War World X Takeover

The cuts and aches faded. After awhile, so did the nightmares and what Wyn came to regard as a deplorable tendency to flinch from men’s voices. Boredom replaced weakness and fear. At one point, she even tried to teach Ellie Greek


“You’re outta your mind, Boston, you know that? Strike a deal with you. I don’t tell you about my business; you don’t teach me that stuff.”

Ellie’s business: clearly, she intended to resume it once they landed. “Hey, stands to reason this Haven they’re sending us to is no garden spot. They’ve got miners there; and where there’s miners, there’s girls. Now, I’m way too old to start turning tricks again, but I’m a damn good book-keeper…work my way in and work up to a share in the place.”

“Is that all you want?” Wyn must have been half stupefied by boredom or the question wouldn’t have popped out.

“What I want? I want to have enough credit so I don’t have to OD on pills and booze when I get too old to work and the food runs out. I want to be my own person. You need money for that, in your own name, under your own control.”

Wyn could see the wisdom in that. She only wished she were as certain of her future as Ellie.

What would await any of them on Haven? What awaited her? She knew convicts worked and worked hard. They were charged for their passage. They were charged for their life support. They were charged for the wretched coveralls they wore and the food, even when they didn’t get full rations. Charged at rates, she suspected, she wouldn’t pay for luxury travel.

It might be possible to repay all that by some form of indenture ranging from apprenticeship to slavery, depending on the employer/owner. And then you’d have to start all over to save the money for passage back to Earth.

No, that wasn’t even a possibility. She had known that from the start. Her exile was final.

If she were going to survive, better not regard it as exile, but as a new life. How would she manage?

A glance about the bay showed her fellow exiles in a new light. The strong ones—casual labor. The other politicals—maybe they could be used as clerks. The wives and daughters arrested with their men? Women’s work, the answer occurred to Wyn immediately. In a low-tech society, cooking and cleaning would no doubt be handed right back to them. Even the children: she recollected that even in the Plymouth Colony that had become her home state, indentures started young.

It looked as if she was about to suffer from her own ancestors’ management tactics. She wondered if she were up to it; she’d lived off Baker wealth, Baker fame and Baker connections her whole life and counted herself lucky. At the same time, she knew, she had inherited the Baker conscience—a double portion, since my brother clearly didn’t get any. And that conscience had a bad way of surfacing at inconvenient times to reproach her or, as it had this time, get her kicked off-world.

So now you get the chance to prove yourself, Wyn. Just what is it you think you can do? An interesting question, wasn’t it? What kind of trade could a displaced aristocrat with a talent for languages take up in middle age?

Anyone on Haven need a butler? A nanny? Sure, she could teach. But with “political” written large on her dossier, would they trust her within five parsecs of a school? What had her brother paid to have written into her files?

She feared she would soon learn.

A few more Jumps and gravity shifts, and the intervening weeks and months passed. Atrocious as their rations had been, they became shorter. They began to sleep more, waking to eat and invent new versions of old curses on the purser, who pocketed the cost of their food. They shed the unhealthy bloat that comes of eating too much starch, became thin, then gaunt as they stinted themselves still further to make sure that the children, at least, had enough.

Haven would be too rough a world for children stunted by malnutrition, she had told one woman, the mother of three, and the word had spread.

One last Jump. One last interval of sitting in a daze. The variable gravity wobbled sickeningly, then steadied at a level that made her ache in every joint. To Wyn’s surprise, gossip helped her identify this as mercy.

Then, one ship’s “night,” while the prisoners were groggy and disoriented, crew and CD Marines burst into the bay and ordered them out. Now. On the double, if not faster.

“My God, just smell them! Like pigs, these convicts,” muttered one Marine. The ensign overseeing the transfer didn’t silence him.

Wyn scarcely had time to grab her precious bag before she and the rest were herded to landers. She staggered a little in the unaccustomed G, then sucked in her breath as if someone had kneed her in the belly as the lander broke away from the ship in which she had spent more than a year of her life and whatever illusions she had brought on board. Zero-G brought her empty stomach flip-flopping perilously close to her mouth, and then Haven s own gravitation and the lander’s braking rockets took hold: she was heavy, heavier than she had ever been; and her vision blurred. It wasn’t fair; she was going to burst, and she hadn’t survived the trip just to explode in reentry because the pilot poured on the G’s. There were no hatches; she wouldn’t even see the sky in which she would die.

From the lander’s cockpit came a steady drone of affirmatives and static: “Beginning final burn…mark…Splash Island coming up on the horizon…”

My God, were they going to land in water? Wyn forced herself not to scream, to unstrap herself and claw at the nearest bulkhead: not to be trapped, not to sink in this steel trap, plunging further and further till it burst asunder, and her lungs…

She wanted to scream a protest, but “uuuhhhhh!” was all that came out, more breath than pain.

And then they were down.

In the water.

On whatever Haven this world might be.





The stench of steam and overheated metal rose about the port. Clutching a bag that felt heavier than any suitcase she had ever packed in her life, Wyn tottered toward the port. A blackened metal ladder led down from it to boats that bobbed in the black water far too much below. Even as the ship floated, she could feel Haven’s gravity, heavier than the ship’s. It felt heavier than that of lost Earth, though she knew otherwise.

Her feet trembled on the rungs of the ladder; the boats crew steadied her as if they hated touching anyone as filthy as she was. Could they smell it through the steam and the traces of this new world?

It took forever for the launch to fill. The thin crying of hungry children rose in the alien air.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

To her surprise, she was answered. “Splash Island,” replied a man with a twisted arm. He grinned and pointed across the dark, dark water. Lights gleamed from translucent sheds on that Island.

“There’s Splash Island. Pro-ces-sing…” he sounded the long word out. “Over there”—a sweep of his arm—”you got Docktown. And beyond it, The City. Castell City.”

A combustion engine roared into fetid life, then backfired so loudly that at least two people screamed and the launch jolted dangerously. The ferryman laughed, exposing broken teeth.

“You don’ wanna fall in. Believe me. We can’t fight what’s in there, and I ain’t goin’ back for ya. Keep your arms inside the launch.”

I haven’t a coin for the ferryman, Wyn thought. In the next instant, she realized she was wrong. The coin shone in the night sky, dominating it, more crimson than copper, baleful as the eye of a cat. Another shone upward, reflected in the opaque water.

Ship’s rumor called Haven’s bloated primary the Cat’s Eye. Funny: on Earth, it had always been the dog who had been sacred to Ares. Cat’s Eye and its reflection glared at each other. It was a world of War, Wyn realized at that moment; and this Charon, this convict who’d served out his life here, ferried her across the water to start a new life.


Haven’s gravity took her as she climbed out of the launch, and she stumbled to her knees. Her hands scrabbled, then filled with mud. Dear Earth, I do salute thee with my hands, the mournful pentameter from Richard II rang in her thoughts. Wrong again. Haven’s ground was dirt, soil: it never would be earth.

“Why are we so heavy?” wailed a child. Its cries were quickly hushed as if it knew Haven were no planet for weeping.

And yet, with the Eye above and the reflection below and the lights of Docktown and Castell City shimmering over the water, it was beautiful.

Moving like invalids their first day out of bed, the convicts shuffled toward the Processing Center.

“God, I am too damn old, for this,” Ellie moaned. “Feel like I got lead boots on. All over me. Or maybe that’s just crud.”

“Men on one side…women on the other…all right, move!” came the order. “Kids with the women.”

Men and women clutched each other, dismayed. They had all been together for so long that separation came as a threat. Down long, shabby corridors they were herded. Wyn noticed that the women guards hustling her and her friends along were unarmed. The corridors opened into a room that smelled, blessedly, of clean steam and water, dripping from nozzles set into the ceiling.

“All right, everyone strip. And scrub good!”

The soap they found in squeeze bottles nearly took off their outer layer of skin, and Wyn had never felt anything as good. Steam billowed about them, mercifully hiding their bodies. But at that moment, she wouldn’t have minded if they hadn’t separated the men and the women.

Tugging a fresh coverall (for which she’d no doubt be billed, too) over damp skin, Wyn caught sight of herself in one of the cracked, water-beaded mirrors still clinging to the walls.

“Look like a New England schoolmarm,” she muttered to herself. In fact, she reminded herself of the frayed sepia photos of her Great Phoebe, who helped found a girl’s school in India, then went on to China to fight against footbinding.

She wasn’t as much slim as lean now, starved down into endurance. And at some point during the journey into exile, her eyes had traded a scholar’s abstraction for a veteran’s wariness.

“Not bad,” Ellie shook her head. “Don’t know why you act like you’re ready for an old-age home.”

“You’re not recruiting me for your line of work, are you?”

Both women laughed, a little raggedly. After decontamination would come Processing, and then Assignment. But what contamination had her brother put in her file? They wouldn’t let her anywhere near students, would they? She might be lucky to find herself hauling scrap in a mine until she collapsed.

Medical processing rid her of fears she’d contracted some disease from the man who raped her. Her arms were sore from immunizations when she was Processed—identification, classification interview, and a battery of tests. She identified them as out-of-date aptitude and personality evaluations, plus an ancient IQ test. Practically meaningless; and yet whatever future she might have could ride on them. Her palms began to sweat, and she pondered each answer as carefully as the girl next to her.

For deportees to survive on Haven, matters were simple. Someone had to buy their contracts for work in town, in the mines, on farms, or wherever: almost anything was better than going it alone. The only other options were farming—usually with inadequate supplies and equipment and in Haven’s outback—or to become one of the walking dead who loitered around Docktown seeking casual work or a quick deal.

Further down the hall, Ellie squirmed in her chair. Wyn knew the woman was thinking, I’m too old to go back to school.

As the tests ended and they were returned to holding pens, Nina turned to her. “Boston, what are we going to do?”

“We have to wait to be assigned,” Wyn said. She just wanted to sit down and rub her temples. How many years had it been since a test had psyched her out?

Nina came close to her, dark eyes wide with terror. “I heard…there’s mines here. A place called Hell’s-A-Comin’ and I’m afraid, Boston. Where there’s mines, they need girls, and…” The big eyes overflowed.

Wyn put her hands on the girl’s shoulders. She glanced about helplessly. Ellie was nowhere in sight. What would Ellie say to this girl? She could practically hear her, “Boston, no way I could make a working girl out of this one.”

So many lives had been broken. Against that, what did the life of one girl matter? Plenty: Nina had been Wyn’s shipmate and she looked to Wyn for help. Wisdom from the Welfare Projects blurted from her mouth.

“We’re probably being watched,” she whispered. “Mess your hair. Slouch. Act anti-social.”

“Anti-social?” Oh God, now she had to give examples.

“Drool or pick your nose or do something that’s a real turnoff. Damn-it, don’t laugh! And, Nina, you want to do me a real big favor? When you start this little act, turn your back on me, okay? I don’t want to watch.”

Wyn sat alone in the detention pen, wondering who would emerge from an inner office to claim her. Everyone knew, when applying to graduate school, on about what day the letters of acceptance or rejection would be delivered. And everyone waited for mail that day for the precious thick or damning thin packets delivered the old-fashioned way. She had sat on admissions committees since then and knew how candidates were discussed. How were her new…her new masters discussing her?

The door slid open slowly and a guard entered. Wyn rose, quickly enough for deference, slow enough to preserve her own illusions. “This way,” the guard said.

No statement that Mr. so-and-so had bought her contract? She started to raise her eyebrows, then thought better of it.

She was brought to a tiny room. In it sat a man dressed in rugged, all-weather clothes conspicuous only by the shimmer of the gemstones he wore on one hand and on the slide about his neck. She had seen such a stone only once, when her niece Caroline had wed that improbable Texan and Shreve’s had had to set the veritable boulder he gave her in platinum. It had been vulgarly large, but the stones this man wore as baubles made it resemble a seed pearl. The man rose as she entered. Her eyebrows did flick upward at that.

“Ms. Baker?”

She inclined her head.

“I’ve been studying your file. Oh. I’m Dan Carmichael, private contractor, at the Kennicott Mines over Hell’s-A-Comin’ way.”

She froze. She had always been able to identify euphemisms. And from her days working in the Projects, she recognized this man. I know a pimp when I see one.

“I said I’d get ya. Never thought I’d find you alone, though, and on your knees. Good place for you.”

Her callused hand went out to brush the back of an empty chair, and she shut her eyes against the pain, the violation and thereafter, the feel of her hand driving steel into flesh and hot blood spurting over her wrist.

He was aiding her to sit; in an instant, he would shout for help, she knew it. She summoned strength from the core of rage she had learned to nurture—”spit on the bastards’ graves”—and shook her head.

“I am too old to…I believe you call it, ‘turn tricks.’ Not to mention my lack of other attractions.”

He stared at her. I’m not going to faint. When he seemed to be sure of that, his laughter rattled the flimsy partitions of the room.

“Varley owes me a favor. He said I ought to meet you, that you were likely to wind up near the top. It stands to reason. The Consul General flags all the politicals; and hell, lady, you’re something special even in the way of politics. Can’t think of a job I could offer you, unless it would be teaching… My gals tend not to have kids. Down the road, though, it’s sure going to cost plenty to send the ones they do have to Company schools.”


“I would hardly think so,” Wyn murmured.

“Some of ’em do, though. And sooner or later, they’ll need schools. Well, that’s down the road.…”

Frontier schoolmarm. Wyn you are going back all the way—at least, if you’re lucky.

“You might tell me something, though. That little girl, the one who talked to you, then started…ugh! That’s all an act, isn’t it?”

Nina had cried in her arms. The urge to protect her like a student made Wyn shiver.

He can check to see if you’re lying, her good sense told her.

“She was raped at Luna Base. When her father tried to help her, they spaced him. She won’t earn back your investment,” she said crisply. Then, inspiration struck.

“Sir…”

“Lord, you speak fine!” He shook his head at her.

“Sir, if you have access to the BuReloc files, you should know that there is one woman…”—How could she phrase this appropriately?—”in your line of work. We called her Ellie.…”

Wyn slid forward on her chair. Sure enough, built into the computer panel on the table was a screen for observing the prisoners awaiting assignment. There sat Ellie. Obviously, she had finished processing later than Wyn. “That one.”

The man’s fingers tapped on the keyboard. A guard emerged and shepherded Ellie out of the holding pen into the cubicle. One quick glance, and she had sized up Carmichael. A grin, a pass of her hand across her hair and coverall, and she looked younger, flushed, even pretty. Wyn blinked. So that was how a real pro did it.

“Damn-it all, Boston,” she blurted. “I thought you said you didn’t want my line of work!”

“Ellie…” It was Wyn’s turn to flush as she realized that she had never known her shipmate’s last name, “I would like you to meet Mr. Daniel Carmichael, who manages.…”

What was the proper way to introduce people in their line of work? Apart, of course, from the obvious. Aha! What had Ellie called her business when they’d met back on Luna?

“…an escort service at Hell’s-A-Comin’.”

She glared at Ellie, willing her to hold out her hand first. The lady always indicated whether she wished to shake hands.

Ellie shook her head, then Carmichael’s hand. Only then did she start to grin.

“Thank you, Ms. Baker,” Carmichael intoned, his voice hollow with laughter.

“Boston, you never told me your name was Baker,” Ellie said. “One of those Bakers? And you let me. Hoo-eee! I’m surprised you even spoke to me.”

Wyn shrugged. Both Ellie and Carmichael watched her with growing amusement.

“Is that how you learned to keep a straight face? You ought to come to work with us…make you the standup comic.”

Wyn smiled at her. So few words, and it was all arranged. I ought not to approve, she thought. But there is Hell’s-A-Comin’, and the brothels are real; and no question, the women in them will do better with Ellie to look out for them.

“Or I could play the piano in the parlor,” she said slyly.

“Got a keyboard instead,” Carmichael said. His face reddened as he lost the struggle against a great shout of laughter. “Sure you won’t reconsider?”

Wyn smiled. “I’ll take my chances.”

“Ya know, Boston, you can be a real a*shole sometimes,” Ellie said.

“I’ll be fine,” Wyn assured her with more confidence than she felt. “You’ll make so much money up at the mines you probably won’t even recognize me next time you see me. Or want to talk to me.”

“You’ll still be respectable. Still Boston,” Ellie said and hugged her. The next instant, she was all business “Where’s those papers?” she demanded. “Isn’t there someplace I got to sign? You want it in blood or what?”

More keystrokes, and the contract whirred out of a slot in the console. Tongue between her teeth, Ellie signed and handed the papers over to Carmichael.

“Ms. Baker, I thank you,” he said. Then he hesitated. “Here’s for luck. The way you’re thinking, you’ll need all the luck you can get on Haven.” He lifted the slide with its glowing gem, a tiny replica of Haven’s giant moon, from about his neck and threw it over to Wyn. “Will you get a move on it, Ellie? We open for business at 2000, and we need to find you a decent dress.”

Ellie followed her new employer out the door. “…gave away a fortune, and you ought to see the stuff she’s still got hidden in that green thing she carries.…”

Silence. The tiny room seemed suddenly cold, echoing. Wyn was relieved when the guard escorted her back to the holding pen. Quickly, she stuffed her new lucky charm into the green bag. At some point, she might be able to sell or trade it. And there was no sense in being a walking target.

There were no windows in the pen. It smelled like every other pen in which Wyn had been deposited with a grunted “wait here.” It shouldn’t, Wyn thought. This was an alien world; somehow, she had expected it would look and feel different. She wanted out, to fight for whatever future Haven might offer her; she wouldn’t get that future sitting here.

“Ms. Baker?” Not a guard this time, but a man dressed almost drably, in what Wyn was suddenly sure was “solid citizen” clothing. Once again, she trotted down the hall to the interview cubicles.

“Ms. Baker, I am Richard DeSilva. He waited for her to acknowledge his family name and to take the hand that he—a vast concession—held out to her.

“How do you do?”

“I assume that your trip here was rather trying.”

Wyn inclined her head and nodded again when DeSilva waved her to a seat. A DeSilva of Kennicott here on Haven? Must be from a minor branch of the family. Not old enough to be a failure, shipped out to the frontier; not young enough to be an heir, proving himself. Probably just old enough to be desperate to make one last push to better himself here, if not lift himself off-world.

“The Consul General alerted me when your file crossed his desk. Yours was marked for two reasons: politics and high intellect.”

“The charges against me were false,” Wyn said levelly “All of them except terminal folly.” And you can’t file an appeal back on Earth for that.

“Most unwise to launch a frontal attack against entrenched authority.” He steepled his fingers. Recognizing the tone of Official Pronouncement from many dinner parties, Wyn nodded: You expert; me, unworldly professor. So tell me, Mr. DeSilva, have you bought my contract? And what do you need me to do?

“I would not do it again,” she said.

“So you have learned from the experience?”

“A very great deal, sir,” she said. She had learned to study those in power, to figure out their weaknesses and survive by playing upon them. She had been a trusting fool, and then she had been helpless. She would not willingly be helpless again.

“It is your knowledge of Earth that I could find useful.…”

“My knowledge of Earth?” Wyn allowed herself to smile. “Mr. DeSilva, I left Earth more than a year ago on what I fully expected to be a one-way trip. And I think neither of our families would say I knew much about the real world when I lived on it.”

“Still,” he said. “Your family’s contacts. Your education, the way you speak.”

She glanced at his hands. He wore a wedding band. That told her: outpost mentality.


“Do you have children, Mr. DeSilva? School-aged children perhaps? And the local schools—are they adequate to those children’s needs?”

Years of faculty/parent conferences and student advising made him easy to read. Shipped out from Earth or maybe born here: an early marriage to a local woman unable to keep pace with his ambition or supply their children with whatever polish he thought they ought to have.

He’d bought her contract for politics. But teaching them could be her insurance policy once he’d mined out her few Earth names and networks.

His face lit. “I have taken up your contract.”

Wyn inclined her head.

“Please think of it merely as an employment contract. My children, of course: and we could use an executive assistant, discreet, cultivated.”

In short, a major domo, their resident status symbol from Earth.

You won’t get a better offer, she heard Ellie’s voice.

No doubt, he would pump her for details of Earth politics, out-of-date as they were. No doubt, he would mine what connections he thought she had about as thoroughly as Kennicott went into the hills by Hell’s-A- Comin. And in return?

Maybe, just maybe, I can strike back.

The idea did not provide the angry pleasure it once had. She had learned something, after all. If DeSilva was a power here and relied on her, she too would have power of a sort, even a chance to shape a place that was not already hopelessly corrupt.

Even her tie to Ellie and Carmichael at the mines might be worth something. Exiles made what choices they had to: anything to cease being “the weak” Anything they could stomach. Ellie’s and Carmichael’s work might be cleaner than the game she was offered.

She thought she could manage. Life on board a BuReloc ship toughened her to the point where she thought that maybe, just maybe, her ancestors—who had not been pampered aristocrats—might not find her a weakling. She was well up to this game, she thought. In fact, even if DeSilva could produce passage back to Earth, she thought she would spurn it in favor of the promise she saw for herself on Haven. She would not always be “the weak,” fated to suffer what she must.

It was not often a person got a second chance. Hers sat across from her, folding up the contract of her indenture and tucking it into his jacket.

DeSilva rose, and she rose with him. “We would be obliged if you would begin at once. Tonight, we have an important dinner.… You will, of course, join us.” He looked pained. “There is the matter of suitable clothing….”

Hadn’t Dan Carmichael said the same thing to Ellie? No, Wyn didn’t think she’d stop speaking to Ellie.

“When I earn it,” Wyn said. She had a sudden crazed vision of stripping open the seams of her faithful green bag, extricating the pearls she had sewed within it, and wearing them with the coverall that was the convict’s badge.

He flinched. “Consider it a condition of employment. You must appear…presentable. One of the Hamiltons will be there.”

Well, thank you, sir! She was a Baker; of course, she was presentable. Then she thought about what else his statement might mean. She intended to teach. But there was always that other way. Marry one’s way up and out.

At her age?

Why not even that? After all, when Great Aunt Phoebe had gotten thrown out of China, she’d come back to Boston and she’d married (which branch of the family was it?).… But DeSilva was waiting for her reply. Wyn copied Ellie’s, even to the downcast look and the breath held long enough to let her blush.

Decent clothes, fabrics that didn’t chafe. And chances to stop being “the weak.” She could hope. It was dignified to hope.

Count no man happy until you have seen the hour of his death. She recalled the old caution from Herodotus.

But don’t write him off till then either. Or her.

DeSilva escorted her through the Processing Center and onto the launch bound for Castell City. A light snow was falling, and the fresh air filled her with new hope as she gazed at the huge, feline primary reflected in the water. When the launch docked, DeSilva made half the dockyard stare by handing her, dressed as she was in convict’s gray, down from the boat. She nodded thanks, then followed him out into her future.





“And the town being now strongly besieged, there being also within some that practiced to have it given up, they yielded themselves to the discretion of the Athenians, who slew all the men of military age, made slaves of the women and children, and inhabited the place with a colony sent thither afterwards of five hundred men on their own.” (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, translated by Thomas Hobbes, University of Chicago Press, Book 6, page 372)





Atalanta




Don Hawthorne



Bureaucracy

Luna, Co-Dominium Offices: 2073 A.D.


After twenty minutes of preamble, Maldonado, the Minister for Sports, was framing his closing argument as any good bureaucrat would: In the form of an opening statement.

“The problem, Mister Chairman, is that the whole justification for holding the games at all is at risk of being invalidated.”

Chairman Vladimir Serafimov of the CoDominium High Council had been listening to his guests for nearly twenty minutes and his boredom threshold was, by his own estimates, about three sentences away and closing fast.

“I disagree,” came the rebuttal from Voorhees, representative from the Colonial Athletics Committee and appointed to serve as an advocate of his colony world of Sauron and its participation in the CoDominium Olympic Games. “If one colony fields superior athletes, it should stimulate the other worlds to increase their efforts on behalf of their own sons and daughters to rise to the challenge.”

Voorhees turned to Serafimov and addressed him directly. “It is neither Sauron’s fault, nor its responsibility, to accommodate the other colonies’ lack of commitment for an event to which Sauron’s young people dedicate themselves for years beforehand.”

“Mister Chairman,” Maldonado said, “in the decades since the CoDominium nationalized the Olympics, they have steadily regained their stature and dignity as contests of amateur athletics held in a spirit of comradely competition.”

“Sauron’s athletes are amateurs,” Voorhees interjected in an icy tone, “They receive no state funding or support whatsoever, and the CoDominium Olympic Organizing Committee verifies this on a yearly basis. A rather insulting process, in fact, which, I hasten to add, no other colony is required to undergo.”

Maldonado clenched his teeth. “By the very nature of Sauron’s militaristic governmental structure,” he began, but never finished.

Serafimov raised his hand, a gesture he rarely used. Anyone who had ever dealt with him in the political arena soon came to regret seeing it. “That is quite enough from both of you.” He leaned forward, interlaced his fingers and held the silence for a moment, regarding both men carefully.

“This has gone from a tedious debate to a rather ominous allegory about nationalism. I would remind you both that when the Olympics were confined to this world, my own country often received the same criticism being leveled at the Sauron System. That’s one of the very good reasons the Olympics are not held between nations any more, but between colony worlds, each of them far more varied in their cultural composition than any one nation of Earth ever was.

“Now,” he sat back and looked at his desk clock, “I require that you, Minister Maldonado, come to the point and make your proposal. Representative Voorhees, do not interrupt.” He nodded to Maldonado. “Proceed.”