To the Stars -- And Beyond

by Robert Reginald

  Mr. Ino felt as if a fist had crashed into the side of his head. A brilliant light flashed before his eyes, dispelling the black mist that had hidden reality from him. Sumiyoshi was the kuromako, the oyabun. Matsuda was Sumiyoshi’s kobun. To the rest of the station, Matsuda was the manager and Sumiyoshi was his deputy. But in secret, it was Sumiyoshi who was the godfather, Matsuda the lieutenant.

  Kuroi kiri returned, this time as black mist of despair, not of mystification. Ino turned to Mrs. Itagaki. A final tragedy loomed before him, but still he had to learn the truth. He asked Mrs. Itagaki, “Miss Inada—you said her hands were roughened and scarred with work. But were they complete? Had she lost any part of her hands?”

  Mrs. Itagaki lowered her head. “Part of a finger. She told me it had happened in a laboratory accident.”

  “Another question. I would rather not ask you this. Please forgive me, and please try to feel no shame.”

  Mrs. Itagaki waited in silence. Sumiyoshi and Matsuda, too, stood in silence. They were in command of the situation. They had nothing to fear. They sipped sake, grinning in amusement.

  Ino said to Mrs. Itagaki, “Did you ever, please forgive me, have occasion to see Miss Itagaki’s body? Did you ever see her unclothed?”

  Mrs. Itagaki reddened and dropped her chin to her chest. There was a pause, then she replied. “I did. I am a widow. Lonely. I was hungry for love. She was young and beautiful and she was blameless. It started innocently.”

  “Please,” Ino interrupted. “Please forgive me for asking so personal a question. But—was she tattooed?”

  Mrs. Itagaki began to cry. “Her body was covered with wondrous designs. Serpents and flowers, goddesses and demons. She was a world herself, a marvel. I could not help myself. I was so lonely and she was so attractive to me. I am the guilty one. She was innocent.”

  “No.” Ino shook his head. “You were the innocent party, Mrs. Itagaki. Miss Inada was herself a kumi, a soldier in this family. Oyabun, kobun, kumi. All of the same ikka. Is it not so, Sumiyoshi? The three of you, all of one gumi family.”

  No one answered.

  “Did she betray you? Did her scientific instincts overcome her loyalty to the ikka? Was she going to tell the truth to Mrs. Itagaki? Or was she going to set out on her own, sell the Face to some kuromako and keep the proceeds? What shame. What shame.”

  Matsuda drew back his fist and struck Ino in the mouth. Ino felt the impact, although oddly with detachment rather than with pain. Then he felt his mouth filling with hot blood. Matsuda said, “Enough.”

  Sumiyoshi said, “Well, we may need some little proceeding against these four. Something for the record. Obviously they were planning a mutiny, were they not, Mr. Matsuda?”

  Matsuda nodded sadly. “Never before in the history of this enterprise. This is terrible, terrible.”

  Sumiyoshi and Matsuda went from person to person, placing gags in their mouths. Then Sumiyoshi summoned the workers who had previously left the room. They must be kumi-in of the lowest level, Ino thought.

  They unbound the four prisoners and marched them, two on each one, toward an airlock. They halted and forced the four to don spacesuits, first disabling the radio of each, and removing the gags. “Do as you are told,” Sumiyoshi growled at them. “And at once. Or you will be killed.”

  Ino’s mind raced but there seemed little hope. He could not break away from the others. He could not summon help. He said to Sumiyoshi, “At least let these two young ones live. They have done nothing. They are blameless.”

  Sumiyoshi shook his head.

  Soon they were outside the station. Fourteen of them, each of the prisoners with a guard at either side, Sumiyoshi leading the way, Matsuda bringing up the rear. With the suit radios of the four prisoners disabled, they could neither send nor receive messages.

  The ground was dark, as black as blood that has stood and begun to congeal. Ino raised his eyes and saw Mars overhead. It was daytime on the planet, and he could see the flare of tiny rockets as balloons curved toward Phobos from Nirgal Vallis. It was Mr. Matsuzaki’s promised help, arriving at last.

  But too late, Ino thought. He knew what Sumiyoshi and Matsuda had in mind. Mr. Ino and Mrs. Itagaki and the two young scientists would be thrown into Stickney crater. Perhaps killed first, perhaps not. Even the telescoping ladder that had saved Ino previously would never survive another retraction and expansion within the regolith In either case, they would never be found. Their bodies would lie with that of Miss Inada for all time, buried beneath a lake of regolith, a lake of black mist.

  Two figures flashed by Ino and the others. One was a man of ordinary size and proportions. The other was tall and gawky, his long, skinny legs like those of a crane.

  Each was brandishing an implement. Ino almost laughed as he recognized the implements: a huge, massive ladle and a thick-bodied rolling pin. They could be no other than Mr. Okubo and the hapless Toshikawa. Somehow Toshikawa, for all his foolishness, had followed the case of Miss Inada. He had understood what Ino was up to, and he had convinced Okubo and won him as an ally.

  The nearest balloon was only a hundred meters overhead.

  Sumiyoshi was gesticulating furiously at Okubo.

  Okubo turned to Toshikawa. Toshikawa’s head bobbed.

  Ino felt sweat on his brow and on his bald pate. If only he could hear their transmissions!

  The balloon was within fifty meters of the ground, and another was not far behind. Three, four, five more could be seen, filling the sky.

  Ino caught a flash from the corner of his eye, and turned to see more spacesuited figures pouring from the research station. They must have been monitoring the conversation among Okubo, Toshikawa, Sumiyoshi, and Matsuda. There were ten of them, twelve, fourteen.

  There could be no massacre now. There were too many figures gliding across the regolith in silence.

  The first of the balloons had touched down and the others were close to the ground. Mars, directly overhead, cast its bloody coloration on Phobos.

  The four prisoners and their eight guards stood like dummies, forgotten and inert. Sumiyoshi must know that his game was up. He would face trial, punishment, shame. And in prison it would become known that he had not only violated his office, he had betrayed his own kobun, Miss Inada. His punishment and his shame would only have begun.

  Sumiyoshi broke away from the others. He took a hop, like a coney. He returned to the ground and took a second hop, higher than the first. A third brought him to the very lip of the Stickney crater. Was he going to plunge into the lake of regolith that lay within the crater?

  No!

  More quickly than the eye could follow, he gathered his massively muscled legs and hurled himself into the sky still again. He rose toward the red mass of Mars. Against the tiny gravity of Phobos he rose higher, turning to a black silhouette, then a black speck.

  He disappeared.

  Hours later he would plunge into the thin atmosphere of Mars, and shortly a small meteor would flare across the black sky, and Sumiyoshi would be no more.

  Matsuda broke away from the group, running, leaping to follow his oyabun. But his muscles were less powerful. He rose from the rim of Stickney and floated in a parabola across the sky, crashing into the regolith that lay in the crater.

  He could lie there and wait for rescue by Matsuzaki’s people, and be taken away to face trial and disgrace. Or he could open his spacesuit and die quickly in the middle of the kuroi kiri. Ino knew that Matsuda would choose the latter. Workers would have to recover Miss Inada’s body, and they would find Matsuda as well, dead or alive. Perhaps the miniature Face and Miss Inada’s computer would also be found; perhaps not. They were too small and too light to make their way to the center of the crater, and locating them in the regolith would be far more difficult than finding the two spacesuited bodies.

  The eight workers who had served as Sumiyoshi’s kumi-in had already given up and returned to the space station. Mr. Okubo and Mr. Toshikawa had followed them, along with the
other workers who had rushed from the airlock.

  Mr. Ino thought of the persons whose lives had been ended in this sad incident, and those whose lives had been changed in other ways. The latter would most notably include Jiricho Toshikawa and Wataru Okubo. The hapless Toshikawa had proved more intelligent and of a more forceful nature than expected. He had acted heroically. Ino wondered why.

  Surely, Toshikawa had felt no special loyalty to Mr. Ino. The two were strangers. Jizo-bosatsu and Shaka-nyorai. Perhaps it had nothing to do with Ino. Perhaps Toshikawa had truly loved Miss Inada. He had felt a need to avenge her death, to see to it that the reputation of her killer did not go untarnished. Whatever Toshikawa’s motivation, Mr. Ino would make a report to Mr. Matsuzaki. Toshikawa would be rewarded. So, too, would Toshikawa’s superior, Mr. Okubo.

  Mr. Matsuda would face his sad fate.

  Mrs. Itagaki would continue her work, perhaps with a promotion in lieu of the vacancies created by Mr. Matsuda and Mr. Sumiyoshi.

  But Mr. Ino thought of Miss Inada—and of Mr. Sumiyoshi. Two souls. Where would they travel? Perhaps they would find themselves beside the river Sai-no-kawara. They were not children, to be sure, but who knew, in truth, what happened to the souls of the dead?

  If there was a hell, if there was a river Sai-no-kawara, then perhaps there was also a Jizo-bosatsu. Unthinkingly, Mr. Ino reached to tug at his moustache, only to startle himself into blinking when his gloved hand struck the faceplate of his mask. He shook his head ruefully. If only he were in truth Jizo. If only he could in truth comfort the sad souls of the sorrowful dead.

  He remained alone near the crater to greet Mr. Matsuzaki’s people. He felt embarrassment, knowing that he would not be able to speak to them except by hand gestures until they were inside the research station. But once there, he would have a great deal to tell them.

  THE FIVE BIOGRAPHIES OF GENERAL GERRHAN

  by Don Webb

  I am Thomas Dam-Seuh Lasser.

  I have written five biographies of General Helen Lyndon Gerrhan, who died in my bed shortly after the battle of ­Lister IV in the early decades of the Belatrin War. Most of my biographies have been suppressed, as have my earlier fiction, because of the effect the books were perceived to have on Terran and Siirian morale. However, the recent thawing up of writing gives me a chance to tell of the books’ creation, and I do so, not out of bitterness for my long imprisonment, nor out of chance to renew my craft as writer, but out of the love for those scholars who will come along after me and put this brief essay in my collected works. The books of the past were a great help to me during the century of my imprisonment. The past is all prisoners have; there is no present beyond that first day which sets the pattern of their imprisonment, and there is no future since the future belongs to a god called Hope, who is forbidden to prisoners.

  The first thing I want to say is that I did not know General Helen Lyndon. I will tell you what I experienced with her, but I have remembered (that is to say recreated)­ that incident so many times, I would put no more faith in its details than I would in any of my other fictions.

  The War was new then. No one had seen one of the black Belatrin cruisers and lived to tell the tale before Helen. ­The Seventeenth Division of the Allied Force had been detached to the Lister system merely to observe the ­Belatrin. All of our encounters had ended in total annihilation of our forces, so the Seventeenth was merely to ­gather data and run away. There had been twenty-five­ dreadnoughts in the fleet; most had been destroyed by the Mind-Bomb. Three tried to take on a single Belatrin ­cruiser, and were vaporized. General Gerrhan’s ship The­ Pegasus tried to warp away, but a streamer of the weapon we ­later came to call the colours touched the ship. Most of ­the crew died in transit. General Gerrhan and two of her aides survived. We didn’t know at that time that willpower was the key to holding off the effect of the colours.

  The three were Allied heroes. Everywhere they went, they were lionized. So they wanted to go somewhere—some backwater oniell colony or commercially pointless planet. ­You can’t get any more commercially pointless than Angkor ­III.

  In those days I lived on the government dole. The social engineers had tried to attract artist and writer types to the planet by establishing a good entitlements program. Writers will do anything rather than work for an honest wage. Except writing, of course, the real bane of our existence. I made love to exotic offworlders who looked like they had money.

  I met her at Mary Denning’s King Suravarman’s Dive. It was full of local culture, exciting Angkorese music, flame sculpture, and our lovely cuisine. In short it was a tourist hell-hole.

  She looked rich. Real rich. She had bright pink eyes like a rabbit, some lovely Maori tattoos, and her teeth were chrome. She looked like she was mean, and that she wanted someone to be mean to her. Her hair was long and purple, and­ it was the only thing she was wearing.

  She was exactly my type. If I had been any poorer, any offworlder would have been exactly my type. She told me her name was Zohra Sibawaih. I told her my real name, and that my sister’s name was Zohra (which is true).

  I bought her a drink, she complimented me on my first book, Stealing My Rules. I knew then she had some very expensive data link. She hadn’t even looked blankly to access the knowledge. But we both knew what the evening was about.

  We went back to her hotel. We ordered some Noroolian­ spice tea. When our outlines got a little blurry we made ­love. A little roughly, which was when I figured she was­ military. Just before the telepathic rush came on, the­ colours hit.

  She suddenly went into extra sharp focus. She looked­ like she was trying to scream.

  Then the telepathic effect from the tea started. It wasn’t the rush of sex that you take the tea for. It wasn’t even thoughts. When the telepathic rush hit me, I was paralyzed.

  It was a series of geometric shapes and colors, that hurt you and hurt you, and made you feel like your brain was bleeding. It was simple shapes at first, just a little too big to fit in your mind, and it was colors that you knew. ­Then it was colors not of this universe, not sane colors, but colors with a meaning all their own. And shapes that shouldn’t work out. And the smell of hot metals and of sex ­and of flowers that bloom in some pandemonium, and the shapes start tearing your mind to pieces. Then frenzied strains of an inhuman music, which decades later I can still remember. ­When I think about it, I can almost see shadowy satyrs and bacchanals dancing and whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning. I could feel the­ colours sucking at her bone marrow, boiling her blood, shorting out her nervous system. There were pains and pleasures beyond endurance, and other moods and feelings there are no human words for—for humans weren’t meant to feel them.

  How long did this last? A couple of minutes objectively, thousands of years subjectively.

  The colours stopped. I saw that a mere handful of bluish dust lay upon the bed, next to me. Then I fainted. I got up late in the night, and I went home. I thought of calling the police, but what would I say: “My one-night ­stand disintegrated?”

  Allied Security sent a flyer to pick me up that afternoon. They’re not real gentle, AS, they tore off the top of my house, and picked me up with a scoop. They flew me off to their headquarters.

  A Free Machine interrogated me.

  No, I did not know she was a general.

  No, I had not met her before.

  No, I did not cause the disintegration.

  No, I did not know that something similar had happened to her aides.

  No, I was not a spy.

  They used a variety of mind probes on me. They weren’t as advanced with those things then as they are now. Parts of my life were sucked away for good.

  Then they took me to see the captain, a Siirian named U’ssmahzzrizzssuibz. It was molting, and tiny bits of its red carapace fell away during the interview.

  “You know,” U’ssmahzzrizzssuibz said, “you are in big trouble.”

  “How am I in troubl
e? I’ve done nothing.”

  “You were present at the death of someone the Allies want to make into a hero. You make that death tawdry.”

  “I know nothing about this woman. Let me go. I don’t know anything about this woman. All I want to do is go back to writing.”

  “We can’t let you do that. I have your profile.” U’ssmahzzrizz­ssuibz tapped a small silver disk with his right claw. “Oh, I’m not interested in your petty larceny. ­It is the opinion of the Free Machine that interrogated you that having gone through such a traumatic experience as the­ colours, you cannot not begin to write about them.”

  That was true I had already begun (in my mind) to try to describe their ecstasy and terror.

  “So,” he said, “we can do one of two things. One, we can lock you up and deprive you of an audience while we are at war. Two, we censor your writings. Now I don’t like ­socio-engineers, because I don’t like being told what to do ­by humans. I have my own idea. We let you write about the ­general and about her death. But you write it as an heroic­ biography with a beautiful ending in her lover’s arms.”

  “But I don’t know anything about her. I don’t follow ­the war effort, I find it too depressing.”

  “We can give you her life, at least as much of her life as the propaganda department thinks the Allies should know.”

  “I’ve never written nonfiction.”

  “Haven’t you been paying attention? This will be fiction.”

  * * * *

  The book was Helen: Why We Fight. I did not come up with the title.

  The first thing I had to change was my birth. Helen had been born and raised on Earth with an hereditary tie to the space army. So I changed my life. We had met at the Space Academy at Katmandu. She was a better than average student, and I was studying the Vajra paradigm of Tibet. I wanted to be bonded, but she had said that her career came first. Civilized space had given so much to her that she felt it was her duty to protect it. She had a near accident on Venus during a training flight. She graduated with honors.