The 97th Step

by Steve Perry

  Pen went over the plan for the fourth and final time.

  He dialed the holoprojic image to full brightness and gestured at the three-dimensional overhead image of the warehouse.

  "All right, here we go again. Snake, where is your watch position?"

  The fat man pointed to a clump of bushes a hundred meters away from the south wall of the building.

  "Right. You have your transceiver?"

  "Here." He waved the coin-sized earpiece.

  "Fire, you and Blade are where?"

  The woman stuck her finger into the image next to the east wall.

  "Fine. And I'll lay the charge here." Pen pointed. "We retreat, and wait for the bang, half an hour later.

  Any questions?"

  There were none.

  "Good. The rain is supposed to start in about twenty minutes. Get dressed."

  The four of them slipped one-way osmotic coveralls over their clothes. The dead-black cloth made no sound as they dressed. Each of them blackened his or her face with waterproof makeup. Around his waist, Pen strapped the pouch containing the blasting putty. He felt a little nervous, but not much. The guards would huddle under the porch roof away from the rain on the opposite end of the building from the blast. The explosion itself would wreck half the building and the rain would ruin a good part of the contents. Nobody would get hurt, and the local group would feel the sense of power that came from an active strike against the Confederation. Grist for the revolutionary mill.

  Another gnat bite, another pinprick. For a second, Pen considered calling it off. The stabs of the last twenty years had all healed before leaking enough blood to cause any real damage. But this group couldn't appreciate that. They were the first to discover the wheel, the first to feel the heat of homemade fire. At least that's what they thought. They wanted their chance.

  "All right. Soon as the storm starts, we move out."

  The warm rain was punctuated by occasional flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder.

  Pen counted seconds. The main force of the storm's pod was several kilometers away, but it was coming down hard enough here. He lay prone under what looked like an azalea bush, feeling the water run down his neck between his cap and coverall.

  Snake's voice erupted in his ear. "Okay, I'm set."

  Pen adjusted the transceiver's volume downward—it wouldn't do to go deaf—and said, "Right. We're going."

  A yellow cone of light pooled under the porch overhang thirty meters away, on the end of the building.

  Four troopers, wearing issue raingear, stood under the shelter laughing and talking. He didn't need to worry about them venturing out into the weather.

  Pen waved, and Fire scrambled across the dark and muddy ground, reaching her position in a few seconds. After a beat Blade followed.

  So far, so good.

  Pen crawled toward his target. It was slushy going, but relatively flat ground. Whenever lightning strobed, he froze, until he was around the corner and out of the line-of-sight of the guard quad. Then he rose into a half crouch and hurried to the prefab plastic wall. He pulled the putty from his pouch and pressed it against the line of rivets that indicated a bracing beam on the other side of the wall. The water didn't affect its adhesion. Quickly, he found the timer, clicked it on, and stuck it into the putty. Thirty minutes, and… mark.

  He grinned. There was enough adrenaline circulating so he felt a little wired. Things were moving along like a fine electronic atom separator—

  The blast of a .177 Parker on full auto killed that thought. Right behind it came Snake's scream, audible without the ear transceiver Pen wore: "Oh, shit!"

  Pen shoved away from the wall, ran to the corner, and dived, coming up in a roll, slinging mud.

  Lightning flashed, and in the second of brightness, Pen took in the scene. Two of the troopers lay sprawled in the mud, half out of the light; the third and fourth members of the quad were firing into the rainy night. Facing the soldiers, his back to Pen, stood Blade. He held some kind of handgun—the weapon coughed, and Pen knew it to be a steel pellet high-pop air pistol, deadly at close range.

  The lightning blinked out, and Pen ran toward Blade, who in turn was running toward the troopers. Was he fucking crazy?

  Those were explosive slugs they were shooting! A single hit would turn half the boy into mush!

  Another strobe flashed. Pen saw that the third trooper was down, and the fourth was still waving his carbine back and forth. Blade continued sprinting straight at the last trooper. And Fire? She was down, fallen in that rubbery boneless posture that means no muscle tone remains. Dead.

  Pen ran faster as the light died. He slipped and skidded in the mire, but kept his footing, calling on his years of movement training. He was very nearly skiing over the mud.

  The next lightning flash happened just in time to show Blade taking the impact of several explosive bullets.

  The boy spun, the air pistol flying toward Pen, not three meters back. Without thinking, Pen caught the weapon, shifted his grip, and raised it. His weapon instinct took him and the gun centered on the last soldier, just as the man's carbine ran dry. The action whined against the empty magazine.

  Pen hurdled Blade's body—no doubt that he was dead, too—and slid to a halt two meters away from the trooper. The man crouched in the gleam of the porch light, scrabbling at his belt for another magazine.

  He looked up and saw Pen within the cone of light, the air pistol aimed at his heart.

  As in a dream. Pen saw the man's face. No. Not a man. No more than a boy, like Blade had been. Fear held the young soldier in an icy grip, his eyes were wide, his mouth open in a wordless scream.

  Shoot him! yelled Pen's inner voice. Kill him!

  "Please, sir!" the soldier said. He dropped the carbine and spread his arms.

  He killed Blade and Fire! Shoot! You can't miss! Kill him! He's the enemy! He's the fucking Confed!

  Pen's finger tightened on the trigger. Another two grams of pressure was all it would take, a hair more—

  "Oh, God, sir, please, please don't!"

  It's a war, isn't it? Revolutions demand sacrifices. There were already three like him down and dead.

  What would one more matter?

  Do it! Do it! Shoot! Shoot! Hurry! Help will be coming! Kill him kill him. killkillkillkillkill-!

  The soldier dropped to his knees, hands clasped as if in prayer. A boy, knowing he was about to die.

  Yes!

  No.

  Pen snapped his hand to one side, the action enough to fire the pistol. The pellet flew half a meter wide.

  The soldier looked up.

  "No, son. Not today. Not by my hand."

  The soldier was hyperventilating, tears streaming down his face. He tried to speak, couldn't, then fainted.

  Pen tossed the pistol away, into the rainy darkness. It hit a puddle, splashing. He turned away from the terrified soldier and walked into the night. He couldn't do it. This was no faceless enemy, it was a boy who didn't want to die. He had his answer then, about how ruthless he could be.

  Pen's revolution was over.

  Thirty-Six

  ODD HOW A man's life changed.

  In the dark and rain of last night, Pen had been a revolutionary. Tired but still playing the game, he had gone to destroy a building. Instead he had destroyed an illusion. Another piece of one, anyway.

  Ahead, the line of people moved into the orbital shuttle. A pair of Confed troopers stood behind a quad leader, watching the passengers. Occasionally, they stopped a man or woman and had words with them.

  The quad leader, a Sub-Lojt, kept nervously touching the butt of his bolstered sidearm as he scanned the incoming line. The trooper was afraid. Pen realized. The beast had felt the sting, only for Pen, at least, it was too late.

  Pen glanced at the man's gun. Until last night, he had kept his feelings about guns suppressed. He had told himself he was not attracted to them, that he did not feel the call, but he had been fooling himself.


  No more. Last night, the gun had sung to him again, a siren calling him to a doom no less certain than the boy Blade had brought upon himself. In the heat of the moment, he could have easily killed the soldier, it was no more than a single contraction of a finger. The gun had called, but its price was too high. He would have won the battle, but lost his soul.

  The truth was, he was in control of himself, and that was the most important thing of all. He had a choice, and he had chosen to override the compulsion. What had Von told him, so long ago? He might not be able to control what he felt or thought, but he could control what he did. That was the important thing, that was the crux of free will. Last night, he had done the right thing, and it didn't matter what he had felt—

  "Your pardon, citizen."

  Pen realized he was facing the quad leader. "Yes?"

  "When did you book your flight offworld?"

  "Early last month. Why?"

  "Your name?"

  "Pen."

  The quad leader nodded at one of the men behind him, who punched something into a modem. After a few seconds, the soldier glanced up from the device's screen. "Three weeks ago, yesterday," the man said. "A religious discount. He's some kind of holy man."

  The quad leader flashed a nervous, almost relieved smile. "Thank you for your time, citizen. You may move on."

  He should be curious, Pen knew. "What's the problem, officer?"

  The quad leader had already dismissed the robed figure from his attention, it seemed, and was busy scanning the next passengers. To Pen, he said, "Confederation business, reverend. Nothing to concern yourself over."

  Pen moved on. Anyone who had booked a flight immediately before or after the shooting of three troopers last night would be answering harder questions, especially if they had somehow gotten past the prescreening in the main port complex. Fortunately, Pen always had a flight booked to somewhere a month in advance, just in case. It was easy to cancel or simply not show and pay the fare. Besides, the Confed had a witness—and the face the soldier would remember until his dying day was not the one Pen wore under the shroud. They weren't looking for a Sibling.

  He boarded the shuttle, and found his way to his seat. The adjacent seats were empty, and Pen settled into his form-chair and looked at the seat's holoproj. The exterior pickups showed the three soldiers, watching the last of the passengers enter the craft.

  Last night, seeing the soldier afraid, hearing him beg for his life, it had come to Pen with the force of a boot in the gut.

  With the bodies of five humans dead in the rain and mud around him. Pen had known. This was not his path.

  This was not his path.

  He had been on it more than two decades, and it was an expensive lesson to find it out after that long, but it was undeniable. He was not the man to face the Confed and wage war. It was not in him to kill another man, ever again.

  It had been a soul-thumping jolt. More than twenty years of his life had been spent moving in the wrong direction. The cause might be just, but he was not the man to preach it. He lacked the charisma to keep the fires burning. Yes, the Confed was intrinsically evil, but it was not so apparently so that people would risk imprisonment or death to topple it—at least not at Pen's urgings. It would take someone with more zeal than his, someone who could do whatever was necessary, no matter what the cost.

  Somebody who could break eggs while smiling.

  There was more. Standing there in the downpour. Pen had also understood that in making the mistakes he had made, he had learned a major thing about himself. What Moon had tried to tell him. What Von had tried to teach him. What had been there all along: he did not need anyone else to be whole. He didn't need a cause. He really was okay alone. More, until he realized that, he would never have anything to offer anybody else. Until he knew who he was, how could he give of himself to another person or some monumental effort? Knowing that he did not know was the first step. Not being attached to the desire to know was the second step.

  There it was, simple and yet glorious. Not the cosmic lightning, but maybe a close enough passage of it for him to feel a static electric harmonic. He did not have to have all the answers. Hell, he didn't have to have any of them. All he could do was the best he could. Nothing else much mattered worth a damn.

  So there it was. Whatever skill or luck or magic was needed to topple the Confed, he did not have it.

  Surprisingly, the thought did not bring with it disappointment; to the contrary, it freed him. So, he had picked the wrong path. It had cost him twenty years, and was an expensive mistake, but that was better than wasting his entire life on it. Better to learn slow than not at all.

  It had given him knowledge. Maybe it had been by the process of elimination—he'd had to learn all kinds of things he was not—but some people never understood. In that tiny fraction of time, holding life and death in his hand over that soldier, having that power, something came through, and for the first time in his life, he felt complete within himself. The words he had first heard so many years past came to him:

  "When you know who you are, you know what to do."

  My, my. Aren't we being philosophical?

  Yes. Tomorrow, he might be a different man, beset with different feelings and thoughts. That was to be expected. People changed, constantly, and certainty might well be the most ephemeral emotion of all, but there and then, in that moment, he had known.

  He laughed softly to himself, remembering the picture that had hung on the wall of Von's zendo, on Koji.

  The leaping man. He knew now why the man had done it. Because he had to or he needed to or he wanted to. That was reason enough. Whether he had made the jump successfully, how he had gotten down, those things weren't important. There was a way the man must have known who he was, to take that risk. Even if he had been a fool, he had known. Just as Pen now knew. Damn. He felt good, as good as he had ever felt. He knew who he was, for now, at least, and so he knew what to do.

  He was going back to Earth. To Manus Island. To Moon.

  He had not found God, but he had found something much more important.

  He had found himself.

  Thirty-Seven

  COMING IN FROM orbit, the clouds were broken up enough so that he could actually see Manus Island. It looked like he remembered: a fish with a hooked nose, small turds dribbling from its rear.

  Had it really been more than twenty years? How fast the time had gone. It seemed quick, but it also seemed a lifetime; he could hold both views easily.

  When he stepped off the local shuttle into the tropical summer at the port on Manus, a shrouded figure stood there waiting for him. She could just as easily have been naked, for he would have recognized her through a mound of kawa.

  "Hello, Pen."

  "Hello, Moon."

  He couldn't say who moved first, but a moment later, they were hugging each other tightly.

  "Welcome home," she said. Her voice broke, and he very nearly started crying. The years dropped away, and she felt the same in his arms as she had the last time they had embraced.

  Eons later, he pulled back and smiled at her. Arms around each other's waists, they walked slowly toward a waiting ground car.

  "I don't have to walk this time?"

  "Well, it's not every day a legend returns. Some of the younger sibs wanted to stage a welcome at the port, no doubt carrying you back to the compound on their shoulders."

  "They must be thinking of somebody else."

  "You know students. They're impressed by almost anything. No one has ever walked more of the pattern on their first try than you did."

  "A bunch of slow learners."

  She hugged him to her tighter. "I'm glad to see you," she said. "You can't know how glad."

  "Yes, I can. I was afraid you might have found someone else."

  "There have been others. I have had lovers, made friends, I haven't been sitting around pining or anything.

  But I think we each only get one soulmate."

  He nodded. "I
think you're right." He smiled through his shroud, seeing her do the same beneath her own covering. "I think I found what I was looking for."

  "I know you did."

  They reached the car. "Oh?" he asked. "How so?"

  "I knew you wouldn't come back until you had."

  "You always were sure of yourself."

  "Not really. I've missed you."

  "And I have missed you, Moon."

  Moon talked as she drove. "Not much has changed. We've put a new coat of everlast on here and there.

  Some of the buildings have recent additions. I told you a lot of it in my letters."

  "The bonsai still growing?"

  "Still are. And the wine cellar has been expanded."

  "I'm still not sure I've learned the lesson of patience you tried to teach me doing those chores."

  "You've learned something. There's a solidity in you that wasn't there before."

  He laughed. "It only took a score of years for me to figure it out. I wonder what the new students would think about that, speaking of slow learners."

  "Better late than never."

  He reached over and put his hand on her leg just above the knee and massaged her gently. When he spoke, the essence of twenty years was in his voice. All of them boiled down into one simple statement:

  "That's what I found out—better late than never."

  The place hadn't changed all that much. Some of the shrubbery was taller and thicker, some of the buildings a different hue than he recalled, and there were some additions. The feel of the compound was the same. Except for the lack of insects. He said something about it to Moon.

  "A project from the biolab," she said. "A few years ago, one of the more creative students got the idea to breed mules for most of the bug pests native to the island. Souped-up their pheromones so the local females would breed with them exclusively. He left the bees and beetles and ants alone. A year later, we shut down the repellors, except for the weather. Every now and then, somebody cranks out a new lot of sterile bugs and turns 'em loose. It seems to be working."

  Thunder rumbled in the distance as they pulled into the fenced compound. Moon waved at the gate guard.