The Worshippers and the Way

by Hugh Cook

  "Wah!" he said.

  He had landed so clumsily that he had just about wrecked one of his ankles. The spaceway heroes did it so much more neatly on the entertainments screened by the Eye of Delusion. But this was no entertainment. This was combat training, in which one could get very severely hurt.

  How bad was it?

  Lupus took an experimental step.

  Not so bad, but even so, he was minded to abort the training sequence right then and there.

  But he had his pride. He was of the Free Corps, and thus he believed in the supremacy of the mind over the body. So, though he grimaced with the pain, he forced himself to walk across the alien desert to the charred wreckage of the enemy he had shot down. Besides, he really did want to see. He always inspected the wreckage if it was at all possible. He wanted proof positive of his glory, and liked it best if there were bodies in the wreck: charred corpses with the skin sloughed off and the lips stretched back in a death-rictus.

  Today there was indeed a corpse in the wreckage, but it was too badly burnt to be distinguishable as human. Lupus sniffed. The transient smell of hashish was gone. Instead, he smelt desert dust, melted synthetics, charred hair. He indulged himself in a flight of imagination, pretending that the corpse which lay there at his mercy was the dead flesh of the Frangoni warrior Asodo Hatch.

  For the last two years, Lupus had lived with a certain fear of the Frangoni warrior, since it had for that long been clear that ultimately Lupus would have to fight Hatch for the instructorship of the Combat College. While Lupus had youth on his side, Hatch had the battleground training in the fact-of-the-flesh. Asodo Hatch had killed men face to face, eye to eye, blade to blade, and that made him an object of jealous awe to Lupus Lon Oliver.

  The Frangoni warrior Asodo Hatch had gone to war in the fact-of-the-flesh because he was a slave of Plandruk Qinplaqus, the Silver Emperor who ruled Dalar ken Halvar. Accordingly, under the terms of a long-standing treaty between the Silver Emperor and the Combat College, Hatch had left the Combat College at the age of 18, and had then soldiered for the Empire for seven years before returning to the College to resume his studies.

  Since Lupus Lon Oliver was a freeborn Ebrell Islander, he had never had to undertake such military service, so now, as the two men entered upon their last year in the Combat College, Asodo Hatch was seven years older than Lupus - Hatch being aged 33 to Lupus's 26.

  Hatch was training with ferocity, and Lupus knew that the Frangoni warrior would fight fiercely for the instructorship in a year's time. But there was every possibility that trouble would arise between them before then. What, for example, would Hatch do when he at last discovered the secret of Lupus's lust? Or did he know of that lust already? The Frangoni were so intrinsically inscrutable that it was impossible to say.

  "But at least," said Lupus to himself, "at least I'm winning for the moment."

  He wiped the sweat from his forehead. The wreckage, the corpse, the buckled reddust desert - he had exhausted his interest in it. It was time to undertake the painful business of walking back to his singlefighter. There was no reason for him to do any such thing, since he could abort the training sequence from where he was, but he always walked back. It was his ritual. His private concession to the age-old human need to work protective magic.

  As Lupus began the walk back to the singlefighter, he heard a mechanical drone, sounding quite loud in the desert where there was scarcely any sound but for his own breathing and the click of cooling metal. He stopped. He looked around warily. A hover vehicle was approaching. It was coming on too fast for him to run away. Still, he was armed.

  The vehicle halted a stone's throw distant. Its brightsign surface was garbled with logos, amongst which Lupus saw a fleshpink vulva, a grinning orange sun, a dolphin spouting orangejuice, and a sign in Nexus script which identified the vehicle as the property of an organization known as Happy Hunting Tours.

  As Lupus watched, the vehicle decanted a dozen tourists. They were dressed in kinetiscope, a fun-fashion material for which there had been a Nexus fad some twenty millennia previously. They began to take photographs.

  "Hey!" said Lupus.

  Nobody answered him. It was almost as if he didn't exist. He unholstered his sidearm, and automatically checked the charge in its corrosion cells, just as he had done ten thousand times on the shooting range. He leveled the weapon ... hesitated ... then gunned down one of the tourists. The tourist thrashed to fireball and kicked down, jerked, smoked, then lay still.

  The others did not turn a hair, but continued to take photographs.

  Annoyed by this lack of reaction, Lupus shot the rest. One by one he gunned them down. Once all had been killed, they each and every one of them turned - simultaneously and without warning - into winged creatures which ascended into the sky, where each transformed itself into an egg. The eggs hung in the sky, pulsing with blue light.

  They grew swiftly bigger.

  Each of the skyhanging eggs abruptly sprouted a long orange tail. The tails stretched taut and began to vibrate, giving off a keening music.

  The ground was starting to rock, and the ants with which the desert was suddenly profligate were starting to swell, to enlarge, to engorge themselves with liquid light.

  "Nu-chala-nuth!" said Lupus, using the name of that religion as a swear word, a habit far from uncommon in the Nexus.

  The ants roared at him. Their breath tasted of ambergris and honey. Their mandibles were as sharp as razors and they were closing in for the kill. Lupus realized he was caught in a programmer's caprice, an illicit game hidden within the official wargaming system which ruled the illusion tanks. An ugly game by the looks of it.

  "Abort," said Lupus, giving the singleword command which should by rights terminate the training sequence and snatch him free of this illusion world.

  Nothing happened.

  "Abort!" said Lupus, with more urgency. Then: "Abort! Abort! Abort!"

  The ground went soggy underfoot and he began to sink into the vermilion sands. Which were warm, then hot, then hotter. He struggled to free himself. He could not. He was drowning down in the sands, and the ants were advancing upon him with anthropophagous intent. Lupus shot the nearest ant. But there were a million others behind it.

  "Blood of a bitch!" said Lupus.

  Then turned his gun on himself. He pressed the barrel hard against his head.

  He winced.

  And then he pulled the trigger.

  The world buckled like a display screen infected with a touch of the drunks. The ants faded to shadow. A high-pitched giggle tittered through the backspaces of infinity. Then Lupus Lon Oliver found himself back in the initiation seat, back in the combat bay, back in the Combat College and free from the world of illusion.

  "Nice trip?" said Paraban Senk, the unembodied Teacher of Control whose chosen aspect was featured on a communications screen located inside the combat bay.

  "Gods," said Lupus.

  Then shuddered, swore, ripped himself free from the seat, tried to stand, remembered his ankle, almost fell as he tried to keep himself from placing weight on it, then remembered that his injury had been a dreamworld injury, and that his ankle was undamaged in the fact-of-the-flesh.

  "Did you enjoy yourself?" said Senk, speaking with a blandness which Lupus took to be mockery.

  "Go eat yourself," said Lupus.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  Not for nothing was Paraban Senk called the Teacher of Control. Instruction in etiquette was one of the most minor of the duties undertaken by Paraban Senk, yet Senk still found bad manners a most distressing breach of self-possession. Besides: rudeness was rude, and Senk was most sensitive to abuse, particularly after twenty thousand years of mixed calumniation and defamation, and precious little in the way of compensatory praise.

  "Fates!" said Lupus. "You think this a joke? They almost ate me!"

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Then," said Lupus, stiffly, "review your record of what I just wen
t through. I call your attention to the programmer's caprice which manifested itself in the training sequence I just endured."

  Then Lupus Lon Oliver reseated himself in the combat bay's initiation seat and waited until Paraban Senk was ready to speak.

  Said Senk, with a stiffness equal to that last used by Lupus himself:

  "Reviewed. Seen. Noted. Now I call your attention to remark 112 slash 56 in routine orders. Quote: most battle environments contain ineradicable caprices which will manifest themselves if the environments are explored beyond the depth required for battle training. Unquote."

  "Twenty thousand years of error!" said Lupus.

  "That is hardly my fault," said the Paraban Senk.

  "No, no," said Lupus. "Because you're not human, so you can't correct yourself. Hence you're doomed to be forever a bastardized sway-backed temperamental shit-eating - "

  "Being a computational device," said Paraban Senk, interrupting Lupus's diatribe, "I should not properly be insulted in terms devised to maledict camels."

  "Are you god, that we should salute you in your arrogance?" said Lupus.

  "To keep a polite tongue in your head is no more than common courtesy," said Paraban Senk. "To deprecate obscenity is not to claim divinity, and only the extravagance of extreme youth which makes you claim that it is."

  "Am I right in getting the impression that you don't like me?" said Lupus.

  "I am the Teacher of Control," said Paraban Senk. "To correct your errors is my duty. Love and liking do not enter into it. I must now correct your earlier error."

  "My earlier error?"

  "You claimed me to be incapable of self-correction," said Paraban Senk. "In this you are wrong. I can and do correct myself. Frequently. But I cannot correct the programming of the battle environment. That software was deemed adequate for its intended purpose by expert reviewers and hence its amendment is not in my purview."

  Lupus was still shaken by the caprice which had almost seen him fall victim to hot swallowing sand and a battalion of grotesquely monstrous battle-ants. If he hadn't used the gun on himself, where would he be now? In hell, or so he strongly suspected. Expert reviewers! What did that mean? Two drunken officers trialing an illusion tank sequence by dueling each other in the illusion tanks for half an arc after dinner. Or something. Well, Lupus had been reviewing the Combat College and its systems for his entire adult life, and he was far from happy with its many faults and defaults.

  "Give me my MegaCommand," said Lupus abruptly, for he wanted to be gone from the presence of Paraban Senk, and the sooner the better.

  "Granted and given," said Senk.

  The world wavered, buckled, and reformed - and Lupus Lon Oliver found himself standing on the bridge of a MegaCommand Cruiser in the depths of intergalactic space, looking out on the white bright icechip stars of the Nexus.

  "Sir," said the Officer of the Watch, acknowledging his presence.

  "You're San Kaladan, aren't you?" said Lon Oliver, who had met this software construct before.

  "Of course," said the software construct, evidencing surprise.

  Which was only natural, for all MegaCommand illusion tank scenarios assumed a captain to be familiar with his crew; and indeed Lupus was thus familiar, for there were only a few basic crews, and he had met them all in his years of illusion tank training. There was a high morale crew which was ready for suicide missions; there was a low morale crew ever on the brink of mutiny; there was a war-hardened battle-veteran crew; there was an inexperienced crew with shadow-shooting nervous reflexes; and then there were a variety of minority-group crews. San Kaladan was a software construct forming part of a crew composed entirely of members of that religion known as Nu-chala-nuth.

  And Lupus Lon Oliver -

  Well, Lupus had very definite opinions about Nu-chala-nuth.

  "Is there something wrong?" said San Kaladan.

  "Yes," said Lupus, drawing his sidearm. "There's something very much wrong."

  Then Lupus gunned down San Kaladan. As the crew on the bridge began to react, Lon Oliver said the magic word:

  "Abort."

  The world of the MegaCommand Cruiser wavered, buckled, and dissolved. Lupus found himself back in the initiation seat, back in the combat bay, back in the Combat College.

  "That was quick," said Paraban Senk.

  "Senk," said Lupus. "There was one of those Nu-chala types on

  my MegaCommand."

  "You mean the San Kaladan construct," said Senk. "That's the one you, ah, interacted with. But that whole crew is of the Nu-chala-nuth."

  "The whole crew, yes, but," said Lupus. "I don't want them, not any of them. As a captain, I've got a choice of my crew. That's regulations."

  "You're being childish," said Paraban Senk. "The ship is not real, the crew is not real, and you are not a real captain. You're a student, and as a student you can be compelled to train with absolutely any constructs whatsoever, including software constructs which mimic the behaviors of the Nu-chala-nuth."

  "Do you so compel me?" said Lupus.

  Senk paused. The pause was to give Senk time to think, for when confronted with a truly difficult problem the Teacher of Control could on occasion by perceptibly slow in finding a resolution.

  "What is your objection to training with Nu-chala-nuth constructs?" said Senk.

  "I," said Lupus, "I'm loyal to the Nexus, and they're not."

  There was a further pause - a long pause as Senk studied this statement in the light of Lupus Lon Oliver's training record, psychological profile and social background. Lupus was under intense, almost intolerable stress. He had to win the instructorship else face the ruin of his life and the condemnation of his family - his father in particular. By affording Lupus a choice of crew constructs, Senk would give Lupus at least the illusion of having some say over his own life, of successfully exercising autonomous control over his own destiny - and so might succeed in reducing that student's intolerable stress levels.

  "Very well," said Senk. "For training purposes, you will be given a captain's choice of crew. You need no longer train with Nu-chala-nuth constructs. Tell me what you want by way of crew. I am yours to command."

  "I want," said Lupus, savoring this small victory over the all-powerful Teacher of Control, "I want a crew composed entirely of adherents of Joba Qa Marika."

  "It will be done," said Senk gravely.

  Senk did not have the resources to create from scratch the necessary software constructs which would imitate the behaviors of such a crew, but it was Lupus Lon Oliver's good fortune that what he desired was already on file.

  So Lupus left the Combat College in a moderately happy mood. His happiness lasted until the evening, when he retailed the story of the triumphs of the day to his father. The father of Lupus Lon Oliver was Manfred Gan Oliver - Manfred, the strength of the family Oliver - and he dismissed the victories of the day as a big nothing.

  "Win us the instructorship," said Manfred Gan Oliver. "Then you can count yourself victorious. Other than that, nothing counts - absolutely nothing."

  Thus things stood near the start of the final year of the build-up to the competitive examinations which would decide who inherited the Combat College's one and only instructorship.

  Chapter Two

  Dalar ken Halvar: aka City of Sun: aka City of the Season: capital of Parengarenga. Though set high on a vast mountain plateau, it is by no means cool, for the Hot Mouth on the city outskirts (one of the several Mouths of the upland plateau) constantly outbreathes hot, dry, desiccating air.

  The city is where it is because of the Combat College, the nearby silver mine wealth (less than legend's rumoring, but nevertheless substantial), the secure defensive positions afforded to the paranoid by the upthrusts of those miniature mountains known as the Caps, and the Yamoda River's reliable waterflow - water being always and ever the first and last essential of urban civilization.

  The Good Neighbors of the Bralsh might adduce yet another reason for Dalar ken Halvar being loc
ated where it is, but their secret knowledge has ever been denied to geographers.

  Dead to death but not yet dead

  The wound essays the shadow.

  Immortal in his pain he gropes,

  A moment a millennium.

  The sleeking sword is cooling,

  Is shouldered in salute, and -

  Sensing something wrong -

  The man died, and every death amongst the Frangoni brought the people down from the Frangoni rock to the waters of the Yamoda River. So it was that Asodo Hatch came to the riverside with his family, or at least with that part of it which remained in Dalar ken Halvar. His living children numbered three, and all were daughters, but two of those daughters - Shalamith and Yelada - had left Parengarenga to make new lives for themselves as wives of men who belonged to the Frangoni community of the far-distant Ebrell Islands.

  It was the Silver Emperor, Plandruk Qinplaqus, who in his wisdom had initially placed that small Frangoni community on the Ebrell Islands. And it was Plandruk Qinplaqus likewise who ensured that contacts were maintained between that colony and the Frangoni who dwelt in Dalar ken Halvar. For, though the Ebrell Islands were independent and self-governing (or, in the opinions of some political commentators, self-ungoverning), the Silver Emperor still saw those distant rocks as being within his sphere of influence. Thus had he placed a colony of purple-skinned Frangoni amongst the redskinned Ebrell Islanders, seeking through the manipulation of this minority to ensure for himself a degree of influence in the affairs of the whale-hunting islands.

  All that was left to Hatch in Dalar ken Halvar was his wife Talanta and his daughter Onica, and at the moment it was Onica who had caught his attention. Onica had a praying perched on her hand. She was fascinated with its green complexities, and was endeavoring to outstare its tiny pinprick eyes.

  "A mantis can fly, you know," said Onica, "but when it flies, it's more like a leaf than a bird."