The Man Who Never Missed

by Steve Perry

  His mind would not be still. It had been over ten years since he’d learned the first of the calming procedures he’d used from that point. They had become almost automatic in that time, his control was nearly perfect. Zazen, kuji-kiri, throndu, point-contraction, mantra, mandala—he knew them all, cages for the monkey brain. But the monkey was elusive this time. And it had a larger, fiercer cousin, a beast which slept in a deep and black cave in the back of Khadaji’s mind. The monkey’s nervous chattering of doom awoke the shaggy creature. Death? It said, red eyes narrowing. No. I will fight Death and kill him! I am not ready to die. Never.

  Khadaji sighed. Too many years, too much preparation had gone into this; too much was stirred for him to calm himself now. Instead of being lulled, his mind was preternaturally alert, filled with thoughts and desires and memories. He saw quietly, but his head was full of storm; epinepherine surged through his blood and washed over his shores in pounding waves. Khadaji remembered.

  He remembered it all.

  Chapter Six

  THE WOMAN EXPLODED into a shower of blood and torn flesh as the slugs from his carbine smacked into her. The look of surprise on her face, of puzzlement, touched him. She had not known she could be hurt, that she could die. It was there on her face as she fell, the amazement. Among the thousands of them charging across the harvested wheat field, Khadaji saw her face clearly. But the look was on other faces in the background. Wrong, the look said. This isn’t right, this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be, those dying expressions said—

  “Khadaji, get your quad to the left, three hundred degrees! There’s another wave coming!”

  “Jasper, Wilks, Reno, the Lojt says cover three hundred, stat!”

  “Why are they still coming, Emile?” Reno was almost sobbing. “We’re blowing them to fuck and they ain’t even armed! They’re fucking crazy!”

  “Goddamn fanatics,” Jasper cut in. “They don’t think they can die, their leader’s told them they’re invincible. Well, we’ll show the stupid ratholes—” He triggered another blast of his carbine, waving it back and forth at hip level like a water hose. Three hundred meters out, four or five of the attackers went down, human wheat in the field used to grow a different crop.

  “Stupid fuckers, stupid fuckers, stupid, stupid—!” Jasper screamed as he fanned his weapon back and forth. All around them, other quads burned the air with blasts from their carbines, firing a locust-cloud of explosive bullets at the oncoming enemy. Thousands of the attackers dropped, so many they were stacked two or three meters high in places, with others climbing the hills of human debris to keep coming. Those were cut down as well, until the mounds of dead grew higher still—

  “Why don’t they stop?” Reno was crying, pointing his empty carbine at the sea of people, clicking the firing stud over and over. “Why don’t they stop? Why?”

  Khadaji felt gray, he felt as if a barrel of sand had been poured over him, ground into his eyes and nose and mouth and muscles. His arms ached from the weight of the carbine, the stink of electrochem propellant filled his nostrils, the roar of the explosions seemed continuous, even through the mute-plugs in his ears. But he kept firing. And firing. And firing…

  —exploded into a shower of blood and torn flesh. “—your quad to the left, three hundred degrees—!”

  “—Goddamn fanatics—.”

  “—stupid fuckers, stupid, stupid—!”

  Khadaji turned away from the slaughter and dropped into a squat over the dry ground; he ejected the magazine from his weapon, drew a full one from his belt and clicked it into place. The sensors in the carbine noted the load. There was a quiet whine as the first round cycled into the firing chamber. He felt as if he had been dipped in lead; the smallest movement was hard, straightening and turning took the energy of a ten klick run. He moved in slow motion, a man standing in thick lube gel to his neck. He pointed his weapon in the general direction of the attackers—there was no need to aim—and triggered it. The Parker carbine vibrated in his hands, sending explosive bullets to join the killing. It seemed to him as if he’d been born to this foreign world, as if he’d lived his whole life here, firing and loading and firing and loading and firing, as if he would surely grow old and die here. His chronometer must have stopped, it showed that only an hour had passed since the first wave of fanatics—yes, Jasper was right—fanatics had swept toward the foam-blocked positions of the Confed’s Jump-troops. Only an hour? He had never fired for a solid hour before. Sometime during that period, a supply robot had issued him a new weapon; dozens of the anodized aluminum dins ran back and forth behind the line, dropping new belts of loaded magazines and replacing burned-out weapons, so the firepower would not slacken.

  And still they came. There must be millions of them, he had never seen so many people in one place, all moving with such singleness of purpose. They weren’t even armed! The dead were piled into mounds of warm flesh, there had to be two or three hundred thousand of them covering the field, withering lower under the explosive spray of a ten kay at full throttle.

  Why? Why did they walk into certain death, never pausing?

  His weapon clicked dry. Mechanically, he turned, squatted, and reloaded. The machinery of his carbine whined again, telling him it was ready.

  Why are we killing these people?

  Khadaji stared at his weapon. The barrel was hot, smoke rose from it in thin tendrils into the cooler air. The weapon seemed alien, suddenly, a strange instrument whose function he couldn’t understand. The gravity was a standard gee, the air carried enough oxy, but this was not his world. The bright yellow sun was hotter than his own; the smells of planet Maro were different from those of San Yubi. Ten thousand of the Confederation’s finest had been sent here, to spend ammunition and time target shooting.

  No. Those weren’t targets out there. He was shooting people, people who laughed and cried and ate and fucked and he was killing them. In the name of any god which might have ever existed, why? What could justify that? What had they done to deserve to die? Because they opposed the confed? Because the confed wanted order on this world? It was insane!

  “Khadaji, what’s up? Your weapon jammed?”

  The voice of the centplex’s commander, Lojtnant Hogan, blared from the transceiver over Khadaji’s left ear.

  “Jammed?” The word was as meaningless as the chunk of deadly plastic, spun crystal and metal that he held.

  But the Lojt misunderstood. “Supply is on the way. Hold on for a minute.”

  Khadaji became aware of his breathing. The damped noise of the constant firing faded from his consciousness; the yelling of the troopers dwindled, the screams of the dying trailed off, and all he could hear was his own breathing. In, out, a little hoarse, but it was steady. His heartbeat was slow, a gently throb under his skin. He felt as if he’d been wrapped in a thick blanket, he was warm, comfortable and alone. He stood slowly and turned yet slower, to look at the sea of dead and about-to-be-dead.

  Why?

  Because.

  The invisible blanket was removed. All the sounds and sights and smells and tastes came back in a rush. The stink of death, of explosives, the cries, the blood. Everything burst upon him in that moment. He knew! He understood why! He could not have said it, there were no words, but the Realization burst from his innermost being. It was all right. ALL RIGHT! Not good, not moral, but he understood it, all in a single cosmic flash which lasted only a second. It was more potent than any psychedelic he’d ever taken, stronger than anything he’d ever felt. Emile Antoon Khadaji suddenly and without any logical or apparent reason knew just who he was, exactly what his place in the universe was. He knew who he was, and so he knew too what he must do.

  He grinned and put his left hand on the top block of foam, then vaulted over it and began to run toward the approaching mob. The sunshine warmed him; the smells were fine, now.

  “Buddha! Emile, what the fuck are you doing—?”

  “—Khadaji, get back here—!”

  “—pull your
fire or you’ll hit him—!”

  “—slipped his drive—!”

  As he ran, Khadaji tore the transceiver from his ear and tossed it away. The voices from the radio went with it. The explosive bullets screamed and whined past him, but they didn’t matter. He would be hit or he wouldn’t, it was all the same, it didn’t matter in the overall scheme of things, whatever was right would happen…

  A tumbling bullet nicked his left boot, ripping the heel away, and he stumbled, tripped and fell. He managed to turn the fall into a shoulder roll, came up and kept running. Without the heel, it was a lopsided run, he nearly fell again, but he kept going. He was fifty meters out and nearing the first of the dead. Another fifty meters and he would be there—

  A body near him jumped under the impact of a slug and an arm blew away from the corpse and bounced from Khadaji’s chest as he ran. He didn’t slow. He could see the faces of the attackers now, dull, almost like plastic dolls, showing no fear or emotion as they moved toward their goal. They didn’t have a chance of reaching it, of course, he knew that. They would learn it as they died; only then would the vapid expressions change in sudden surprise.

  He passed the first of them. They ignored him. His uniform seemed to make no difference, they could not focus on a single man. He began to strip the lightweight gear away, still running.

  When he was down to a thin coverall, he finally slowed to a walk. There were still thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of them, all moving opposite the way he now walked. Those in front of him moved to let him pass, as if they knew he was a man with a mission, as if they could somehow see he was a man on fire.

  He walked on, not knowing where he would go, what exactly he would do, only that he was going to do something. He had no money, no way to get off the world, no way to live. He had known only the military and he was done with that now. But he didn’t worry. He had no cares and no problem was too big for him to solve, he knew he had the answers somewhere within him, he had only to look.

  Somewhere within him, he would find a plan.

  Chapter Seven

  THE MEMORY OF it was still strong as he wandered about the streets of Notzeerath. A few kilometers away, three-quarters of a million people had died violently only days earlier, but there was no sign of it here. There was no fear of the Void in these people, he understood that now. They were believers in soul regeneration, of being born anew after each cycle. Their High Priest was considered a god and they would march into the teeth and claws of death for him. Many had. More would. Khadaji was wrapped in his personal Realization still, and so he understood. He knew whatever answers he needed would come to him—he was operating totally on an intuitive level for the first time in his life. He didn’t worry about the Military looking for him. They would surely think he was dead—walking into the fanatics as he had, he should have been torn to pieces. They wouldn’t even look for his body, among all the others. He stood on a corner, awash in the sensual input of the city: six-wheeled vehicles with alcohol-powered engines rumbled by on hard plastic tires; people shopped at an open-air fruit and vegetable market; the steady thrum of a broadcast generator vibrated from the plastcrete through his bare feet. He had thrown his boots away.

  “Lost, pilgrim?” came a deep voice from behind him.

  Khadaji turned, to see a figure wrapped from head to foot in folds of gray cloth. Only the eyes and hands were visible in the gray cloud. The eyes were green and clear, the hands short-fingered and powerful looking, ridged with tendons and thick veins. A man’s hands. He must be hot under all that material, Khadaji thought.

  Khadaji smiled. “Lost? No. I don’t know where I am, but I’m not lost.”

  The man in gray laughed. “A zen answer, pilgrim, and perfect for a holy man. Have you been such long?”

  “I’m not a holy man,” he said. “Until a few days ago, I was a soldier. Something… happened. I… saw something, felt something, somehow. A vision.”

  The tall figure in gray nodded. “Ah. Relampago. You are blessed, pilgrim.”

  Khadaji didn’t know the word; however, he was certain that the man was going to tell him what it meant.

  He did. “The Cosmic Flash, the Existential Lightning, the Finger of God—Relampago. There are people who labor a lifetime hoping for that touch, sweating through postures and prayers and complex rituals.”

  “I’m not sure that’s what happened to me—”

  “Oh, it is, pilgrim. It shows. You are producing psychic energy like a kirlian flare. Anyone with any sensitivity could see it. Even a blind man could feel it through the pores of his skin.” The man in gray shook his head and Khadaji knew he was smiling, even though he could not see his face. “I’m the current Pen,” he said, “and this tent I wear marks me as a member of the Holy Order of the Siblings of the Shroud.”

  “You’re a priest?”

  “Close enough. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but the designation is sufficient.”

  Khadaji thought for a few seconds. “You said you were the current Pen. Is that a name or a title?”

  “My name. Pens come and Pens go, and it is my lot to be the Pen of the moment. When I am gone, another will take the name and carry on. There is never more than one of us at a time.”

  Khadaji understood. A week ago, it would have sounded weird, but now it made perfect sense. Though he couldn’t have said why, exactly, he knew it did.

  “What can I do for you, then, Pen?”

  Pen moved his hands so that the palms faced the sky. “It is I who is to do for you, pilgrim.”

  “My name is Khadaji. Emile Khadaji.”

  “Ah. Well, Emile Khadaji, I am, among other things, a teacher. Can you tell me of your vision?”

  Khadaji smiled. He shook his head. “There are no words for the feeling,” he said. “The best I have come up with is that I felt and heard and saw and smelled and tasted a sense of… rightness. Of order, of unfolding as it should be.”

  “Ah. And how did this vision come to be?”

  Khadaji told Pen of the slaughter. He left none of it out. When he finished, the gray-robed figure nodded.

  “Yes. It happens that way. Would you care to hear the psychology and physiology of the experience? The science of it?”

  Before Khadaji could speak, Pen continued. “Oh. Excuse me, I forget my manners. You need new clothes, and food. When did you eat last?”

  Khadaji considered it. “Three days,” he said. “Before the attack. I’ve been drinking water from public fountains, but food hasn’t seemed very important.”

  The fabric covering Pen’s face shifted slightly. He had to be smiling. “Come, then, we’ll see to clothing and food and then we’ll talk.”

  While it somehow seemed natural that Pen would do these things for him, Khadaji felt a sense of wonder about it. Before he could ask, Pen answered his question. “When one is ready for a teacher, a teacher appears; the same is true of students—when the right one appears, a teacher knows. The Disk spins and we are spiraled along to our proper places. It was no chance which brought us together this day, Emile Khadaji, but the twirlings of the Disk—for now, we are for each other.”

  Khadaji nodded. He had never paid court to mysticism, he had been raised by atheist parents and shaped by a pragmatic military, but he was no longer the person he had been. He followed the bulky figure in gray because he understood, in some strange fashion, what Pen meant.

  They sat in the shade, under a broad-leafed pulse tree in the court of an outdoor restaurant. Khadaji now wore a set of loose-weave orthoskins in a gray which nearly matched Pen’s shroud, and dotic boots custom-spun for his feet. He ate slowly from a plate of highly-spiced vegetables and sipped from a mug of splash. Arteries throbbed under the woody skin of the pulse tree a meter away. He watched them and listened while he ate.

  Pen was talking. Lecturing. “The psychology of the religious experience has been well-researched and taped. There are many paths up the mountain—sensory deprivation or sensory overload
—emotional response to stimuli or the lack thereof is common. Drugs, of course, from psychoactives to the more mundane depressants. Electropophy can bring it about, as can organic brain damage, lack or excess of oxygen, even sex can trigger it. And what it is, according to the science of man and mue, is a subjective mental state, somewhere to the left of hypnosis. A trick the mind plays on itself. A delusion, void of reality.”

  Khadaji took another bite of the vegetables, then grinned.

  Pen inclined his head slightly to one side. “And none of what I’ve just said matters at all, does it?”

  Khadaji shrugged. “I know what I felt. I hear what you are saying. I understand it here—” he tapped his head with one finger, “—but that doesn’t compare to the way I feel it here.” He pointed at his belly.

  “You are convinced of its truth?”

  Khadaji nodded.

  “Good. So am I. Science, alas, for all it has done for us, is sometimes short-sighted. A product of the monkey-brain, science is, and too concerned with numbers and equations and limits, at times. Today’s mysticism will be tomorrow’s science.”

  Khadaji sipped at his splash. The mildly alcoholic drink did little to wash the hot spices away.

  “You have told me of your vision,” Pen said. “You have glimpsed the Disk as it spun, the largeness of it, the lightness of it. But you saw flaws.”

  Khadaji sighed. “Yes. It was not so much a sight as a feeling. Everything was right, but there was a kind of… wrongness, as well. About man.”

  “A large painting is made up of many figures,” Pen said. “You can see it at a distance and get an impression of it, but you cannot know it until you look closer, at the small parts which form it. The study will take some time; it may lead you to many places. I can only guide you part of the way. Will you allow me to show you what I can?”

  This was part of it, Khadaji knew. He had a sense of mission, of purpose so strong he had no choice but to go with it. He nodded again. “Yes,” he said.