Well, he could kick this female back down among the other prisoners. But he didn’t want to. He seated himself across from her, lit a cigar out of the box on his desk, and held his own glass to the light. Ruby smoldered within.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “How was I to know? What’s done is done. There wouldn’t have been so many casualties if they'd been sensible and given up. We shot a few to prove we meant business, but then called on the rest over a loudspeaker, to yield. They didn’t. For that matter, you were riding a six-legged animal out of the fields. I’m told. You came busting right into the fight. Why didn’t you ride the other way and hide out till we left?”
“My husband was there,” she said after a silence. When she raised her face, he saw it gone cold and stiff. “And our child. ”
“Oh? Uh, maybe we picked up the kid, at least. If you’d like to go see —”
“No,” she said, toneless and yet somehow with a dim returning pride. “I got Hauki away. I rode straight to the mansion and got him. Then one of your fire-guns hit the roof and the house began to bum. I told Huiva to take the baby — never mind where. I said I’d follow if I could. But Karlavi was out there, fighting. I went back to the barricade. He had been killed just a few seconds before. His face was all bloody. Then your cars broke through the barricade and someone caught me. But you don't have Hauki. Or Karlavi!”
As if drained by die effort of speech, she slumped and stared into a comer, empty-eyed.
“Well,” said Golyev, not quite comfortably, your people had been warned. " She didn't seem to hear him. “You never got the message? But it was telecast over your whole planet. After our first non-secret landing. That was several days ago. Were you out in the woods or something? — Yes, we scouted telescopically, and made clandestine landings, and caught a few citizens to interrogate. But when we understood the situation, more or less, we landed openly in, uh, your city. Yuvaskula, is that the name? We seized it without too much damage, captured some officials of the planetary government, claimed the planet for IP and called on all citizens to cooperate. But they wouldn’t! Why, one ambush alone cost us fifty good men. What could we do? We had to teach a lesson. We announced we'd punish a few random villages. That's more humane than bombarding from space with cobalt missiles. Isn’t it? But I suppose your people didn't really believe us, the way they came swarming when we landed. Trying to parley with us first, and then trying to resist us with hunting rifles! What would you expect to happen?”
His voice seemed to fall into an echoless well.
He loosened his collar, which felt a trifle tight, took a deep drag on his cigar and refilled his glass. “Of course. I don't expect you to see our side of it at once,” he said reasonably. “You've been jogging along, isolated, for centuries, haven’t you? Hardly a spaceship has touched at your planet since it was first colonized. You have none of your own, except a couple of interplanetary boats which hardly ever get used. That's what your President told me, and I believe him. Why should you go outsystem? You have everything you can use, right on your own world. The nearest sun to yours with an oxygen atmosphere planet is three parsecs off. Even with a very high-powered agoratron, you'd need ten years to get there, another decade to get back. A whole generation! Sure, the time-contraction effect would keep you young — ship's time for the voyage would only be a few weeks, or less — but all your friends would be middle-aged when you came home. Believe me, it’s lonely being a spaceman.”
He drank. A pleasant burning went down his throat. “No wonder men spread so slowly into space, and each colony is so isolated,” he said. “Chertkoi is a mere name in your archives. And yet it’s only fifteen light-years from Vaynamo. You can see our sun on any clear night. A reddish one. You call it Gamma Navarchi. Fifteen little light-years, and yet there's been no contact between our two planets for four centuries or more!
“So why now? Well, that's a long story. Let’s just say Chertkoi isn't as friendly a world as Vaynamo. You'll see that for yourself. We, our ancestors, we came up the hard way, we had to struggle for everything. And now there are four billion of us! That was the census figure when I left. It’ll probably be five billion when I get home. We have to have more resources. Our economy is grinding to a halt. And we can't afford economic dislocation. Not on as thin a margin as Chertkoi allows us. First we went back to the other planets of our system and worked them as much as practicable. Then we started re-exploring the nearer stars. So far we've found two useful planets. Yours is the third. You know what your population is? Ten million, your President claimed. Ten million people for a whole world of forests, plains, hills, oceans... why, your least continent has more natural resources than all Chertkoi. And you've stabilized at that population. You don’t want more people!”
Golyev struck the desk with a thumb. “If you think ten million stagnant agriculturists have a right to monopolize all that room and wealth, when four billion Chertkoians live on the verge of starvation,” he said indignantly, “you can think again.”
She stirred. Not looking at him, her tone small and very distant, she said. “It’s our planet, to do with as we please. If you want to breed like maggots, you must take the consequences.”
Anger flushed the last sympathy from Golyev. He ground out his cigar in the ashwell and tossed off his brandy. “Never mind moralizing, he said. I'm no martyr. I became a spaceman because it’s fun.”
He got up and walked around the desk to her.
538 A. C. C.
When she couldn’t stand the apartment any more, Elva went out on the balcony and looked across Dirzh until that view became unendurable in its turn.
From this height, the city had a certain grandeur. On every side it stretched horizonward, immense gray blocks among which rose an occasional spire shining with steel and glass. Eastward at the very edge of vision it ended before some mine pits, whose scaffolding and chimneys did not entirely cage off a glimpse of primordial painted desert. Between the buildings went a network of elevated trafficways, some earning robofreight, others pullulating with gray-clad clients on foot. Overhead, against a purple-black sky and the planet's single huge moon, nearly full tonight, flitted the firefly aircars of executives, engineers, military techs, and others in the patron class. A few stars were visible, but the fever-flash of neon drowned most of them. Even by full red-tinged daylight, Elva could never see all the way downward. A fog of dust, smoke, fumes and vapors hid the bottom of the artificial mountains. She could only imagine the underground, caves and tunnels where workers of the lowest category were bred to spend their lives tending machines, and where a criminal class slunk about in armed packs.
It was rarely warm on Chertkoi, summer or winter. As the night wind gusted, Elva drew more tightly around her a mantle of genuine fur from Novagal. Bors wasn’t stingy about clothes or jewels. But then, he liked to take her out in public places, where she could be admired and he envied. For the first few months she had refused to leave the apartment. He hadn’t made an issue of it, only waited. In the end she gave in. Nowadays she looked forward eagerly to such times; they took her away from these walls. But of late there had been no celebrations. Bors was working too hard.
The moon Drogoi climbed higher, reddened by the hidden sun and the lower atmosphere of the city. At the zenith it would be pale copper. Once Elva had fancied the markings on it formed a death’s head. They didn’t really that had just been her horror of everything Chertkoian. But she had never shaken off the impression.
She hunted among the constellations, knowing that if she found Vaynamo’s sun it would hurt, but unable to stop. The air was too thick tonight, though, with an odor of acid and rotten eggs. She remembered riding out along Lake Rovaniemi, soon after her marriage. Karlavi was along: no one else, for you didn’t need a bodyguard on Vaynamo. The two moons climbed fast. Their light made a trembling double bridge on the water. Trees rustled the air smelled green, something sang with a liquid plangency far off among moon-dappled shadows.