Michael Flynn - The January Dancer

(“But let them have their moment,” the scarred man sneers. “For now, they live in a green paradise and the black igneous reality lies out of sight, beyond the crest of the Reeks. All the eruptions, all the steam and lava, burst forth in the Barrens below, where the plates are thinner and the core breaks through. So their future doom is yet to come. Unless…”)

…unless one day the Vale of Eireann, too, erupts. The Big Blow, they call it, making it a joke. There are hot springs in the glen below Ben Bulben…

And so it is a world of sad songs ( which should please you, harper ). When they want to make merry, the Eireannaughta don’t sing. They fight. And that they do often enough to lighten the mood that surrounds them.

They have little enough in the Vale. They can feed themselves and make the most basic things, and they have far more power than they need from thermal stations, but there’s little to do for diversion and their arts are ordinary. Drinking is one (and there they do show considerable talent) and conversation is another (and that they class as a martial art). Orbital factories, built by companies from better-endowed worlds, have come in search of cheap power. New Eireann makes most of its off-world exchange by beaming excess power to them, and a little more by supplying them with fresh food. ICC ships come and go with other supplies for the stations and haul away their products. Very little finds its way to the world below.

The other major source of off-world income is the tourist trade. People have come from Agadar and Hawthorn Rose, from the Lesser Hanse and Gladiola, from even High Tara itself. They come to climb the Western Reeks and stare at nature raw, at the great geysers and fountains of lava, at the rivers of molten rock and the basalt glaciers. “An’ d’ye be seein’ the wee pyroclastic cloud there? Sure, an’ I hope ’t isn’t blowin’ our way…Ah, mind the drop here, yer honor; wouldn’t want ye t’ fall into yon lava pool.” Oh, they play it up, the Reek Guides do: a great mouthful of the blarney and just enough hint of the danger to make the tourists shiver in delight.

(“An’ shure ’tis only an image,” the scarred man mocks the accent. “They are no more Irish than you or I are Tibetan. Nor any less. Across so many centuries, everyone on Old Earth was our ancestor. It takes more than eponymous settlers or carefully contrived archaisms to resurrect something that long dead. But what can a people do when they have no future, save reconstruct some storied past?)

Then the tourists ride the gondolas back down into the Vale from which the rest of the planet, out of sight behind the Reeks, can seem a bad dream. They stay in Da Derga’s Hostel or in quaint tourist cottages in the Mid-Vale or sample the excitements (such as they are) in New Down Town. They spend some more money and remain until they grow bored (which happens soon) or frightened (which happens sooner). One morning, the tourist throws open the shutters in the terribly cute guest room, and takes a deep breath of the bright green grassy Vale—and the breeze is just a trifle too warm and bears just the tiniest acrid wisp of molten stone. And “terribly cute” seems suddenly more than merely “cute.” So they think, Who in their right minds would ever have settled here? And then they think, Who in their right minds would stay here a moment longer?

So the tourist numbers aren’t very great in the wider scheme of things. Far more people flood Alabaster to see the Cliffside Montage. But enough of the curious come to satisfy a small world like New Eireann. They bring hard currency—the Shanghai ducat, Gladiola Bills of Exchange—and they bring something near as important: news of the great wide world. Messages travel only so fast as the ships on Electric Avenue, and only to where those ships touch orbit, and so news arrives in snatches and batches at irregular intervals and often from unexpected places. The Eireannaughta were tolerably well informed of doings on New Chennai and Hawthorn Rose, and somewhat less so regarding Jehovah or the Jenjen Cluster. But High Tara? The Hatchley Commonwealth? Far Gatmander? Oh, those were magic names and faraway places! At times it was easy to believe that there really was a sprawling United League of the Periphery out there, and itchy youths like Slugger O’Toole might ship out on a passing tramp and go searching for the planet crusted with gold.

A number of years earlier the Eireannaughta had hired the Clan na Oriel to manage their government contract and the Clan sent in an honest administrator, who took the office-name of Padraig O’Carroll, though his real name was Ludovic Achmed Okpalaugo. By all accounts he ran a clean and honest administration, though at first the Eireannaughta didn’t realize that because they didn’t know what one looked like. When they did, they revolted, because an administration that won’t take bribes generally won’t hand out favors, either.

There are appetites that ought not be fed, for they grow on their feeding. As an extra inducement to potential renters, New Eireann had invited the Interstellar Cargo Company to service those orbiting factories. ICC ships ranged throughout the ULP, “from Gatmander to the Lesser Hanse,” as their slogan had it. And they had the magic touch: uncannily anticipating where each good would demand the best price. It worked well for everyone: customers received goods they wanted, producers found greater profit, and the ICC pocketed a handsome fee. So the ICC pretty much owned the traffic for everything in New Eireann space.

Except the tourist trade.

There was a nice cash flow in that pipeline. Not much compared to what the ICC already had; but consuming all that wealth had only made them hungrier. And when a fat man feasts, there are always those who gather the crumbs. Oriel wouldn’t kick back or fix contracts, but the ICC was more flexible in that regard. They did not consider buqshish to be wrong . They were not bound by the moralities of ancient religions and made no secret of it. They believed in sharing the wealth, too, so long as they had the larger share.

Neither did they lack for corporate ethics. When you take a bribe, you give good value in return. If you kick something back, you make sure of performance. One time on Agadar, the ICC let a contract to build a road along the Inkling Ocean. The contractor skimped on the materials and the road washed out in the first monsoon. So the ICC factor called up his house militia and they found the contractor and put him to work on the repair gang, out in the hot sun with a tar-brush in his hands and a terai -hat on his head. And they gave the repair contract to his biggest competitor. There’s something charming about such an honest corruption. The kidnapping and forced labor weren’t legal, not until afterward when they had bought the Assembly; but it was poetic. You can’t argue that.

So when Certain Persons approached the ICC factor on New Eireann and suggested that a change of administration might be to the benefit of all, the factor—whose name was Vandermere Nunruddin—replied that while he could not condone such a thing, he saw no reason why the ICC could not do business with whatever administration held Council House. He may even have suggested a few management corporations that might bid on the job, one of which was, in the spirit of open competition, not an actual subsidiary of the ICC.

No one expected what happened.

Nunruddin probably anticipated a quiet coup, with Clan na Oriel offered a golden parachute and an ICC subsidiary brought in. Cynics often think that everyone else is just waiting to cut a deal, and that even saints are selfish. The Certain Persons who dined with him probably thought the People were behind them. But if an honest administration that gives no special favors and taxes at a reasonable rate for matters palpably in the public good engenders a certain loathing in the hearts of some, it evokes genuine fondness in the hearts of others. Most of the Eireannaughta would likely not have minded dipping their snouts in a government trough, but most of them didn’t believe that Certain Persons would ever let them anywhere near that trough. So if it surprised the cabal and the ICC factor when so many people rose up against the coup, it surprised everyone else how many backed it.