Cristopher Stasheff - Escape Velocity

“A lot, to me. To most of us, for that matter. When you’re stuck way out here on the fringe of the Terran Sphere, you start caring a lot about whether or not people’ve ever heard about your planet. Be nice to feel even that important.”

“Mm.” Her face softened a moment, in a thoughtful frown. “Well … I’m afraid this won’t help much. I used to be a clerk back on Terra, in the records section of the Bureau of Otherworldly Activities—and a report about Wolmar came through occasionally.”

“Oh.” Dar could almost feel himself sag. “Just official reports?”

She nodded, with a vestige of sympathy. “That’s right. Nobody ever saw them except bureaucrats. And the computer, of course.”

“Of course.” Dar heaved a sigh and straightened his shoulders. “Well! That’s better than nothing … I suppose. What’d they say about us?”

“Enough.” She smiled vindictively. “Enough so that I know this is a prison planet for criminal soldiers, governed by a sadomasochistic general; that scarcely a day passes when you don’t have a war going on…”

“Holidays,” Dar murmured, “and Sundays.”

“ ‘Scarcely,’ I said! And that you’ve got an extremely profitable trade going with the natives for some sort of vegetable drug, in return for which you give them bits of cut glass and surplus spare parts that you order through the quartermaster.”

“That’s all?” Dar asked, crestfallen.

“All!” She stared, scandalized. “Isn’t that enough? What did you want—a list of war crimes?”

“Oh …” Dar gestured vaguely. “Maybe some of the nice things—like this tavern, and plenty of leave, and …”

“Military corruptness. Slackness of discipline.” She snorted. “Sure. Maybe if I’d stayed with the Bureau, a piece of whitewash would’ve crossed my desk.”

“ If you’d stayed with them?” Dar looked up. “You’re not with BOA anymore?”

She frowned. “If I were working for the Bureau, would I be here?”

Dar just looked at her for a long moment.

Then he shook himself and said, “Miz, the only reason I can think of why you would be here is because BOA sent you. Who could want to come here?”

“Me,” she said, with a sardonic smile. “Use your head. Could I dress like this if I worked for the government?”

Dar’s face went blank. Then he shrugged. “I dunno. Could you?”

“Of course not,” she snapped. “I’d have to have a coiffeured hairdo, and plaster myself with skintight see-throughs and spider heels. I had to, for five years.”

“Oh. You didn’t like it?”

“Would you like to have to display yourself everyday so a crowd of the opposite sex could gawk at you?”

Dar started a slow grin.

“Well, I didn’t!” she snapped, reddening.

“And that’s why you quit?”

“More than that,” she said grimly. “I got fed up with the whole conformist ragout, so I aced out instead.”

“ ‘Aced out’?” Dar was totally lost.

“Aced out! Quit! Got out of all of it!” she shouted. “I turned into a Hume !”

“What’s a ‘Hume’?”

She stared, scandalized. “You really are away from it all out here, aren’t you?”

“I’ve kinda been trying to hint about something along those lines, yes. We get the news whenever a freighter lands, about three times a year. So until they invent faster-than-light radio, we’re not going to know what’s happening on Terra until a couple of years after it’s happened.”

She shook her head in exasperation. “Talk about primitive! All right … a Hume is me—a nonconformist. We wear loose gray coveralls like this to hide our bodies from all those lascivious, leering eyes. We shave our heads, so we don’t have to do up a pompadour everyday. And we don’t submit to those prisons society calls ‘jobs’; we’d rather be poor. We’ve put in our time, we’ve got some savings, and between that, our GNP share, and whatever we can pick up at odd jobs, we manage to keep going. We do what we want, not what the I.D.E. wants. That’s what’s a Hume.”

Dar nodded, lips pursed and eyes slightly glazed. “Uh. But you don’t conform. Right.”

“I didn’t say that, gnappie! I said we’re nonconformists.”

“Uh—right.” Dar nodded. “I see the difference—or I’ll try to.”

She turned on him, but Cholly got there first. “Do thet, lad! Do thet, and you’ll make me proud of you! But you see, you have to know the history of it, don’t you? Of course you do; can’t understand nothing wot’s happening in human society if you don’t know the history of it. The first who was called ‘Nonconformists,’ see, they started showing up toward the end of the 1500s, now. Shakespeare wrote one of ‘em into Twelfth Night , called him ‘Malvolio.’ Puritans, they was, and Calvinists, and Baptists, too, and Anabaptists, all manner of Protestant sects what wasn’t Church of England. And the Anglicans, they lumped ‘em all together and called ‘em ‘Nonconformists’ (the name got put on ‘em from the outside, you see, the way it always does) ‘cause they didn’t conform to the Established Church (what was C. of E., of course). Yet if you sees the pictures of ‘em, like Cromwell’s Roundheads, why! they’re like to one another as bottles in a case! Within their opposition-culture, you sees, they conformed much more tightly than your C. of E.s—and so it has been, ever since. When you call ‘em ‘nonconformists,’ it doesn’t mean they don’t conform to the standards of their group, but that their group don’t conform to the majority culture—and that’s why any opposition-culture’s called ‘nonconformist.’ Now then, Sergeant …” And he was off again, back to the reality case.

The Hume stared after him, then nodded thickly. “He’s right, come to think of it …” She gave herself a shake, and scowled at Dar. “What was that—a bartender, or a professor?”

“Cholly,” Dar said, by way of explanation. “My boss.”

The Hume frowned. “You mean you work here? WHOA!”

Dar saw the indignation rise up in her, and grinned. “That’s right. He’s the owner, president, and manager of operations for the Wolmar Pharmaceutical Trading Company, Inc.”

“The boss drug-runner?” she cried, scandalized. “The robber baron? The capitalist slave-master?”

“Not really. More like the bookkeeper for a cooperative.”

She reared up in righteous wrath, opening her mouth for a crushing witticism—but couldn’t think of any, and had to content herself with a look of withering scorn.

Dar obligingly did his best to wither.

She turned away to slug back a swallow from her glass—then stared, suddenly realizing that she had a glass.

Dar glanced at Cholly, who looked up, winked, nodded, and turned back to discussing the weightier aspects of kicking a cobble.

The Hume seemed to deflate a little. She sighed, shrugged, and took another drink. “Hospitable, anyway …” She turned and looked up at Dar “Besides, can you deny it?”

Dar ducked his head—down, around, and back up in hopes of a sequitur. “Deny what?”

“All of it! Everything I’ve said about this place! It’s all true, isn’t it? Starting with your General Governor!”

“Oh. Well, I can deny that General Shacklar’s a sadist.”

“But he is a masochist?”

Dar nodded. “But he’s very well-adjusted. As to the rest of it … well, no, I can’t deny it, really; but I would say you’ve gotten the wrong emphasis.”

“I’m open to reason,” the Hume said, fairly bristling. “Explain it to me.”

Dar shook his head. “Can’t explain it, really. You’ve got to experience it, see it with your own eyes.”