by David Drake
“You’re going to use him to drive the ship,” the tanker broke in again. Levine had told him the scuttlebutt about the Alayan drive, suggestions that the Alayans themselves had not denied in discussions before Slade made the survivors’ decision for them. A warping of real space very different from the human technique of entering a separate Transit universe. A warping of space achieved through the warping of a human mind, the rumors went. . . .
“No, Mister Slade,” replied the dancing fingers on the vocalizer, “we have used him to drive the ship. We cannot use his mind again, because it no longer has a basis in objective reality. That is always the case, I am afraid. You were aware of the situation when you accepted our offer of transport.”
Slade ignored the last part of the statement. It was true; he simply did not care to dwell on it. “They always go—go berserk like Stoudemeyer just did?”
Light of no discernible hue played over one of the Alayan’s—faces; a shrug of sorts. “Rarely that. We apologize. Generally catatonia, sometimes other forms of aberration. We did not expect this—” Warmth spread across the human’s skin that implied the speaker had gestured in the infrared. “—but one cannot be certain what the ash will look like when one burns a log.”
“And you can’t—do this—travel—yourselves,” Slade asked through a grimace that reflected his difficulty in finding words. Slade no longer believed he was simply in a tube connected to the passenger compartment, though he had no better explanation of where the Alayan might have taken him.
“Any sentient mind will serve the purpose,” said the Alayan. “Any mind with a grasp of reality and the ability to change reality through—fantasy, if you will. We direct the fantasies so that they become real . . . and the vessel moves in objective reality through the—pressure of the subject’s mind. Unfortunately, that mind moves as well, in a psychic dimension from which it cannot be retrieved. We could use ourselves as subjects, but we do not do so while we have minds aboard which are not ours. That is the main value for which we trade.”
The listening human realized that there would have been no hostility or even emotion in the words whether or not they were the construct of a vocalizer. The Alayans did not hate their passengers; nor did they treat humans cruelly, the way humans were often wont to do to their own species. It was a simple operation, like triage: separating victims into those who would survive and those who would not. Nothing in the process implied a desire that some not survive . . . a wish for Kile Stoudemeyer to bite through his fellows’ throats and to spend the rest of his life in total sedation.
But better that than similar destruction of an Alayan mind. The choice, after all, was the Alayans’.
“I knew,” Slade said, aloud but more to himself than to the exoskeletal creature before him, “that people—some of us—might go nuts because of your drive. I mean, Transit hits some people like that, the sensation’s different for everybody . . . and it makes some people snap. I didn’t figure that it wasn’t may go nuts, it was like firing a gun and watching the empty case spit out. I think we’d better, ah, disembark at the next landfall. Unless—I mean, how many stops can you make on the—” Slade did not pause, but his lips stuck momentarily in a rictus as he finished, “—present fuel?”
“Everyone who wishes to leave and is permitted to do so by the planetary authorities,” said the Alayan, “may of course disembark on Terzia. There will have to be a second—impetus—to reach that world, Mister Slade. More than that to reach any other planet which could be suitable for your purpose, for your leaving the ship.”
Slade hammered his fist into the corridor wall. The wall absorbed the blow with a massive resilience like that of deep sod. The hazy light seemed to fluctuate.
“You may do as you see fit, Mister Slade,” the alien went on. His faces flickered, occasionally in the visible spectrum, “but I would suggest that you not discuss the situation in detail with your fellows until you have landed. It would cause distress, and it would probably lead to violence and injuries more serious than any the need of propulsion will cause.”
“Who goes next?” the tanker demanded as he stared at his hand.
“The choice is generally random,” the vocalizer said. “Not you, of course. Though if there is someone you would like to choose for the next segment? Or however far you choose to prolong the association after you have had time to reflect.”
“Anyone?” Slade said. He turned and looked at the alien: the courteous, slim-bodied creature who was discussing his human cargo like lambs in a pen. “Shouldn’t be hard to find somebody dead worthless in this lot, you’d think. . . .”
Not hard at all. Some of the outlaws were men Don Slade had been on the verge of killing a time or two himself. There were others, a few, whom the tanker still did not know by name. They were without personalities—to Slade. Without any of the factors that would have made them people instead of objects.
And there were those whom the crash of GAC 59 had disabled: paraplegics for whom no therapy could do more than maintain life, limbless torsos who would be shambling wrecks even with better prosthetics than they were ever likely to afford.
No problem for Don Slade. No problem for Captain Slade, who had hosed innocents with cyan fire during more operations than he cared to remember.
“All right,” the tanker whispered to his clenched fist. “Take me.” He turned his back on the Alayan. In the hollow distance, there was no sign of the door by which they had entered the corridor.
“You mean, Mister Slade—” began the mechanical voice. Its tone could not be hesitant, but the words’ pacing was.
“I mean use me in your drive, curse it!” Slade shouted as he spun around. “I—”
He paused. The anger melted away from the fear it had been intended to cloak. Then the fear surrendered itself to the honesty of desperation. “There’s none of them worth the powder to blow them away,” the tanker whispered. “And I’ve sent men to die, the Lord knows. . . . But these’re mine, like it or don’t. And it’s all too much like deciding who to butcher so that the rest of the lifeboat gets another meal. I’m not going to do that.”
“Your principles do you credit, Mister Slade,” said the Alayan, “but as the leader—”
“I don’t have any bloody principles!” Slade said. “I’m just not going to axe one of my men for no better reason than to save my ass. Besides—” more calmly, now; almost diffident— “I don’t see. . . . I mean, some of those fellows aren’t bolted together real tight. Me, though . . . well, you’ll see.”
The Alayan’s exoskeleton dulled for a moment to an almost perfect matte finish. Then the sheen that Slade had equated with health, but which probably indicated something else, returned. “All right, Mister Slade,” the alien said. One of his tendrils played over an object on the belt around his midsection. The corridor began to fall in on itself. A door formed in the end of it as there had been when the pair entered. “You will not feel anything. There will be no pain. I cannot tell you exactly when it will happen, though it will not be soon.”
Slade nodded. He stepped to the door. It was already opening onto the globe in which Slade had been sleeping when Stoudemeyer went berserk in the adjacent compartment.
“And Mister Slade,” continued the voice which the tanker did not turn to face, “this passage will open for you if you wish to reconsider your decision.”
“I won’t,” said Slade as he rejoined the wondering humans who called him their leader.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Slade whuffled in his sleep. The blanket covered him for its feel rather than for need of warmth in the controlled climate of the passenger globe. Slade’s hands tugged the fabric closer and his body shifted slightly. There was nothing to awaken the men snoring in darkness to either side of the tanker.
There was nothing to indicate to them that Don Slade was in Hell.
Slade was not sure how he had gotten there this time, though there was nothing unfamiliar about his surroundings. It was night, and th
irty degrees of the horizon bubbled and writhed with the inverted orange funnel of a fire-storm. Somebody had been caught without nuclear dampers. A fusion bomb had gone off and had found fuel enough in the target area to multiply blast effect a thousandfold with winds of living flame.
But where was his tank? Where in hell was his tank, Hell was his tank . . .?
There was nothing nearby but mud and shattered trees. Powerguns slashed the distance with blue-green bolts. Occasionally they were answered or amplified by flares of high explosives that preceded their shock waves by many seconds. The mid-level overcast reflected the spire of the fire-storm into a soft, ghastly ambiance. It lighted the figure picking its way toward Slade across the mud and shell-holes.
Reflex moved the tanker’s hand toward the pistol which should have been in his belt. The pistol was not there, however; and his hand was either missing or not responding to control. Slade could not be sure. Vision was no longer quite the accustomed process either.
“Sing out!” called Don Slade in warning. It was what he would have done if he were armed, if he could have slipped to cover behind a stump. What was wrong with his—
“What’s the matter, Don?” called the oncoming figure. The voice was a pleasant tenor that cut through the hissing wind. “There’s nothing more to fear, is there?”
“Via,” said the tanker. “Via! Major Steuben!”
“Oh, call me Joachim, Don,” said the other figure. “You did when we were alive, after all. And anyway, we’re all equal here.”
“Joachim,” the big man begged. “Where are we?”
There could be no doubt that it really was Joachim Steuben. The uniform that rustled like a whore’s undergarments; the boyishly-smooth face and the curly black hair, signs of wealth spent lavishly when they could no longer truly be signs of youth. The pistol in a cutaway holster high on Joachim’s right hip, an ornamented bangle for a mincing queen—until he chose to kill. Joachim Steuben, slim and dainty as a white mouse . . . and the unit he commanded on the jobs for which no one else quite had the stomach, the White Mice. The Greeks, after all, had called their Furies the Kindly-Minded Ones.
Major Steuben commanded the White Mice until he died.
“Why Don,” the trim figure said. “We’re where people like you and I go when we die. We’re in Hell.” Steuben giggled, a sound that Slade remembered too well to mistake it for humor. “We’re where everybody goes.”
Something passed overhead with a freight-train rush, an artillery salvo aimed twenty kilometers down-range. The ground trembled to its passage.
“Joachim,” Slade said. “I think we ought to get out of here.” His legs would not move, he could not see his legs. “I think I’m going to need your help. I don’t—”
“I thought loyalty was the answer,” said Joachim. He spoke conversationally. The dead major was ignoring Slade’s words as one may ignore another’s words at a party, where there will be plenty of time for the other to make his point later . . . and none of it makes any difference anyway. “Be perfectly loyal to a man, answer his needs even when his words don’t admit those needs.” Joachim gestured with a dainty hand. “Do you know what loyalty brings you, Donnie?”
“Joachim, I didn’t—” Slade began. He respected Major Steuben, but he feared Steuben as well. Joachim was like a tank under the control of someone else; not necessarily hostile, but unstoppably lethal if it was chosen to be.
“Loyalty,” Steuben continued in his smooth lilt and harsh smile, “brings you a shot in the back.”
“I didn’t shoot you, Joachim!” the tanker said.
“I know who killed me, Don,” said the smiling figure. “And I know that nothing matters.” Joachim reached out with his right hand, his gun hand, and made as if to stroke Slade’s cheek. The smooth palm did not or did not quite touch the tanker. “Do you fancy me now, Donnie?” the slim man said.
Slade tried to lick his lips. “I don’t think so, Joachim,” he said.
Joachim giggled. “It’s as good as any offer you’ll get here, my friend,” he said. “And as bad, of course. I’m not real, you know.”
The slim figure turned. The back of the silk uniform rustled. The cloth was tattered and charred around the crater which a cyan bolt had left in killing the Major. “Nothing is real for you any more, Donnie,” Joachim called as he walked back through the wasteland. The sky warmed the bright-work of his pistol’s frame. “Nothing ever will be real,” said the lilting voice as the wind swallowed it at last.
“I’m going home, Joachim,” Slade called. “Home is real. Joachim Steuben! I’m real!”
Across the horizon from the fire-storm, a calliope began to rave at the sky.
“What’s the matter, brother?” asked a voice behind Slade. “Don’t feel like such a big man now, is that it?”
Don turned his attention with the care of a man who needs a further moment to think. Via, do I look that old? Aloud he said, “Hello, Tom. I didn’t expect to find you here.”
“But it’s just the place for Mad Dog Slade, isn’t it, brother?” said Tom. He gestured at the shattered forest, at the shot-split night. “So it’s the place for me, too, now that we’re the same. Now that we’re dead.”
They were fraternal twins, not identical; but they shared some features, and they had the same deep, powerful chests. Tom Slade was stocky where his brother was simply big; and the years since they separated had not been kind to the man who had stayed on Tethys. The orange haze hid the change in hair color, from fair to white; but the individual strands were coarser, now, and they were strewn at wider intervals across Tom’s scalp than they had been twenty years before. Tom’s face was wrinkled. At the moment, the wrinkling was exaggerated by the bitter grimace into which Tom had screwed his mouth.
“No,” Don said slowly. “I don’t think it’s the place for me, Tom. Or either of us. Let’s see if we can’t find a way out, shall we?”
“Why?” snarled Tom. He moved closer with his hands spread at his sides, as if to grapple with his bigger brother. A blade had entered beneath Tom’s ribs on the left side. The edge had been sharp enough to be drawn up diagonally through bone and the organs of the thorax. Tom’s shirt flopped away from the gash. The bloody stain on the fabric seemed glisteningly fresh. “So you could kill me yourself, Don? I know you’ve always wanted to, dear brother. Well, you’re too late. I’m dead.” Tom’s left hand deliberately spread the lips of his wound. “And you’re dead too.”
The tanker tried to reach out for his brother’s dripping hand, but he still had no control over his own limbs. “Tom,” he said softly. “I maybe wasn’t what you wanted in a brother, but I never hated you. And . . . Via, Tom, if I’d wanted you dead, you wouldn’t have had to wait around for it. Come on, help me and we’ll get the hell out of here.”
“We can’t get out!” the shorter man shouted. “We can’t! Don’t you understand that?”
“No, I don’t understand,” Don said simply. “Look, I have been these places—” he would have gestured to the waste around them— “that’s no more than the truth. And I’m not interested in standing around in another one, buck naked or whatever the hell I am. Now help me, curse it!”
The other figure slumped back from the tanker. “I can’t even help myself,” Tom said. “Any more than I could help my jealousy of you when we were alive. And I’d tell you I was sorry, Don, but it doesn’t really matter now. Nothing—” and the figure turned, walking away from Don Slade as distant sirens howled—“ever mattered. I see that now. . . .”
“Tom!” the tanker called. “Tom!”
“Shouldn’t bother you that he doesn’t listen to you,” said another voice. “After all, you never listened to anybody else, did vou?”
The speakers always approached from behind; but Don Slade noticed that however he turned, the glare of the fire-storm was on his left side. “Hello, Father,” he said. “I guess I could have figured that you’d be here.”
Councilor Slade looked much the same as he ha
d when Don last saw him on Tethys. That was not surprising. Though the Councilor had lived eighteen years after Don left home as a recruit for Hammer’s Slammers, he had always seemed aged.
As with the son who had succeeded him, time and duties had taken a harsh toll from Councilor Slade. His hair was gone, save for a fringe, and his eyebrows were starkly white as they pinched together in the angry expression Don remembered so well.
“Then I’m sure I’ve given you some pleasure,” the Councilor snapped in reply. “Cherish it, brat. You’ll find no other pleasure ever again.”
“I guess I am glad to see you,” the tanker said. “I’ve regretted the way we parted often enough. I don’t mean I’d have ever come back to Tethys if you were—” the swallow would not come—“still alive. But I wanted a chance to apologize for my part in the way things worked out. It wasn’t all my fault, but I’m sorry for the part that was.”
“You’re a liar!” the Councilor screamed. He clenched his fist and shook it. His frailty would have made the gesture ridiculous were it not for the fury that glinted from the close-set eyes.
Three shells burst squarely overhead. They were so high that the pops of the charges were several seconds behind the red sparkle. Don cringed, equating the mild warning for the rain of fire and fragment the pops presaged. Aloud he said, “Do people tell lies here, Father? I don’t feel like it myself.” Then, “Why did Tom say he was jealous of me? He’s the one who had it all.”
“Did he?” Councilor Slade said with a gibing laugh. “You’re the one who had Marilee, though, aren’t you?”
“I knew the lady,” Don admitted. He was surprised to learn that an anger hotter than mere frustration was still possible for him in his present guise. “And she brought me down about as hard as I care to remember. I don’t say I didn’t deserve it, but . . . she married Tom, he knew he’d won that one!”
