【英文读物】The Patriot.docx

【英文读物】The PatriotChapter 1 The Martianne is heard occasionally these days as a stirring concert or band selection. But there was a time when its playing was punishable by deathand its defiant strains challenged the harried police in tavern and drawing room all over the Earth.In the days just before one marche militaire changed two worlds, Earth was weary of war, afraid of war, and desired to put behind it all reminders of war. The psychosociologists said uniforms of policemen, of postmen, of airline pilots, of lodge brethren, of theater ushers, were militaristic, and they were abolished. The psychosociologists said the march rhythm in music was nationalistic and instigated combative feelings, and it was banned. The scenes, the sounds, the sights of antagonisms between men were forbidden.The Polonaise, the Marseillaise, the March of the Toys, all suffered the same fate. Sousa's marches and Tschaikovsky's 1812 Overture went the same way. Dixie and the Hawaiian War Chant were treated alike. All were relegated to tape in dusty archives, and their sale or public performance forbidden on pain of fine and prison sentence.Whatever unlawful violence there might be on faraway Mars, Earth was through with all forms of war and its trappings.Into these circumstances, Cornel Lorensse intruded on the night of December 6, 2010. He pressed his thin face against the steam-misted window of The Avatar in Nuyork and saw a piano standing idle inside.The Avatar was one of those small restaurants sunk a few feet below sidewalk level, which catered with exotic dishes to the tastes of a select group. It was well-populated at this hour, and Cornel licked his lips hungrily at the epicurean delights unveiled at each table.He felt in the pocket of his worn coveralls. A single coin answered the exploration of his fingers. He was down to his last resource, and he was no nearer to finding the Friends than he had been when he landed.He looked again at the piano, hesitated, then went down the three steps to the restaurant's door, pushed it open and went in. It was his good fortune that Wan Ti, owner of The Avatar was receiving his guests in person at the moment."I'll play you a concert for a meal," said Cornel, gesturing toward the piano.Wan Ti's dark eyes swept over him, taking in the battered coveralls, the earnest face, the untrimmed blond hair, the slender hands. Wan Ti's yellow countenance remained bland."I have a piano player," said Wan Ti.Cornel laughed, with a note of desperation in his tone."Let me play one selection," he urged. "If you want to stop me then, you can kick me out."What Wan Ti thought could not be gauged from his expression, but he had not built his clientele against fierce competition by turning his face away from the unusual. He inclined his head slightly, and waved Cornel to the piano.Cornel sat down at the keyboard, brushed his hair back from his eyes, and flexed his long fingers. Thrusting the tantalizing aroma of food to the back of his mind, he played.The murmur of conversation in The Avatar faltered and died as the fervid melody of Beethoven's Sonata Appassionata filled the air. It was unusual music to people accustomed to hearing the more modern compositions of Schonberg, Harris and Westine. The comparison of Cornel's inspired touch to the mechanical renditions of Wan Ti's regular piano player was noticeable even to those who were unfamiliar with music.When the final movements of the allegro ma non troppo faded, Cornel sat back and looked toward Wan Ti. The proprietor cocked an ear toward the rare applause, smiled and nodded slightly. Exultantly, Cornel swung into Chopin's Fantasie-Impromptu and followed it, not pausing, with Liszt's Waldesrauschen and Schubert's Serenade.The applause was just as enthusiastic, but by now the hum of voices and the click of eating utensils had begun to rise again. Frowning slightly, Cornel hunched his shoulders and began a composition the most musical of his audience had never heard before.Like the molten notes of the nightingale, the music floated and throbbed above the diners, almost a physical thing. The people in the restaurant paused with food halfway to their lips. They turned to see the artist, carefully, so that no chair would scrape. The waiters stopped with trays in their hands. Wan Ti stopped a newly arriving couple, his fingers at his lips.In the midst of the applause that roared through the room when Cornel had finished, a waiter tapped his shoulder."Excuse me, sir," he said. "Miss Meta Erosine asks that you join her at her table."Rising and bowing to his audience, Cornel followed the man to a table at the rear of the room, where a woman sat with her escort.Meta Erosine's pale, heart-shaped face, with its mop of short black hair and luminous black eyes, was widely known on Earth, but Cornel had never been to Earth before. Her vibrant beauty blazed on a victim unprepared for it.She was clad in the cretan-can-can style just then becoming popular, with breasts exposed over a tight bodice and a short, ruffled skirt gathered in front to reveal the knees. She smoked a long-stemmed, tiny-bowled pipe, studded with jewels.Beside her sat a sleek, mustached young man in ruffled lavender shirt and pink tights, his fingers covered with rings."Sit down and eat with me, musician," invited Meta. Somewhat dubiously, Cornel took a seat at her right, across the table from the beruffled escort."Meta, I wish you wouldn't demean yourself by taking up with tramps and guttersnipes," objected her companion, wrinkling his nose."Leave me, Passo," she ordered, waving an imperious hand. "Why should I sup with painted popinjays when I can adore genius?"Passo flushed and his mouth fell open. But he arose and slunk quietly away."Now, musician," said Meta, leaning over the table so that her powdered breasts brushed the glassware, "tell me, what was that last number you played?""One of my own compositions," he said diffidently. The odor of food was too much for him, and he leaned across the table to appropriate Passo's untouched salad. "Its name is Wind in the Canals.""It should be Le Vent dans les Canals," she said. "You should title your compositions in Frenchthey will be more fashionable.""I don't know French," he said, munching a stick of celery. "We don't speak French on Mars."She laughed, a laugh like the music of his playing."You will, my genius," she promised him. Her eyes ran over his lean face, his unkempt hair. "You look as though you could use shelter and clothing. Come home with me tonight. I shall give your genius to the world." Chapter 2 Cornel never had experienced such luxury as was his in the apartment Meta assigned to him in her magnificent home in Jersi. He had his personal servant. New clothes were waiting for him. A barber cut his hair when he had finished a hot, scented bath, and the big bed in which he slept was soft as down.Meta asked no information of him until they met at a late breakfast the next morning. There, beautiful in translucent white negligee, she sipped her coffee and asked questions."I came from Mars to get help for my people," he said. "We need guns and supplies, food and oxygen equipment.""You're one of the Charax rebels?" she asked."Rebels?" He snorted. "We're free people, fighting for our freedom. We want self-government, we want to own our land and our homes, we want the right to rule our own lives.""That's guaranteed in the Constitution," said Meta."Earth's Constitution. Mars isn't Earth. The Mars Corporation controls both spaceports. It owns all business and industry on Mars. It's milking the planet dry of resources and profits, and it's set up a company government that makes the people of Mars no better than slaves."He smiled a bitter smile."Earth's government protects the freedom of Earth's people," he said, "but the people of Earth don't know what's happening on Mars. The Mars Corporation has its senators and representatives, bought and paid for, so the Earth government sends troops and supplies to Mars to fight the battles of the Mars Corporation. We aren't rebels, we're fighting for our just freedom.""If the Mars Corporation controls the spaceports, how did you get to Earth?" she demanded."We have three battered ships hidden in the desert near Syrtis Major," said Cornel. "It takes a long time for us to get fuel to take one of them up, but they thought it worthwhile if I could get to Earth and get help for my people.""Why you?""My music is well known on Mars, and my people know that the people of Earth love music. Here on Earth, where there is peace and prosperity, people pay to hear good music and good musicians. Our plan was for me to give great concerts and at each concert ask the people of Earth to help their Martian brothers gain their freedom.""A good way to get arrested," said Meta dryly. "You'd be convicted of inciting military action and sentenced to prison in any court of Earth.""I didn't know that, but I suppose the Friends would have a way.""The Friends?""The Friends of Mars. It's an organization of Earth people trying to help us. I suppose it must be a secret and illegal organization, for I found that the man I was supposed to get in touch with had been arrested, and I haven't been able to find out anything more about the Friends.""Such an organization would be illegal on Earth," said Meta. "Come here, Cornel. I want to show you something."Taking him by the arm, she led him from the breakfast room to a terrace overlooking a snowy valley. She moved closer to him in the chill wind that billowed her thin garments around her, and waved her hand at the scene below them."This is Earth," she said. "Look at those mountain peaks, the blue sky and the white clouds. In summer, this valley is clothed with green, and warm breezes bring the scent of flowers to this terrace. Have you ever seen anything like this on Mars?""No," he said softly. "Mars is always cold and dusty, and the sky is nearly black.""Cornel," she said softly, you're a great musician. Mars is rough frontier territory, and the frontier has no place for music. Last night you saw what your music could mean here."Forget Mars. You belong to Earth." Chapter 3 The meteoric rise of Cornel Lorensse to fame in 2011 and 2012 now commands a full column in the Encyclopaedia Terrestriana. Brushed off in a single sentence in the encyclopaedia, but much discussed in that day, was his close relationship with Meta Erosine, his patroness.For half a decade, wealthy, beautiful Meta Erosine had been the toast of Earth. She was an actress, a painter, a singer, a socialite, and she had changed men almost as often as she changed the dresses she wore. Her face was familiar in newspapers and on television screens, her husky songs were on a million recording tapes, her colorful antics were the grist for magazine articles and the subject of denunciations from the pulpit.In Cornel she seemed to have found a vehicle for all the burning fire of her energy. She pushed him, she groomed him, she threw the power of her wealth behind him. His slender figure clad in a black velvet suit sat at polished pianos on a hundred stages; and for each concert, the auditoriums and the audiences were bigger.Meta was with him on these concert tours; and between tours he stayed in seclusion at the big house in Jersi, putting into music his memories of his native Mars. Each tour introduced to the world the new compositions of Cornel Lorensse.What he wrote and played was the haunting music of the deserts, the canals and the marches. Into his music he poured the loneliness of the red sands and the violence of the desert winds, the beauty of sable skies jeweled with enormous stars, the happiness of the helmeted traveler when he reaches the green valleys of the canals, the hopes and joys of human lovers gathered in bubble-like domes amid the chill wastelands.He did not, as Meta had wanted to, give his compositions French titles. He named them as he would have named them on Mars: The Desert Wanderer, Swift Phobos, Marsh Gardens, names that were strange to Earth, but were familiar themes of his own people.His melodies took music-loving Earth by storm. They burst upon a world in which 20th century dissonance had strangled 19th century romanticism, like flowers in a garden of crystal. It was Cornel Lorensse and those pioneer composers who avidly aped him who began the 21st century Renaissance in music.Without shame, Cornel lived on the largesse of his patroness, for his growing fees and royalties all went for one purpose. He had found the society called the Friends of Mars, and everything that he earned he poured into their coffers to finance privateer space vessels able to elude the Mars Corporation's company-owned warships and to keep a thin line of supplies flowing to the Free Martian people scattered in their desert strongholds.Like any secret society in a hostile culture, the Friends of Mars maintained dissociated chapters, connected by the slenderest and most carefully guarded lines of communication. Cornel knew of only one chapter, in Nuyork, and to this he took his contributions when he was between concert tours.During one of those visits, late in the summer of 2012, Javan Tomlin, chief of the chapter, told him that all he contributed was still not enough for Mars to become free."Our base of support isn't broad enough," said Javan. "Ships cost money, fuel costs money, supplies cost money. Guns and ammunition are most expensive of all, because military weapons are illegal. No one man can support such an operation, even when he makes the kind of money you're making."There were half a dozen of the Friends of Mars, besides Cornel and Javan, in the meeting room. The others nodded agreement at Javan's words."None of us are wealthy and we can't contribute much but our time and work," said one of them. "The wealthy people all sympathize with the Mars Corporation.""That's too much of a blanket indictment," said Javan. "The Mars Corporation controls the spacelines to Mars, and what little information comes back to Earth is censored and heavily propagandized in their favor. Most people don't know what's happening on Mars. Our people need a powerful radio transmitter to broadcast to Earth, Cornel."Cornel shook his head."What information the people of Earth get must be disseminated on Earth," he said. "Powerful radio equipment would take up space and weight needed for arms. Besides, the Mars Corporation forces have air power and directional finders. They'd bomb a permanent installation before it had a chance to send out its second broadcast.""All we can do is work and hope," said Javan gloomily. "If we had a fleet of about a dozen good ships, we might be able to swing it, but we have only two and a third abuilding.""There are three on Mars," Cornel pointed out."One was blasted in spa