was black synthetic, rather than the usual highly-polished Circassian walnut most people who can afford a custom gun, which this clearly was, prefer.
It also had an amazingly large bore.
".500 A-Square," I guessed.
He shook his head.".577 Tyrannosaur. I figured if I was going to mess about with guns, there was little point in going for anything except the heaviest."
Which was true. The Tyrannosaur is an obsolete shoulder cannon, obsolete mainly because it will kick you swilly and also, until the time machine came around, because it was utterly impractical after the near demise of contemporary big game hunting.
Amused at the name, I fired two rounds from one once, that belonged to a friend who was both an antiquarian and, I think, a masochist, and I had no desire at all to fire a third time.