Uller Uprising Read online

  IV.

  If You Read It in Stanley-Browne

  Von Schlichten and Blount entered the bar together--the Broadway Room,decorated in gleaming plastics and chromium in enthusiastic ifslightly inaccurate imitation of a First Century New York nightclub.There were no native servants to spoil the illusion, such as it was:the service was fully automatic. Going to a bartending machine, vonSchlichten dialed the cocktail they had decided upon and inserted hiskey to charge the drinks to his account, filling a four-portion jug.

  As they turned away, they almost collided with Hideyoshi O'Leary andPaula Quinton. The girl wore a long-sleeved gown to conceal a bandageon her right wrist, and her face was rather heavily powdered in spots;otherwise she looked none the worse for recent experiences.

  "Well, you seem to have gotten yourself repaired, Miss Quinton," hegreeted her. "Feel better, now?... Miss Quinton, this isLieutenant-Governor Blount. Eric, Miss Paula Quinton."

  "Delighted, Miss Quinton," Blount said. "Carlos tells us he found youstanding over poor Mohammed Ferriera, fighting like a commando. How isMohammed, by the way? No danger, I hope; we all like him."

  Mohammed Ferriera was still unconscious, the girl reported; he had aminor concussion, but the medics were not greatly disturbed, andexpected him to be fully recovered in a few weeks. Von Schlichteninvited her and her escort to join him and Blount. Colonel O'Leary wascarrying a cocktail jug and a couple of glasses; finding a table outof the worst of the noise, they all sat down together.

  "I suppose you think it's a joke, our being nearly murdered by thepeople we came to help," Paula began, a trifle defensively.

  "Not a very funny joke," von Schlichten told her. "It's been played onus till it's lost its humor."

  "Yes, geek ingratitude's an old story to all of us," Blount agreed."You stay on this planet very long and you'll see what I mean."

  "You call them that, too?" she asked, as though disappointed in him."Maybe if you stopped calling them geeks, they wouldn't resent you theway they do. You know, that's a nasty name; in the First CenturyPre-Atomic, it designated a degraded person who performed some sort ofrevolting public exhibition...."

  "Biting off live chickens' heads, in a sideshow wild-man act,"Hideyoshi O'Leary supplied. "When you get up north, watch how thepeasants kill these little things like six-legged iguanas that theyraise for food."

  "That isn't the reason, though," von Schlichten said. "As we use it,the word's pure onomatopoeia. You've learned some of the languages;you know what they sound like. _Geek-geek-geek._"

  "As far as that goes, you know what the geek name for a Terran is?"Blount asked. "_Suddabit._"

  She looked puzzled for a moment, then slipped in her enunciator. Evenin the absence of any native, she used her handkerchief to mask theact.

  "Suddabit," she said, distinctly. "Sud-da-a-bit." Taking out thegeek-speaker, she put it away. "Why, that's exactly how they'dpronounce it!"

  "And don't tell me you haven't heard it before," O'Leary said. "Thegeeks were screaming it at you, over on Seventy-second Street, thisafternoon. _Znidd suddabit_; kill the Terrans. That's Rakkeed theProphet's whole gospel."

  "So you see," Eric Blount rammed home the moral, "this is just anothercase of nobody with any right to call anybody else's kettle black....Cigarette?"

  "Thank you." She leaned toward the lighter-flame O'Leary had snappedinto being. "I suspect that of being a principle you'd like me to bearin mind at the polar mines, when I see, let's say, some laborer beingbeaten by a couple of overseers with three foot lengths ofthree-quarter-inch steel cable."

  "Well, you could also remember that a native's skin is about half aninch thick, and a good deal tougher than a human's," von Schlichtentold her. "And it wouldn't hurt any if you found out how theselaborers are treated at home. Mostly they're serfs hired from the biglandowners; it's a fact you can easily verify that permission to jointhe labor-companies at the polar mines is regarded as a privilege,granted as a reward or denied as a punishment. And most of the geeklandowners are bitterly critical of the way we treat our labor at themines; they claim we make them dissatisfied with the treatment theyget at home."

  "Of course, they're always glad to have the peasants taken off theirhands during a slack agricultural season," Blount added, "and we trainworkers to handle contragravity power-equipment. I won't deny thatthere's a lot of unnecessary brutality on the part of the nativeforemen and overseers, which we're trying, gradually, to eliminate.You'll have to remember, though, that we're dealing with a naturallybrutal race."

  "Of course, mistreatment of native labor is always blamed on othernatives, never on the gentle and kindly Terrans," she replied. "That'sbeen SOP on every planet our Association's had any experience with."

  "Now look; you just came here from Niflheim," von Schlichten objected."The Company employs quite a few geeks there; how much brutality didyou run into there?"

  "Well, I must admit, the Ullerans who work there are very welltreated. Except that I don't think it's right to employ any peoplewith silicone body-tissues where they're going to breathefluorine-tainted air."

  "Nobody ought to be employed on that planet!" Hideyoshi O'Learydeclared. "I did a two-year hitch there, when I was first commissionedin the Company service."

  "I put in two years there, too," Blount supported him. "And I mightadd that that's a year longer than any Ulleran native is ever allowedto spend on Niflheim. You know what the setup is, there, don't you?The Terran Federation Space Navy discovered and explored both Ullerand Niflheim, which made both planets public domain. The Company wasoriginally formed to exploit Uller alone, but the Federation insistedthat both planets would have to be franchised to the same company.They wanted Niflheim exploited, mainly because of the uranium-depositsthere. As it turned out, the Company's making as much money out ofNiflheim as we are out of Uller."

  "What you miss is this," von Schlichten pointed out. "On Niflheim,there are about a thousand Terrans, and not more than five hundredgeeks, all employed on construction-work and in the mines, on theplanet itself, working directly under Terran supervision. We use thembecause they have four hands, and in the power-driven contragravityarmor that's necessary there, they can manipulate more controls and domore things at once than we can. Here on Uller, at the polar mines,there are about ten thousand geeks working under five hundred Terrans,and most of the latter are engineers or technicians who don't dosupervisory work. So we have to use native foremen, and they're guiltyof what mistreatment the workers suffer."

  "And remember, too," O'Leary added, "work at the polar mines can onlygo on for about two months out of the year--mid-September tomid-November at the Arctic, and mid-March to mid-May at the Antarctic.Naturally, things have to be done in a hurry and under pressure."

  "Well, why do you work mines at the poles? Aren't there mineraldeposits in places where you can work all year 'round?"

  "Not as rich, or as accessible," Blount said. "You know what theseasons are like, at the poles of this planet. The temperature willrange from about two-fifty Fahrenheit in mid-summer to a hundred andfifty below in winter. There's the most intense sort of thermalerosion you can imagine--the ice-cap melts in the spring to a sea,which boils away completely by the middle of the summer. There will beviolent circular storms of hot wind, blowing away the light sand anddust and leaving the heavier particles of metallic ores and metalsbehind. Then, when the winds fall, we move in for a couple of months.It isn't really mining, or even quarrying; we just scoop up ore fromthe surface, load it onto ore-boats, and fly it down to Skilk andKrink and Grank, where it's smelted through the winter. The nativesrun the smelters; use the heat to thaw frozen food for themselves andtheir livestock while they're melting the ore. In the north,metallurgy and food-preparation have always been combined that way."

  "Yes, if you think the natives who work at the mines feel themselvesill-treated, you might propose closing them down entirely and see whatthe native reaction would be," von Schlichten told her. "Independentlyhired free workers can make themselves rich,
by native standards, in acouple of seasons; many of the serfs pick up enough money from us inincentive-pay to buy their freedom after one season."

  "Well, if the Company's doing so much good on this planet, how is itthat this native, Rakkeed, the one you call the Mad Prophet, is ableto find such a following?" Paula demanded. "There must be somethingwrong somewhere."

  "That's a fair question," Blount replied, inverting a cocktail jugover his glass to extract the last few drops. "When we came to Uller,we found a culture roughly like that of Europe during the SeventhCentury Pre-Atomic, or, more closely, like that of Japan before thebeginning of the First Century P. A. We initiated a technological andeconomic revolution here, and such revolutions have their casualties,too. A number of classes and groups got squeezed pretty badly, likethe horse-breeders and harness-manufacturers on Terra by the inventionof the automobile, or the coal and hydroelectric interests when directconversion of nuclear energy to electric current was developed, orthe railroads and steamship lines at the time of the discovery of thecontragravity-field. Naturally, there's a lot of ill-feeling on thepart of merchants and artisans who weren't able or willing to adaptthemselves to changing conditions; they're all backing Rakkeed andyelling '_Znidd suddabit!_' now. You know, it's a shame that geekmessiah isn't a smart crook, instead of an honest fanatic; he couldtake in the equivalent of a couple of million sols a year off theNorth Uller merchants and the Equatorial Zone shipowners. But it is afact, which not even Rakkeed can successfully deny, that we've raisedthe general living standard of this planet by about two hundredpercent."

  "Rakkeed is a Zirk," von Schlichten said. "They're the nomads who hireout to the northern merchants as caravan-drivers, and also prey, orused to prey, on the caravans as brigands. Since our air-freightersgot into operation, neither caravan-driving nor caravan-raiding hasbeen a paying business, and our air-patrols have made caravan-raidingsuicidal as well. So the Zirks don't like us. The only thing they knowor are willing to learn is handling these six-legged riding-andpack-animals we call hipposaurs. We employ a few of them as cavalry,and a few more of them work as the local equivalent of _gauchos_, andthe rest just sit around and listen to Rakkeed's sermons."

  Both jugs were empty. Colonel O'Leary, as befitted his junior rank,picked them up; after a good-natured wrangle with von Schlichten,Blount handed the colonel his credit-key.

  "The merchants in the north don't like us; beside spoiling thecaravan-trade, we're spoiling their local business, because theland-owning barons, who used to deal with them, are now dealingdirectly with us. At Skilk, King Firkked's afraid his feudal nobilityis going to try to force a Runnymede on him, so he's been curryingfavor with the urban merchants; that makes him as pro-Rakkeed and asanti-Terran as they are. At Krink, King Jonkvank has the support ofhis barons, but he's afraid of his urban bourgeoisie, and we pay him ahandsome subsidy, so he's pro-Terran and anti-Rakkeed. At Skilk,Rakkeed comes and goes openly; at Krink he has a price on his head."

  "Jonkvank is not one of the assets we boast about too loudly,"Hideyoshi O'Leary said, pausing on his way from the table. "He's asbloody-minded an old murderer as you'd care not to meet in a darkalley anywhere."

  "We can turn our backs on him and not expect a knife between ourshoulders, anyhow," von Schlichten said. "And we can believe, oh, upto eighty percent of what he tells us, and that's sixty percent betterthan any of the other native princes, except King Kankad, of course.The Kragans are the only real friends we have on this planet." Hethought for a moment. "Miss Quinton, are you doing sociographicresearch-work here, in addition to your Ex-Rights work?" he asked."Well, let me advise you to pay some attention to the Kragans. You'llonly find them treated at any length at all in that compendium ofmisinformation, Willard Stanley-Browne's _Short Sociographic Historyof Beta Hydrae II_, and ninety percent of what Stanley-Browne saysabout them is completely erroneous."

  "Oh, but they're just a parasite-race on the Terrans," Dr. PaulaQuinton objected. "You find races like that all through the exploredgalaxy--pathetic cultural mongrels."

  Both men laughed heartily. Colonel O'Leary, returning with the jugs,wanted to know what he'd missed. Blount told him.

  "Ha! She's been reading that thing of Stanley-Browne's," he said.

  "What's the matter with Stanley-Browne?" Paula demanded.

  "Stanley-Browne is one author you can depend on," O'Leary assured her."If you read it in Stanley-Browne, it's wrong. You know, I don't thinkshe's run into many Kragans. We ought to take her over and introduceher to King Kankad."

  Von Schlichten allowed himself to be smitten by an idea. "By Allah, sowe had!" he exclaimed. "Look, you're going to Skilk, in the next week,aren't you? Well, do you think you could get all your end-jobs clearedup here and be ready to leave by 0800 Tuesday? That's four days fromtoday."

  "I'm sure I could. Why?"

  "Well, I'm going to Skilk, myself, with the armed troopship_Aldebaran_. We're stopping at King Kankad's Town to pick up abattalion of Kragan Rifles for duty at the polar mines, where you'regoing. Suppose we leave here in my command-car, go to Kankad's Town,and wait there till the _Aldebaran_ gets in. That would give us abouttwo to three hours. If you think the Kragans are 'pathetic culturalmongrels,' what you'll see there will open your eyes. And I might addthat the nearest Stanley-Browne ever came to seeing Kankad's Town wasfrom the air, once, at a distance of four miles."

  "Well, they live entirely by serving as mercenary soldiers for theUller Company, don't they?"

  "More or less. You see, when we came to Uller, they were barbarianbrigands; had a string of forts along caravan-roads and at fords andmountain-passes, and levied tolls. They raided into Konkrook andKeegark territory, too. Well, we had to break that up. We fought alittle war with them, beat them rather badly in a couple ofskirmishes, and then made a deal with them. That was before my time,when old Jerry Kirke was Governor-General. He negotiated a treaty withtheir King, bought their rievers'-forts outright, and paid them asubsidy to compensate for loss of tolls and raid-spoil, and agreed toemploy the whole tribe as soldiers. We've taught them a lot--you'llsee how much when you visit their town--but they aren't culturalmongrels. You'll like them."

  "Well, general, I'll take you up," she said. "But I warn you; if thisis some scheme to indoctrinate me with the Uller Company's side of thecase and blind me to unjust exploitation of the natives here, I don'tpropagandize very easily."

  "Fair enough, as long as you don't let fear of being propagandizedblind you to the good we're doing here, or impair your ability toobserve and draw accurate conclusions. Just stay scientific about itand I'll be satisfied. Now, let's take time out for lubrication," hesaid, filling her glass and passing the jug.

  Two hours and five cocktails later, they were still at the table, andthey had taught Paula Quinton some twenty verses of _The HeathenGeeks, They Wear No Breeks_, including the four printable ones.