Shouting with laughter hidden by the thunder of the starliner landing, Ran Colville marched toward the entrance and his future. He didn’t look back at the limousine, which still sat with the right-hand door open.
Franz Streseman’s monorail compartment was a party of Grantholm citizens: two couples and six single men. All of them were middle-aged, all of them were buzzed if not drunk; and they were very loud. Franz sat stiffly, staring toward his hands crossed in his lap and thinking about the engineering degree he was leaving behind.
Perhaps forever; but “forever” was a concept beyond the experience of an eighteen-year-old, while the utter disruption of his life was a present reality.
“Damn, damn, damn the Mindanesians,” sang the party from Grantholm, all the men and three of the women joining in on the choruses.
Franz knew the lyrics, from a camp song of the Mindanao campaign twenty years before. Mindanao had been settled from Earth, mostly by Filipinos and other East Asians, but with funding and control from Grantholm. The colony fell behind on its repayment schedule, because a significant proportion of its wireweed production was being diverted to interloping traders at free-market prices rather than going to Grantholm on fixed-rate contracts.
Grantholm’s determination to have its rights sparked a full-scale rebellion.
“Cross-eyed, dirty-faced ladrones,” the party sang.
“Underneath the triple suns, civilize them with our guns,
“And return us to our own beloved homes!”
The men in the Grantholm party were of an age to have served on Mindanao, but it was unlikely that all of them had done so. Grantholm had developed a network of dependant worlds through a combination of entrepreneurial drive and governmental action. Most of the armed forces which put down the Mindanese Rebellion—and they did put it down, though wireweed production was only now beginning to equal what it had been before the war—came from those subject planets.
Five years after the Mindanese Rebellion drowned in blood, Mindanese battalions were serving Grantholm on Cartegena during the “emergency” there.
“Social customs there are few,” boomed the Grantholm men.
“All the ladies smoke and chew . . .”
The monorail swayed gently as its gyroscopic stabilizer matched the polar winds without difficulty. Ultra-high-frequency sound predicted the force and direction of gusts, feeding data to the stabilizer, so that the monorail actively met disturbances instead of reacting to them. Magnetic bearings supported the cars which slipped along above the rail without direct contact, and the podded drive motors vibrated only at the molecular level.
The cars’ physical environment was as smooth as human endeavors could be in the real world. The social environment within Franz Streseman’s compartment, however—
“And the men do things the padres say are wrong . . .”
The compartment was designed to hold thirty people in comfort. Besides the Grantholm party, there were only five others, huddled, like Franz, at the further end, though the monorail was packed on this run.
A family of six—father, mother, and children, none of whom was older than ten standard years—shuffled into the compartment from the next car down. The adults hesitated for a moment, blinking as if fearful that the apparent emptiness was a trick.
A Grantholm man noticed the newcomers. “Hey!” he shouted. “This compartment isn’t for slant-eyes!”
“Yeah,” cried one of the women. “Ride out there!” She pointed to the white expanse beyond the car’s full-length side windows. Violent winds lifted dry snow from the ground and whipped it into ghastly patterns. “There’s plenty of room for your sort.”
The newcomers were in origin Tamils, from low on the Indian subcontinent. Their eyelids had no sign of an epicanthal fold—
And more particularly, they were as unlikely to be citizens of Nevasa as were those folk in the front of the compartment
“Pardon?” said the man. His smile was broad and as humorless as that of a man dying in convulsions. “I am Parvashtisinga Sadek and—”
“Go back where you came from, slant-eye!”
“Hey, you can leave the wife. I might have a use for her!”
“Save the oldest girl, too!”
Very deliberately, Franz Streseman got up from his seat He stood in the aisle, facing the Grantholm party with his legs spread and his hands crossed behind his back in a formal at-ease posture. He said nothing, but he met the eyes of any who looked his way.