“When we heard that first siren on the Sunday of the declaration of war, things like damp spiders ran up and down our backs…”
He paused and drew breath.
“Damp spiders… I'm not surprised.”
“It goes on:
“And then… we went out and begged… Men of 60, who had seen the things at the pictures of which we had lost our breakfasts, and who had spent twenty years saying: 'never again!' declared on oath that they were 40 and beseeched the authorities to give them rifles… Because it couldn't take us all at once, we cursed the War Office.”
“It seems there is a good deal about our ancestors we didn't know.”
“Blind with gas… blind with gas… I wonder how that would work.”
“On them or us?”
Up came something headed “strategical matrices”—rows of outdated mathematical notations. “Axis of advance”? “Maginot Line”? “Cones of fire”? Was that something like a Bunsen burner? And what did they want it for?
Among the scraps the search of “war” had found us was another piece, of no immediate value, but which I would remember much later:
In one Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in World War II a prisoner was caught stealing supplies from the Japanese guards. Other prisoners had been brutally beaten or tortured to death for the most petty infractions of discipline or for slow work, and hundreds were dying of starvation and other ill-treatment. The Japanese authorities, however, decided to make a real example of this man: The punishment they devised was so hideous that even the ordinary Japanese guards were sickened and ashamed by it, and went out of their way to give the victim extra food and otherwise try to compensate for the atrocity. The punishment that so horrified them was this: the prisoner was compelled to wear an armband saying “I am a thief.”
Yes, I remembered that later.
“I'm worried,” said Peter Brennan. He too had been perusing old texts, trying to sort fact from fiction and put it all into some sort of coherent order. “Listen to this:
“See what you have done!” cried the King, “Cost us a proven warrior on the eve of battle.”
“Why does that worry you?” I asked. It seemed an odd thing to arouse his concern among so much else.
“Because… because when I read those words, I realized I would like someone to refer to me as a 'proven warrior.' I don't know why. I'm very uncomfortable about it.”
“Don't worry,” said von Diderachs, “the occasion is hardly likely to arise.”
I looked again at one of the first things I had collected:
I had been too late shutting the house down: The cleaner had got to my clothes, but there was some mud from our shoes on the floor of the car. None of the police forensic laboratories had people available, but I had my own laboratory at the Institute.
Analysis produced DNA fragments: mine and Dimity's, other human DNA that might have come from the island or from previous passengers, a mess of countless Wunderland microbes, nucleic acid fragments and other microscopic biological debris, and a single hair, origin unknown, of an orange color. I had Dimity co-opted onto the Defense Committee.
We would be moving into permanent session, I was told. Apparently it had been decided that Defense was a full-time job.
I was advised to get my senior graduate students to take over my basic teaching. The best of them wouldn't like that, I thought. They had research projects of their own. Or perhaps the best researchers were those who loved teaching too.
I was told to tell them it was the first step to tenure. And, anyway, it was an emergency. I called Leonie Hansen first. It is a dreadful failing for an academic to have favorites, but one can't help picking out the brightest. I told myself my good opinion of her was entirely due to the quality of her work, and not at all because she reminded me a little of Dimity.
Chapter 6
It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism
“I've worked out what a general staff is. That's another spoke of the wheel reinvented.”
“I've found a table of military ranks. I guess we should make our police chiefs and so forth generals.”
“No!” said van Roberts, “It's easy enough to see what's happening: destroy every bit of Constitutional law and reform that has been achieved here and install a military or military-industrial dictatorship under the Nineteen Families worse than anything in the first settlement days! For what? An alleged signal from Sol and perhaps an alleged sighting of something by people who are virtually employees of the Families! Flap your ears all you want, but that's what it adds up to!”
“Rubbish! Irresponsible rubbish!”
“Is it?” That was Gretchen Kleinvogel. “We know the Nineteen Families like to think of themselves as the bearers of traditions. What greater ally and reinforcement of tradition is there than militarism?”
“What do you want next, flags and trumpets and regiments?” Van Roberts took this up. “We came to this world to make a new start, remember!”
“The Families formed the consortium that paid for the ships. You came courtesy of us!”
“As your hereditary underlings, so you thought!”
“No one compelled you!”
“The Families and their attached clans make up about eight percent of this planet's population. They have half the places on these committees. Is that democracy or a naked powerplay?”
“It's not a question of democracy.”
“No, it never is, is it?”
“It's a question of leadership, and necessity.”
“And of raising taxes! This proposal to lift lasers onto our moons! Have you any idea what that will cost!”
“The Serpent Swarmers are already installing lasers on their asteroids. We should do the same!”
“If they are doing it, why should we need to? They don't have to haul them out of a gravity well. It's just duplication of effort. Unless, of course, it's your ships that are contracted to do it, your factories that are contracted to build them… I suppose you'll say the emergency means we have to bypass normal government tendering processes.”
“In any case, it's a fait accompli. The ships are gone.”
“There are too many tanj faits accompli. Again and again we hear something has already been done before we're told!”
“Personally, I'm not too happy about the Swarmers having any assets we lack.”
It went on. But a few wheels seemed to be turning now.
“We've got the strakkaker factory back in production.”
“And are we building more strakkaker factories?”
It broke up at last. The various factions on the committee departed separately, several barely on speaking terms with one another. I thought again that a sleep machine would be useful. I had not foreseen how quickly production priorities would change. A whole range of technical and electronic goods had disappeared from the shops.
I was buzzed. It was Leonie Hansen. A dozen others were standing around her. All my graduate students had been working on the orange hair.
“When we took it apart, its cell structure was radically unlike any Earth or Wunderland form,” she said. “Nor does it match anything we have from Jinx, Plateau or the other new colonies.”
“So what do you think?”
“It looks as if the Grossgeister felinoid may have been some sort of scout. It would be better for us all if I'm wrong,” she said. Excitement and exhilaration sparkled in her eyes.
A rosette of light began to blink at the corner of the screen, a signal that someone with a Defense Committee comlink was trying to reach me. I thanked the students and told them to organize a report for the next day.