by Timothy Zahn
His headache was mostly gone when he awoke. Along with most of the day.
“Yeah, I figured you were sick or something when you didn’t show up this morning,” Pete said when he called the print shop. “Didn’t expect it was something like this, though. You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Radley assured him, a wave of renewed shame warming his face. How could he ever have thought someone with Pete’s loyalty would betray him? “Let me shower and change and I’ll come on down.”
“You don’t need to do that,” Pete said. “Not hardly worth coming in now, anyway. If I may say so, it don’t sound to me like you oughta be running ’round yet, and I can handle things here okay.” There was a faintly audible sniff/snort, and Radley could visualize the other man smiling. “And I really don’t wanna have to carry you all the way home if you fall apart on me.”
“There’s that,” Radley conceded. “I guess you’re right. Well … I’ll see you in the morning, then.”
“Only if you feel like it. Really—I can handle things until you’re well. Oops—gotta go. A customer just came in.”
“Okay. Bye.”
He hung up and gingerly felt the lump on the back of his head. Yes, Pete might have had to carry him home, at that. That little outing had sure gone sour.
As had his attempt to catch a murderer. And his attempt to solve a rape. And his attempt to stop an embezzlement.
In fact, everything the Book had given him had gone bad. One way or another, it had all gone bad.
“But it’s truth,” he gritted. “I mean, it is. How can truth be bad?”
He had no answer. With a sigh, he stood up from the kitchen chair. The sudden movement made his head throb, and he sat down again quickly. Yes, Pete might indeed have wound up carrying him.
Like someone else had already had to do.
Radley flushed with shame. In his mind’s eye, he saw a medium-build black man, probably staggering under Radley’s weight by the time he reached the hospital. Quietly helping to clean up the mess Radley had made of himself.
“I wish they’d gotten his name,” he muttered to himself. “I’ll never get a chance to thank him.”
He looked down at the Book … and a sudden thought struck him. If the Book contained the names of all the criminals in town, why not the names of all the Good Samaritans, too?
He opened to the Yellow Pages, feeling a renewed sense of excitement. Perhaps this, he realized suddenly, was what the Book was really for. Not a tool for tracking down and punishing the guilty, but a means of finding and rewarding the good. The G’s … there they were. Ge, Gl, Go …
There was no Good Samaritans listing.
Nor was there an Altruists listing. Nor were there listings for benefactor, philanthropist, hero, or patriot. Or for good example, salt of the earth, angel, or saint.
There was nothing.
He thought about it for a long time. Then, with only a slight hesitation, he picked up the phone.
Alison answered on the fourth ring. “Hello?”
“It’s me,” Radley told her. “Listen.” He took a careful breath. “I know the difference now. You know—the difference between true and truth?”
“Yes?” she said, her voice wary.
“Yeah. True is a group of facts—any facts, in any combination. Truth is all the facts. Both sides of the story. The bad and the good.”
She seemed to digest that. “Yes, I think you’re right. So what does that mean?”
He bit at his lip. She’d been right, he could admit now; he had enjoyed the knowledge and power the Book had given him. “So,” he said, “I was wondering if you’d like to come up. It’s … well, you know, it’s kind of a chilly night.”
The Book burned with an eerie blue flame, and its non-plastic bag burned green. Together, they were quite spectacular.
Protocol
“I was thinking,” Aimee Shondar said casually as she set the last of the breakfast dishes in the drainer, “that I might go to the market this morning.”
Her husband Ted lifted his eyes up over the facplate with the look on his face that she’d known would be there. “I was going to fix the garden today,” he said, his tone mildly reproving, as if she should have remembered that. “We had a second Stryder come through last night, you know.”
“No, I didn’t,” Aimee said, frowning. Usually she was the first one awake when a Stryder came lumbering across their land in the middle of the night. “What did he hit?”
“Mostly the tomokado area,” Ted said, sounding disgusted. “I swear sometimes they deliberately take whatever route will let those size-twenty feet of theirs do the most damage. A lot of it should be salvageable, but it’ll take most of the day to replant the vines. I really don’t have the time to go to market with you.”
“I wasn’t asking you to,” Aimee said, fighting to keep her voice steady. “I can go by myself.”
The look in Ted’s face deepened. “We’ve been through this, Aimee,” he reminded her in the patient tone of an adult explaining a difficult concept to a young child. “I don’t want you going to the village alone.”
“I know that,” Aimee said, feeling a quaver trying to nudge its way into her voice. She hated confrontations, hated them with a passion. “But I’m twenty-four years old. It’s high time I started learning how to do things on my own.”
“So take up knitting,” Ted suggested. “Or hydroponics, or supportable architecture. Better yet, come help me in the garden today and we can both go to the market tomorrow.”
“But the shoreline traders are coming in today,” Aimee protested. “All the best fish will be gone by tomorrow.”
With a sigh, Ted laid aside the facplate. “Okay, fine,” he said. “I guess I can do the garden tomorrow.”
“I already said you don’t have to go with me,” Aimee said, feeling familiar stirrings of annoyance and frustration. He was patronizing her again. She hated when he patronized her. “I’m perfectly capable of dealing with the Stryders all by myself.”
“Really?” he countered, the patient tone starting to fray about the edges. “There’s only been one time I know about when you were actually alone with them.”
Aimee had known the conversation would eventually end up here. All conversations about going into the village alone ended up here. But even knowing that, and expecting it, the comment still hit her in the gut like a Stryder’s razordisk. “That’s not fair,” she insisted, the quaver in her voice into full shake mode now. “Aunt Ruth sneezed during the protocol. It wasn’t my fault.”
“I never said it was,” Ted said calmly. “Look, kiddo, I don’t blame you a single scrappy seed. Matter of fact, I’ve always been rather impressed by the fact that a kid your age didn’t panic at what happened, and even managed to get all the way back home by yourself. And past, what, two more Stryders, too?”
Aimee shivered at the memory. After twelve years, she still shivered at the memory. “Three,” she corrected him quietly.
“Three,” he repeated. “My point is that you can’t go through an experience like that without it affecting you. I feel you tense up every time a Stryder lumbers into view, like a rabbit facing a doggerelle. I’m just afraid that—well, look, I’m just afraid, that’s all. Okay?”
Aimee sighed deep within her. “I know,” she said. “But someday I’m going to have to grow up.”
He smiled. “You’re already grown up just fine, Aimee,” he assured her. “Maybe it’s just me who’s still feeling traumatized by the past.”
“And so I should humor you?”
“Something like that.” He stood up, brushing the breakfast crumbs off his coveralls. “Give me a couple of minutes to change and we’ll go.”
The road leading toward the village was more crowded than usual this morning, Aimee thought as they headed out, with both pedestrians and pull carts wending thei
r way between the ruts. Apparently, everyone in the district had fresh fish on their mind. It made her glad she hadn’t let Ted talk her into waiting until tomorrow.
“Nice day for a walk, anyway,” Ted commented as he steered her around a cart rattling noisily over the rough road. One of the wheels seemed on the verge of falling off, she noticed as they passed it. Too bad, too—the cart itself looked almost new.
But then, what little they had in the way of heavy machinery never seemed to last very long these days. As a girl, Aimee remembered her grandmother spinning grand stories about machines from the colony ship that could create perfectly round, perfectly smooth wheels, as well as other incredible devices that could last for years and years.
But no one had seen anything like that for a long time, and it was unlikely anyone ever would. The Stryders had long since plowed their random Juggernaut paths across and through all the colonists’ major manufacturing areas, leaving nothing but rubble behind. Only in the more small-scale areas of electronics manufacture had the colonists been able to maintain anything of the technology they’d brought from Earth.
And it was just as well they’d been able to keep that. Without the language translators and the protocol programs coded into their facplates, the entire colony would long ago have been slaughtered.
“Did you check the list before we left?” Ted asked.
Aimee nodded. “At last report there were four Stryders in the square, with two more—”
“Stryder!” someone ahead of them called.
The knot of people jerked to a halt, a sudden eerie silence ringing in Aimee’s ears as the rattle of the carts abruptly ceased. She slid her facplate from its belt pouch, feeling her pulse throbbing at the base of her throat. Somewhere up ahead, Death Incarnate was coming. Coming to snatch the unwary, or the careless, or the foolish. …
And then, there he was, just rounding one of the trees ahead to the left of the road: three meters of tall, golden-skinned being, like a mythological Greek god impossibly come to life. He was walking more or less toward the group of humans, his path cutting diagonally across the road ahead of them.
Beside her, Ted lifted his plate chest high. “Fifty meters ahead, angling inward thirty degrees left to right,” he murmured rapidly toward the plate. All around them, Aimee could hear others muttering into their own plates.
And even with her stomach trying to do gymnastic maneuvers around her spleen, she found herself smiling tightly to herself. This one, at least, was a no-brainer. She’d done this protocol so many times she could practically quote it. Stand still, head bowed to look one meter in front of you, hands folded in front of your chest—
“Stand still, head bowed to look at the ground one meter in front of your feet, with your hands folded in front of your chest,” she heard Ted’s plate give the protocol for this kind of encounter. “Holding objects in your folded hands is acceptable. If he changes direction to approach at less than ten degrees, drop to your knees as soon as he comes within your peripheral vision, head still bowed. Resume activities when you can no longer see him. If he continues or increases his angle, maintain position. Resume activities when you can no longer hear his footsteps.”
All around her, Aimee could hear the protocol message being repeated from another thirty plates. For her part, she had already bowed her head, folding her hands around her plate at her chest. Straining against the tops of her eyelids so that she could see if the Stryder changed direction toward her, she tried to ignore the tension quivering through her muscles.
Did all the people around her have that same quivering, she wondered? Certainly they all had cause to. The Stryders had killed over a quarter of the colonists in their first two months on the ground, and had probably killed one a week in the thirty years since then. Everyone knew someone who had died suddenly and violently at the edge of a razordisk for making some mistake in the protocol. She was hardly alone on that score.
And yet somehow, all the rest of them managed to get through the day just fine. Maybe Ted was right, she thought distantly. Maybe she just didn’t have the emotional strength to face the Stryders alone.
The thudding footsteps were getting closer. Aimee tensed a little harder; and then the footsteps were past and heading back into the forest to the right. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. The footsteps faded into the forest sounds—
“All clear,” someone on that edge called softly.
There was a general rustling as everyone relaxed, coming out of their stiff bows and taking a few deep breaths of their own. A murmur of conversation rippled through the crowd, and here and there Aimee heard a nervous giggle or a mother calming her frightened children. With a multitonal group squeak, the carts started up again, and the crowd shambled back on its way.
“Why didn’t you check the protocol?” Ted asked, his voice tight.
“I didn’t need to,” Aimee told him. “Most contacts are in that ninety-to-ten-degree approach angle. I know that one by heart.”
“I don’t care if you’ve got it tattooed on your retinas,” Ted growled. “You don’t play like that with Stryders. Ever.”
“I’m not a child, Ted,” Aimee shot back in a low voice, feeling heat rising into her cheeks. To be lectured that way in the privacy of her own home was bad enough; but have it thrown into her face in public was humiliating in the extreme. “I can take care of myself.”
“Then prove it,” he countered, not bothering to lower his voice. “And you can start by calling up the protocol yourself instead of relying on someone else to do it for you.”
Clenching her teeth, Aimee kept her eyes on the back of the woman walking ahead of them. “Whatever you say.”
The rest of the trip—aside from the creaking of the carts, the buzz of conversation from the rest of the crowd, and the rustlings of the forest—was very quiet.
The settlement of Venture had once been envisioned as the first and possibly greatest city of the new colony, a sprawling metropolis filling the land between the forest and the ocean shore thirty miles to the east, with the mysterious Great White Pyramid as the center of a huge park within its borders. But with the discovery of the Stryders, all such grandiose plans had long ago faded into dust. Small villages were about as extensive as human habitation got here, and even that was sometimes pushing their luck. The more decentralized the populace, the better.
Still, even a small village was a treat after the isolation of the forest. Aimee took deep breaths as they passed the outer rings of houses and shops and continued inward, drinking in the aromas of cooking and baking and commerce and people. It was like waking from a dream, she always thought at this point. A reminder of what it was to be human.
“Two more have come in,” Ted grunted from beside her, studying his plate. “We’ll probably run into at least one of them.”
“That’s okay,” Aimee said, looking around at the various merchants opening up their shops and trying to ignore the butterflies testing their wings in her stomach. “I’m ready.”
“And if and when it happens, you check the protocol,” he said tartly. “I don’t see any fish here. The dealers must be somewhere on the other side of the Sanctuary.”
“Yes, they’re probably on the east side, near the butchers,” Aimee agreed as they started to angle off to the right. “Most of the other people seem to be heading that direction—”
“Stryder!” the call drifted back.
Everyone stopped dead in their tracks. “Where?” Aimee heard a man growl. “I don’t see anything.”
“That way!” a young girl answered, pointing to the left, her voice a mixture of excitement and dread. “I can hear him!”
Just about twelve years old, Aimee noted with a quiet shudder as she gazed at the girl’s profile. The same age she herself had been when that Stryder had cut down Aunt Ruth beside her.
At her side now, Ted was nudging her urgently with
his elbow. Pushing back the memories, she pulled out her plate.
And then, from the direction the girl was pointing, the Stryder appeared from behind a tree. He pushed past the side of one of the booths, his bulk bending back the memory plastic and eliciting a soft crunch from something inside, and headed straight toward them.
The butterflies in Aimee’s stomach took flight as she lifted the plate to her lips. “Fifty meters to the left, coming straight toward me,” she said, her lips feeling cold and dry. “He just pushed past a booth, probably breaking something inside.”
“Go down on your right knee, continuing to face forward, leaving your left knee bent at a ninety-degree angle,” the plate instructed her. “Put your left hand on your left knee, palm resting on the kneecap, fingers pointed down along the shin. Set your plate down on the ground and then put your right hand across the back of your left, elbow pointing forward and bent at a ninety-degree angle, fingers pointed straight out toward the Stryder. Lower your head to look at your crossed hands.”
She did as instructed. Her right arm wasn’t quite long enough to make a precise ninety-degree angle, and she had to lean her shoulder forward a little to compensate. Peripherally, she could see everyone nearby following suit as she gazed at her hands. Those farther away, of course, would be doing the protocol for a ten-to-ninety-degree sideways approach.
What did it all mean? After thirty years, no one still had an answer to that question. The Stryders didn’t even seem to notice the humans scurrying around their feet, at least as long as they obeyed the strange rules of the protocol. They couldn’t be communicated or reasoned with; they couldn’t be deflected or lured or frightened away from the complex paths they wove through human-occupied land; and they couldn’t be killed, at least not with any weapon the colonists had ever been able to bring against them.
