Antagonist - Childe Cycle 11

by Gordon R Dickson; David W Wixon

  Henry MacLean had come here, to the Others' headquarters in Ecumeny, for the purpose of trying to keep Bleys alive until the boy—Henry still thought of Bleys as a boy, which was unfair, since Bleys was deeply involved in a man's sins—until the man who had grown out of the boy could shake off the hand of Satan that clutched at his heart.

  Henry was convinced that Satan did not yet own that heart—that inside himself, Bleys was still the boy Henry knew, who wanted desperately to do good. And so Henry had deliberately placed his own soul in jeopardy.

  Because Henry MacLean was now aiding and abetting doings he was highly suspicious of. Even though he did not know what Bleys' ultimate purpose was, Henry had heard things in Bleys' words, and seen things in Bleys' manipulations of other people, that made him sure he would not like that purpose.

  Yet there remained a chance that Bleys would see his danger, and turn back. And it was Henry's self-appointed task to keep Bleys alive until that time came.

  Another task, too, remained in the back of Henry's mind, one he feared he might have to undertake: he might have to kill Bleys himself, if it began to appear that the boy's soul was about to pass beyond redemption.

  Henry had left the farm on which he grew up, on which he raised his children and buried his wife, precisely for the purpose of protecting Bleys—Bleys, who might still be reachable. Bleys, who might be damned now but perhaps not irredeemably so.

  There were those in some of the more radical churches, Henry knew, who preached the doctrine of the blood atonement: the belief that one who had sinned grievously could be saved only by the shedding of his own blood—by those who cared enough to want to save him. Henry did not believe in that doctrine. He thought it smacked of blasphemy for men to claim to have the power to redeem lost souls.

  Henry had observed that doctrines such as the blood atonement always seemed to enslave their followers to the voice of their patriarch, and that those patriarchs were themselves usually corrupted by the power they wielded. Henry would have none of that; like most on the Friendly planets, he believed firmly in his right, and duty, to decide, for himself alone, what his path to his God must be.

  What he feared he might have to do did not fall within that blood-atonement doctrine, because he had no hope that by killing Bleys he could save the boy's damned soul. Rather, Henry's hope was that he might have a chance, at the point where Bleys was about to commit himself to damnation, to kill him before he took that last step over some invisible line in front of his soul.... Better to kill him when he was still, deep inside, that lost, vulnerable boy— if Henry waited too long, to the point where Bleys had crossed that line and become one with Satan's purposes, it would be too late for killing him to do any good.

  But Henry could not avoid wondering whether he was taking too much upon himself.. . perhaps, deep down, he was hoping for a miracle of some kind, that would take the burden from him—and

  now he shied away from that thought, recognizing the blasphemy of comparing himself, even if only implicitly, to the suffering Christ in the Garden the night before the crucifixion.

  He turned restlessly onto his side, to look, out the window beside his small bed. He had awakened long before Association's star would begin to gray the eastern sky, but the lights of the city made all of its night-time hours luminous, in an evil-seeming orange tone—a thing which still seemed strange to him, born and raised in the countryside, where they knew what black night was.

  He had lived his entire life as either a farmer or a killer, and he had found that both vocations required early risings. These hours were habit with him, and he was not comfortable with other ways, even though he now lived kilometers away from the old farm.

  He had left the window open, as he did every night, having found a way around the builders' intention to keep this building, the Others' main headquarters, sealed; he liked the feel of the air moving across his face, even if it stank of city. His view was dominated by the side of an office building across the wide street, since he had chosen a room on a low floor.

  Joshua was probably awake by now, too, he thought. His eldest son now worked the old farm, living there with his wife and sons. Henry smiled: there was another child on the way. He hoped it would be a little girl, this time. He had always regretted not having a daughter of his own, for all that he loved his two boys deeply; and at times he wondered how his life would have been altered with a girl in the house, in those years after Miriam died. Would Joshua and Will have come out differently?

  Not that he had anything to complain about. Joshua had become a fine, sturdy man, more levelheaded and calm than his years would suggest. And Will—Will had done his duty despite his fears; and for all Henry regretted he would never see the type of citizen and father Will would have become, he was proud of his boy.

  No, his man. Will had by his death earned recognition as an adult, and as one of God's own.

  As for Dahno and Bleys: how would they have been affected, if they had come to live with him in a house that had a girl, or even a young woman, in it?

  Henry remembered how it had been in those days when Miriam and he lived alone together, working on the shared dream of farm and home and family. His life had seemed warm and blessed, and he worked on the stony land with joy in his heart, knowing he would see her soon, bringing him out a lunch at noon or greeting him in the farmyard as he walked back in, driving the goats to be milked— Miriam would help with that, too; she was a far better milker than he was.

  Dahno had come to them when Miriam was still alive, but she had died a year after his arrival, shortly after Will was born. Henry wondered what effect her death might have had on the eleven-year-old newcomer. What did he make of it all?

  Henry had tried to make time for Dahno, too, as well as for Joshua, trying to fill part of the hole left by Miriam. He didn't know if he had managed it rightly.

  Joshua had turned out very well, though. And the report of the psychomedician who had analyzed the young Dahno on Cassida, where his mother was living at the time she sent the boy to Henry, had suggested that the boy's character was already set as in concrete long before Henry ever saw him.

  Henry could accept that as a fact; he had seen for himself the unbreakable shell the boy Dahno had developed.

  When Bleys had been sent to the farm, almost ten years after Dahno, his older half-brother had already left, to move into Ecu-meny and set up on his own.

  Bleys had been a very different kind of boy.

  Dahno had already been beyond Henry's ability to reach, but Henry had never felt that way about Bleys. There had always been a kind of vulnerability to the boy; not the kind of weakness most people had—in some ways, Bleys was stronger than anyone Henry had ever met—but a kind of yearning quality, as if he were someone who had been deprived of something important in life, and ached for it. . . .

  Dahno, Henry thought, might well be damned already—it was hard to tell, through the wonderful facade of cheer and charm he maintained for all comers. But Henry, for all that he felt that charm himself, knew it was in truth just a kind of armor, through which no one had ever penetrated.

  That woman has much to answer for, he thought, thinking of the two boys' mother. He had heard, with no surprise, that she had committed suicide, at about the time Bleys left the farm. He had never passed that information to the brothers; it was at best a second=hand report, of whose truth he could not be confident.

  The news had come in a note from Ezekiel, Henry's younger brother, reporting a story he said he had only heard ... warm, cheerful, irreligious Ezekiel, who had found the Friendly worlds too harsh, and fled—only to find himself somehow emotionally bound to the cold, hard renegade Exotic who had birthed first Dahno, then Bleys. Birthed them, only to warp them and throw them away.

  Henry had not heard from Ezekiel again.

  He blinked a couple of times now, and tried to turn his thoughts; until after a moment his eyes focused on the building across the street. At this hour that building was sidelit by the
orange city lights, which seemed their most evil when the night got very late and few were on the street. . . the lights of the building in which he lay gave off a whiter glow, but they seemed to be overwhelmed by the sickly orange ... who was in there?

  It struck him that, for all this building was armored against even the charges from power pistols, the distance across the street was short, and there were other weapons... .

  There were roving bands of rebels on both Friendly worlds, he knew. To some extent, that had always been so—a society built on religious discord was certain to produce those whose dissent would reach the stage of armed rebellion. But it seemed there were more of those bands—Commands, some called them—than ever in his lifetime.

  He had not, himself, ever joined such a Command—his time of war had been fulfilled in other ways. There had always been plenty of warfare to go around.

  Henry knew that the Commands, which had always been bitterly, violently opposed to the organized religious groups that wielded governmental power on the Friendly worlds, had seen clearly, some time ago, that the Others, that strange group organized by Dahno and now led by Bleys, were now the true controlling force on Association and on Harmony.

  Would that not make Bleys a target for the Commands?

  Henry was not certain assassination was in the Commands' book of tactics, but he did not want to make any assumptions.

  Those Commands were made up of hard, experienced warriors—it was not long since some of them had managed to sabotage the new Core Tap under construction on Harmony, blowing up a goodly part of its infrastructure ... what would such a quantity of explosives do to this building?

  This needed consideration.

  Henry rolled away from the window, not bothering with a light— the street lighting provided illumination, and in any case he was used to moving about in the darkness of early mornings. Many technological tricks had come into his life since he moved here to be with Bleys, but he was most comfortable making use of only those that were absolutely necessary.

  Now his hand moved unerringly to the controls for the in-house communications system, and punched the number for Carl Carlson, his second-in-command.

  "Carl," he said, "we're doing a drill. Wake section B of the new class and get them up—no breakfast—and ready to go to Siloam Park. Exercise Twenty-seven. Wake all the trainers and get the vans organized—we leave in fifteen minutes."

  The new recruits were joking and laughing, even engaging in a little horseplay, as they headed back to the parking lot after their training session. It was a normal reaction, Henry thought, for any group of healthy men and women just released from hard work, and not yet completely over the hormonal spikes that came with hard, and somewhat dangerous, training—which still showed in their flushed faces and perspiration-soaked hair.

  In the last few hours, without benefit of breakfast, these recruits had been run through a strenuous series of exercises designed to test both their fighting skills and their abilities to analyze situations; they all felt they had performed well today.

  None were raw youngsters; in fact, they were all blooded veterans out of a variety of conflicts. Most had fought in inter-Church skirmishes here on Association, or on Harmony, and all of them, including the few off-worlders among them, had graduated to larger conflicts, often as mercenaries.

  These were people, Henry knew, who had discovered they liked fighting—that ordinary life was too tame for senses honed on the emotional and hormonal rushes ignited by the proximity of immediate, violent death. Henry knew that because he, himself, had been one of those people—and still was, to his shame.

  Like most of the Friendlies among his recruits, he had entered the ranks of the killers innocently, believing he was doing God's will by defending his own Church, and his neighbors, against occasional raiding parties from rival Churches. But as he matured, and found himself involved in more and larger inter-Church wars, he had come to realize that somehow he had shifted over from fighting in defense to fighting because he found it exciting, even thrilling.

  He had known it was sinful; and yet each time he entered some new war—now as one of those called, in the Friendly culture, a Soldier of God—there had been some justification, some reason that could be argued made the killing necessary and pardonable, even righteous.

  However, the same intellectual abilities and temperamental self-control that had made of the young, uneducated Henry MacLean one of the best at his profession also made him able at times to look at himself with a critical eye, and by the time he neared his late twenties, a ten-year veteran of the wars, he was no longer able to let himself be overwhelmed by the unthinking enthusiasms of youth.

  So he had quit, returning to the farm that had been untended since his mother's death, during the sixth year of his time of war—and to the religion of his childhood. He had taken a wife and raised their two sons, as well as the two boys his younger brother, Ezekiel— whose sin took a completely different form—had asked him to take in ... that memory brought Henry's mind back to the problem he had been struggling with, earlier this morning.

  Ezekiel had never actually said that first Dahno and later Bleys were his own children, but Henry had raised the boys as if they were his own sons—as much, at any rate, as they would let him; for they had come to him nearly in their teen years, and much of what they were was already formed, beyond Henry's power to reshape.

  Henry suspected, though, that he had failed both boys.

  Dahno, almost ten years older than Bleys, and older than both of Henry's own sons, had come to the farm almost as a wild animal. The psychomedician's reports Ezekiel had sent indicated that the boy, molded by the way his mother had treated him, lived without regard for anyone else, driven by a need to find the freedom and independence he had been denied.

  Even those reports had only hinted at the boy's ability to make himself likable, even beloved, by anyone on whom he turned his attention. Henry himself had felt that charm, despite his familiarity with the reports, but it had not prevented him from trying to teach the boy, and to mold a conscience into him. However, Henry suspected—he could not know, for Dahno never let anyone inside— that he had failed in that task.

  Dahno, however, had been a vast help around the farm, with his extraordinary size and strength; and if he had not cared for Miriam, Henry's wife, and for Henry's firstborn son, Joshua—and then for Will—Henry had not been able to tell it.

  Bleys, when he arrived some years later, was a completely different kind of boy. He had lacked Dahno's ability to charm, but had been a serious, even humorless, boy, intent on finding his correct place in the world, in the universe. He had the ability to love, Henry thought; and Henry believed Bleys loved him and his two sons, as well as Dahno—and now, Toni. But Henry grieved for the boy, and now for the man.

  Because it had come to seem to Henry that Bleys, for all his desire to love, and to be right with the universe, was more lonely than anyone Henry had ever known. It was as if he observed the entire world, and all of humankind, from behind a translucent wall in his own head.

  Bleys had tried desperately to belong to Henry's world, but when his ultimate effort failed, he had gone off to Ecumeny to join his older brother's enterprise. He had gone on to become a philosopher and speaker known throughout the Younger Worlds.

  Bleys was now richer, and more powerful, than anyone Henry MacLean had ever known; but he was, deep inside—or so Henry believed—still alone, and still wanting to find his right place in the world—to find his God, or some substitute for the God he could not believe in.

  In all his time on the farm, Henry had been acutely aware of the pistol that lay buried in a field, a presence that silently accused him of the imperfection of his own faith. Yet he had preserved it against a day of need, and that day came when he saw clearly the direction of Bleys' life; and so Henry had dug up that pistol, cleaned it, and taken it into Bleys' service—but on his own mission.

  In his mission of protecting Bleys until he could sa
ve himself, Henry had created a team of warriors, to be bodyguards; for he knew that Bleys walked dangerous paths. Assassination was not uncommon on the Friendly worlds, and Henry had no reason to believe other worlds were any different.

  Those bodyguards, however, could never handle the alternative mission Henry had taken on himself.

  Henry firmly believed that inside the large, strikingly handsome man, known around the Worlds for his vast intellect and golden tongue, the earnest boy still lived—the boy who had come to Henry's farm wanting nothing more than to be loved and wanted. But the man, Henry feared, might be pursuing a course even the Exotics, that people the Friendlies called the Deniers of God, would find themselves appalled to contemplate.

  Henry remembered his thoughts of early morning—it was not hard; the thoughts came to him in many dark moments ... and yet, the boy was still in there.

  More than two dozen of the Soldiers Henry first recruited for Bleys had been lost in their escape from Newton. That planet, which deified scientific accomplishment, had proven to be ruled by people willing to inject Bleys with a substance that, Henry thought, could as easily be called a poison as anything else.

  Henry knew little about such things as genetics; Harmony and Association, the poorest of the Younger Worlds, were not able to provide more than a few of their people with much formal education. But Henry came to work for Bleys knowing his own limitations, and his new life had given him facilities and time never before available to him—facilities and time he had tried to use wisely. And he was adept at picking up information just by being around people like Bleys and those he associated with.