The Heirs of Babylon

by Glen Cook

  “I wasn’t planning anything, Kurt. Just curious, that’s all.”

  Hippke departed. Kurt strolled aft, leaned against the empty depth-charge rack. His head swirled with confused thoughts about Martin Fitzhugh, Beck and his old master, Gregor and Erich, and Karen. Karen. She often lurked on the borders of his mind. Had she reached Telemark? How was her pregnancy coming?

  Sea Detail was piped again after dinner. In a better mental state than earlier, Kurt went to his station. The last ships to seaward were getting under way. Jager soon cast off her mooring buoy, slowly turned toward the sea. Kurt’s heart beat rapidly. This time a Meeting, not a Gathering, was her goal.

  “She feels like a new ship,” said Gregor, leaning on the chart table beside Kurt. He now seemed under no strain.

  “Uhm. The new screw. The helmsmen’ll be happy. I tried steering on the way down. That was work.”

  “Where’s that station guide? Captain’ll want it soon.” From the drawer beneath the table Kurt took a fleet-formation diagram High Command had sent days earlier. He and Gregor examined it for perhaps the twentieth time, making certain of Jager’s station. “This should be Combat’s problem,” Kurt grumbled.

  “So fix the radars, you don’t want to do it,” Gregor growled back. “Where’s the stadimeter?”

  “You figure it out yet?”

  “I think so,” Lindemann replied. “I’ve practiced enough. You try. Get me the distance to that collier....”

  The hours passed, the sun set, and ships still milled about, trying to find their stations. Jager had assumed her own with little difficulty, but others... well, some crews knew nothing about formations. All was confusion. Jager had several near misses.

  The fleet began moving eastward the following day, and spent the next ten sailing to Malta, where Italian ships were waiting.

  On the fourth morning the barometer plummeted. By the end of the watch, Jager was taking white water over her bow. Great spumes of foam heaved into the air as the shuddering vessel dug her nose into the seas. The howling wind grew steadily stronger. Rain fell in angry sheets.

  The evening watch was worse. The wind blew a whole gale, force ten, and promised more. The waves ran as tall as Jager’s bridge. She took green water over the bow. Her stern lifted clear as she crossed each wave, staggering while her propellers cut nothing but air. Little could be seen through the haze and driven spray. A small carrier on the starboard quarter took water on her flight deck. A corvette on the port beam disappeared at times, as if spending part of her life underwater. And the wind screamed.

  Watertight doors-and windows soon proved they were not. Smashing waves, driven by force-eleven winds, pushed fingers through the seals, gradually soaked interior decks and passageways. Salt encrusted the feet of equipment, though sailors labored to keep the water away.

  The rolls were murderous, as much as sixty degrees, so far over the yards almost diddled the crests of waves. Men had to tie themselves into bed. There were injuries, bruises, a broken arm, and a fatality when a man fell from a catwalk in the forward fireroom.

  Desperately clinging to a handhold on the overhead, during the storm’s third night, Hans asked, “Wonder how Obermeyer’s taking this?”

  Kurt felt compassion for the man. He was sick himself. “Go put him out of his misery.”

  “Aw. Tummy troubles? Don’t worry about Obermeyer. He’ll probably commit suicide.”

  Distressed though he was, Kurt still caught the seething jealousy beneath Hans’s words — he probably hoped Obermeyer would suicide. Then von Lappus could no longer deny him a commission — Hans seemed to want that brass terribly bad.

  “Would you for crissakes shut up!” someone moaned. “Mind your helm. You don’t have time to worry about your stomach,” Hans growled.

  There was in Hans’s recent words a veiled gloating, a secret cry of victory. Kurt had heard it before, each time Wiedermann got the better of him. This for Hans: it was never open or taunting, just a puffing of the chest and a heavier charge to his words.

  Hans, Hans, Hans. Hans was a lifelong mystery to Kurt, more unfathomable than Karen, seldom more than half-real. Like all children, he had at times been exuberant or sulky, ambitious or lethargic, any of a hundred pairs of opposites. But in Hans there had also been an unchildlike reserve, an almost adult lack of imagination, a fondness for conformity and the established order. His father’s presence, power, and person had hung over him like a cloud, molding him strangely.

  Karl Wiedermann, of an authoritarian, almost monastic profession, was a stricter disciplinarian in his home than in his work. After Hans’s mother died (he and Kurt had been four at the time), Karl rapidly became a tyrant of narrow limits, thunderous at home, almost too lenient with Kiel’s leaders. While the High Command grip gradually eased on the Littoral, Karl’s tightened on Hans (Kurt suspected the man of secretly blaming his son for his wife’s death), subjecting him to growing terror.

  At the age of eight, during one of their periodic spells of friendship (Otto had the measles and Kurt could find no other playmate), Kurt went with Hans to his father’s shop. Karl was all smiles for a time, attentive, ready with snacks, instructive when the boys asked any of their hundred questions concerning the furniture maker’s art. Then the Wiedermann cat came dashing through. Kurt seized its upright tail (he had been crueler then), eliciting a yowl. Hans shoved him to stop the torture. Kurt shoved back, boy words of anger were exchanged, Hans swung. Kurt countered and gave him a bloody nose. Hans retreated.

  Then Karl stepped in, belt in hand. Kurt fled, pursued by Hans’s howls and Karl’s bellows about cowardice.

  Perhaps Hans does have good reason to dislike me, Kurt thought. Every time we grew friendly, I eventually cost him a whipping. Maybe it’s in his blood now: if we’re friendly long, he’ll suffer.

  A groan jerked his attention from his thoughts One of the Political Office signalmen squatted in a corner, clung desperately to the bulkhead. Eyes closed, he muttered over and over in English, “Oh, God, make it stop!”

  It seemed the storm would never end. The four days of its duration were individual eternities. But the fifth day was like entering Paradise. The height of the waves dropped to six meters, the wind to thirty knots, and the rolls to reasonable angles.

  The “man overboard!” cry reached the bridge that evening, carried by Gregor, who had gone below for coffee. Beck was the victim. Kurt looked at Hans, Hans at another man, and so forth. No one believed it an accident.

  Von Lappus arrived moments later, assumed the conn. “Which side?” he asked.

  “Port side, sir,” Lindemann replied.

  The Captain ordered a turn to port. The destroyer rolled terribly as she ran parallel to the seas. They searched till dark, till even Beck’s underlings were satisfied he was forever lost. As Kurt had suspected, the three now proved capable of speaking German.

  The search was a grand performance. Kurt thought it a cynical sham (yet every time Beck’s name crossed his mind, he felt relief because he would not now have to give the man an answer about joining High Command). He saw, in the faces of his officers during unguarded moments, that no one cared about Beck, that they hoped he would not be found.

  He was not, so some were happy. Kurt was not. He knew Beck a little, knew he was real, and could not rejoice in his destruction. Nor were the three young Political Officers, who were suddenly very much on their own.

  There was a three-day halt at Malta while the warships refueled. During the stay, Jager suffered examinations and investigations. Political Officers from Purpose asked apparently endless questions, yet Jager finally earned a clean bill — but, Kurt suspected, only because several ships had lost men overboard, and Beck had been none too strong.

  No new Political Officer was assigned. That Kurt found curious. There must be a devious reason. Would the Political Office play Jager like a fish, making certain the hook was well set before she was reeled in?

  He cornered Hippke during the pause at Malta, after
trying to catch him for days. Erich had been avoiding him since Beck’s disappearance, speaking only when he relieved the watch, when no weighty matters could be discussed.

  “Erich, did you have anything to do with Beck?” Kurt snapped, surprising himself with his own intensity. Hippke would not meet his eyes. Nervously, he looked to see if they were watched. “I was afraid you’d think that after the way I talked. No, I didn’t do it. Really. I swear. Funny thing is, though, nobody knows who did. Far as I know, it really was an accident.”

  Kurt had to be satisfied with that. Hippke refused to discuss it further. His apparent sincerity in denying responsibility might have been faked, but Kurt came to a similar conclusion once he had snooped around. Everyone thought Beck had been pushed, but no one knew by whom. This death was a mystery deep as Otto’s.

  The possibilities frightened Kurt. Was it really coincidence? Accident fulfilling threat? But it did not have the feeling of accident, no more than the attack in Norway.

  Someone had to be responsible.

  Kurt suffered attacks of nervousness, compounded by inactivity. He felt compassion for Haber, whose state was now pathetic. To fight it, he began reading the forbidden book from his safe.

  XI

  MALTA to Port Said was uneventful. Kurt spent his time puzzling out the meaning of the first chapter of Ritual War. After a day wrestling with words not in his vocabulary, he decided to translate the book on paper. Good for killing time, if nothing else, and time he would have, for the Suez Canal was closed, silted up since the last Meeting.

  Ten days out of Malta, lager dropped anchor in Lake Manzala. Von Lappus announced that most of the crew would go ashore to help clear the canal. With some fast verbal footwork, Kurt convinced Gregor that Jager could not manage without him — their being related may have helped. And there was the translation, which had become important to him. With his dictionary to explain unfamiliar and technical terms, the book soon shook the roots of his world. As the title implied, it told of the beginnings of the War.

  He had not gotten far yet, but black hints had appeared like bloodstains on a neolithic altar, hints that, unless the book was one monstrous lie, everything he knew of the past two and a half centuries was purest invented history. He had to continue.

  Ritual War claimed to have been written during the first two decades of the War, and had reached the public in 2008. It had become, according to the preface, an immediate international bestseller, popular throughout a savaged world. And possession soon became a crime. Production went underground. Kurt’s edition was of the twenty-fourth printing of the second revision, undated, with a later supplementary pamphlet tucked in behind the last page.

  Briefly, the first chapter explored the ecologicaleconomic crisis which had set the stage for the War. The pollution problems of the seventh and eighth decades of the twentieth century had snowballed and roared into the mid-ninth decade with the fury of an avalanche as wastes, and the new microbiology evolved within them, poisoned and destroyed vast food resources. Worldwide panic and depression, ignoring ideologies, economic controls, and the efforts of man in general, followed a year of almost universal cereal-crops failures. The capitalist house of paper had fallen with a muted crump The interpreters of Marx had fled Moscow a step ahead of angry workers and peasants, their carpetbags filled with yards of worthless rubles.

  The book scarce mentioned human suffering, assuming the reader had endured the experiences of the time. Kurt obtained none of the misery of 1986 and 1987. He did not see the starving billions, the riots, the burning cities, the dead mounded in Western streets, the cannibalism that swept the non-Hindu east. He knew not the desperation that made men murder for a loaf or dried fish. He felt none of the frantic dismay of a man who, early on, found his entire life’s savings would not buy a tin of cat food. He could not comprehend the unbalanced ecological equation initiating the collapse. The numbers, the statistics were meaningless. He could not encompass their vastness.

  There is a way to channel the frustrations of a people, a way of creating work and concerted effort for a common end — though then it was certain to worsen the already disastrous ecological situation —

  War.

  (Like a drumbeat, its sound, like a trumpet call, like the tramp of marching men — War! War! Krieg Guerre A harsh, short word in any tongue.)

  Kurt could not imagine the desperation behind the Geneva Accord of 1987. He was appalled by the author’s calm, passionless picture of government heads agreeing to a vast but limited war of recovery, by economists casually establishing kill-quotas and consumption rates of megadeaths per year.

  Something had happened to upset the delicate balance of the engineering war. Something would make the war the War. The author would explain in a chapter entitled “The Nuclear Exchange.”

  This much Kurt learned by Lake Manzala, and, although horrified, he had to leam more. The macabre, unemotional, committee-report style of the book, dreadful in itself, drew him on — he knew the author must explode sometime. He felt like a vulture, perched and waiting for that explosion.

  Kurt stood on the port wing two days after reaching Egypt, with the feelings of a condemned man as the gibbet-trap falls away beneath him. Now he knew why Fitzhugh had given him the book. The old man meant him to plunge into Gregor’s movement in reaction to that disaster of the past — a disaster still in progress. And he was tempted. He had a decision to make. What to do. Drift with the tide, as he had all his life? Or join something probably as wicked as what was?

  And, as he told himself he would do the latter, he knew he lied. He would always be a follower, a drifter with the flood. He did riot like it. It meant he was a nothing. What had Gregor said? “You take no stands.” But — what was wrong with the middle-of-the-road stand?

  “Hey, Kurt. What’s the matter? You really look down.”

  “I don’t know, Hans. Just wondering why I’m here — God, the heat! — and how Karen’s getting on. Thinking about the baby....”

  “Suppose we change the subject?”

  Kurt nodded slowly. So. Hans still had not gotten over his loss. Best humor him. Their enmity was fading. No sense tempting it.

  His mind slipped off on a tangent, forgetting the present Hans in a question about Hans of the past. Why had Karen become engaged to him? It was a question he had never dared probe deeply, for fear of the answer. Karen had not had much use for Wiedermann before Kurt had gone to sea with the Danes — had, indeed, been quite cruel to him as a child. Why had she changed her mind?

  These questions, long suppressed, burst upon him in full bloom, and from his subconscious — which worried such things whether he willed it or no — welled glimmerings of answers. Karen. Telemark. Brindled Saxon. Beck saying the underground had unusually good information on Jager’s plans. Various other clues too subtle to label. Given the assumption that Karen was associated with the underground, Kurt could understand her engagement. She had wanted to recruit a Political Office family member for the resistance. And Hans, even without Karen for incentive, had motives for joining that movement. What better way to avenge himself on a cruel father?

  Yes, that would answer several disquieting questions — but raised more, equally unsettling. Why had Karen married him if for political reasons once, why not twice? All his relatives were associated with the underground — now he was lonely, solitary between tribes. Opposite Karen stood shadowed Marquis, another new question. For Kurt had gradually come to suspect Hans, because of his family background, of being that masked unknown. But, by labeling Hans Brindled Saxon, his emotions left him with a less likely suspect (assuming Marquis had killed Otto, for which he had none but emotional evidence): Haber.

  It was all so confusing!

  Hans was staring at him strangely. He must get back to the world, say something, anything. “Ho. w long will we be here?”

  “A long time. The ships that were already here — the Greeks, Turks, and Ukrainians — have been working for months, and they haven’t gotten
much done. I heard about four months to reach Great Bitter Lake, and six more to Port Suez.”

  Kurt groaned. “Damn, Hans, I wish I’d jumped ship in Norway. Or not shown up the morning we left.”

  “Careful, Kurt. These Political Officers are kids, but they can still get you hung. There’s too much loose talk now.”

  “I know. I’ve had to warn some of my men.”

  “There’s one of yours I’ve warned myself, but he won’t listen. Hippke.”

  “Erich? Again? I’ll kick his head in....” He suddenly had a strong impression that Hans was probing for something. His attitude toward what Erich had been saying? “You people made a wrong choice in picking up Hippke.” He watched for a reaction, saw none.

  “Oh, he hasn’t done anything open. Yet. It’s his attitude. He’s, insolent. Nothing that’ll get him hung, but enough to keep them watching, hoping he will do something. And he will, if he thinks he can get away with it. I can’t get through to him. Will you try?”

  Kurt looked at Hans from the comer of his eye. He could picture the Boatswain being this concerned for someone else only if a threat to himself were involved — which supported his earlier notion about Hans being the Brindled Saxon. “Ill talk to him. Ah! There he is now, heading aft. Erich!”

  Kurt walked to the rear of the wing, to the ladder leading down to the torpedo deck. Hippke was about to start up. “Stay there, Erich.” He went down. “Come over here.” They went to the port torpedo tube and sat. “Erich, you’ve got to be more careful.”

  “What? Why?” He seemed honestly mystified.

  “I hear our Political Officers are watching you pretty close. So be more careful, eh?”

  “What’d I do?” Defensive.

  “It’s the way you act toward them. You keep antagonizing them, they’ll keep watching. And, sooner or later,