Then Chono was climbing in and starting the car. “How about you? Get the fascination for Milagso from watching holo shows?”
“‘Fraid so,” Arlan confessed. “By the time I got to high school, I’d decided it was kid stuff, that life wasn’t really like that out here.”
“Right about that!” Chono pushed a lever, and the craft lifted off the ground, then started off toward the spaceport gate. “What made you change your mind?”
“College,” Arlan said. “There was enough of the dream left so that I did a term paper on Milagso, and found out that the reasons for being out here are every bit as idealistic as they sounded on the holo shows.”
“Odd way to put it,” Chono said slowly, “but I couldn’t really disagree. What kind of ideals did you have in mind?”
“Protecting the masses of people on the Central Worlds from the Xiala.” Arlan grinned. “Who wouldn’t want to protect fair maidens from dragons? Of course, I know the Xiala are more like snakes than lizards, and a lot of the people back home don’t deserve protecting—but it still gave me a sense of purpose.”
Chono nodded, but he wasn’t smiling. “Hope you aren’t expecting a battle, though, Arlan. The Xiala ~haven’t attacked in fifty years, and the odds are that they’ll never strike again.”
“Only because you’re here,” Arlan said, “and they know you’ve beaten them before.”
“Sounds like you’ve picked up the history, right enough.”
“Well, I know Milagso began as a military outpost, and General Millston had the vision to make them raise their own crops, so they wouldn’t be dependent on shipments from the Central Worlds. After they’d survived a few attacks, some of the soldiers began to think of it as home. They married each other and settled down—and got to feeling very possessive about the planet.”
“That happens when you’ve worked hard to turn a wasteland into a farm,” Chono said. “You get to feeling that there’s something of you in that dirt.”
Arlan looked keenly at him, with a sudden hunch. “Were you a volunteer?”
“Still am.” Chono grinned. “Married another vol, and homesteaded. We’ve got two kids so far, and we’ll probably stay another decade or so.”
Maybe their whole lives, then. Arlan couldn’t quite keep the admiration out of his voice. “Even though the Xiala might attack any day?”
“Even though,” Chono confirmed. “It’s rough, and Sharl has to do without the conveniences—but there aren’t any crowds, and the neighbors are good people.”
Arlan couldn’t help but think what a world of comparison was embodied in that brief statement, between the struggling back-stabbing life of the overcrowded Central Worlds, and the friendship and shared burdens here. He was probably still romanticizing, though.
Then something caught his eye. He glanced at it, then stared. “Is that a Bolo?”
“Oh, you mean the tractor?” Chono said casually.
“Tractor? That’s one of the most powerful military machines ever built—and it’s two hundred years old if it’s a day!”
“And still working in top form.” Chono nodded. “Yes, it’s the real thing.”
“You use them for tractors?”
“Sure do.” Chono pulled over to the side of the road and let the hovercar settle. “It’s tough getting modern machinery out here—but the Bolos came with General Millston.” He turned to watch the huge ~machine.
“How did you get them to do that?”
Chono shrugged. “It was their own idea.”
“Their own?” Arlan turned, frowing. “How about their commanders?”
“All dead.” A shadow crossed Chono’s face. “Brave men, all of them.”
“They died fighting the Xiala? Inside a Bolo?”
“Some did—the snakes decoyed them into getting out to help what they thought were wounded humans. The others?” Chono shrugged. “Old age. These Bolos have been here a long while.”
“Couldn’t you have trained new commanders for them?”
“We did. The Bolos wouldn’t accept them—they say their original mission is still unfulfilled.”
“Unfulfilled.” Arlan turned to stare at the metal ~giant, frowning. “That really makes it odd that they’d agree to work in the fields.”
“I know,” Chono sighed. “Ask one of them. He’ll tell you it’s necessary to fulfill its mission—the development of this colony.”
“Something seems wrong about that.”
“I know—helping this colony succeed, isn’t a military objective. But we need their help—we probably couldn’t survive with it—so we’re not about to protest.”
“Unless the colony itself is a military objective.”
“I suppose we are,” Chono said. “As long as there are humans here, the snakes aren’t—but that doesn’t seem like enough, somehow.”
Arlan stared. It seemed so incongruous, a vast fighting unit, capable of standing off a small army all by itself, equipped with a plow blade and a power take-off. He wondered why this hadn’t been in any of his reading. “Couldn’t you build tractors?”
Chono shook his head, watching the gigantic ~machine churning away. “Iron-poor planet—and you wouldn’t believe the cost of importing even just the ore. We couldn’t pay it, anyway—we don’t produce much of a cash crop.”
“But—doesn’t it cost just as much to run them?”
“No. Fissionables, we’ve got. Besides . . . you never know. . . .”
Arlan swallowed, remembering. The Bolo Corps had made the difference between victory and defeat, life and death on this little world. “You keep them out of honor,” he whispered.
“That what you think?” Chono looked at him sharply. “Well, we honor them, yes. But they’re working machines, Arlan. They’re the life-blood of this colony.”
“You mean—you couldn’t farm without them?”
“Oh, we’d find a way. We’d be on the verge of starvation, though. Always.”
“But they’re still armed!”
Chono nodded. “Of course. You can’t take the cannons off a Bolo—even if it would let you. They’re built into the fabric and structure of the machine so thoroughly that you’d have to take it apart piece by piece—and you wouldn’t be able to put it back together.”
“That’s kind of dangerous!”
“Not to us,” Chono said quietly. “They know their friends, and they know their enemies. A Bolo won’t fire on a human.”
He said it with such total certainty that Arlan accepted it—for the moment. He decided he’d have to learn a lot more about Bolos. He watched, frowning. “That’s kind of a funny way to pull a plough.”
A three-hundred-meter cable stretched behind the Bolo, its far end connected to a plow with twenty shares. The great machine was winding a winch that pulled the plow through the earth and toward them. Directly across the field, another Bolo was reeling out line connected to the back of the gang-plow.
“It’s a reversible plow?” Arlan asked.
Chono nodded. “When the plow gets all the way to this side, the far Bolo will start pulling. Primitive, but it works.”
It was primitive in more ways than one. A human being sat atop the plow, directing it with some sort of steering apparatus. Clearly, it was an improvisation that had become the accepted way of doing things.
Chono started the hovercar again and sent it on down the road. “Know what Milagso stands for?”
Arlan nodded. “It’s short for ‘Military Agrarian ~Socialism’—the system the Russians used, to colonize Siberia. The soldiers had to farm to keep themselves fed.”
“Right. Only, after a while, they were guarding prisoners who did the real work. No criminals get sentenced to come here—we couldn’t trust ’em, especially if the Xiala attacked. You have to volunteer for this outfit.”
Arlan shivered; somehow, the sight of the great military machines, converted to pulling plows, made the Xiala seem very real, and very close—not just a relic from pioneering days. It was also a sight that summed up the whole nature of the colony—a sword beaten into a plowshare, but ready to become a sword again at a moment’s notice.
Chono turned in through an automatic gate in a wire fence; it swung closed behind them. The reason was immediately clear—a hundred cows and steers, wandering about chewing the dusty grass. In separate fields far off, the bulls grazed by themselves against the sunset.
A few hundred feet inside the fence, a dozen long, low buildings clustered, with young men and women in khaki slacks and shirts wandering about and standing in small groups, chatting with one another. For a moment, Arlan had the crazy thought that he was looking at summer camp again.
The feeling passed as Chono pulled up in front of a bunkhouse on the end. People looked up, and started drifting over.
“This is home, for as long as you want,” Chono said, and got out.
Arlan followed, feeling very nervous.
“Hi!” She was long-legged, brunette, and freckled, with a snub nose and a wide mouth. “I’m Rita. Welcome to Milagso!”
Other young men and young women were coming up behind her with grins on their faces, smiling and welcoming. Arlan felt sudden relief from a tension that he hadn’t known was there. Slowly, his own smile ~began to grow.
* * *
Breakfast was a happy, boisterous time of laughing and boasting about the number of hectares they would plant and plow that day—and ribald joking about who was eyeing whom. The only damper on the hilarity was the rifle slung over Rita’s shoulder—and the variety of personal arms carried by every other member of the camp, locally born or volunteer.