Fuzzy Sapiens (f-2) by H. Beam Piper

Author:H. Beam Piper [Piper, H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf
ISBN: 0-441-26190-6
Publisher: Ace
Published: 1976-03-19T05:00:00+00:00

“THIS IS LIKE old times, Victor,” Coombes said, stretching in one of the chairs. “Nobody here but us humans.”

“That’s right.” He brought the jug and the two glasses over and put them on the low table, careful not to disturb a pattern of colored tiles laid on one end of it. “That thing there is a Fuzzy work of art. It is unfinished, but just see the deep symbolic significance.”

“You see it. I can’t.” Coombes accepted his glass with mechanical thanks and sipped. “Where is everybody?”

“Diamond is a guest, at a place where I’m not welcome. Government House. He and Flora and Fauna are meeting Pierrot and Columbine, Judge and Mrs. Pendarvis’s Fuzzies. Sandra is chaperoning the affair, and Ernst is conferring with Mrs. Pendarvis about quarters for a couple of hundred Fuzzies who are coming to town in about a week to be adopted.”

“I’ll say this: your Fuzzy and Fuzzyologists are getting in with the right people. Did you hear Hugo Ingermann’s telecast this afternoon?”

“I did not. I pay people to do that kind of work for me. I went over a semantically correct summary, with a symbolic-logic study. As nearly as I can interpret it, it reduces to the propositions that, A) Ben Rainsford is a bigger crook than Victor Grego, and, B) Victor Grego is a bigger crook than Ben Rainsford, and, C) between them, they are conspiring to rob and enslave everybody on the planet, Fuzzies included.”

“I listened to it very carefully, and recorded it, in the hope that he might forget himself and say something actionable. He didn’t; he’s lawyer enough to know what’s libel and what isn’t. Sometimes I dream of being able to sue that bastard for something, so that I can get him in the stand under veridication, but…” He shrugged.

“I noticed one thing. He’s attacking the Company, and he’s attacking Rainsford, but at the same time he’s trying to drive wedges between us, so we don’t gang up on him.”

“Yes. That spaceport proposition. ‘Why doesn’t our honest and upright Governor do something to end this infamous space-transport monopoly of the Company’s, which is strangling the economy of the planet?’ ”

“Well, why doesn’t he? Because it would cost about fifty million sols, and ships using it would have to load and unload from orbit. But that sounds like a real live issue to the people who don’t think and have nothing to think with, which means a large majority of the voters. You know what I’m worried about, Leslie? Ingermann attacking Rainsford for collusion with the Company. He hammers at that point long enough, and Rainsford’s going to do something to prove he isn’t, and whatever it is, it’ll hurt us.”

“That’s the way it looks to me, too,” Coombes agreed. “You know, among the many benefits of the Pendarvis Decisions, we now have a democratic government on Zarathustra. That means, we now have politics here. Ingermann controls all the other rackets, and politics is the biggest racket there is. Hugo Ingermann is running himself for political boss of Zarathustra.

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