Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  “Well, then, uh—” The servant offered a clumsy boys’-club laugh. “Then why’d you marry one?”

  And, somehow, it always comes back to Shanna. Hari emptied the snifter, swallowed hard, sighed, and with a blurred whip of the wrist fired the empty snifter over the pond to shatter on the rocks on the other side, a shimmering crystal shower echoing the waterfall’s rainbow spray. Hari rolled his eyes up to meet the consternation on the servant’s face. “Maybe you better go sweep that up, huh? Before the Businessman gets here.”

  “Jeez, Caine, I didn’t mean to—”

  “Forget it,” Hari said. He leaned back on the rocks and laid his elbow over his eyes. “Go sweep.”

  Lying there, he could only think of the end of A Servant of the Empire. He could almost feel Shanna’s lap below his head, almost smell the faint musk of her skin, almost hear her whisper to him that she loved him, that he had to live.

  The happiest dream he could dream, lying on the rocks beside Marc Vilo’s pool, was of lying on the shit-stained cobbles of a narrow Ankhanan alley, bleeding to death.

  A shadow fell across his face and woke him up.

  His heart leaped, and he started upward, shading his eyes, breathless—

  Vilo stood over him, haloed by the afternoon sun. “I’m goin’ into Frisco. Come on, Hari, I’ll give you a lift home.”

  4

  VILO’S ROLLS LURCHED slightly on insertion into the slavelanes. The Businessman unbelted his pilot’s straps, walked back to the passenger lounge, and poured himself a long shot of Metaxa. He drained a third of it at a gulp and lowered himself onto the love seat that formed a corner with the sofa where Hari sat.

  “Hari, I want you to get back together with Shanna,” Vilo said.

  Long years of practice in dealing with the upcastes kept Hari stone-faced. He’d anticipated it and thought he was ready, but the sizzle in his chest told him he’d never be ready for this.

  It seemed like, somehow, she was all around him, like he couldn’t turn his head without seeing something that reminded him of her, like every word spoken in his presence was some kind of a jeering reminder that he had been tried and found wanting—that, in the end, he just wasn’t good enough for her.

  He stared out one of the broad windows that sided the Rolls, watching the snowcapped peaks of the Rocky Mountains flow past far below. “We’ve been over this,” he said tiredly.

  “Yes, we have. And I don’t want to have to talk about it again, understand? You patch things up with her, and I’m not kidding.”

  Hari shook his head wordlessly. He looked down at his hands, folded now between his knees like a sullen child’s, and with a sudden twist popped his knuckles hard enough to make his joints ache. “Can I have a drink?”

  “All right,” Vilo said. “Help yourself.”

  Hari went to the bar and kept his back to his Patron while he pretended to scan the liquor display. Finally he stabbed a code at random, and the dispenser whirred and hummed and burped up some evil-smelling crimson frozen fruit concoction—and eliminated Hari’s last delaying tactic. He sipped it and made a face.

  “Exactly what is your problem?” Vilo asked. “I think this is the third time I’ve told you, straight out and no dodging, that I want you two back together. So what’s the holdup?”

  Hari shook his head. “It’s not that simple.”

  “My ass. The only reason I let you marry her in the first place was she’s good for your image. And mine. I need to soften a little so I can cozy with Shermaya Dole; she’s a little leery of selling GFT to me.”

  The Doles were a Leisure family, but it pleased Shermaya to dabble in Investing, and occasionally in Business; she sponsored a number of Actors, including—most prominently—Shanna.

  Vilo took another long pull of his brandy and went on musingly. “Green Fields Technologies . . . Y’know, I’ve been trying to crack into agriculture for five years now, and GFT has some new synthetic something or other that’s supposed to let us recover the Kannebraska Desert for farming. Dole’s worried about the GFT Laborers and Artisans, though; I’ve almost got her convinced that I won’t postacquisition downsize at all. Silly bitch. Anyway, I’ve been talking to her about Shanna, and she says she won’t press for a reconciliation; she’s got this thing about letting you two work this shit out for yourselves. I say, screw that. Dole’s a twitch, and a softhearted one, too. She’s teetering. I get you back together with Shanna, it just might trip the wire on this deal. So do it.”

  “She left me, Biz’man,” Hari murmured, and was again surprised at the sudden twist of pain that followed saying this. It always surprised him, every time. “There’s not much I can do.”

  “Well, what’s up her goddamn ass then?” Vilo snapped. “There’s probably five billion women that’d sell both their tits and an ovary to spend one night with you! Jesus Christ!”

  “The nights weren’t the problem.”

  The Businessman chuckled crudely. “I’ll bet.”

  Hari stared down into the creamy crimson head of his drink. “She, ah . . . shit. I don’t know. I think she figured that I’d be a little less like Caine. It was—” He took a deep breath. “It was the Toa-Phelathon thing that started it, if you really want to know.”

  Vilo nodded. “I do know. That’s why I picked that cube for you to audit today.”

  Hari stiffened, and muscles at the corners of his jaw suddenly bulged.

  “She left you because you’re an asshole,” Vilo told him, jabbing his finger at Hari’s chest. “She left you because she couldn’t stand living with a homicidal shit-heel who treated her like dirt.”

  A red mist began to coalesce in Hari’s vision. “I never. . .” He clenched against his temper and said, “It wasn’t about how I treated her. I treated her like a queen.” The glass trembled in his hand and slopped a bit onto the Rolls’ carpet. The spreading stain looked like blood.

  Vilo followed his gaze and snorted. “You can clean that up later. Right now I’m not done talking to you.”

  He drained his glass and leaned forward, creases in his face deepening with his frown. “I know you’re a little wrought up, but you listen now. I want you back together with Shanna, and no fucking around on this. You do whatever it takes. If she thinks you’re too . . . whatever, you make goddamn sure that you’re less. You follow? I don’t care what it takes. You do it.”

  “Biz’man—” Hari began.

  “Don’t ‘Biz’man’ me, Michaelson. I give you a lot of fucking slack. I let you talk up, I let you play studman for the public, and I give you a lot of fucking money. You start paying back now. You ever don’t feel like it, you just remember that you’re not the only motherfucking Actor that fronts for VI.” Vilo sat back to let Hari think about it.

  Hari’s ears rang with the tension in his neck. Slowly, carefully, he set his glass down on the bar, watching his hand all the way. Then, just as slowly and carefully, he turned back to his Patron and said, in a voice held very soft and very calm, “Yes, Biz’man. All right.”

  5

  HARI STOOD BY the tall chain fence that surrounded the grass court behind the Abbey and watched Vilo lift the Rolls expertly from the lawn, its turbocells rotating toward flight position before it cleared the trees. He squinted against the backblast but held his position respectfully until the Rolls slid into the thick, rolling clouds over San Francisco, clouds that now reflected the bloody glow of the streetlights from the city below.

  He walked to the broad armorglass doors of the sunroom, put his hand on the scanner, and said, “Honey, I’m home.”

  The pause was as brief as money could make it, while the scanner read his palm and matched it against his voiceprint, then disengaged the security system and magnetically unlocked the door. Actuators hidden in the walls took up much of the work of opening the seventy-odd kilos of armorglass that made up the doors; they seemed as light as old-fashioned plexi.

  The lights came on as he entered the sunroom, and the Abbey said to him, “Hello,
Hari. You have fourteen messages.”

  The furniture in the sunroom was a beautifully matched set of antique bentwoods; Hari moved through the room uneasily, touching nothing. The drawing room lit up as he approached the door.

  He said, “Abbey: Query. Messages from Shanna?”

  “No, Hari. Shall I replay messages?” The voice followed him; the housecomp phased the sound from tiny speakers hidden in each wall to make the Abbey’s voice seem to speak softly from just behind Hari’s left shoulder. Shanna had found the placement creepy; she’d never liked to talk to the house, and she had pestered him to change it until they’d once nearly come to blows.

  Hari sighed. He stopped on the rose-veined marble floor of the front hall and looked up the wide empty sweep of the stairs that rose to the second-floor loggia. “Yeah, fine,” he said. “Abbey: Replay messages.”

  The nearest wallscreen—the one beside the service elevator behind the stairs—lit up. Hari couldn’t see the face as he turned away and climbed the stairs, but he knew the voice—the deferential whine of his lawyer. Even though they were of the same caste, both Professionals, his lawyer insisted on bootlicking; Entertainers have some theoretical social precedence over Attorneys.

  As Hari walked through the echoing halls of the Abbey, each wallscreen behind him flicked off and the next one ahead flicked on, all showing his lawyer’s sweating face as he explained that Hari’s petition to upcaste to Administration had been denied yet again; the lawyer believed that the Studio was blocking him, because Caine was still so popular that Hari’s retirement from Acting would represent a substantial fiscal burden et cetera et cetera.

  Hari went into the gym and stripped off his Professional’s suit and slacks. He didn’t have much interest in what his lawyer had to say; he hadn’t really expected to be allowed to upcaste, anyway. The lawyer’s only other news was that Hari’s request for an appeal of his father’s sedition sentence had been denied yet again.

  The balance of the messages were of even less interest, from his local Professional’s Tribune asking for his endorsement in the upcoming election, to eight different begging calls from various charitable organizations, interspersed with requests for appearances and interviews on a number of magazine netshows. He made a mental note to have the Abbey’s secretary subroutine upgraded to include a precis function; it would be painfully expensive—all AI functions were—but more than worth it, if it would allow him to avoid hearing their whining voices and seeing their eager, sincere, puppy-dog eyes.

  Much of his time at home he spent here, in the gym. The exercise rooms, and the track that circled the second floor of the Abbey, were the only parts of the Abbey that hadn’t been refurnished under Shanna’s direction. Everywhere else, Hari felt like a guest in his own empty house.

  Clad only in his shorts, Hari went to work on the gelbag without putting on gloves or foot guards. The harder it was hit, the stiffer the gelbag became, up to approximately the resistance of human bone, then it gave way with a sharp pop. Long before Hari had worked out the pressure of the frustrated anger that boiled behind his ribs, each blow he struck penetrated deep into the gel with a satisfying crack that sounded a lot like the snap of a human neck.

  His shoulders gradually began to loosen as his body warmed up—with a painful slowness that forcefully reminded him of the approach of his fortieth birthday. It only made him hit harder. He barely even saw the bag, after a while; shifting images of the Toa-Phelathon assassination played tag behind his eyes.

  That was one of Caine’s murders that stayed with him, hung around the back of his head like an upcaste guest: no matter how sick of him you get, you can’t make him leave.

  He couldn’t even blame the Studio for it: Caine had taken that job, accepted the Monasteries’ commission, even though the Studio had told Hari that they were leaning in favor of war between Ankhana and Lipke, Overworld wars being very good for business, very fertile ground for young Actors to make their reputations. Hari had gone before the Studio’s Scheduling Board to personally argue in favor of the assassination. He’d argued that the murder of the Prince-Regent would destabilize Ankhana’s federal feudalism; he’d argued that civil wars are bloodier and far more bitter than war between two empires on opposite sides of the Continental Divide could ever be.

  He’d never wanted to be proven so conclusively right.

  The bloodshed that had followed, as the various Dukes of the Cabinet jockeyed for power and slaughtered each others’ adherents, was appalling even by Overworld standards. The poor, bewildered little Child Queen Tel-Tamarantha, in regency for whom Toa-Phelathon had ruled, had survived her uncle by mere hours; none of the competing Dukes could take the risk that another would control her, and so the first casualty of the Succession War had been a beautiful, slightly dim-witted nine-year-old girl.

  Sometimes, now, as he slammed the gelbag with fist and elbow and shin, it was his own face he imagined on the bag’s surface, his own neck that he wanted to hear snap.

  A Servant of the Empire was unusual for a Caine Adventure, nearly unique. Despite his reputation, Caine rarely murdered his targets outright, in blood that cold; the audiences didn’t like it. They wanted more action, more risk—some few even liked a fair fight. The murder of the Prince-Regent was still a popular rental, even now—three years later—largely because of the extraordinary violence of Caine’s escape from the palace. Caine had killed four more men and one woman beyond the two guards, the master steward, and the Prince-Regent, a total of nine; he’d also nearly died himself, and the increasing desperation of his attempts to get out of the Colhari Palace while hanging on to consciousness added suspenseful spice.

  If he had been what he pretended to be, an Overworld native, he would have died that day. Even the state-of-the-art medical technology of the Studio infirmary had barely sufficed to save his life after his emergency transfer back to Earth. He’d stumbled into that alley in Ankhana’s Old Town as his vision faded to black, sure that the Studio would leave him there to bleed to death because he hadn’t made it back to his designated transfer point.

  The exception they’d made for him had been approved at the highest level; it had to be. No one below the Board of Governors, in Geneva, can pass down such decisions. Arturo Kollberg, the Chairman of the San Francisco Studio, had personally pleaded with them; when Studio CEO Turner added his voice to the plea, they had finally approved the emergency transfer that had saved his life.

  Emergency transfers are more rare than flawless diamonds. After all, where’s the suspense, if Actors can be pulled back to Earth anytime they get in a little trouble? Even stars of Caine’s magnitude get killed from time to time; it’s what keeps the first-handers coming back. You never know if the Adventure you’re passing up might be the Actor’s last. Among the Leisurefolk and Investor families that make up the bulk of the firsthand audience, there’s a whole bag of cool derived from having been on-line with a major star when he or she is violently killed—in real time, seeing what he sees, feeling the life drain from his body as though it’s your own.

  And that’s where he’d been, lying among rags and scraps of food, his blood pulsing through his fingers onto the shit-stained cobbles of an Ankhanan alley, when a shadow had fallen across his face and woke him up.

  He leaned his forehead against the impact-warmed poly of the gelbag and draped his arms around it, like an exhausted boxer going into a clinch to hold himself on his feet. The memory had him in its jaws, now. It shook him like a terrier shakes a rat, trying to crack his spine with the whiplash.

  That filthy little cul-de-sac, and the shadow on his face, opening his eyes to see the haloed silhouette above him . . .

  Shanna had stood over him, a full eclipse of breathless horror.

  She’d been in Ankhana on an unrelated Adventure of her own, as Pallas Ril; Ankhana before the Succession War had been a popular environment. The uproar at the palace, the shouts of panicked guards and blaring trumpets and the massive, desperate manhunt through the street
s of Old Town, had drawn Actors like flies to a three-day corpse, all hoping to inject a little excitement into their second-rate Adventures. Of the hundreds of men and women in Ankhana who’d been looking for him that morning, only Shanna had taken that narrow turn into the stinking shadows of the cul-de-sac where he lay, the head of Toa-Phelathon still held by a snarl of bloody hair in his fist.

  Only Shanna had knelt beside him, had cradled him on her lap, had stroked his hair as light had faded from his world.

  They had been married less than a year.

  He would have been better off if he had died that day. Instead, the emergency transfer had finally been approved, when it was almost too late, bringing them both into a reality far colder than a lonely death in a filthy alley.

  It brought them to Earth, and to each other.

  She had believed—when they met, as he courted her, even when they married—that Caine was only an act. She had believed that inside somewhere, within his heart of hearts, he was a fundamentally good and decent man. She had believed that no one could see in him what she saw, until that morning when she knelt with his head on her lap.

  When she looked down and saw the old man’s head on the cobbles like a discarded ball, ragged shreds of neck below the bloody ruins of its eye, she finally began to suspect that she was wrong about him, and the world was right.

  That wasn’t the end of their marriage, no: that would have been too easy. Neither of them were quitters. They hung on to each other like grim death, fighting and making up and fighting again, both of them pouring their guts into each other, no matter what the cost. It was Shanna, as usual, who had done the right thing, the smart thing, the practical thing: she had let him go.

  When she left, she took with her everything that had been right with his life.

  He pushed himself off the gelbag and whipped into a side kick that folded it in the middle like a car around a bridge pylon. He grabbed the bag and tried to rip it off its shock cords; he hammered at the bag with fists and stiffened fingers, elbows and knees, forearms and shins, toes and heels and forehead. But no matter how hard he hit, how long he worked, he couldn’t touch the anger. He couldn’t get at it, not this way. And the anger was only the shield of the pain.