Soldier, Ask Not

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "Ian found his brother's three assassins hiding in a hotel room in Blauvain," said Padma. "He killed them with his hands-and by so doing he calmed the mercenaries and frustrated the plans of the Blue Front to salvage something out of the situation. But then Ian resigned and went home to the Dorsai. He's charged now with the same sense of loss and -bitterness you were charged with when you came to St. Marie." Padma hesitated. "Now he has great causal potential. How it will expend itself within the future pattern remains to be seen."

  He paused again, watching me with his inescapable yellow gaze.

  "You see, Tam," he went on after a moment, "how no one like you can resign from effect upon the fabric of events? I tell you you can only change.” His voice softened. "Do I have to remind you now that you're still charged-only with a different force instead? You received the full impact and effect of Jamethon's self-sacrifice to save his men."

  His words were like a fist in the pit of my stomach-a blow as hard as the one I had given Janol Marat when I escaped from Kensie's camp on St. Marie. In spite of the new, watery sunlight filtering down to us, I began to shiver.

  It was so. I could not deny it. Jamethon, in giving his life up for a belief, where I had scorned all beliefs in my plan to twist things as I wanted them, had melted and changed me as lightning melts and changes the uplifted sword-blade that it strikes. I could not deny what had happened to me.

  "It's no use," I said, still shivering. "It makes no difference. I'm not strong enough to do anything. I tell you, I moved everything against Jamethon, and he won.”

  "But Jamethon was wholehearted; and you were fighting against your true nature at the same time you fought him," said Padma. "Look at me, Tam!"

  I looked at him. The hazel magnets of his eyes caught and anchored mine.

  "The purpose for which on the Exotics it was calculated I should come to meet you here is still waiting for us," he said. "You remember, Tam, how in Mark Torre's office you accused me of hypnotizing you?" I nodded.

  "It wasn't hypnosis-or not quite hypnosis," he said. "All I did was to help you open a channel between your conscious and unconscious selves. Have you got the courage, after seeing what Jamethon did, to let me help you open it once again?"

  His words hung on the air between us; and, balanced on the pinpoint of that moment, I heard the strong, proud-textured voice praying inside the church. I saw the sun trying to pierce through the thinning clouds overhead; and at the same time, in my mind's eye, I saw the dark walls of my valley as Padma had described them that day long ago back at the Encyclopedia. They were there still, high and close about me, shutting out the sunlight. Only, like a narrow doorway, still ahead of me, was there unshadowed light.

  I thought of the place of lightning I had seen when Padma held up his finger to me that time before; and-weak, and broken and defeated as I felt now- the thought of entering that area of battle again filled me with a sick hopelessness. I was not strong enough to face lightning anymore. Maybe I never had been.

  "For he hath been a soldier of his people, who are the People of the Lord, and a soldier of the Lord," the distant, single voice praying from the church came faintly to my ear, "and in no thing did he fail the Lord, who is our Lord, and the Lord of all strength and righteousness. Therefore, let him be taken up from us into the ranks of those who, having shed the mask of life, are blessed and welcomed unto the Lord."

  I heard this, and suddenly the taste of homecoming, the taste of an undeniable return to an eternal home and unshakable certainty in the faith of my forefathers, was strong in my mouth. The ranks of those who would never falter closed comfortingly around me; and I, who also had not faltered, moved into step and went forward with them. In that second, for a second, then, I felt what Jamethon must have felt, faced with me and with the decision of life and death for himself on St. Marie. Only for a moment I felt it, but that was enough.

  "Go ahead," I heard myself saying to Padma.

  I saw his finger lifted toward me.

  Into darkness, I went-into darkness and fury; a place of lightning, but not of open lightning any Ionger, but roiling murk and cloud and storm and thunder. Tossed and whirled, beaten downward by the rage and violence about me, I battled to lift, to fight my way up into the light and open air above the storm clouds. But my own efforts sent me tumbling, sent me whirling wildly, pitching downward instead of up-and, at last, I understood.

  For the storm was my own inner storm, the storm of my making. It was the inner fury of violence and revenge and destruction that I had been building in myself all these years; and as I had turned the strengths of others against them, now it turned my own strength against me, pushing me down and down, ever farther into its darkness, until all light should be lost to me.

  Down I went, for its power was greater than mine. Down I went, and down; but when I was lost at last in total darkness, and when I would have given up, I found I could not. Something other in me would not. It kept fighting back and fighting on. And then, I recognized this as well.

  It was that which Mathias had never been able to kill in me as a boy. It was all of Earth and upward-striving man. It was Leonidas and his three hundred at Thermopylae. It was the wandering of the Israelites in the wilderness and their crossing of the Red Sea. It was the Parthenon on the Acropolis, white above Athens, and the windowless darkness of my uncle's house.

  It was this in me-the unyielding spirit of all men- which would not yield now. Suddenly, in my battered, storm-beaten spirit, drowning in darkness, something leaped for wild joy. Because abruptly I saw that it was there for me, too-that high, stony land where the air was pure and the rags of pretense and trickery were stripped away by the unrelenting wind of faith.

  I had attacked Jamethon in the area of his strength-out of my own inner area of weakness. That was what Padma had meant by saying I had been fighting myself, even while I was fighting Jamethon. That was why I had lost the conflict, pitting my unbelieving desire against his strong belief. But my defeat did not mean I was without a land of inner strength. It was there, it had been there, hidden in me all along!

  Now I saw it clearly. And ringing like bells for a victory, then, I thought I heard once more the hoarse voice of Mark Torre, tolling at me in triumph; and the voice of Lisa, who, I saw now, had understood me better than I understood myself and never abandoned me. Lisa. And as I thought of her again, I began to hear them all.

  All the millions, the billions of swarming voices- the voices of all human people since man first stood upright and walked on his hind legs. They were around me once more as they had been that day at the Transit Point of the Index Room of the Final Encyclopedia; and they closed about me like wings, bearing me up, up and unconquerable, through the roiling darkness, with the lift of a courage that was cousin to the courage of Kensie, with a faith that was father to the faith of Jamethon, with a search that was brother to the search of Padma.

  With that, then, all my Mathias-induced envy and fear of the people of the Younger worlds was washed away from me, once and for all. I saw it, finally and squarely. If they had only one thing in actuality, I had all things in potential. Root stock, basic stock, Earth human that I was, I was part of all of them on the Younger worlds, and there was no one of them there that could not find an echo of themselves in me.

  So I burst up at last through the darkness into the light-into the place of my original lightning, the endless void where the real battle lived, the battle of whole-hearted men against the ancient, alien dark that would keep us forever animals. And, distantly, as if down at the end of a long tunnel, I saw Padma standing under the strengthening light-and dwindling rain of the parking lot speaking to me.

  "Now you see," he said, "why the Encyclopedia has to have you. Only Mark Torre was able to bring it this far; and only you can finish the job, because the great mass of Earth's people can't yet see the vision of the future implicit in its being finished. You, who've bridged the gap in yourself between the people of the Splinter Cultures and the Earth-born, can b
uild your vision into the Encyclopedia, so that when it's done, it can do as much for those who now can't see, and so begin the remodeling that will come when the Splinter Culture peoples turn back to recombine with Earth's basic stock into a new, evolved form of man."

  His powerful gaze seemed to soften a little in the strengthening light. His smile grew a little sad.

  "You'll live to see more of it than I will. Goodbye, Tam."

  Without warning, then, I did see it. Suddenly it flowed together and clicked in my mind, the vision and the Encyclopedia as one reality. And, in the same moment, my coursing mind leaped full-throated onto the track of the opposition I would face in bringing about that reality.

  Already they began to take shape in my head, out of my knowledge of my own world-the faces and the methods I would encounter. My mind raced on, caught up with them, and began to run on into plans ahead of them. Even now, I saw how I would work differently than had Mark Torre. I would keep his name as our emblem and only pretend the Encyclopedia continued to build on according to his forelaid plans for it. I would name myself as only one of a Board of Governors, who all in theory would have equal powers with me.

  But actually I would be directing them, subtly, as I could; and I would be free, therefore, of the need for Torre's cumbersome protections against madmen like the one who had killed him. I would be free to move about Earth, even while I was directing the building, to locate and frustrate the efforts of those who would be trying to work against it. Already I could see now how I would begin to go about it.

  But Padma was turning to leave me. I could not let him go like that. With an effort I tore my attention away from the future and came back to the day, the fading rain and the brightening light.

  "Wait," I said. He stopped and turned back. It was hard for me to say it now that I had come to it. "You ..." My tongue stumbled. "You didn't give up. You had faith in me, all this time."

  "No," he said. I blinked at him, but he shook his head.

  "I had to believe the results of my calculations." He smiled a little, almost ruefully. "And my calculations gave no real hope for you. Even at the locus

  point of Donal Graeme's party of Freiland, with five years' added information from the Encyclopedia, the possibility of your saving yourself seemed too small to plan for. Even on Mara, when we healed you, the calculations offered no hope for you."

  "But-you stayed by me . . ," I stammered; staring at him.

  "Not I. None of us. Only Lisa," he said. "She never gave you up from the first moment in Mark Torre's office. She told us she had felt something- something like a spark from you-when you were talking to her during the tour, even before you got to the Transit Room. She believed in you even after you turned her down at the Graeme locus; and when we set up to heal you on Mara, she insisted on being part of the process, so that we could bind her emotionally to you."

  "Bind." The words made no sense.

  "We sealed her emotional involvement with you, during the same process by which we repaired you. It made no difference to you, but it tied her to you irrevocably. Now, if she should ever lose you, she would suffer as greatly, or more greatly, than Ian Graeme suffered his loss of a mirror-twin at Kensie's death."

  He stopped and stood watching me. But I still fumbled.

  "I still don't-understand," I said. "You say it didn't affect me, what you did to her. What good, then-"

  "None, as far as we could calculate then, or we've been able to interpret since. If she was bound to you, you were of course bound to her, as well. But it was like fastening a song-sparrow by a thread to the finger of a giant, as far as the relative massivity of your effect on the pattern, compared to hers. Only Lisa thought it would do some good."

  He turned.

  "Good-bye, Tam," he said. Through the still misty, but brightening air I saw him walking alone toward the church, from which came the voice of the single speaker within, now announcing the number of the final hymn.

  He left me standing, dumbfounded. But then, suddenly, I laughed out loud, because I suddenly realized I was wiser than he. Not all his Exotic calculations had been able to uncover why Lisa's binding herself to me could save me. But it had.

  For it surged up in me now, my own strong love for her; and I recognized that all along my lonely self had returned that love of Lisa's, but would not admit it to myself. And for the sake of that love, I had wanted to live. A giant may carry a songbird without effort against all the beating of little wings. But if he cares for the creature he is tied to, he may be made to turn aside out of love where he could not be turned by force.

  So, along that invisible cord binding us together, Lisa's faith had run to join with my faith, and I could not extinguish my own without extinguishing hers as well. Why else had I gone to her when she called me to come at Mark Torre's assassination? Even then I was turning to compromise my path with hers.

  Seeing this now, the whole needle of my life's compass abruptly spun right about, a hundred and eighty degrees, and I saw everything suddenly straight and plain and simple in a new light. Nothing was changed for me, nothing of my hunger and my ambition and my drive, except that I was turned right about. I laughed out loud again at the simplicity of it; for I saw now that one aim was merely the converse of the other.

  DESTRUCT : CONSTRUCT

  CONSTRUCT-the clear and simple answer that I had longed for all those years to refute Mathias in his emptiness. It was this which I was born to do, this which was in the Parthenon, and the Encyclopedia, and all the sons of men.

  I had been born, as were we all-even Mathias- if we did not go astray, a maker rather than a smasher, a creator, not a destroyer. Now, like one clean piece of metal, hammered free finally of impurities, I chimed clear through every atom and fiber of my being to the deep, unchanging frequency of the one true purpose in living. Dazed and weak, I turned away at last from the church, went to my car and got in. Now the rain was almost over and the sky was brightening faster. The faint mist of moisture fell, it seemed, more kindly; and the air was fresh and new.

  I opened the car windows as I pulled out of the lot into the long road back to the spaceport. And through the open window beside me I heard them beginning to sing the final hymn inside the church.

  It was the Battle Hymn of the Friendly Soldiers that they sang. As I drove away down the road the voices seemed to follow me strongly, not sounding slowly and mournfully as if in sadness and farewell, but strongly and triumphantly as in a marching song on the lips of those taking up a route at the beginning of a new day.

  Soldier, ask not-now or ever!

  Where to war your banners go! ...

  The singing followed me as I drove away. And as I got farther into the distance, the voices seemed to blend at last until they sounded like one voice alone, powerfully singing. Ahead the clouds were breaking. With the sun shining through, the patches of blue sky were like bright flags waving, like the banners of an army, marching forever forward into lands unknown.

  I watched them as I drove forward toward where they blended at last into open sky; and for a long time I heard the singing behind me, as I drove to the spaceport and the ship for Earth and Lisa that waited in the sunlight for me there.