Fire Time Read Online Free PDF

Free-associate. Tell me about your past life, your family, your comrades. In return, I can at least bring them your greetings, and whatever presents you wish to send.
    ‘But help me.’ Dejerine knocked back his second glass. ‘Give me ideas. What shall I say to them, how reconcile them and get them to co-operate, I who come in as the agent of a policy that dashes their fondest hopes to the deck?’
    Conway sat for a space, his vision lost in the overlook across Luna, before he said carefully: ‘You know, you might start by showing them that documentary of Olaya’s which made the big splash last month.’
    ‘On the background of the war?’ Dejerine was startled. ‘But it was generally critical.’
    ‘No, not quite. It tried hard to be objective. Oh, everybody knows Olaya is no enthusiast for this thing. Too aristocratic by temperament, I suppose. But he’s a damn fine journalist, and he did a remarkable job of getting a variety of viewpoints.’
    Dejerine frowned. ‘He skimped the fundamental issue: the Eleutherians.’
    Emboldened, Conway answered, ‘Frankly, I, and I’m not alone, I don’t agree they are the fundamental issue. I admire them, of course, and sympathize, but mainly I think we, humankind, we have to stay on top of events for our survival as a species. On Ishtar I’ve seen such chaos rising–’ Earnestly: ‘But that’s what I’m getting at. Somebody like, oh, my sister Jill, her whole life spent there … she, her kind of people, they only see the horrors Anu is bringing to
their
planet. If they could realize that sacrifices have to be made for a higher good– But they’re intelligent, you know, trained in scientific skepticism; they’ve spent their lives coping with the wildest jumble of cultures and conflicts. No slick propaganda pitch is going to win them over.
    ‘That Olaya show, it was honest. It touched reality. I felt that, and … I can tell you my people on Ishtar would. If nothing else, they’d understand we still have free speech here, Earth isn’t a monolithic monster. It ought to help.’
    Now Dejerine was quiet for a time which grew.
    At the end, he jumped to his feet. ‘All right!’ he exclaimed. ‘I asked for your advice, and – Donald, Don, may I call you? I’m Yuri – immediately you begin. Come, do have some more. Let us settle down to the serious business of getting drunk.’

III

    Southbound, Larreka and his attendants neared Primavera about noon of the day after he had left his wife at Yakulen Ranch. The human settlement lay three marches upriver from the city of Sehala. No longer was that site a precaution against possible trouble. Surely everyone in Beronnen, and most dwellers elsewhere throughout the Gathering, had come to understand that the Earthfolk were their friends, the last best hope of saving their entire civilization. But the aliens still needed space to raise crops and cattle which could nourish them in ways that raingrain or breadroot, the flesh of els or owas, could not. And those who studied nature, like Jill Conway, preferred readier access to wildlife than the plowlands around Sehala afforded. And those who studied people declared that their own constant presence in the city would be too upsetting.
    Not that any such effect could amount to a dustpuff – Larreka had often thought – alongside the upsettingness built into this world.
    He swung briskly down a road which paralleled the wide, sheening flow of the Jayin. An important highway, it was brick-paved; he felt heat as well as gritty hardness. But that wasn’t enough for a tough-padded old soldier to slow himself by putting on buskins. Bad though the time was becoming, South Beronnen always escaped the worst of what the Rover passed out … except indirectly, of course, when starveling hordes invaded this favored land. Furthermore, right now was mid-autumn in the southern hemisphere, the airs easing off toward rainy winter, no matter how hard the Rover tried to screw things up.
    Its red