The Man Who Never Missed

by Steve Perry

  Not the same.

  Chapter Twelve

  THE COMFORTABLE RHYTHM of work, exercise and Juete remained the same, on the surface. The work was becoming easier, almost dull. Now and again, there would be something he had to look up, but mostly, he was able to do in two minutes what would have taken ten a few months earlier. The sumito exercises felt solid, he practiced them daily and his control increased slowly and steadily. And Juete was as good as ever. She was discreet; Khadaji never knew for certain when she had lovers. He was sure she did meet other men and maybe women, when they were not together. She spent most of her off-time with him, but not all of it. He wanted to ask, but he never did. He could stand it, if he didn’t have to know. When he thought about it, he was honest enough to know his imagination had to be painting a much worse picture than the truth. But he could stand it.

  The days and weeks slipped by in a monochromatic routine which became his security. The highs were few, but then, so were the lows. Work. Exercise. Juete. There was no major factor against which he could complain, nothing was really wrong, there were no sharp points of discontent jabbing at him. He lived day to day, in a kind of fuzzy disquiet.

  Eventually, it was a customer who brought things to a focal point for Khadaji, an old woman lost in the depths of expensive wine. She spoke to Khadaji because he was there; he thought she would have said as much to the wall, had he not been.

  “—nine’y-seven, boy, that’s how old. I might have—wha?—another twenny-five years lef? Tha’ be all righ’, I had the body I did when I was for-forty! But like this? Why should I bother? I could’uh been so much more, y’know? I had chances, I could—could—have gone to Earth, been the mis’ress of a rich bi’ch. I could’uh been powerful, rich, somebody! Bu’ I pissed it away, I din wanna take the chance. I thought I’d have time, plen’y of time, I was young, I was forty! An’ now I’m old and it’s all gone pas’ an’ it’s too late.”

  She looked up from the glass of clear wine and stared at Khadaji, who stood silently behind the bar. The pub was nearly empty and he had no chem to mix.

  “But you don’ unnerstan’. You’re a kid, you think you’ve got all the time there is, don’cha? Blow off a year here, piss away a year there, it don’ matter, you got plen’y to spare.”

  She lifted the wine glass, drained it, and set it carefully back onto the bright surface of the bar, as if it were still full and she was afraid of spilling it. “But you’re wrong. Wrong.”

  Khadaji nodded, but it was more for himself than the old woman. There was no flash of sudden knowledge, no cosmic rush of feeling, but there was a moment of… focus. Why was he here? Working in a backworld pub, listening to a drunk, nailed into a routine which was comfortable and pleasant, but going nowhere? He tried to think about the feeling he’d had during the battle on Maro, when he’d deserted the military, but that certainty, that sense of purpose, was only a faint memory. When had it faded? Why? He did remember the horror he’d felt at all the killing. A Confederation which could condone such had to be evil. It had to be opposed.

  Well. You’re certainly in a position to do a lot about it here, aren’t you?

  “One more,” the old lady said.

  Khadaji mechanically punched in the order and waited while the dispenser filled the glass with the fermented products of three kinds of grapes. Funny, how deep his knowledge of such things ran. The cuvee of this particular liquid was a blend of Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Chardonnay, a single-fermentation process. Given time and another round of fermentation and tirage, still wines could become champagnes. He knew this, but he did not know many other things, important things.

  “Hurry up, honey, I only got maybe twenny-five years lef’, remember?”

  He set the glass in front of the woman and added the cost to her credit tab. She clutched the wine with both hands.

  Khadaji shook his head. Tending pub wasn’t going to teach him how to resist the Confed. He had to educate himself, he had to learn how the beast was built, how to find its Achilles’ heel—or if it even had such a weak point. He stared at the old lady and understood what it was she had said. There was so much he needed to know and so little time in which to learn it. He had to start now.

  Yes. Now.

  Most of the patrons had gone home, including the old woman who liked still wine, and only the hardiest of the vampire crowd remained, talking quietly among themselves. Juete was also gone—and not alone, Khadaji had seen.

  When he told Kamus, the old man was philosophical.

  “I figured,” he said. “You were beginning to get the look. Most tenders are afflicted with itchy feet, I never can keep the good ones very long. I was hoping you’d settle in with Juete and stick for a while longer, but if you’re set, I won’t kick. I’ll give you a good vouch. You’ll stay long enough to let me break in a new tender?”

  Khadaji nodded. “Sure.”

  “If it’s none of my business, say so, but—where you going?”

  “I don’t really know, Kamus. I’ve got some things I need to work out, some studying to do. I thought I might try Bocca, in the Faust System.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the place to go if you want education. If it’s taught anywhere, they teach it on Bocca.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  The old man looked thoughtful for a moment. “What about Juete? You seem tied to her pretty tight. You plan to try and get her to go with you?”

  Khadaji thought about that for a long time before he answered.

  He had planned to tell her before they made love, but he didn’t want to spoil what might be the last time. Afterward, when they lay quietly in her soft bed, it was easier.

  “Leave? Why?”

  He had not told anyone before, save Pen, but he tried to explain it to her. He started with his life in the military, told her about his feelings before and during and after the slaughter on Maro. About the feeling of… wrongness that he had seen, and the knowledge that he must do something about it.

  “You are only one man,” she said. Her voice was soft.

  “A single man cannot hope to change the ways of an entire galaxy.”

  “You’re probably right,” he said. “I don’t think one man can change it all. But maybe I can affect it some, in some small way.”

  “You would be a ripple in an ocean, at best.”

  He sighed. “Maybe. Better a ripple than nothing.”

  “Bocca is a tropical world,” she said. “—Hot, rainy, a burning sun. My skin would not survive without constant screening. You would ask me to accept that?”

  For a long moment, he said nothing. “Would you go, if I asked?”

  She was quiet for a time, as well. Then, “We have been good together. I can see your love for me, and I feel such for you, in my own way. But you’re asking me to leave my home, the world of my birth, a place where I am hardly accepted, to go to a place where I would be more of a freak.”

  He took a deep breath. “No, I’m not asking you to do that.”

  She sat up suddenly. The servomotors in the bed whined as they tried to adjust to her quick movement. “You aren’t asking me to go with you?” Her voice was laced with puzzlement—and anger.

  “I wanted to know if you would—if I were to ask. You didn’t seem particularly enthused about the idea, so I won’t ask.”

  Juete slid away from him and out of the bed. She turned and stared down at him, her hands clenched into fists. She was no less beautiful for her anger. Khadaji felt a hard lump gather in his chest, and a dryness wrapped his throat. “You don’t want me to go!”

  He sat up on the bed and clasped his arms around his bare knees. “I love you. I want to stay with you. But I also have something I must do. I have a… vision. I might well fail in trying to attain that vision. Probably I will. I can’t ask you to share the kind of life I might have.”

  “You can’t ask?—” Her voice became cold, as it did when he’d seen her really angry. “I would not have gone. If you had begged, I would not h
ave gone!”

  In that moment, looking at her wonderful nakedness, he thought he understood something more about her. She needed him to ask her to go, so she could be the one to refuse. He had known she wouldn’t leave Darkworld and so had thought to spare his own ego by playing ‘what if’ games with her. In doing so, he had cheated her of refusing. It was an important point, one he should remember. He was tempted to say something, to tell her she would do just fine without him, that she could find another like him with little effort. But he didn’t say it; it was a thing they both knew. And there were already others.

  He slid off the bed and began to gather his clothes.

  They did not speak as he dressed. He realized now that he had not really known Juete as he had thought.

  Already, he was learning.

  There was no one to see him off at the sling. As Khadaji stood there, waiting to board the boxcar, he wondered if Pen had known this moment would come. He wondered about Pen, about how he was doing, where he was. There might be a way to trace him, through the Siblings of the Shroud. One day, he would have to do that. But not now. Now, he had places to go and things to learn, it was time to start thinking of what he was going to do, and how it might be achieved, once he decided. Leaving Juete was painful, but he would survive. It was as Pen had said: the Disk was still in spin and who could say where it would take him?

  His inner voice spoke to him then, nasty in its interrogative. O how philosophical we are! Would you have been so quick to leave if you’d thought Juete ‘faithful’ to you? Was it your vision which truly made you go? Or lanced pride?

  Khadaji shook his head, but the voice had already done its mischief and was gone. He didn’t want to think about the question it had raised. Damn!

  As he entered the boxcar, he half-hoped to see Juete running up to the entrance, to ask him to stay—or to go with him. It didn’t happen. Self-control, Pen had taught him, was primary. You had to be able to control your own actions before you could hope to influence the actions of others.

  He had, Khadaji knew, kilometers and years to go.

  Ah, damn!

  Chapter Thirteen

  KHADAJI STROKED A control bar and the form-chair in which he sat extruded itself into a bed, complete with privacy sonics and polarizers. He was tired, more so than he should be after only six hours on the system hopper. He wanted to be alone.

  The voyage from Rim to Bocca would take six days. That time would be on both ends of the trip, moving at subluminal speeds before and after the Bender did its magic. Bender was what it was called by almost everybody, but the true name of the drive which gave men the galaxy was the Scales-Waller Augmented Reality Analog Instigation Construct. What it did was simple enough to say—the Bender put a ship into that state of being in which the vessel was all places at once. Once there (or here or everywhere), the Bender wrapped metaphysical fingers around a particular point of allness and pulled it to the ship. The physics and mathematics of it were enough to drive an average genius insane—Scales and Waller had both been as far above the average genius as the average genius was above a moron.

  So what, Khadaji? Why do you care? Aren’t you just trying to avoid what you really should be thinking about? Hmmm?

  Yes, dammit! Leave me be!

  Maybe the bed was a bad idea, he thought. Maybe he should go to the lounge and strike up a conversation with another passenger.

  No. He didn’t want to do that.

  He looked at the menu on the bed’s control holoproj and saw that the device had a built-in sleep generator. Good. He would set the thing for six hours and escape his thoughts that way.

  It was only as he was drifting off that Khadaji wondered what he might dream about…

  —was deep enough so the warmer colors had begun to fade, save under the artificial day of the lamps he wore. There were left the blues and violets, rippling gently in the cold silk of the Nemui Sea. Emile wondered about that name. The oceans of San Yubi were all connected and at times, this named portion of the water world seemed anything but a Sleepy Sea.

  “Emile, let’s have a position report.”

  The voice from his comset startled the boy. He glanced at the chronographic read built into the rim of his mask. The numbers winked at him grayly. Sharkshit, he was overdue again. He cleared his throat. “I’m at hex seven, Dad. One-nine-two meters.”

  The suit’s heater kicked on, fighting the chill of the water. Emile still felt cold; probably because his father would be pissed at him for missing report—in time as much as from the water.

  “Recorded,” his father said. “Do let me know when you reach the inversion, if you are still awake.”

  “Yes, sir.” He felt guilty enough without the sarcasm. The old man could really be nasty when he wanted to be. Good thing his mother wasn’t oncom. She was already pissed at them both. She didn’t want Emile doing visuals any deeper than a hundred meters anyway; if she knew he was past-tensing his reports, she’d raise bottom muck to get the old man to cancel it.

  Emile blew a larger than normal exhaust. The bitter tasting gas mix chorused away from him in a burst of hemispherical bubbles heading for the surface. His mother was relatively dense, considering she was a medic and a lib. Half of Emile’s friends were doing deep visuals, easy, and he’d been dolphed by them until his old man had finally let him go below a hundred. Sharkshit, he was twelve, not a towhead!

  Emile looked down, but it was too dark to see the inversion layer yet. He checked his descent rate, adjusted the suit’s trim a hair to speed it up.

  ‘Course, there was good and bad in being able to do deep. He wanted to, but he also didn’t want the old man to think he’d changed his mind about herding. No way. There were five other worlds in the Shin System and he’d never even been off planet. He didn’t want to spend his life sucking mix and herding tuna. Directing sharks and harvesting was fun, but it got old fast. He didn’t know how the old man kept it up after all the years. It was flatshoal boring and Emile wasn’t going to spend his life doing it—not studying and cataloging ick and bug poisons like his mother, either. He pitied his little sister. Evin already had it laid out for her, she’d be a fishfarmer, contracted to a fishfarmer, and when she got old enough to get pregnant, she’d raise more fishfarmers! Sharkshit, it was enough to make him want to spit. He was getting out and off, soon as he was able.

  Meanwhile, he’d better not miss another report. Emile kept a steady watch on his chronometric read as he sank toward the inversion layer.

  —slid the hatch of the bottle shut and tapped the sealer control. He grinned like a dolph through the densecris dome at the approaching storm. It looked like a good one, and Weather had reported the pod was thick and full of juice.

  “Yo, Emile, you tucked and ready?”

  Emile laughed. That was Little Hamay in his bottle. He was half a klick south and behind Emile’s bottle, so he couldn’t see the other boy, but Emile said, “Yeah, I’m ready.”

  Already the bottle began to bob in the small waves being pushed ahead of the storm. It looked like it was gonna be a good fucking ride. Lightning flared two klicks away.

  A third voice filled the short circ of the com. “Are you sure we won’t get into deepmuck over this?” That was Jeda, in her own bottle, just to Emile’s left.

  “No way,” Emile said. “I told ‘em we’d be discom while we ran the desal tests, so we got three hours, at least. Nobody will bother us and we can dive and be back on station in plenty of time to finish.”

  “You hope.”

  “Trust me, Jeda. I wouldn’t lie to you.” Talking to Jeda made him feel tingly, as if something was fluttering in his belly. Last year, she’d been just another girl. But now, there was something different about her. He hadn’t figured out just what had changed, but something sure had. He kept wanting to be around her, to talk, to be… alone with her. Only most of the time, he couldn’t think of a sharkshitting thing to say. So he’d invited her to storm-bounce with him and Little Hamay. “What’d you have t
o ask her along for?” Little Hamay had said. All Emile could do was shrug. Why not?

  The rain came across the water in blowing patterns, spattering the waves and whitecapping them. Emile’s bottle—a two-meter-long sub shaped like a kayak with a densecris bubble in the middle—began to pitch a little more. Storm-bouncing was a kick, but definitely a negative as far as the adults were concerned. If they knew about this, Emile would be stuck in his cube and disconnected from anything except edcom for two weeks. But they wouldn’t find out.

  Little Hamay came oncom. “Hey, Emile, you heard the story about the Deep Ranger?”

  Deep Ranger was the hero of the entcom series cast. Guy was able to change into a gill suit and kick ass like nobody when the mals started trouble. He wore a disguise, so nobody would know his secret identity. “Tell me,” Emile said.

  “Okay. It’s a Fuggin Roy joke. Fuggin Roy is tapped into edcom, see, and it’s primary sex ed. The teacher says, ‘Okay, I need some input examples of sex stuff. So Fuggin Roy’s input circ lights, but the teacher don’t want to call on him, ‘cause he’s such a jerk-off. So she calls on Mary. And Mary says, ‘Mitosis, that’s cell division.’ And the teacher says, ‘Good, Mary. Who else?’ And Fuggin Roy’s circ blares again, but she calls on Bill, and he lays out something about menstrual periods. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘One more.’ This time, nobody’s circ lights except Fuggin Roy, so she has to call on him. So Fuggin Roy says, ‘Well, the Deep Ranger is out diving, see, and all of a sudden, eight thousand mals come out of the coral and start shooting at him with harpguns. So the Deep Ranger pulls his own harp-gun and starts filling the water with long darts, zap, zap, zap! And pretty soon, the Deep Ranger has killed all the mals, speared ‘em deader than chum.’ The teacher waits a few seconds and Fuggin Roy don’t say nothing else, so she says, ‘Well, that’s a very nice story, Roy, but—what’s it got to do with sex?’ And Fuggin Roy says, ‘Well, it’ll teach them mals not to fuck with the Deep Ranger!’ ”