Emerald Eyes | Page 7

vengeance; they do not and cannot cast aside the memory of their
ancient liberty."
Amnier looked at him quizzically. "The Prince," he said after a moment.
"The Old Man would have been proud of you." He smiled distantly. "In
the same work it says, this is a paraphrase, a city used to liberty can be
more easily held by means of its citizens than in any other way, if you
wish to preserve it."
Malko nodded. "Yes. It says that."
Amnier did not answer. There was a silence that continued until
Suzanne left her work station and returned to where they waited.
Amnier sat with his eyes unfocused, looking off into a distance that did
not exist; Kalharri stood, eyes fixed on Amnier's face. Neither saw
what they looked upon.
"Malko?" Amnier looked up at the woman, flushed with strong emotion.
Montignet continued, "We have one. It's going to live."
"Fascinating," murmured Amnier. He looked down at the steel stairway
he sat on. When he looked up again there was a flat snapping sound,
like a whip being cracked. For an instant Amnier stared directly at the
flat black cutout of a man, merely the outline of a shape. I doubt he
ever again fully believed his own eyes after that; Camber Tremodian
was gone before Amnier could be certain of what he had seen.
None of the others appeared to have noticed. "Which one is it?" asked
Malko quietly.
"Number fifty-five. Series C, number C; we've been calling it Charlie
Chan."
"Do you know its sex yet?"

"Male."
Malko Kalharri had not yet turned away from Darryl Amnier; now he
came closer, squatted until his eyes were on a level with Amnier's. "I
think we shall name him Carl...Castanaveras, perhaps. Yes."
Amnier blinked. His mind seemed to be elsewhere. "Oh?"
"Yes," said Kalharri, "Castanaveras. I think it an appropriate name."
Three days after my life brushed against his, Jorge Rodriguez died of
radiation burns.
Camber and I have kept the costs of the battle down; Jorge Rodriguez
was only the fifth human being in sequential Time to die in a battle of
the Time Wars.
It might have comforted him to know that.
Or not.

2.
Three decades passed. The SpaceFarers' Collective continued to grow.
Early in the 2030s, they established SpaceFarer colonies in the Asteroid
Belt.
In the late 2030s, the United Nations began colonies in the Asteroid
Belt, in an attempt to forestall the SpaceFarers' Collective's bid to
assume control of the Belt. They were successful; the SpaceFarer
colonies never flourished. Their success did them no good, however.
The U.N. colonies were largely self-sufficient; with the time lags in
their supply lines, they had to be. It was a logical result that they should
find themselves more sympathetic toward the SpaceFarers than toward
a government millions of kilometers away. In 2040, with support from
the SpaceFarers, all but a half dozen of the Belt colonies declared their
independence from the Unification.

Of necessity the colonies evolved into "CityStates." It was the logical
basic economic unit for a society built of flying mountains.
When Carl Castanaveras was still a young boy, before puberty turned
him into a Peaceforcer weapon, an officer of the United Nations Peace
Keeping Force once asked him what he wished to do with his life.
The question startled the boy. He had been raised by doctors and
scientists and Malko Kalharri; the Peaceforcer's question was not the
sort of thing anyone had ever asked of him before.
After a moment's consideration he said, "Am I supposed to do
something with it?"
There can be good mistakes. Fact and truth and history are rarely
related. The facts are these.
Carl Castanaveras was born on the eighteenth of September in the year
2030. He was named after a soldier who, fighting for his country, died
during the Unification War; he was raised in a world that still bore the
scars of that war. The America in which he was raised was an occupied
country, with more Peaceforcers than police. The war was history
already by the time he was old enough to understand its causes. In
classes he was taught about its great battles; how after the Battle of
Yorktown, the young Marine Corps sergeant who was in command of
what was left of the United States Marine Corps forced the U.N. forces
to withdraw into a neighboring city before he would agree to surrender
his forces. In agreeing to surrender, a young Marine named Neil
Corona produced the most memorable quote of the War: "We will fry
under your goddamn cannon," he said, "before a single Marine will lay
down his arms in Yorktown."
After that war's end, the slow task of rebuilding began. France, alone
among the industrial nations of the time, emerged unscathed from