Voyage Across the Stars

by David Drake

  “I think we can do better than that, Captain,” said the woman. She was close enough to extend a hand to grip Slade’s warmly. She smiled. “I am the Terzia.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Don Slade slept in a comfortable room. If he wished, he could have opened it into a porch by cranking the roof and west wall into recesses. There was no need for that. This night on Elysium, Slade was tired enough to sleep on a heap of cinders.

  No resident of the planet above the age of six was asleep.

  The mental netting that linked the folk of Elysium was as real and as resilient as a spider’s web, but it did not change the fact that humans evolved as social individuals. It was as individuals that they talked now in family groupings before they joined again in the decision that the society would make—as an individual.

  Onander filled a mug that he had thrown and fired himself in youth. He handed it to his daughter. Nan already sipped from a similar mug at the astringent blend of coffee, cacao, and milk.

  “Well, we certainly can’t keep him here,” said Onander. By watching himself fill the third mug, he did not have to catch the eyes of either woman.

  “No, dear,” said Nan in a tone which was further from agreement with her husband than the words themselves were. “That wouldn’t be at all fair to him, would it?” In a slightly different voice she added, “The Terzia acts in such human ways on occasion. It’s a little hard to believe, sometimes.”

  The surface of Risa’s drink began to tremble until the girl set the mug down with a thump. The blush on her cheekbones clashed with the coppery tinge of her hair. “He’s not something we have to be afraid of, you know,” Risa said. “He’s alone. And he’s been acting quite nicely. Well? Hasn’t he?”

  “Well, he’s certainly been acting,” said her father. His tone was sharpened by the rasp of Risa’s demand.

  “Now, dear, that isn’t fair,” said his wife before Risa could respond. That would raise the emotional temperature still further. “Everyone tries to be pleasant to strangers. That’s all Don’s doing. But of course, Risa—” She looked calmly over to her daughter—“he is very dangerous. And we couldn’t allow him to stay, even if he wanted to.”

  “Well, what is the mural in the Hall?” the girl demanded, more in frustration now than anger. “What sort of men—and women!—fought the mutants? Weren’t they like him? Our ancestors. Why should we be afraid of Don?”

  “Oh, Risa,” Onander said softly. He reached out a hand. His daughter took it willingly, greedily. “The battle was no myth; but the mural is a warning, not a trophy. Those were our ancestors, yes. Some of our genes. . . . And we all of us, despite the unity we’ve begun to achieve; all of us could be back in that Hell of violence and slaughter, very easily.”

  “But the mutants aren’t here, Father,” Risa said. “They’re still on the colony ship or they’ve died out. Or maybe they landed somewhere after all, have their own world—but they aren’t on Elysium.”

  Onander turned his daughter’s hand palm-upward. He cupped his own much larger hand above it on the table. “The mutants were half the war, my dearest. When our ancestors built the matter transmitter, they left the mutants behind. But they couldn’t leave themselves behind.”

  He paused, looking from the paired hands to the eyes of his daughter. “Don Slade is a credit to the race in many ways,” Onander continued softly. “And no, if it hadn’t been for souls like his among our ancestors, we would never have survived to settle Elysium, to make it what we have for the past millennium. But there are things in us which if awakened would drop us back into chaos as suddenly as our ancestors escaped it. And you know that also, my Risa.”

  “He wouldn’t be happy, dearest,” Nan said sadly. It was hard to tell whether the sadness was on her daughter’s behalf or for more personal reasons. “Not even for a little while, now that he’s so focused on getting back to Tethys. He really does believe it will be home to him after twenty years, you know.”

  “Yes,” Risa said with a sharp movement of her head, a nod or a peck. She slipped her hand from beneath her father’s. When Risa drank from her mug, it was with loud gulping noises.

  “I think,” said Onander heavily, “that it’s about time to make a decision.” Nan met his eyes and nodded; Risa nodded to her mug of bitter drink.

  The trio fell silent around the handsome kitchen table. The alcohol lamp burbled softly beneath the pot of drinks. Occasionally a local equivalent of insects would be batted away by the repulsion field guarding the open window.

  Physically, the family was of three separate entities . . . but their minds were merging, and all over Elysium minds were merging to decide the fate of a sleeping castaway.

  “Captain Slade?” the voice whispered. “Don?”

  Hours of tension and a heavy meal had drugged Slade as thoroughly as a deliberate anesthetic. The reflexes were still there, however, even if they had to fight to the surface through meters of cotton batting. “Roger,” the tanker said, groping for the equipment belt that should have been close to his head.

  Risa touched Slade’s hand with one of hers. He felt the edge of the bed give under her slight weight. “I came to tell you,” the girl said, “that they—that we are going to send you to Tethys.”

  “That’s—” Slade said. “Well, I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to thank you. But if Elysium ever—has need for what I have or what I am, it’s yours.”

  Slade had been momentarily blind when he rolled out of sleep. Now the tanker’s eyesight was returning with a rush. The door of his room was closed. Starlight through the window above the bed showed that Risa wore a pastel garment, high-necked and frothy. The garment covered a great deal more of the girl’s skin than had the suit she wore in the air car, but it covered that skin with little more than the shadow it threw.

  “Girl” was the wrong word. Dear Lord, but there could be no doubt but that Risa was a woman.

  “You won’t be able to remember us, though,” Risa said as she sat primly. “We—we’re peaceful here on Elysium, and they think that if word got around. . . .”

  “Sure,” the tanker said. He shifted so that he was upright with his back against the window ledge. His legs were tucked beneath him and covered with the sheet. “I, well. . . . There’s some places like yours where I figure they wouldn’t let a stranger go at all. For the reason stated. I’ll admit I half thought. . . .”

  Slade’s voice trailed off. The woman beside him had been in his mind, however. She knew that the thought had been multiple, not partial. A door closing and the hiss of lethal gas from vents. Burly men holding Slade on either side and the prick of an injection. A greeting, and as Slade turned, a blast of gunfire. The tanker had known too many situations in which an individual did not fit the circumstances. It was never something he had liked; Slade preferred to think of his enemies as gunmen facing him. But he had heard the stories, sure he had.

  Lord have mercy on the soul of Joachim Steuben; and on the soul of Donald Slade, who was headed the same way in the Lord’s good time.

  “Ah,” Slade added, “I wouldn’t have anybody think I was in the habit of shafting people who’d done me favors. I don’t blame you folks for wiping my memory, but—it wasn’t something I’d have talked about anyway.”

  “There will be some things that will remain,” Risa said. She twisted slightly toward the man. Her knee bumped Slade’s. When he edged away, she twisted further. “You’ll remember meals, probably, though not where you ate them. You’ll even remember faces. A memento of . . . us here on Elysium.”

  The tanker was frowning in concentration. Aloud he said, “The kindness you’ve done me will be that, Risa. That will stay, I’m sure. I don’t forget help I’ve been given, or who gave it.”

  “Don, I’m not a child,” she said. Her left hand touched the sheet over Slade’s thighs, then slipped with a butterfly’s delicacy to the man’s bare torso.

  Slade touched Risa’s hand loosely enough for affection but not so loosel
y that the hand could fumble the way it seemed to want to do. “I know that,” the tanker lied. Then he went on fiercely. “And you know that I’m not an adult, not like anybody here would recognize. I never will be. You know that!”

  “Don, that doesn’t matter,” Risa said. She tugged her hand, away now and not downward. It came free at once.

  “Sure it matters, Risa,” the tanker replied. “It would matter to you if you saw a friend getting into something that was going to do a lot more harm than good. Wouldn’t it?”

  Risa sat bolt upright again. “I think that’s my decision, isn’t it?” she said in a voice harder than any she had used before to Slade. Her garment blurred away from her bosom like shock waves from bullets.

  “No, Risa, it’s not,” Slade said gently. “Not unless I’m—do you have dogs, here? Domestic animals of some sort, anyway. Not unless I’m an animal. If I’m a human being, then it does matter. That’s your decision, Risa. Am I a human being, to you?”

  The girl burst into tears.

  Slade wrapped her to his chest, safely now and a little sorry of that fact, but. . . .

  “I didn’t mean,” Risa gurgled. “I just didn’t want you to, to leave and—”

  “I’m not going to forget,” Slade whispered to the soft, curly hair. “Anything that leaves me mind enough to remember meals is going to let me remember you saving my life. And . . . you being you. You being here makes it a better universe, Risa. And I’ll know that too.”

  Risa straightened, sniffled, and stood up. “I—” she began. Then she said, “You’ve been good for us here on Elysium, Don. It doesn’t usually happen, but I think . . . it might be that if you went traveling again, after you’ve settled your business on Tethys, that you could find your way here again. I’d be a little older then, of course.”

  Risa turned and walked out of the room. She closed the door softly behind her.

  Blood and Martyrs, Slade thought. Sixteen going on forty. . . . And here he was, forty himself and that a miracle the way he’d lived. He had been going to lay back on Tethys, he’d told himself that. But Tom with his chest split open and Marilee calling for help, well. . . . Marilee knew the sort of help you got from Hammer’s Slammers. She knew what to expect from Don Slade when she told him there was trouble.

  And if they were no more than fancies in a madman’s skull, Tom and Marilee and the others—then they were Don Slade’s fancies. Maybe there would be a chance to settle down afterwards, if he lived to be forty-one.

  Blood and Martyrs. Slade was smiling as he drifted off to sleep again.

  In a room not far from Slade’s, Nan and Onander held one another. The man was weeping softly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Dawn awakened him with her rosy fingers.

  The air was brisk enough to be comfortable, and it had enough of a salt tang to remind Slade of home. He stretched in bed—and found himself lying on gravel instead of a mattress.

  “Where in the Hell am I?” the big man grunted. But the real Hell of it was, he knew the answer before he voiced the question. What he did not know was how he had come to lie behind a spaceport warehouse on Tethys.

  “Via,” Slade said in wonderment. He was wearing boots and a two-piece work-suit of neutral gray, not livery. There was a hand-scrip in one pocket. It held about a month’s pay for a laborer in both Tethian currency and in crystalline Frisian talers. There were identity cards as well, three of them in three different names . . . and one of them the card Don Slade would have carried had he stayed on Tethys and succeeded to the Slade Councilorship.

  The last thing Slade remembered clearly was boarding a lifeboat on Terzia. That boat sure as blazes had not landed him here . . . but the only other thing in his mind was a girl’s face, elfin cute and smiling beneath a tumble of red curls.

  The tanker remembered what the phantoms of his mind had told him aboard the Alayan ship, also. He scraped a small hole in the gravel and hid within it the card in his own name and one of the others as well. He kept only the one calling him Donald Holt. Into the same small hiding place he dropped the seal ring from his hand. The ring was unremarkable till its weight indicated that it was of projectile-grade osmium. It would look precisely the same in a bath of molten steel. It was the only thing Slade had kept with him from the day he lifted from Tethys as a Slammers recruit.

  He filled in the hole with a gentle motion of his boot sole and noted the number of paces from it to the corner of the warehouse as he walked away.

  Somebody had wished him well; the nondescript clothing and the false indentities were proof of that. The memory of the red-haired girl followed Slade, but he could not get a grip on the thought. “I sold my clock, I sold my reel . . .” the tanker sang to himself. But this Johnnie had come back from soldiering. . . .

  A train of low-boys were emptying at the front of the warehouse. The foreman of the crew glanced at Slade sharply. The big man was not one of the warehouse team, however, and therefore not worth worrying about. Slade noted that the foreman and the truck drivers all seemed to be in red-piped clothing suggesting Dyson livery. The low-ranking cargo-handlers wore plain gray.

  “To buy my love a sword of steel . . .” the castaway murmured as he smiled. He wiped his palms on his thighs.

  It was still home. The sky to the west was the right pale gray with its hint of violet. The air had the odors of childhood, though they were over-printed here by ozone from landing thrusters. Slade had never spent much time at the Port when he was growing up, though it existed as an enclave in the family estates. A neutral enclave, administered by a board appointed by the Council as a whole. Now everyone with rank seemed to claim allegiance to the Dysons. Welladay. . . .

  It was a city, now, the spaceport. There had been houses for the permanent staff and their families, a few hundred households at the time Slade had left. From the look of the barracks—some of the buildings very new, still under construction—there were many times that number present now.

  Of greater concern were the shanties spreading beyond the formal buildings. Some of them seemed to be rigged out for entertainment of one sort or the other. Certainly they did not house workers. Men and women lounged among the shanties now, while the bustle of business continued on the field.

  There were three huge starships down and a number of intra-system ferries and tenders. One of the latter had landed recently enough that steam was venting from its hull as the thrusters cooled. The cargo bay was still closed, but a handful of passengers had disembarked. Humans were always fringe cargo, save for the occasional new settlement—and, more often, the transport of a mercenary regiment.

  Nothing like that here. Most of the passengers were entering a large air car in Krueger colors. They seemed to be a honeymoon couple and their servants, returned now with subdued expressions. Slade had never thought that the uncertainties of a long journey were a good way to begin married life; but then, he had never been married.

  There was one man apart from the Krueger party. He was talking to the driver of a utility van outside the port office as Slade approached. Though the man’s back was to the tanker, Slade could hear him saying, “ . . . to Slade House?”

  “Much in the way of luggage, then?” the driver asked.

  “Pardon me, master,” said Don Slade as he stepped almost between the two men, “but I couldn’t help—Blood and Martyrs!”

  “Came to look for you, my man,” said Danny Pritchard with a slow, tight grin.

  The driver was blinking from one ex-soldier to the other. Pritchard touched Slade’s jaw to silence him and said to the driver, “A standard cubic-meter case is all. In the office. And an extra—”

  “Thirty libra,” Slade said, cued without either partner’s conscious awareness of the question.

  “—if you fetch it to the truck yourself.”

  The driver shrugged. He took the scribbled claim check and sauntered into the building.

  “Been back long?” Pritchard asked as the two men sized each other up. />
  Danny looked a little more gray than Slade had remembered him. Fit, though, the Lord knew. Slade’s exercises had not included walking. He was sure that even the kilometer he had just strolled through the Port village had raised blisters on his right sole and heel. “I don’t think so,” he said aloud. “Say, did you have anything to do with that?”

  “With how you left Terzia, you mean?” Pritchard asked.

  “No, I—oh, never mind,” the tanker replied. “There’s other things to worry about now, I guess.”

  His friend frowned and nodded his head. “Look,” said Pritchard, “how much do you know about what’s going on here the last while? Anything?”

  “Is my brother dead?” Slade asked.

  Pritchard nodded.

  “Yeah,” Slade muttered, aloud but to the part of his mind which believed in Hell. “Well,” he continued, “I guess I’m not color-blind.” He nodded toward a Port official in full Dyson livery, calling orders to a gang of laborers. “I suppose there’s some things to straighten out back at the House, too.”

  “Don, I don’t know how bad it is,” said Danny Pritchard. “But it seemed like I ought to take a look. With the Colonel’s blessing.”

  “I’m not asking anybody in to fight my fights,” Slade said sharply.

  “And I’m not offering to,” Pritchard snapped back. “I’d have thought you’d seen enough with the Slammers to know that blowing people away’s a curst poor way to settle things anyway—unless you figure to get them all. How many people do you think you and I can kill, Don?”

  “Via, I’m sorry,” the big man said. He chuckled. Clasping his comrade on the shoulder very lightly, he went on. “You know the only thing I was ever fit for was line command. Got any bright ideas, staff mogul?”

  “Yeah,” said Pritchard. “Got the idea that you lie low for a couple days instead of barging right into things. The Council’s going to meet at Slade House, you know?”