Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

 

Chapter 02: THE COMMITTEE FOR RESPONSIBILITY

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
—H.L. Mencken

 

Emerson dismounted and led Topper by the reins. “Cayuse”, he explained, was the Chinook Indian word for horse. “They don’t seem to be using it back on Earth, anymore, so I thought I would put it to work here.”

“A good choice,” his father agreed. He reached out. The alien animal did seem to enjoy a human touch, was well-behaved, with an odor no more—or less—distinctive than that of a horse, which he had always rather liked. Morgan was proud of his son and wanted him to know it. “Wilson and I brought back a nickel-iron asteroid that ought to feed the settlement’s needs for metal—and our family’s need for cash—for the next year. What else has been going on down here while I was gone?”

Llyra shrugged, keeping a suspicious eye on the alien animal her son claimed to have tamed. “Only the usual: building, repairing, cooking, preserving, sewing, and cleaning. These are not complaints, my husband, dear. It beats hell out of eight hours of skating practice a day. We had a barn-raising for the Lockharts last month.”

Morgan laughed and nodded. “What are they raising in this barn?”

“I don’t know,” Llyra told him. “Not sheep.” At the moment, they were passing by the pens she had built for sheep that something in the environment had killed. She had wanted wool, to harvest, spin, and weave—not to overlook lamb stew in the fullness of time. Now she was looking more closely at Topper with an evaluating eye. “You can keep your cayuse in the sheep pen,” she told her son, “at least for tonight.”

She turned to her husband. “Oh, and I was just telling Jasmeen about the visitors we had yesterday on our doorstep.”

“Visitors?” Morgan repeated. Visitors were rare on the frontier world.

“Four of them, a shaky old woman and a man, an even older black woman, and a younger man with a bald head, bulgy eyeballs, and practically no facial features. They were all dressed for indoors in a city on Earth—in East America, in fact—not for our boonies. They called themselves the ‘Committee For Responsibility’”.

Wilson spoke up. “Hmm. CFR. Very ominous.” Jasmeen gave him a questioning look. He responded, “Ancient history. A cabal of bad-guys. We learned about it from our history tutors.”

“Its use here may be a coincidence,” said Morgan. “What did they want?”

“They wanted me to sign a petition, although to whom I couldn’t guess. The kids, too, and you, if you’d been here.” Her face took on a sour expression. “Basically, I think they want to start a government on Rosalie’s World, one with the ‘democratic’ power to tax, make laws, levy fines, and redistribute wealth in direct contravention of the Stein Covenant which we all signed to be here.”

“Wonderful,” said Jasmeen. “I thought we’d left that all behind.” As yet Llyra’s former coach had no children of her own to offer to the future, but here, on a new world, she had hopes.

“So did we,” Wilson told her, “when Pallas was established.”

Llyra continued. “This must have been one of the first homesteads they called on. They were absolutely horrified that two of the kids—Emerson and Julie, of course—were armed. Apparently they’re newcomers to this dangerous frontier world of ours and don’t know I wouldn’t let them go outside without adequate protection. Nor would any other mother here.”

“Sure,” said Jasmeen, pointing to Tieve’s low-slung ten millimeter pistol, a gift from her great-great-grandfather who invented it. “There’s the snakoids, to begin with.” Some species of the legless mammalian predators were poisonous, like their name-sakes, and a constant concern.

“Not to leave out the ngudogs and the ngucats,” Emerson volunteered. These were large, ferocious animals, the former mostly a wolf-like hunter and scavenger, the latter a crafty ambush predator.

“And the hornpigs!” laughed little Julie. In true Pallatian tradition she had killed her first this year, providing her family with pseudopork and bacon, and herself with a warm rug at her bedside.

“Those horrible things in the water,” Tieve shuddered. “I have nightmares about them now and again.”

“And the gooneybirds,” Lyra finished, referring to a winged mammaloid reportedly the size of the famed twentieth century military cargo plane. Lower gravity on this planet, and half again as much oxygen as Earth, made for some odd species, which seemed to be exclusively mammalian.“There was a child carried off by one of them in Tickle Cove last year. Anyway, those CFR people, I ordered them off the porch, and they went away, grumbling.”

The two families shared a celebratory supper at an enormous table, a polished section of a fallen tree, that was Llyra’s pride and joy. As a festive fire burned in the fireplace (it wasn’t particularly cold and the homestead was powered by a compact, sealed fusion reactor buried under the west end of the cabin), they ate meat and plants native to Rosalie’s World, plus a few treats imported from Pallas, Mars, Ceres, the Moon, and even Earth. Emerson described for his father—and his fascinated Uncle Wilson, who was in dire need of a new pistol belt—the way he had designed the saddle for Topper by himself and 3D-printed it.

Finally, it was time for the Ngus to go home. The Trasks settled in, the three children in a loft at one end of the house, their parents and the baby at the other end, and went to sleep.

Time passed.

Suddenly, they were awakened by the most hideous alien screaming that they’d ever heard, like a hundred dying rabbits or a thousand cats whose tails had been stepped on. Apparently it was Topper, penned up in the enclosure a few yards away from the house originally meant for sheep.

Snatching up his heavy force-pistol, Morgan rushed out in his underwear to see what was going on. Llyra ran downstairs, baby Jazzie bouncing perilously in her arms, and upstairs again at the other end of the house, to evacuate the other children from the loft they shared.

To his horror, Morgan, himself a veteran of a violent revolution back on Earth, Newfoundland’s Rebellion of the Dome, found that someone had dashed a Molotov cocktail against the west side of the family’s log house.