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He held their eyes a few more moments, and then he and his last followers climbed into the air car and it lifted off into the cool morning.
"I don't like what I'm hearing. I don't like it at all," Henri Krietzma
His tone and expression contrasted strongly with the deliciously cool breeze blowing across the penthouse terrace. The primary component of the distant binary system known as Spindle was a G0 star, but the planet Flax was thirteen light-minutes from it, and it was spring in the planet's northern hemisphere. Spectacular thunderheads-blinding white on top and ominous black across their anvil bottoms-drifted steadily in from the west across the Humboldt Ocean, but it would be hours before they arrived. For the moment, the three men on the terrace could enjoy the brilliant spring sunshine and the windborne perfume of spring blossoms from the terrace's bounteous planter boxes as they gazed out over the capital city of Thimble on the west coast of the improbably named continent of Gossypium.
It was a beautiful city, especially for a planet in the Verge. Its buildings were low, close to the ground, without the mountainous towers of modern counter-grav cities. That was because when most of Thimble was being built, the people doing the building hadn't had counter-grav. But if they'd been limited to primitive technologies, they'd obviously taken great pains when they designed their new capital. The huge central square, built around a lovingly landscaped park of flowering green and intricate water features, was clearly visible from the penthouse terrace. So were the main avenues, radiating out from the square like the spokes of a vast wheel. Most of the city buildings were constructed of native stone, a blue granite that glittered when the sun struck it, and more water features and green spaces had been carefully integrated into the city plan.
It wasn't until one got beyond the center of the city on the landward side, away from the ocean, that one began to encounter the ugly, crowded slums which were the legacy of poverty in almost any of the Verge systems.
"None of us particularly likes it, Henri," Bernardus Van Dort said mildly. Van Dort was fair-haired and blue-eyed. He stood well over a hundred and ninety-five centimeters in height, and he sat with the confidence of a man who was accustomed to succeeding. "But we can hardly pretend it was unexpected, now can we?"
"Of course it wasn't unexpected," the third man, Joachim Alquezar, put in, his lips twisting wryly. "After all, stupidity's endemic to the human condition."
Although very few people would ever have described Van Dort as short, Alquezar made him look that way. The red-haired native of the planet San Miguel was two hundred and three centimeters tall. San Miguel's gravity-only eighty-four percent of Terran Standard-tended to produce tall, slender people, and Alquezar was no exception.
"'Stupidity' isn't really fair, Joachim," Van Dort reproved. "Ignorant, yes. Unaccustomed to thinking, yes, again. And prone to react emotionally, certainly. But that isn't the same thing as irredeemably stupid."
"Forgive me, Bernardus, if I fail to discern a practical difference." Alquezar leaned back, cradling a snifter of brandy in his right hand and waving a cigar gently with his left. "The consequences are identical."
"The short term consequences are identical," Van Dort replied. "But while there's not a great deal that can be done about genuine stupidity, ignorance can be educated, and the habit of thought can be acquired."
"It always amazes me," Alquezar said with the smile of an old friend rehashing a familiar argument, "that a hardheaded, hard-hearted, money-gouging Rembrandt capitalist can be so revoltingly liberal in his view of humanity."
"Oh?" Van Dort's blue eyes glinted as he smiled back. "I happen to know that 'liberal' only became a dirty word for you after Tonkovic pinched it for herself."
"Thereby confirming my lifelong suspicion-previously unvoiced, perhaps, but deep seated-that anyone who actually believes someone who claims to be a liberal suffers from terminal softheadedness."
"I hope the two of you are enjoying yourselves." Krietzma
"We're not enjoying ourselves, Henri," Van Dort said, after a very brief pause. "And we're not taking the situation lightly. But I think it's important to remember that people who disagree with us aren't necessarily monsters of depravity."
"Treason's close enough to depravity for me," Krietzma
"Actually," Alquezar said, looking steadily at Krietzma
"Why not?" Krietzma
Alquezar winced ever so slightly, and shook his head.
"I won't disagree with you, although I imagine the point could be argued either way, at least until we get a Constitution adopted that establishes exactly what is and is not legal on a Cluster-wide basis. But however accurate the term may be, there are certain political drawbacks to using it. One which springs immediately to mind is that throwing around terms like 'treason' and 'traitor' will actually help your opponents polarize public opinion."
Krietzma
"Joachim is right, Henri," he said gently. "The people you're describing would love to provoke you into something-anything-they and their supporters can characterize as extremism."
Krietzma
"All right," he half-growled. "Point taken. And I'll try to sit on myself in public. But," his eyes flashed, "that doesn't change the way I feel about these bastards in private."
"I don't think anyone would expect it to," Van Dort murmured.
Not if they have any sense at all, at any rate, he thought. Expect emotional detachment out of Henri Krietzma
He felt a familiar twinge of guilt at the thought. Dresden was ruinously poor, even for the Verge. Unlike his own Rembrandt, or Alquezar's San Miguel, which had managed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps to become fabulously wealthy-by Verge standards-Dresden's economy had never risen above the marginal level. The vast majority of Dresden's citizens, even today, were ill-educated, little more than unskilled labor, and modern industry had little use for the unskilled. The Dresden System's poverty had been so crushing for so long that only the most decrepit (or disreputable) of tramp freighters had called there, and no outside system— including Rembrandt , he admitted bleakly-had ever been attracted to invest there.
Which was why Dresden's medical capabilities had been as limited as its industrial capacity. Which was why Henri Krietzma
That was what fueled Henri Krietzma
Over the last twenty T-years, largely as a result of the efforts of men and women like Henri Krietzma
It had been a hard, bloody fight, and it had instilled a fiercely combative, fiercely independent spirit in the citizens of Dresden, matched with boundless contempt for the parasitic oligarchs of star systems like Split.
Oh, no. Detachment was not a quality much to be found in Dresden.
"Well," Alquezar's deliberately light tone told Van Dort his old friend had followed-and shared-his own reflections, "however Henri wants to describe them amongst ourselves, we still need to decide what to do about them."
"That's true enough," Van Dort agreed. "Although, I caution all of us-myself included-yet again that we must avoid creating an undue impression of collusion between us. More especially, between you and me, Joachim, and Henri."