“Unless what?” I asked. He looked back at me.
“There’s always an unless,” I said.
“Unless Amanda can find us an honorable way out of the situation,” he said. “As it now stands, there doesn’t seem to be any way out. Our only hope is that she can find something in the contract or the situation that the rest of us have overlooked. Drink?”
“Thanks.”
He got up and went to a sideboard, poured a couple of glasses half-full of dark brown liquor, and brought them back. He sat down once more, handing a glass to me, and I sniffed at its pungent darkness.
“Dorsai whiskey,” I said. “You’re provided for, here.”
He nodded. We drank.
“Isn’t there anything you think she might be able to use?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “It’s a hope against hope. An honor problem.”
“What makes it so sensitive that you need an Adjuster from home?” I asked.
“William. You know him, of course. But how much do you know about the situation here in Nahar?”
I repeated to him what I had picked up from Michael and Padma.
“Nothing else?” he asked.
“I haven’t had time to find out anything else. I was asked to bring Amanda here on the spur of the moment, so on the way out I had my hands full. Also, she was busy studying the available data on this situation herself. We didn’t talk much.”
“William—“ he said, putting his glass down on a small table by his chair. “Well, it’s my fault we’re into this, rather than Kensie’s. I’m the strategist, he’s the tactician on this contract. The large picture was my job, and I didn’t look far enough.”
“If there were things the Naharese government didn’t tell you when the contract was under discussion, then there’s your out, right there.”
“Oh, the contract’s challengeable, all right,” Ian said. He smiled. I know there are those who like to believe that he never smiles; and that notion is nonsense. But his smile is like all the rest of him. “It wasn’t the information they held back that’s trapped us, it’s this matter of honor. Not just our personal honor—the reputation and honor of all Dorsai. They’ve got us in a position where whether we stay and die or go and live, it’ll tarnish the planetary reputation.”
I frowned at him.
“How can they do that? How could you get caught
in that sort of trap?”
“Partly,” Ian lifted his glass, drank, and put it back down again, “because William’s an extremely able strategist himself—again, as you know. Partly, because it didn’t occur to me, or Kensie, that we were getting into a three-party rather than a two-party agreement.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“The situation in Nahar,” he said, “was always one with its built-in termination clause—I mean, for the ranchers, the original settlers. The type of country they tried to set up was something that could only exist under uncrowded, near-pioneering conditions. The principalities around their grazing area got settled in, some fifty Cetan years ago. After that, the neighboring countries got built up and industrialized; and the semi-feudal notion of open plains and large individual holdings of land got to be impractical, on the international level of this world. Of course, the first settlers, those Gallegos from Galicia in northwest Spain, saw that coming from the start. That was why they built this place we’re setting in.”
His smile came again.
“But that was back when they were only trying to delay the inevitable,” he said. “Sometime in more recent years they evidently decided to come to terms with it.”
“Bargain with the more modern principalities around them, you mean?” I said.
“Bargain with the rest of Ceta, in fact,” he said. “And the rest of Ceta, nowadays, is William—for all practical purposes.”
“There again, if they had an agreement with Wil-
Ham that they didn’t tell you about,” I said, “you’ve every excuse, in honor as well as on paper, to void the contract. I don’t see the difficulty.”
“Their deal they’ve got with William isn’t a written, or even a spoken contract,” Ian answered. “What the ranchers did was let him know that he could have the control he wanted here in Nahar—as I said, it was obvious they were going to lose it eventually, anyway —if not to him, to someone or something else—if he’d meet their terms.”
“And what were they after in exchange?”
“A guarantee that their life style and this pocket culture they’d developed would be maintained and protected.”
He looked under his dark brows at me.
“I see,” I said. “How did they think William could do that?”
“They didn’t know. But they didn’t worry about it. That’s the slippery part. They just let the fact be known to William that if they got what they wanted they’d stop fighting his attempts to control Nahar directly. They left it up to him to find the ways to meet their price. That’s why there’s no other contract we can cite as an excuse to break this one.”
I drank from my own glass.
“It sounds like William. If I know him,” I said, “he’d even enjoy engineering whatever situation was needed to keep this country fifty years behind the times. But it sounded to me earlier as if you were saying that he was trying to get something out of the Dorsai at the same time. What good does it do him if you have to make a penalty payment for breaking this contract? It won’t bankrupt you Graemes to pay it,
will it? And even if you had to borrow from general Dorsai contingency funds, it wouldn’t be more than a pinprick against those funds. Also, you still haven’t explained this business of your being trapped here, not by the contract, but by the general honor of the Dorsai.”
Ian nodded.
“William’s taken care of both things,” he said. “His plan was for the Naharese to hire Dorsai to make their army a working unit. Then his revolutionary agents would cause a revolt of that army. Then, with matters out of hand, he could step in with his own non-Dorsai officers to control the situation and bring order back to Nahar.”
“I see,” I said.
“He then would mediate the matter,” Ian went on, “the revolutionary people would be handed some limited say in the government—under his outside control, of course—and the ranchers would give up their absolute local authority but little of anything else. They’d stay in charge of their ranches, as his managers, with all his wealth and forces to back them against any real push for control by the real revolutionary faction; which would eventually be tamed and brought in line, also—the way he’s tamed and brought in line all the rest of this world, and some good-sized chunks of other worlds.”
“So,” I said, thoughtfully, “what he’s after is to show that his military people can do things Dorsai can’t?”
“You follow me,” said Ian. “We command the price we do now only because military like ourselves are in limited supply. If they want Dorsai results—military
situations dealt with at either no cost or a minimum cost, in life and material—they have to hire Dorsai. That’s as it stands now. But if it looks like others can do the same job as well or better, our price has to go down, and the Dorsai will begin to starve.”
“It’d take some years for the Dorsai to starve. In that time we could live down the results of this, maybe.”
“But it goes farther than that. William isn’t the first to dream of being able to hire all the Dorsai and use them as a personal force to dominate the worlds. We’ve never considered allowing all our working people to end up in one camp. But if William can depress our price below what we need to keep the Dorsai free and independent, then he can offer us wages better than the market—survival wages, available from him alone—and we’ll have no choice but to accept.”
“Then you’ve got no choice, yourself,” I said. “You’ve got to break this contract, no matter what it costs.”
“I’m afraid not,” he answered. “The cost looks right now to be the one we can’t afford to pay. As I said, we’re damned if we do, damned if we don’t—caught in the jaws of this nutcracker unless Amanda can find us a way out—“
The door to the office where we were sitting opened at that moment and Amanda herself looked in.
“It seems some local people calling themselves the Governors have just arrived—“ Her tone was humorous, but every line of her body spoke of serious concern. “Evidently, I’m supposed to go and talk with them right away. Are you coming, Ian?”
“Kensie is all you’ll need,” Ian said. “We’ve trained
them to realize that they don’t necessarily get both of us on deck every time they whistle. You’ll find it’s just another step in the dance, anyway—there’s nothing to be done with them.”