The Soul Eater

by Mike Resnick

  He knew then that they were quasars, and concluded that they were embryonic galaxies—unless this was a contracting old age rather than an expanding infancy, in which case they were the end result of galactic lives rather than the proud beginnings. He leaned toward his first conclusion, but he gave the matter very little thought, for a quarter of a million miles away from him floated the Soul Eater.

  The creature was his only reference point in a strange universe, the only fixed and known quantity in a time and space that would be forever alien to him. It was even possible that they were the only two living things in the whole of this Creation.

  And one of them would have to die.

  With a snarl he plunged the Deathmaker forward. The Soul Eater seemed unaware of his presence until he had pulled to within seventy-five thousand miles of it, and then it jumped ahead. He followed it for an hour, unable to close the gap between them. His hand inched over to the diluter. He knew he had to fire it before the creature eluded him and left him stranded here, lost and alone.

  He pressed the firing mechanism.

  Instantly, inside his head, he heard, or felt, or sensed, an inhuman howl of anguish. The Soul Eater wobbled crazily and changed directions continuously, while a portion of it turned a bright blue, then a dull gray, and finally vanished. A few moments later it had regained its spherical shape, though smaller now, and began evasive maneuvering at a somewhat diminished speed.

  The sensation of pain was no longer as sharp as it had been, and Lane was able to begin manipulating the ship's control panel. And then, added to the physical pain, was a feeling of uncomprehending hurt. Not bitter, not angry, not resentful, but puzzled, as a puppy feels toward the child who kicks it.

  Lane couldn't stand any more of the emotional agony, and he slowed the Deathmaker until the creature was out of sending range. Then it began moving in a straight line, and, adjusting the ship's speed to that of the Soul Eater, Lane followed it at a distance of two hundred thousand miles.

  He put the ship on automatic control and, for the first time, surveyed the interior of the pilot's cabin. Vostuvian's corpse lay at an awkward angle, its blind eyes staring at him in reproach while its lips grimaced horribly. Lane dragged the body to an airlock and jettisoned it—and then, suddenly panic-stricken, he raced to the Deepsleep chambers.

  The Mufti was dead, as he had known it would be, its metabolism halted when the ship's systems were shut down during the trip through the black hole.

  He lifted the little animal gingerly out of its chamber and cradled it in his arms, stroking it gently and methodically. Numb and miserable, he walked back to the pilot's cabin, still carrying it, and sat down, holding it so tightly that it would have been screaming in pain had it been alive.

  Finally, when the animal's body started to stiffen, he gently carried it to the airlock, and a moment later the Lord High Mufti was jettisoned into space. Space could be kind to a body, or grotesquely capricious. Lane had seen what happened to a man whose spacesuit was ripped open while he was still alive, and it wasn't a pretty sight. On the other hand, space would treat his little pet benevolently, preserving its body and features as it floated there for all eternity, and for that Lane was glad.

  Then he turned his attention back to the Soul Eater.

  It was all he had left. Vostuvian was dead, the Mufti was dead, the universe he had known was as good as dead. It was just the two of them now. Nothing else, no one else mattered, or even existed.

  He was pretty sure he could kill it at will. It was crippled, and his instruments showed that it was now only about five miles in diameter.

  But he couldn't rid his mind and memory of its reaction when he had wounded it. It had trusted him, just as the Mufti had, and he didn't feel like killing two trusting creatures in a single day. Tomorrow would be soon enough.

  But the next day the Soul Eater had regained some of its strength and increased its speed. Also, whether from disorientation or panic, it began shifting directions again, and Lane had no choice but to follow it.

  They remained thus for almost a week, and suddenly a new element entered into Lane's considerations: he had spent more fuel matching the creature's maneuvering during the past six days than he had spent chasing it all the way up to the black hole. If he continued using fuel at this rate, his tanks would be empty in another ten days.

  The Soul Eater continued to change directions every few hours for the next six days, and now Lane knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that if he didn't kill it soon he would never be able to.

  And then the Soul Eater began to slow down. Possibly it had finally expended its seemingly endless supply of energy, possibly it was feeling the aftereffects of the diluter, possibly it was taunting him. But whatever the reason, he soon pulled to within one hundred thousand miles, then eighty, then forty, and then both the creature and its pursuer came to a stop, twelve thousand miles apart.

  Suddenly Lane realized that he didn't feel the accompanying tension that always came with the Soul Eater's presence. Instead he felt old, tired, weary, with a horrible, aching, overwhelming loneliness.

  The Soul Eater had given up. It was ready to die, tired of running away, unable to understand how something it trusted could hurt it so badly. It waved no white flag, requested no peace conference.

  It had surrendered unconditionally.

  Lane placed his hand on the diluter's firing mechanism—and stopped.

  He gazed at the creature through his viewing screen, and it looked old and beaten. Its color was dull and unchanging, its body no longer pulsated and throbbed with energy, its shape remained constant.

  He tried to analyze the Soul Eater's emotions. There was no anger, no hatred, no outrage against destiny; there was just resignation, and a desire to get the inevitable over with as quickly as possible.

  This was the moment Lane had lived for for more years than he could remember, the moment he had longed for and killed for and robbed for and lied for. It was his ultimate triumph, the victory for which he had traded his career and his wealth and his youth. He removed his hand from the diluter. This was a moment to be savored for as long as possible. The creature was beaten and humbled; it would make no attempt to escape. He could pause for awhile to enjoy the taste of victory.

  It tasted bitter.

  He thought of Tchaka's parting question, and found that he still couldn't answer it. What would he do after he fired the diluter?

  He was a hunter. He needed his quarry every bit as much as this particular quarry needed him. Even if he died a week from now, it would be the loneliest, emptiest, most meaningless week of his life.

  And then he realized that Tchaka's question had barely scratched the surface. He no longer drank, he had no use for drugs, women didn't interest him, and he knew that, having experienced the Soul Eater, nothing less than that ever could please him again. He had no family, no friends, only a handful of acquaintances. His money was almost gone, his office building sold, his profession a distant memory. All he had, all that remained, was the defeated beast hovering near the Deathmaker.

  Did he hate it for what it had done to his life?

  Yes.

  But he knew, with a certainty that admitted of no argument, that he needed it even more than he hated it.

  “Oh, hell,” he said softly. Then carefully, almost tenderly, he aimed the vibrator at the very center of the Soul Eater and pressed the firing mechanism.

  And, instead of the usual physical and mental thunderbolt, he felt a gentle emotional tendril reach out and encompass him, flowing through every inch, every molecule, every atom of his body and mind. It lingered lovingly, gratefully, and then withdrew.

  Lane spent a few minutes trying to analyze what the creature had felt and his reaction to it. When he had finally sorted out his emotions, and, strangely, found them unrepugnant, the creature reached out to him again.

  And this time there was neither pain nor loneliness.

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  * * *

/>   CHAPTER 23

  They stayed there for a long time, the hunter and the hunted.

  Then one day the Soul Eater began moving away very slowly, and Lane, puzzled, followed it. It soon increased its speed, but Lane held the Deathmaker at a constant velocity, very conscious of his diminishing fuel supply. After a few minutes the creature adjusted its pace to that of the ship.

  And at last they came to a black hole, almost as large as the one through which they had entered this time and space. There was no swirling vortex of gas or debris, for the hole had assimilated all such matter long ago. There was, instead, an almost tangible absence of anything but the hole itself.

  The Soul Eater made three approaches before it finally came in at the exact angle that suited it, and Lane had no choice but to match it, move for move. Then they were between the event horizons.

  Once again Lane expected to experience some physical reaction, and once again he felt nothing at all. He looked ahead, and could see the Soul Eater far in front of him; then he tried to look back, and found that he could see absolutely nothing of the universe he was leaving.

  He had no idea how long he spent inside the black hole, or how far he had traveled, for time and distance had no meaning there, but eventually the Deathmaker was hurled into another universe.

  His universe.

  He checked his stellar reference points, fed them into the computer, and found that he was halfway between the galactic core and the Inner Frontier. The Soul Eater had waited for the ship, and now hovered a few hundred miles away, undulating in little waves.

  He went over the ship's systems, determined that they were still in good working order, and decided that fuel and water were his first concerns. He laid in a course for Rabot VI, the nearest frontier world which he knew to have fueling facilities. He soon reached light speed and then let the ship's inertia carry it along, while the Soul Eater raced beside it.

  Finally, many weeks later, he began decelerating as he approached Rabot VI. The creature realized that he was going to land and flashed him, in quick succession, feelings of puzzlement, hurt, misery, and panic. He tried to reassure it, to assuage its fears, but he didn't know how. Then, as he put the Deathmaker into orbit prior to receiving his landing coordinates and clearance, the creature's terror got the better of it and it raced off in the opposite direction.

  He filled his fuel and water tanks up, laid in still more food, and tried without success to learn if the Rachel had been found yet. Finally, when everything was in order, the Deathmaker took off for the last time.

  The Soul Eater was waiting for him out beyond Rabot, as he had known it would be. Then, content and serene, they matched velocities and continued their endless voyage through the trackless void, which seemed somehow to have become a little smaller and a little less frightening.

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  * * *

  EPILOGUE

  Time passed.

  Years came and went, as years do. The Democracy was experiencing one final burst of strength and solidity before its final dissolution. The credit was stable again, but only momentarily. Devilowls had been added to the ever-growing list of extinct species. The cure for eplasia was not as comprehensive as originally believed, and the disease still lingered on. And, as always, the frontier worlds gave all such developments little notice and less thought.

  Tchaka's was crowded.

  Rubbing shoulders at every table were the hunters, the explorers, the adventurers, the misfits who had elected to come out to the frontier. At the back of the room was a crew of Dabihs, seeking employment as skinners on a hunting expedition. By the door were four black marketeers, each trying to outwit and outbluff the others. Standing where the light would show him off to best advantage was a brilliantly clad and bejeweled miner who had just hit it rich. Two of Tchaka's whores leaned against one end of the long, polished bar, taking their equivalent of a coffee break.

  Tchaka himself was tending the bar. He was a few pounds heavier, his face was a little more lined, the knuckles of his right hand were still swollen from a brawl the previous week, but he was as imposing and vigorous a figure as ever. His artificial eye flashed and sparkled brilliantly, and the little lizard in his earlobe represented his thirty-seventh generation of living jewelry.

  Three young men, bearded and mustached in an attempt to belie their ages, their hats affixed at just the proper jaunty angles, their boots a little too new and too clean, sat at a table near the bar. They had been swapping their limited store of tall tales, and a mild argument had ensued.

  “Ask Tchaka,” said one of them. “He'll know.”

  “Might as well,” agreed another. “Hey, Tchaka, can you give us a little help?”

  “Blonde or redhead?” Tchaka grinned. “I'm always willing to help a paying customer.”

  “Later,” said the young man. “We need a little information first.”

  “Ask away,” said Tchaka, leaning across the bar to pinch one of his whores as she strutted past.

  “My companions here,” said the young man, with just the proper note of condescension in his voice, “seem to think there's something to the new Flying Dutchman legend.”

  “I don't even know the old one,” said Tchaka.

  “The original one concerned a captain who had to sail Earth's oceans for all eternity until the curse was lifted by the love of a woman. But now there's supposed to be some incredibly ancient man way out past the frontier, who's doomed to keep chasing someone or something that no one else has ever seen.”

  “They say his ship never lands,” said another of the men, “and that he races away whenever anyone approaches him.”

  “And you're asking my opinion?” said Tchaka.

  “Yes. What do you think?”

  “I like the first version better,” said Tchaka with a smile that nobody understood.

  “That's not what I mean,” said the young man. “What about the story? Do you know if it's true or not?”

  A grizzled old miner who had been listening intently sidled over to them. “Just a fable dreamed up by some feebleminded spacehand to pass the time of day,” he said. “You might just as well believe in"—he searched for the right example—"oh, in the Dreamwish Beast.”

  The three sophisticated young men all laughed at that. A moment later Tchaka joined them, and as he threw back his head his golden teeth glowed like tiny yellow stars in the vast cavern of his mouth.

  Mike Resnick was born and raised in the Chicago area. He attended the University of Chicago, where he met his wife, Carol, “and majored in absenteeism.” They were married in 1961, and their daughter, Laura, an award-winning writer herself, was born a year later.

  Mike and Carol bred and exhibited collies with enormous success during the 1960s and 1970s, and they purchased the country's second-largest boarding and grooming kennel, which they still own and operate in Cincinnati.

  Mike wrote in a number of other fields prior to 1981, when he began concentrating almost exclusively on his first love, science-fiction. Since that time he has produced such well-received novels as the bestselling Santiago, the Nebula-nominated Ivory, Soothsayer, Oracle, Stalking the Unicorn, and of course Adventures, the book that brought Lucifer Jones to the world.

  He was never very interested in short fiction until the mid-1980s, when he began turning it out in quantity. The downstate returns aren't all in yet, but when last we looked he had won Hugo awards for “Kirinyaga” and “The Manamouki,” and had also been nominated for a number of other brilliant stories.

  Mike and Carol spend a month in Africa every year, and they are also much in demand on the science-fiction convention circuit.

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  * * *

  AN EXCERPT FROM

  Lucifer Jones BY MIKE RESNICK

  A NOVEMBER 1992

  QUESTAR RELEASE

  The Master Detective

  They say that there are a lot of differences between Hong Kong and some of the African cities I
recently left behind. Different people, different cultures, different buildings, even different food.

  Of course, there are a lot of similarities, too. Same lack of consideration for those who are bold enough to tinker with the laws of statistical probability. Same steel bars in the local jail. Same concrete walls and floors. Same uncomfortable cots. Same awful food.

  Truth to tell, I'd had a lot more time to consider the similarities than the differences. I'd gotten right off the boat from Portuguese East Africa, checked into the Luk Kwok Hotel (which thoughtfully rented its rooms by the hour, the night, or the week), spent the next hour in a local restaurant trying to down a bowl of soup with a pair of chopsticks, and then, realizing that my funds needed replenishing, I got involved in a friendly little game of chance involving two cubes of ivory with spots painted on them. It was when a third cube slipped out of my sleeve that I was invited to inspect the premises of the local jail.

  That was five days ago, and I had spent the intervening time alternately trying not to mind the smell of dead fish, which is what all of Hong Kong smelled like back in 1926, and gaining some comfort by reading my well-worn copy of the Good Book, which I ain't never without.

  The girl who brought my grub to me was a charming little thing named Mei Sung. She was right impressed to be serving a man of the cloth, which I was back in those days, and I converted the bejabbers out of her three or four times a day, which made my incarceration in durance vile a mite easier to take.