Sword of the Lamb

by M. K. Wren

  His cheeks went red. “That . . . occurred to me.”

  Alexand smiled at that, then sobered as he asked, “But what about your invisible guards from Security? Won’t they have to know your pseudonym?”

  “Why would they? All they have to do is keep me in sight and make sure I’m not attacked by a berserk history lector—or whatever it is that Father will be worried about. They don’t have to know what name I’m using, and they won’t know.” Then he clasped his hands together, closing his eyes briefly. “Oh, Alex, I have to do it this way. I want whatever I do, anything I achieve, to be mine. I want to . . . to be me.”

  Alexand nodded, his gaze drawn to the windowall. “I can understand that too, Rich.”

  “I know. I wish you could . . .”

  “That kind of me-ness is one thing that doesn’t come with the Crest Ring.” Then Alexand smiled. “But thank the God that doesn’t apply to the second born.”

  “I hope Father doesn’t think it does.” He paused, eyeing Alexand intently, then, “Alex, don’t you want to know what my Fesh name will be?”

  “Come on, Rich, you know I want to know.”

  Rich reached for a scriber and lightpen from his bedside table, and his seriousness in protecting his new identity was brought home to Alexand by the fact that he chose to write the name, not speak it aloud. The chance of their rooms being monitored was remote, but it was always a possibility. He wrote two words, then turned the screen for Alexand to see.

  Richard Lamb.

  Alexand studied it, smiling at the ironic overtones, and at one aspect of it that Rich wouldn’t have considered: what animal except the lamb was so generally regarded as a symbol of gentleness?

  Or of sacrifice?

  He put that thought aside, smiling at Rich as he hurriedly cleared the screen.

  “Thank you, Rich.”

  He shrugged. “Don’t thank me for something it’s not in my power to withhold from you.”

  “Then I’m grateful for that.” Alexand looked at his watch. “But did you know it’s 01:00?” He rose, stretched his free arm, and yawned. “I don’t know about you, but I’m tired.”

  Rich nodded, then, as if he’d just thought of it, “By the way, did you check your comconsole? There’s a lettape for you. It came in today; a SynchCom transmission from Castor.”

  “Castor?” Alexand felt a disconcerting warmth in his cheeks. “From Adrien? Oh, Rich, why didn’t you tell me sooner?” “Selfishness. I knew I’d lose you immediately, and I wanted to hear about your adventures in Montril.”

  Alexand attempted an indifferent shrug. “Why would you have lost me? A ’tape won’t dissolve if it isn’t read on the moment.” He had turned to face the windowall, but the nocturnal vista only reminded him of pearls like stars in night-black hair.

  Rich said, “Alex, I can’t believe you’re trying to delude me, so don’t delude yourself.”

  “Delude myself about what? I . . . don’t even know her.”

  “You keep saying that. All right, I suppose it’s true, but I think you’ll get to know Serra Adrien Eliseer a great deal better in the future. Her name came up when Mother and I were at the beach. Mother was probing.”

  “For what?”

  “How you really feel about Adrien.”

  He asked numbly, “What difference does it make?”

  “Possibly a great difference, considering the political situation with Eliseer and Selasis. Certainly a great difference to Mother. She liked Adrien very much; enough to call her the only possible bride for you, and she said Father agrees with her. I know it can’t be counted done until the contracts are signed, and that’s a long time in the future, but the odds are very high that they will be signed.”

  Alexand was incapable of responding to that, closing his eyes against an unexpected vertigo.

  I’ll still make room for joy. I’m strong enough to withstand pain and willing to accept the risk, and I can’t live without . . .

  “Rich, I hope you’re right.”

  “So do I. And I’ll make a prediction: next year at the Concord Day balls, you’ll be Serra Adrien Camine Eliseer’s escort.” Then he added with a wry smile, “And further, the society reporters will describe you as a ‘striking’ couple.”

  Alexand could only laugh at that, and he still felt the warmth of it within him even when it faded.

  “Rich, I’m very lucky to have . . .” He stopped before voicing the thought: to have two linked-twin souls.

  Rich nodded, smiling gently. “I’ll make another prediction, Alex. The Contracts of Marriage will be signed by the time you reach Age of Rights.”

  Age of Rights. Five years. It seemed a long time. So much could happen in five years.

  But, Adrien, I can’t live without hope, either.

  PHOENIX MEMFILES: DEPT HUMAN SCIENCES:

  SOCIOTHEOLOGY (HS/STh)

  SUBFILE: LAMB, RICHARD: PERSONAL NOTES

  27 DECEM 3251

  DOC LOC #819/19208–1812–1614–27123251

  Lectors Fensly and Cordeli have published a new translation of the Disasters Diary, and although their annotations leave a great deal to be desired, it was a pleasure—at least a moving experience—to reacquaint myself with the Diary.

  It wasn’t, of course, actually a diary of the Disasters, but simply a personal journal kept by a woman of the period, and her accounts throw more light on the everyday life of the independent agrarian family—a way of life that has no modem parallel—than on the history of the disintegration of her civilization. Mary Hobson and her husband, whom she calls “Bob” (which is probably a nickname rather than a forename, and might have referred to short stature), lived on a farming-grazing complex in eastern Conta Austrail near the ancient city of Brisbane, where they bred sheep on land they held in sole ownership. The Hobsons were also members of a religious sect that disapproved of abortion or contraception—this at a time when the population had soared over eight billion, according to some estimates, ten billion in others. And that vast population was entirely confined to Terra. (Or “Earth,” as it was called before the Confederation Lords became so enamored of ancient nomenclature during the extraterrestrial colonization phase. I’ve always liked the old term; it had such rich meanings in the language of the day.)

  Mary Hobson’s antagonism to population control is commented on at length by Fensly and Cordeli as a phenomenon of the time, and they present evidence that her religious sect numbered its adherents in the billions. The lectors find that incomprehensible, yet I wonder if they balk at the equally incomprehensible fact that today our religious and social doctrines sanction the enslavement of seventy percent of our population. One thing the study of history has taught me is that no one has a right to laugh at the fallacies of the past, and something Fensly and Cordeli have overlooked is that their attitudes toward birth control are not shared by the majority of Fesh, and Bonds are generally encouraged by their Lords to be fruitful and multiply. Their Lords do practice birth control, but not out of any concern for overpopulation; their concern is for divisive House successional battles and the dilution of power. Fensly and Cordeli can be smug about the matter because overpopulation is not really a problem today with the total population at about four and a half billion spread over nine planets and five satellites. That doesn’t mean it won’t be in the future, nor does it mean we’ve learned the bitter lesson taught by the twentieth century and the Disasters, any more than Mary Hobson recognized the lessons of informed prognostication, or even of common sense available to her.

  In 2030, when her civilization was on the verge of crumbling under the weight of that glut of human beings, and when this surviving volume of Mary’s diary begins, she reports that a neighbor chided her on the birth of her fifth child (she bore seven altogether), which suggests that some of her contemporaries were concerned about overpopula
tion, but Mary blithely informed her neighbor, so she tells us, that “God will provide.”

  What the God provided beginning in that fateful year was the Great Drought. However, Conta Austrail—at least the eastern and southern sections—was spared the worst of the Drought, so Mary’s personal experience of it is limited. She describes four unusually dry years and is constantly outraged at the rocketing prices of food at nearby markets. She also quotes lettapes—rather, the handwritten “letters” of the period—from a cousin in Noramerika, who pleads for financial aid so he and his family can move to Conta Austrail. He was also a small landholder and reports his land parched and blowing away in black dust storms, his family reduced to beggary. We don’t know his fate; her subsequent attempts to contact him proved futile.

  A friend in Brittan—or “England,” as Mary calls it—tells her of government food rationing, and if the translations of measurements are correct, they were at a starvation level. Mary corresponds with that friend, whom she identifies simply as “Cora,” for another five years, and is increasingly dismayed at Cora’s accounts of mass starvation, large-scale civil disorder, and the death of her husband in an encounter between army police and factory workers. The letters become sporadic, and finally, after an interval of a year, Cora mentions in what proved to be her last letter that her two children are ill with “that new kind of flu.”

  That was the beginning of the Pandemic, and “that new kind of flu” was only one of many mutating virus forms that along with more conventional diseases—like typhoid, typhus, bubonic and pneumonic plague, yellow fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria, malaria, smallpox, and cholera—in a period of twenty years killed an estimated four billion people.

  Mary Hobson, in Conta Austrail. was isolated to a great degree from these disasters, although not unaffected by them. She reports that Bob has butchered most of their sheep; it has become too expensive to maintain the herds, and there is no market for the wool—no factories to convert it into cloth. But for Mary, the God still provides. “We have the land and we can live off it until all this settles down.”

  But it didn’t settle down. She reports, almost casually, in 2040 that Bob is building an electrified fence around their house and nearby fields “to keep those gangs of hoodlums out.” A year later, Bob is pleased at acquiring a store of ammunition for the weapons the family depends on to defend its holdings. “Can’t look to the police any more,” Mary tells us. “They’re as bad as the gangs.” She also tells us that these gangs, or “rovers,” have all but taken over the city of Brisbane. “It’s worth your life to go there now.”

  And a few months later, it apparently was worth her eldest son’s life. He didn’t return from a trip to that ill-fated city. Mary mourns, “The worst part is not knowing, but I told Bob, none of us is going after Sid. None of us is ever setting foot outside the gates again.”

  Her only news from beyond her gates in the following years comes from a radio communication system. In 2045 she enters in her diary vague reports of wars between “Russians,” “Americans,” “Chinese,” and other peoples or “nations.” Her information on these events indicates the deteriorated state of communications. She knows less of the Nuclear Wars than we do today, and her reports show a time lag of up to four years. For instance, she notes the death of the king (of “England,” it is assumed) in 2048, but by then the island of Brittan, like most of Noreurope, was a radioactive ruin.

  But the Hobson family survives in its isolated bastion. There are even poignant descriptions of such commonplace events as the celebration of various holidays, and in 2049 the marriage of her daughter Livia to Ben Lewis, who lived on a nearby landholding. Mary is especially pleased that a traveling minister of her religion was present to sanctify the vows. We are also told of seasonal farm life, crops planted, tended, harvested. The crops, however, were seldom bountiful, too often deformed and stunted, or devoured by insects. One summer she describes swarms of grasshoppers “bigger than your hand,” and the following autumn, the invasion of their fields by armies of hairless rabbits.

  No more does she assure us that the God will provide. Her God has become an avenging God. “This is what comes to a world full of sin. God’s will be done.”

  Mary Hobson couldn’t know the magnitude of the wages of sin in the rest of the world, of the estimated seven billion deaths that resulted from famine, pollution and chemical poisoning, disease, war, the mutant plagues, and, finally, anarchy. She was isolated in her farm bastion as to a great degree Conta Austrail was isolated from the worst of the Disasters. That, and the fact that its resources weren’t as gutted by the excesses of the twentieth century as were those of the rest of the planet, and that it wasn’t so extensively urbanized, explains why Conta Austrail became the site of the new renaissance after the Second Dark Age. But isolation didn’t save the Hobsons.

  The Pandemic finally, in 2052, reached their farm keep. We don’t know from Mary’s description of the symptoms which of the diseases rampant at the time struck her family down. She refers to it simply as “the fever.” Her youngest child succumbed first, then, within a week, her husband and the remaining four children still at home or surviving. Mary tells us she buried them all herself and prayed for their souls, “but it didn’t seem right, there being no priest to say last rites.” But she hopes her God will understand.

  In the last entry in the diary she says she will have to leave the farm. “They’ll come to burn it down as soon as they find out the fever was in it.” We don’t know who “they” are; perhaps her rural neighbors. And Mary realizes she will be a pariah, since she’s been exposed to the disease.

  “I didn’t catch it, though,” she notes. “Maybe somewhere I can find another farm where they won’t know about the fever. I’ve still got a strong back and a lot of years’ work in me. I can pay my way. Nothing else to do but go out and look for a place to take me in. God’s will be done.”

  The diary was found nine hundred years later in the excavation of the medieval enclave of Renhold near Sidny. How it got there we’ll never know, but we do know the enclave was established in the early twenty-first century during the Disasters. Perhaps Mary Hobson did find a place that would take her in.

  CHAPTER II

  Septem 3246

  1.

  The Lord Evin Daro Galinin, first born of Lord Mathis, heir to Daro Galinin and the Chairmanship, was dead. And with him, his only son, Marc, and the Lord Alexis Arment Ivanoi.

  Alexand stared at his father, hearing the words echoing and reechoing. He felt himself caught in a sort of sensory warp. That fact, those terse words, made a mockery of the reality around him.

  12 Septem. Today was his birthday: his seventeenth birthday.

  He wondered why that irrelevant fact came to mind, why something so meaningless in the face of this disaster assumed the proportions of portent; why the only physical sensation he was aware of was the weight of the gold medallion at his throat—Rich’s birthday gift to him—and the ruby and black jade ring on his right hand—a gift from Adrien Eliseer.

  Adrien. . .

  Even she seemed unreal, infinitely distant; more than time or light years.

  Morning sunlight slanted through the wide door into the gymnasium and fell onto the ruffled waters of the thermal pool, casting shivering reflections, gossamer veils of light, impalpable, yet somehow more tangible than the reality of walls and water and tiled floor and heavy-scented, tropical foliage. More tangible even than the four persons who shared this light-spun silence with him.

  Dr. Kairn Bettis, Rich’s physiotherapist, moving like a sleepwalker to help Rich out of the pool and into a sitting position on the rim. And Rich, frail and weightless as a bird, suddenly drained of all substance, pulling close the towel she draped around his shoulders.

  Fenn Lacroy, sinewy hands curling reflexively at his sides; he had dropped his fencing foil, yet Alexand couldn’t rem
ember hearing the sound. Nor could he remember what had happened to the foil that had been in his own hand.

  And the quivering reflections moved across Phillip Woolf’s taut, saturnine features, catching in the pale irises of his eyes.

  The reality was in the words, not in this segment of space/time.

  Evin and Marc Galinin and Alexis lvanoi are dead.

  The reality was in the wellsprings of grief those deaths would tap. Lord Mathis and Lady Camma Galinin. herself dying, in one blow robbed of their only son and his only son. Elise Woolf bereaved of a brother. Lady Marcessa Galinin, who must mourn a husband and a child at once.

  And Honoria Corelis Ivanoi, who had loved her husband, and must grieve his loss and comfort two sons, one little more than an infant, the other a child of five.

  Wellsprings that would be inexhaustible.

  And finally a voice in the eternal silence that had lived no more than seconds. Alexand saw Kairn sagging, her hands tightening on Rich’s shoulders, saw her lips moving, but her voice seemed strangely disembodied, as if it came from within his own mind.

  “The God help us . . . Evin Galinin . . .”

  The next voice was his own, and it seemed as disembodied as Kairn’s.

  “When, Father?”

  “About two hours ago.”

  Alexand knew he would have to face the political implications of these deaths, knew they spelled a disaster that might destroy Daro Galinin and Ivanoi. And DeKovcn Woolf. Orin Selasis would be waiting, ready to pounce at this unprecedented opportunity. But Alexand couldn’t make the mental shift into that plane yet. In the eye of memory was the patriarchal face of Mathis Galinin. How would he tolerate this? How would he hold on to his sanity? He had already had to grieve the loss of one son, and now both Evin and Marc—

  “My lord, shall we leave you?” Fenn Lacroy, glancing at Dr. Bettis, who rose and turned to Woolf.