Hero!

by Dave Duncan

  “Yes, ma’am.” Vaun is certain he is blushing all the way down to his groin. Blushing, after five years in Doggoth!

  “For you I would prescribe an initial dose of ten.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “You can experiment, but my guess is that seven will put you at about civilian standard and you’ll need ten or so to be a normal, obnoxiously raunchy spacer. Twelve for parties.”

  He nods, wondering why he feels insulted and angry.

  She gives him a real smile, and very white teeth flash in her very black face. “It adds to life, Crewboy. Believe me, you’ll like it.”

  She slides the handcom into her pocket and turns away. “Prior did it,” she says over her shoulder as she goes to the door. “It was the only way he could pass. Put your pants on and come out here.”

  THERE WAS NO stiffener available in Forhil. There was no booster of any kind. The medical stood silent and dark, and nothing Vaun tried would activate it.

  Well, he wouldn’t be staying long, and one day without booster wouldn’t hurt. His metabolism was vastly superior to most, and he wouldn’t lose much of his edge in one day. It would soon return. A day without stiffener might even be advisable, as he hadn’t replaced Lann yet, but he knew that girls would soon start eyeing him oddly and the boys would catch on a day or two later. A spacer not on the make was not normal.

  There would be dreams, too.

  He had showered and shaved, and donned fresh clothes delivered by Zozo herself. Then he had gone to the medical, intending to have a full checkup, because of the battering he had endured in ejecting from the torch. Staring in baffled anger at the mass of useless, shiny junk, he resigned himself to bearing his bruises until he got back to Valhal.

  But of course the bruises were not his real concern. In truth, he had been rattled by seeing Zozo’s disintegration. He found that insight distasteful. How did a boy feel when at last he heard the warning—that inevitable warning—about increasing his daily dose of preservative?

  How old was Tham?

  How old was he?

  Ruefully he recalled Maeve’s shrewish comment the previous night about his not being recognized at the party. What she had been hinting was that Admiral Vaun, famous hero, was ancient history now. Probably none of the boys and girls present around that firepool had even been born when he’d boarded Unity and faced down the Brotherhood. That was a medicine more bitter than booster.

  It was not the sort of medicine a boy wanted, though.

  Well, if he could do nothing about black eyes, he should be able to cure hunger. Turning to go in search of the kitchens, he discovered Zozo standing in the doorway with the damned gun still dangling in one limp hand. Spying? He hid his anger in a bland look of inquiry and asked politely, “Can I see him now?”

  She peered at him with a vagueness that only came from neverminds, the unmistakable appearance of being somewhere else. So, now she had chosen to meet her voluntary disintegration in a drugged daze, but that was her business. Tham had no choice, if his body was rejecting the booster, but she had gone into withdrawal voluntarily. Vaun didn’t think he could ever do that, not for anyone.

  Eventually she nodded. “He says so.”

  “Lead the way, then.”

  Zozo thought about that, then nodded. She turned and shuffled out the door. Vaun followed. He caught up with her in a couple of long strides and made a fast snatch for her wrist, twisting the gun away from her.

  She made no attempt to resist. “Why didn’t you just ask?” she asked bitterly, rubbing her fingers.

  “Why didn’t you just offer?” he snapped back. Surprisingly, the weapon was a spacer’s bullet-throwing pistol. Unless Zozo had skills he was unaware of, she would not have been able to hit the planet from the ground floor with a thing like that, but he felt much happier with it safely tucked in his belt.

  Long ago, he had shot Abbot with one of those…

  Hunched and awkward, she led the way back along the corridor, and out into the lofty central hall. Again Vaun sensed the paltry neglect that he had felt in the gardens. Pale dust dulled tables and banisters, and the beams of sunlight from the high windows were alive with sparkling motes. Forhil was already in mourning for the boy who had owned it for…how many years?

  He had hoped Zozo would lead him to the dining room, or at least the kitchens, but she headed for the library, and he realized that he was dreading the coming encounter.

  He knew the comcom as an attractive, trim boy with oversize freckles decorating a snub nose, and curly brown hair above a notable widow’s peak, a boy who smiled a lot and said very little. Either Tham preferred to run his mix very fast, or he was just naturally full of energy. He rarely sat down for two minutes at a time. He was a daunting companion in any sort of physical activity. At gill fishing he could swim even Vaun to a standstill, and then innocently suggest a half-hour run back up to the house just for the sheer enjoyment of it.

  And now…

  Now Tham was a shabby dressing gown full of bones, stretched out in a huge, heavily upholstered, brown chair. His eyes were closed; his breathing rattled. If that was what age looked like, then he must be as old as the galaxy. Most of his hair had fallen out, leaving only a taut stretch of skin to hide his skull, and yet his face hung in loose sags, frosty with stubble. His bare shanks were blotched and thin as sticks.

  Vaun had never dreamed it would be this bad. No wonder people withdrew from the world when it started! He had known domestic animals grow old, of course. Favored pets were given their own booster, but when their bodies likewise rejected the preservatives, then pouncers and horses could be mercifully shot.

  “He was awake a minute ago,” Zozo said fretfully. “I told him you’d come.”

  The room was silent except for an ironic, cheerful crackling from the big stone fireplace. A dog howled somewhere in the distance.

  Vaun stared miserably at the pathetic relic in the big chair. “Roker truly threatened him with a mind bleed?” he asked softly.

  “So he says. They had a screaming row.”

  “About what?”

  “About Roker forcing a com call through to a boy who’d gone into withdrawal.”

  So how would Vaun’s behavior rank? “What has he been holding back, Zozo? What secrets has he kept from Planetary Command?”

  She blinked vaguely. “None.” They were both whispering. “Or so he says. He swears that every signal ever received has been fed to Archives as required. But Roker’s a crafty devil. He trusts no one.”

  Roker was having delusions if he thought he could run a mind bleed on Tham now. Even the preliminary trephination would kill him. But the talk of mind bleeding might be Tham’s own delusion, if his brain was rotting as fast as his body.

  Oh Tham, Tham! Few indeed were the admirals or commodores who would accept invitations to Valhal, or invite the upstart Vaun to visit their own abodes. Many would turn off their party beacons if they detected the signature beam from his torch. Stuck-up aristocratic prigs, all of them, while Tham, whose family was older than any…

  Suddenly the folds of skin twitched like blinds, and Tham’s eyes were open, staring up at Vaun. They were bleary and yellow, but they were most horribly and certainly Tham’s eyes, peering out of that decaying monstrosity of a body in which he was imprisoned.

  Nothing else moved and the strenuous breathing rattled on at the same pace. The dog howled.

  Vaun stepped close and knelt painfully to clutch the thin, cold bones of the comcom’s fingers. “Tham, I’m sorry!” The invalid had a sour smell.

  Sunken flesh around Tham’s mouth began to move, and what happened was apparently intended to be a smile—not a very happy one, though. “Who did your face?”

  “I bailed out a little early.”

  “You always did think that fences were for climbing, didn’t you, Vaun?” Even if Tham was as angry as Zozo, his gibes would be more subtle than her shrewish reproaches. Tham was never discourteous, even when his meaning was deadly.

>   “I should not have come if I…Damn!” Vaun wasn’t about to start telling lies to an old friend, and there was no use apologizing now. “Listen, Tham, I came because of a misunderstanding. I just need to ask you a couple of questions, then I’ll go and leave you in peace. This wasn’t Roker’s idea. Just me. A favor for an old friend?”

  “How may I be of assistance, Admiral?” The voice was a scratch of fingernail on old, dry bone.

  “You know there’s a Q ship coming…”

  “Three, the last I heard.”

  “The one from Scyth, I mean. It was due in about this time next year. Out of sheer curiosity, I checked on it—and I discovered that it isn’t braking. I thought we’d lots of time to…time before it arrived. But it should have started braking by now.” No need to tell Tham that Scyth was seven elwies away, or that such a journey needed a rock, which could not decelerate like a metal-skin boat. “It’s on impact course, and in about a hundred days we’ll need an Eject button on the planet. Suddenly it feels urgent…Tham.”

  What wasn’t urgent to someone who looked like Tham looked? Or what was? Did anything matter at all? Tham’s Eject button had already been pushed.

  “And what can I do?” His mind seemed to be unaffected. The boy Vaun had known so long was still in there, in that suddenly ancient body. It was going to take him with it.

  Vaun had never considered himself as being afraid of death, no more than any other living being, but he knew that some deaths were better than others. “I want to know if it’s the Brotherhood, Tham. That’s all that concerns me. If it’s beasties or a runaway derelict or anything else at all, then Roker and his boys can do the worrying. But if it’s the Brotherhood again, then…”

  Vaun let the sentence fade out, wondering what the ending really was…Then I feel responsible?

  Tham grimaced and squirmed, as if at a sudden cramp. “How the hell should I know? You think I can pick up signals from a Q ship?”

  “Of course not. But when Scyth went silent, you told me you thought it was the Brotherhood’s doing.”

  “Maybe I did. Thought so once. Still do, I suppose.” Tham rubbed his eyes wearily. “Didn’t you tell us that Abbot told you that the Brotherhood came from Scyth originally?”

  What was going on here? Was Tham deliberately playing dumb, or was this just part of his illness?

  “No,” Vaun said. “Abbot claimed that the Brotherhood did not originate on Avalon. And you know damn well that Abbot could have been lying. Scyth went silent—what? Thirty years ago?”

  “Thirty-three, our time.”

  “And twenty years after that—”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Nineteen years after that, a Q ship leaves the planet, heading for Ult.” Why hadn’t everyone panicked then? But Vaun had had no need to storm the fortress of Forhil and consult Commodore Tham to find the answer to that question. Because the ship wouldn’t arrive for years, so who cared? There had been lots of time, and everything else had been more urgent. Now the time was up.

  Tham coughed painfully. “Vaun, you’re as bad as Roker. In fact you’re worse. You both think I have some enormous store of secrets about the Brotherhood, and The Meaning of Life, and How to Feed a Family of Four on One Gushima Egg. He seems to think I’ve been confiding in you, for Krantz’s sake! Remember the Ootharsis of Isquat?”

  “Vaguely,” Vaun said, wondering if Tham was hallucinating. “Gibberish.”

  “Yes, gibb—” Tham coughed, and twisted in his chair, and coughed again. Zozo came over to him, and perched on the arm beside him. She laid a hand on his shoulder.

  When he spoke again, his voice was an insectile rustle in the big, still room. “That is the secret, Vaun. The whole secret. That it’s all like that. Scraps and fragments. Languages we don’t understand. News that means nothing, and is hundreds of years old anyway. Static from the Q ships blanks most of it, and the rest is gibberish. Every world is an island, Vaun. We’re on our own.”

  Vaun remembered the loudmouth lieutenant at Maeve’s party the previous night. The boy had been right, in a way—why did everyone not worry more about this? Scyth was one of the closest worlds, yet it had gone silent and no one had done anything. They had all gone on with their own little lives and trusted the Patrol to do any worrying required. And beyond Scyth, all the way back to the origin, thousands upon thousands of worlds had inexplicably gone silent in the last thirty millennia.

  “But Avalonian Command say they’ve won, don’t they? The war there is over, the Brotherhood defeated?”

  Tham grunted, and rubbed his eyes.

  “Don’t they, Tham? Isn’t that right? They finally answered, and said they’d won?”

  “That’s what the com said.” Tham coughed. “It was garbled, though, and friggin’ short. Maybe the Brotherhood won, and faked the message, mm?”

  There was the problem—four elwies was too far to go to find witnesses. “Tham—tell me about the Silence? What took out the old worlds? Beasties? Destruction? Is it suicide, or murder?”

  Tham shook his head as though unwilling to waste his fading time on trivia. “You know all the theories as well as I do.”

  “Do I? I’m asking for the Patrol’s real thinking here, Tham, not what the civilians hear, or the stuff that gets taught at Doggoth. What do Roker and his cronies believe?”

  “Don’t know that they ever worry about it.” Tham closed his eyes wearily. “Same as everyone else, I suppose. Worlds just wear out, maybe. Like me. Or they invent something better than radio. And just talk to each other, not us. Or they stop caring. Like me. Why is everyone so anxious for my famous last words?”

  “What happened to Scyth?” Vaun demanded.

  “Plague?” the invalid mumbled. “They had a plague on Scyth.”

  “That was a hundred years ago!”

  “Close-run thing, though. Maybe it came back and next time took everybody?”

  “No plague ever takes everybody!”

  Tham wheezed for a moment. “Families?”

  “Families? I never heard that one. What families?”

  “Designer genotypes like the Brotherhood. It can’t be the only one. There must be others, many others, in a million worlds. They wouldn’t be any friendlier to each other than they are to…to us. I don’t know, Vaun. I never have. What is this strange superstition about wisdom on deathbeds?” The familiar eyes glared resentfully in their unfamiliar, macabre surroundings.

  “A chance to look back and review a life’s work, I suppose.”

  “And Roker told me I had to file a report before I could go off duty.” Tham bared his teeth, and again seemed to spasm with cramp. “Well, I told you, didn’t I?”

  “Er…” Vaun thought quickly over what had been said. He sat back on his heels to ease the pressure on his sore knee. “You did?”

  Again the dying boy was racked by a spasm of coughing, and this time it was worse. “Yes, I did,” he said at last, hoarsely. “So now it’s my turn. Why don’t you like singing?”

  “Huh? I do like singing. I join in any—”

  Tham was shaking his skull-like head. “I mean listening to singing.”

  “Opera? Folk songs? I—”

  “Don’t play dumb, Vaun. I haven’t time for games. As long as there’s a band, or any instrument…that’s fine. But unaccompanied voices…They drive you nuts. You get almost hysterical. Why, Vaun? Tell me now.”

  Vaun shivered as some unwelcome memory tried to surface and he pushed it back down in its psychic swamp. “I’ve no idea. Is that true? Ask DataCen, it has all my synapses cataloged. No idea, Tham.” He shivered again.

  “I noticed that,” Zozo remarked vaguely, not looking at either of them.

  Tham sighed. “Then try this one. Vaun, what did happen when you boarded the Q ship?”

  Vaun flinched. “Oh, Krantz, Tham! Not after all this time? Not you, too!”

  The dying boy said nothing, just gazed painfully at his visitor. The dog howled, far away.

  Even Tham? Ha
d no one ever trusted Vaun?

  “Go read the history books!”

  Still Tham just waited, staring accusingly with his dying eyes. Zozo smiled mindlessly at a lithoprint on the far wall. Security would be monitoring the conversation. Roker himself could access those records—if not now, then very soon, when Tham’s heart stopped. Oh, Tham!

  “I pretended to be Prior!” Vaun snapped. “I fooled them. They gave me the run of the ship. I managed to trigger the self-destruct and I got the hell out, in the shuttle! That’s the official story, it’s my story, and it’s the true story!” He looked for reaction, and saw none. “For Krantz’s sake, Tham! Unity blew herself all over the sky. The whole of Shilam saw the flash. All over Ult, rocks were falling for weeks. You know that! What else could have happened?”

  Tham sighed again, a long sad exhalation as if something vital were seeping away. He closed his eyes for an agonizing moment.

  “You still owe me one, then,” he whispered. “Hercule!”

  The standard Security sim at Forhil was a testimony to Tham’s former sense of humor. It imaged in now beside his chair, a hairy, beetle-browed boy, bulging with tattooed muscles and festooned with weapons. It glowered suspiciously at Vaun, then at Zozo on the arm of the chair, and finally down at its owner, all with the same belligerent expression. Vaun rose to his feet and backed away a couple of steps. He wasn’t afraid of a mirage, although this one was admittedly oppressive and intended to be so. It was Tham he was wary of now.

  “Transmit the Memorabilia file to Admiral Vaun at Valhal,” Tham said hoarsely.

  “Deciphered, Commodore?”

  “No. Ciphered.”

  “Done, sir.”

  “Power down all circuits still active.”

  The sim’s scowl grew even more menacing. “I need confirmation of that, Commodore. Code seven-four-three?”

  “Eight-three-two.”

  The sim vanished instantly and the illusory flames dancing in the grate faded out into cold emptiness. Vaun had a strange sense of the building itself growing still, although he had not been aware of any other background noise. A house was a machine, and tended to have its own imperceptible hum of life. This one had just died.