The Forever Hero

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Boom!

  Even as the sound of his impact on the empty container rumbled down the cleared area next to the wall toward the guard post, he was dashing for the alley.

  “Hear that?”

  “Storm, stand?”

  “No storm!”

  The boy did not stay to hear the debate between the two guards, but slunk down the narrow alleyway deeper into the dark, sniffing and listening.

  He sought an empty dwelling. In all those he had passed, he could sense shambletowners mumbling to each other after their evening meal. Either that or sullen silence.

  Dark was the shambletown, lit but by a few ratfat torches set behind salvaged glass, and by the dim glow from deep within the clay-bricked homes.

  Another alley lane, across a wider street and to the left, beckoned. The boy darted a look, then melted back into the gloom as two figures trudged down the street, not looking to either side. The muted clanking told him they were the replacement guards for the eastern wall, and he shrank farther into the darkness.

  Once they disappeared from view, he skittered across the dimly lit thoroughfare, such as it was, and vanished into the darkness again, more like a rat than a boy.

  Three dwellings down, he found a likely place. Like all the others, at this time of night the window was sealed with a patched hide cover, but there were no sounds from within, and not even the faintest touch of heat radiating from the hide.

  He looked up and down the alleyway, then raised his sharp and jagged blade. One cut…two…three…and the bottom flap of the hide was free.

  A glance under the hide and inside told him that no one was within. He needed no further encouragement to scrabble up the flaking sandpainted wall and through the narrow aperture.

  The enclosed space was small, just two rooms plus the alcove used for food preparation and cooking, and the flat shelves in the now-covered front window that contained the plant beds.

  As he saw the plants, despite the smell of excrement used as fertilizer and the musty smell of unwashed shambletowners, saliva moistened his mouth.

  He checked the cooking area and found a small bin with three shriveled and raw potatoes. He took a bite from one, forcing himself to chew it slowly. One swallow of the mealy substance was all he could take, although the taste told him it was free of landpoison.

  While he finished chewing, his eyes surveyed the two rooms. In the sleeping room was a single pallet wide enough for a man and a woman, centered on a raised clay platform. In the clay brick alcoves behind the platform where there should have been a few tunics and personal belongings, there were neither.

  In the main room were only a table woven from grubush branches and two matching stools.

  His eyes darted back to the pallet made of ground cloth, newly pounded into shape, and with no scent of shambletowner to indicate it had been used.

  The boy padded over to the largest plant flats, but only sprouts broke the surface. On the far left was a narrow flat with older plants. He sniffed, and could detect no landpoisons. Then he pulled a single leafy stem and attached bulb from the damp soil. Wiping it on his tunic, he studied the rounded white bulb and narrow leaves.

  Finally, he nibbled on a leaf. While slightly bitter, the taste was better than yucca. Next, he took a nip from the bulbous part. Nearly tasteless, it was crisp and swallowed easily.

  He could have wolfed down the entire plant on the spot, but he knew that that much food that quickly, even poison-free food, could cause his guts to rebel, and he contented himself with a series of small and careful bites.

  Leaving the remainder of the bulb by the flat, he retreated to the sleeping quarters and slashed a section off the unused pallet, carefully cutting it to keep one corner of the bottom double-thonged section intact as a bag. After bringing his makeshift bag across the nearly pitch dark room to the slightly lighter area behind the leather hide front window cover, he began to pull out the bulbous vegetables one at a time until he had a small heap.

  He shook his head. While he would have liked more, he could carry only so many. If he stayed, he ran the risk that the shambletowners would find and kill him, as they had his parents.

  He hoped what he could carry would be enough to get him through the weakness. If not, he would have to come back, and that he scarcely wanted to do.

  Every concentrated scent in the shambletown, every odor from the Maze, was an assault, an assault that made it difficult for him to concentrate fully and increased the danger of being discovered.

  After loading the bag, he gathered it and tied it shut with a piece of leather cut from the rear window cover. Then he used another loop to hang it around his neck and under his tunic. That left his hands free, although it created a bulging outline—a dead giveaway were he seen. There were no fat people on the high plains…anywhere.

  A check on the back alley indicated no passersby, and he eased himself out through the narrow window and onto the uneven stone pavement with only a slight scratching and muted thump. He replaced the window cover as well as he could.

  Retracing his steps up the back lane, he came again to the single street he had crossed, and, again, he checked both ways, listening carefully, before he slid across into the darkness of the other side.

  Whussshh!

  Instants before the cudgel struck, he saw it and tried to drop away, away from the flat-faced man who hammered it toward his skull.

  Hands grabbed for his thin arms.

  Fire burned down the side of his face, but even as his knees buckled his own blade slashed at the four legs around him.

  “Fynian! Hold devulkid! Hades! Eiiiii!”

  The boy whipped the knife from leg level toward the man with the cudgel, his legs recovering and supporting his spring. Though off center, the jagged edge ripped a thin cut in the underside of Fynian’s left arm as he brought the cudgel around for another attack.

  The fingers grasping him loosened, and the boy broke clear, avoiding the deadly club, and scrambled behind both men, running, regardless of the noise and the growing pain in his left leg, full speed toward the wall.

  “Devulkid! Devulkid!”

  “Devulkid!”

  Still clutching the blade, his bag thudding against his chest, he pounded across the open space before the eastern wall and leaped onto the clay barrel just ahead of the two pursuers and a wall guard. Without slowing, he scrambled up and over the rough bricks to slide to the bottom of the wall with a thump, his left leg buckling under the impact.

  His breath hissed from the pain of the fall, but he lurched to his feet and half ran, half scrambled the distance to the Maze, where he began to climb. Halfway up toward the hole, his fingers slipped as an old brick snapped in two under his weight, and he skidded down, the rough-edged rubble abraiding his already injured left leg, which collapsed again as his feet hit the purple clay.

  Fssst!

  Another wall torch flared into flame. Then a third, and a fourth.

  The devilkid ground his teeth against the pain from his leg and scrambled up the Maze toward his escape hole, forcing himself to make sure the handholds were firm before trusting his weight on them.

  Crack!

  A slingstone plowed into the rubble next to him, shattering a brick. The chips stung his uncovered right shoulder.

  He forced himself upward toward the narrow hole that he knew the large shambletowners could not and would not fit into.

  Crack!

  Another slingstone shattered under his feet.

  He could see the hole just above him, could scent the odors he recalled from his entry and squirmed the last body length to it.

  Crunch!

  “Ooooo!” The involuntary exclamation was forced from him, expelled by the force of the slingstone that had hit his side as he had twisted inside the dark passage.

  “Got devulkid, Fynian!”

  Now it hurt not only to use his left leg, but his left side was bruised.

  He slid farther down the winding way and behind an ancient beam t
o catch his breath.

  While an occasional slingstone rattled part way down the hole, he could tell from the outside sounds that the shambletowners were not about to chase him tonight, not with the still-freezing rain, and not into the higher Maze holes. Not his time.

  He rested. But before long, he began to pick his way back out of the Maze. He had to be clear of the shambletown, well clear, before the lightness of dawn.

  Fynian, the broad man, he would remember.

  III

  Screens. Screens and their images were what dominated the bridge. Every console on the Torquina’s bridge had at least three, and each was tied to an accompanying seat that doubled as an accel/decel couch, despite the fact that such usage had never been required.

  The main screen displayed the image of a planet, a planet swathed mainly in clouds, except for occasional clear spots over the oceans. The Torquina swung in an almost geocentric orbit to allow the sensors and data relays from the exploratory torps maximum analytical time.

  Some of the officers and techs watched. Some paid no attention. Some looked periodically.

  The data flow centered on a single console with but four screens, in the innermost corner of the bridge. Had the captain wanted, he could have duplicated or monitored the flow. He did not so choose.

  The Imperial Interstellar Survey Service officer facing the console continued to juggle the inputs, often manipulating two screens simultaneously.

  “What does it look like?” asked the engineering officer who stood behind her.

  “Worse than you can imagine. Worse than I’d believe. Some are still alive. Don’t see how.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Patterns. Patterns. Look.” She pointed to the top screen in front of her. “See the square here? That’s built on top of the ruins. Then there’s the background heat. Wouldn’t be there if it were deserted.”

  She shook her head, and her short red hair fluffed out above the silver and black of her watch uniform.

  “Background contamination is high.”

  “How high, Lieutenant Marso?” asked the captain from the command console across the bridge.

  “Until we get the sampling data back, Captain, I can’t provide figures. There are areas of widespread erosion and a total lack of vegetation in places where by all rights there should be trees, or at least grass, especially by some of the streams and rivers. First class ecological disaster, ser.”

  “We knew that,” commented the engineering officer. “We knew that before we came.”

  Lieutenant Marso ignored the comment, not even turning her head in his direction.

  “Any hopeful signs?” pursued the captain.

  “Some. Some areas of habitation. Mainly in the high plains areas and places where there is drainage. Sedimentation areas look the deadest. I can’t tell about the oceans, although they should have been affected last and should have been the first to recover.”

  “Place will never recover. Like Marduk,” observed the chief engineer.

  “It’s not like Marduk. Nothing at all lives there. Here you can see some recovery.”

  “A few savages, a few thousand square kays where they can eke out a minimal survival. That’s recovery?”

  The ecologist bit her lip and shifted the image from screen three to screen four, bumped four into memory store, and took the latest torp data on screen three.

  As the temperature data began to register, she frowned, then checked the parameters again.

  “Trouble, Lieutenant Marso?”

  “Not exactly, Captain. But it’s cold, a great deal cooler than the old records would indicate. The ice caps are larger, and the high plains temperature, where it should be midsummer local, shows a high of less than ten degrees Celsius. Even taking into account unusual variations, that’s more than twenty degrees below either the old records or our modified projections.”

  “Recovery!” snorted the chief engineer under his breath as he clumped from the bridge back to his own control center. “Recovery indeed.”

  Lieutenant Marso’s fingers continued to flicker over the console controls as the data in her files built, as the ship’s torps continued their transmissions, and as the purple landspouts traversed the continent beneath.

  The captain waited, and the Torquina crept along her surveillance orbit.

  IV

  First, to the south of the small wilds and east of the Maze was the shambletown square, purple-gray clay hard-packed over the jagged rubble of the buried city. Around the square was the shambletown itself, a mass of old stone and clay brick structures threaded with winding ways. Last, around the shambletown were the walls of clay brick painted rough-smooth with sandpaint and backed with walkways for the handful of guards.

  East of the shambletown was the Maze, that jumble of toppled buildings of the ancients that crowned the long ridge top, and to the west, below the space cleared by the shambletowners, rising from scattered grubushes, was a marble hulk, once domed, that had been a capitol.

  As for the Maze…

  The boy darted from it, from grubush to grubush beneath the northern edge of the smooth shambletown wall, until, at last, he could see the cracked and tumbled walls of the old structure.

  He rested more weight on his left leg than his right, and when he walked, he limped. The limp was less pronounced when he ran. Even in the dark his blond hair glinted, as if with a light of its own, to match the hawkish brown-flecked yellow of his ever-searing eyes, eyes that also seemed to glow in the darkness.

  “Hsssst…”

  His eyes tracked the sound, his body turning. As he saw the plume of dust rising on the downslope to his right, he checked the wind direction, then relaxed.

  The breeze was still blowing toward the mountains and would carry the chokeplume down into the clay-filled rubble that spread across the valley.

  The area had been spared the worst of the landspouts and the concentration of landpoisons had kept the scavenging down, but little enough was left of the old city, little enough that few would even have recognized the desolation for what it had been.

  The blond boy let his eyes trace the faint outline of what others could not see at all in the night, from the jagged and sand-scoured peaks of the west to the flattened hills to the north and the rolling plains to the east. The ground fog was building in the depressions, gathering its own poisons as they sifted from the poisoned ground, and though the swirls caused by the joining of mountain and plains winds could not be seen, the boy could sense them, as he always had.

  “Fssst!”

  A new torch flared on the shambletown wall.

  “Devulkid!”

  “Where devulkid?”

  The jumble of voices registered in his ears, echoing and rumbling off the rubble of the Maze, off the rough-smoothed walls of the shambletown. To both the north and the south, the Maze dwindled into low mounds, sometimes little more than humps of clay and sand and brick. From the larger mounds protruded here and there rusted or black metal beams twisted into shapes never designed by their makers.

  The thin and golden-haired boy darted a look back over his shoulder, as a gate began to creak open.

  The oily smell of torches wafted toward him, ahead of the pursuers who still gathered their courage, but who had waited for him to return.

  Taking a last look over his shoulder at the puddle of light outside the shambletown wall, the hawk-eyed youth began to trot to the east toward the diffused and yet-to-appear glow in the sky that would be all that usually represented the sun.

  His breath left a ghostly plume that faded into the darkness and into the beginnings of the ground fog.

  The leader of the shambletown pack carried a long staff and lumbered to the edge of the downslope just above the point where the last vestiges of the chokeplume trailed away. He looked northward into the darkness and raised his head as if to scent out the interloper.

  A second man joined him, carrying both cudgel and torch.

  “See devulkid?”


  “No. Think went wilds?”

  “Too smarmy.”

  The two turned toward the east. To their right was the higher mass that rose into the Maze, and ahead were the rough hummocks through which their quarry had departed.

  “Track out?”

  “East, then south,” offered a third man.

  “South, back to desert,” affirmed the man with the cudgel.

  “More than desert. Ships.”

  “No ships! Never ships! Ships brought the death!” The first man laid his staff across the arm of the second. “Never!”

  The leader shook his head at the unseen devilkid and pointed his staff back at the gate from which they had emerged.

  “Back!”

  The wind blew the steam of his breath, like a chokeplume, down the hillside toward the river of ground fog that wound its poisoned way toward the north along the thin trickle that had been a river.

  Then he turned and began to retrace his steps toward the shambletown, the oasis of hoarded warmth and frugality that represented the only order left on the high plains.

  The second man flexed his sore arm and lifted the cudgel, looking eastward into the darkness.

  “Gram saw him. Me. Devulkid.” He spat at the ground and made the hope sign in the air.

  In turn, he dropped his head, turned, and plodded after the other two as they retreated behind the safety of their wall.

  V

  Build with honest iron; build with stone; build with wood. If you cannot build with those, do not build.

  For while what you have built may last, while it may tower into the night skies and mirror the sun by day, you cannot afford the cost.

  And, in time, your children will grub for their lives in the wilderness, or pay their sustenance to the warlords, if they survive at all.

  Jane-Ann D’Kerwin Nitiri

  Philosophies of Rebuilding

  Scotia, Old Earth, 4011 N.E.C.

  VI

  The boy loped across the after-dawn dimness south of the shambletown and north of the windridge toward the hill cave that served as home.