The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales

by Brian Stableford

  Before he died, Tom Haste contrived to figure out exactly why he’d swerved, thus causing one accident by his action in order to prevent the worse one that he might have caused by inaction, and exactly why he had been justified in sacrificing his own goods in order to protect others, and exactly why it was sometimes better to inhibit the progress of other road-users than facilitate it.

  In sum—and it was an item of arithmetic that felt exceedingly good to a robot, in a way it never could have done to a human being—Tom convinced himself that what he had actually done when he reached his own explosive crisis-point, had not only been the right thing to do, but the right thing to want to do.

  How many desirous intelligences, he wondered, before the rot and the rust completed their work, could say as much?

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  * * * *

  CAPTAIN FAGAN DIED ALONE

  The house where I was born stood on a cliff-top far above an ocean shore. I grew up with the sound of waves and the taste of spray. I spent long hours watching the sailing ships making their slow and graceful progress along the skyline. They never came close. There was no harbor within thirty miles of the house.

  My mother called me Malachi, and surnamed me Fagan, after my father. It wasn’t a comfortable name to bear amongst the insular, xenophobic people who were our neighbors. They all remembered my father, although none of them had known him well, and they kept the rumors and the legends in constant circulation within our small community, so that my name was a permanent stigma. I couldn’t understand why, because my father was long gone by the time I was old enough to have remembered him, and my mother was careful to see that the malicious talk never reached my ears. It wasn’t until I was old enough to work, and to earn a certain degree of independence, that I began to hear about Captain Hawker Fagan.

  He had lived on many worlds before he came to mine. I could track the course by which he had come in the stars that shone in the sky by night. A second chain of starlight delineated the direction of his going. There was no shortage of people to tell me the names of the stars and the things that he was rumored to have done there.

  The local people took a particular interest in Hawker Fagan, because he was the only living legend which was ever likely to come close to them. They enjoyed some tiny fraction of his notoriety, and they looked at me—his son—with fascinated repulsion. I was something not quite of their world. A part of my identity belonged out in the stars, in the strange modern mythology which had grown up around such men as Leander A Chara, Falcon Smith, Stephen Stranger—and Hawker Fagan.

  They couldn’t tell how much of the legend was true and how much false, and nor could I—but they didn’t want to know; it made no difference to their narrow, futile lives. To me, though, the truth was important and I didn’t want it confused with lies and fancies. All through my adolescence and my early manhood I carried the idea of one day being able to follow the trail that my father had left in the sky, in order find the truth, and to find him. It grieved me that I couldn’t remember his face or the sound of his voice. It disappointed me that none of the men I knew could describe him. To them, all strangers looked alike, and it was only in the quality of their names that there was any meaningful difference.

  Only my mother could talk about Hawker Fagan in any genuinely knowledgeable fashion, and I could never be sure how much trust I could safely place in her memories. She loved to talk about him, but not in the same awestruck way that the others did. She hadn’t known him intimately for more than a few weeks, but she talked about him as if he had spent many years by her side.

  She told me about his charm and his beauty. For her, the important thing about Hawker Fagan had been his charisma. He had been an idealization of her faint, flimsy daydreams. In her eyes, he was forever strong, forever kind. He was simple and understanding. She couldn’t see that all she retained was a frail, colorless image of a man who must have been so much more—but she was a contented daughter of a contented people. She didn’t have the imagination, or the capacity, to be unhappy.

  I grew up to believe that my mother and all of her kind were too shallow to have seen even a fraction of what there was to see in Hawker Fagan. I always knew and felt that I would have to go out to the stars before the name could take on the least significance, but I dared not hurry. I was all that my mother had left of the one love of her life, and I loved her too much to take it away from her. So I lived and worked with her people for long years, while my heart was always reaching out to the silver roads in the night sky.

  It was a good life, in its way. The sea was never harsh or angry, the fields were fertile and the climate calm. We lived largely without hate, and there was never any hint of anguish or the bearing of grudges. I was very much like those people, I suppose, while I shared their livelihood, but they and I were equally enthusiastic to make certain that I could never be one of them. I was always isolated, always different, always the son of another kind of man.

  My mother died when I was twenty-four years old. I don’t know exactly what it was that killed her. She had a cancer, I believe, but I think that she was also sickened with loneliness and a lingering contamination of other-worldliness. Perhaps she knew how badly I needed to go into deep space while I still had some sort of a chance to find my father, and perhaps she wanted me to make that pilgrimage, more than either of us realized.

  I watched her fade away into the personal darkness of her painless dying and although she made it easy for us both, I shed a good many tears during the last few days. Then I made haste to sell the house, and the land attached to it, in order that I might buy my way on to a starship. I would have preferred, before I left, to set a light to the house in which I had been born and lived, and watch it burn— but that would not have been practical. Even so, when I left the cliff-top, I left nothing tangible behind me. There was no longer anyone there that I loved, and no property to which I could ever return.

  I cast away my worldly identity to become a wanderer, like my father: a creature of the vast emptiness of space. It seemed to me to be the only thing that I could do—the only interpretation I could put upon the purpose of my life.

  In the slum that surrounded the spaceport, where I lived while I waited for a berth I could afford, I found a human wreck who actually remembered Hawker Fagan. The old man was maddened by addiction to some kind of alien poison, and dying of half a dozen different parasites and diseases. No one else would go near him to give him water and food—but the quality of his remembrance was worth more to me than all the insipid chatter that had circulated around my home because, whatever he might have been reduced to by the time I fond him, when that man had known Hawker Fagan, he had been a spaceman—a real man.

  I helped him to live long enough to defeat his sickness and clean him of most of his parasites, and even managed to get him on to one more ship, bound for one more world, where his addiction would undoubtedly drive him to another filthy death in another filthy slum. Perhaps it was no great kindness to put one last turn on the thread of his life, but it was all that I could do to make my presence felt in his span of existence, and I hope that I gave him something more than a few more days of misery.

  The Hawker Fagan he had known—or, at least, the Hawker Fagan he chose to depict—had been a cruel and brutal individual who had spent years hopping from world to world in a tiny, filthy ship, which devoured the living flesh of its crews with radiation and time-distortion. He talked about “Captain Fagan” as if he had lived in close intimacy the man, sharing more than his ship and his landfalls. He painted that Captain Fagan as a pirate, a killer, a hero, a demon and a demigod, and himself as a shadow of all those personalities. In his mind, he and Fagan had shared a long and incoherent tale of adventure and suspense, which was so dramatic as to be obviously fictitious. He wasn’t lying, though—I think I could be sure of that. His memory was obviously playing him false, but it could only twist, not create.

  His shattered mind sometimes made sarcastic mockery of his friend
ship with Captain Fagan, making their exploits into a humiliating farce of bombast and superheroism, but there was a reality somewhere in the disjointed account—a reality of action, violence, strife, misery and occasional triumph—and in the tragic end to which the tale had brought its teller, there was also terror and despair. I felt that it gave me a taste and a touch of the real Hawker Fagan, albeit blurred by a crippled mind. The man had flown on Hawker Fagan’s ship—and had lived to fly others.

  I found no one else on my own world who could give me any account of my father, though. They had all passed on, in one way or another.

  The stars beckoned. I bought a crewman’s berth on an ultraship, and encountered deep space and deep time. The experience alone was enough to give me new perspective on my quest for Captain Fagan. I had imagined that the empty vastness of deep space would make me feel tiny and humble, but Ultra was quite unlike anything I could have imagined. Ultra isn’t empty. Ultra is full—filled with power and fear. Ultra liberates the mind from the body; it gives a mind room to expand, to change and to mature. Return to space from Ultra gives you claustrophobia; space is a cage made of vacuum, locking you inside your tiny skull. World-dwellers can’t understand that, although they understand well enough that hardened and habitual starmen are a different breed, alien to their own.

  I learned very quickly why it is that so many ships go into Ultra and never come out. I began to understand why star wanderers are very special men.

  I obtained passage on a number of ships, always as crew, never as a “passenger”, despite the fact that the pay was sometimes high enough for one long haul to pay for two or three sleep-rides. To me, as to most crewmen, there was no difference between a “passenger” and an item of cargo. Passengers had destinations; I didn’t. I wanted to share the way of life that had long been Hawker Fagan’s, at least in some small measure. I didn’t want to travel wrapped in a cocoon, deeply asleep, with my brain tenderly preserved from all the stress and strain of Ultra, as well as its exotic radiations.

  I worked one ship, the Lady Helen, alongside an engineer named Corelli who had once nursed a drive for Captain Fagan—but that fraction of his memory related to the Captain’s better days, in a cleaner, faster ship which leaked hardly any radiation and damped the time-distortions to a tolerable level. Corelli’s story was not one of triumph and bravado in the face of adversity; such horror as there was in the account hadn’t been shared between Fagan and his men, but inflicted by the one upon the others.

  Corelli told me how my father loved to take his ship too close to the corona of a blue sun, hugging a tight orbit until men began to drop because of heat prostration—and all for no reason. Because, he quoted, the stars were there. He told me about the Captain Fagan who liked to explore the caves of dead planets drifting between the stars, looking for the living organisms that their deep, lukewarm cores sometimes still sheltered—the deadly, desperate organisms that had reached the end of their evolutionary path, which maimed and destroyed everything that came near, in a futile attempt to prove their immortality and invincibility.

  The engineer also gave me second-hand accounts of Hawker Fagan’s duels with hyperspatial storms still raging in the chaotic skies where gaseous nebulae had imploded or stars had slipped through the fabric of time into other universes. Captain Fagan, it was said, had sometimes done the impossible, and ridden out time-storms while the memory-fed nightmares and the echoes of Ultra had destroyed the minds of his crewmen. Corelli, of course, couldn’t vouch for the truth of such tales personally, but he claimed that they fitted the character of the Hawker Fagan that he had known: the man who had no reasons for what he did; Death’s tormentor and tempter; the man who had to show how brave and indestructible he was, and keep on showing it in every possible way at every possible opportunity.

  Corelli, too, had survived expeditions not unlike those he had attributed to Fagan. Ultra led many men to such extravagances—but the single-minded fanaticism of Captain Fagan was something that Corelli had never encountered in any other man. Captain Fagan was his hero, because had survived, where hundreds of men had died or lost their minds. Whenever the engineer pronounced the name of “Captain Fagan” there were shadows of fear and awe in his eyes and in his voice—and yet, he said, Captain Fagan was never afraid, and never awestruck.

  On another world, three years after my mother had died, I found another woman who had loved him. She was not like my mother. My mother had been shadow-like and delicate. This woman was self-assertive and strong. Her love had not lingered, but had been neatly packed away and carefully isolated the day my father had left her, forgotten unless and until the need and opportunity came to revive it. She claimed that what she told me contained nothing but the truth—perhaps not the whole truth, but truth uncontaminated by rumors, lies and legends. She said that Hawker Fagan was simply mad. She said that he had lost his own identity, and was therefore as careless and diffident in the way he dealt with his own fate as the stars were themselves in their dealings with microbial mankind. He lived in a whirlwind of irrational fervor and fury. He destroyed objects, people and relationships with equal randomness and passion.

  I wondered how it was possible for her to have loved a man such as she described, but she was far more cautious in discussing her own motives than is describing his lack of hem. She talked about my father dispassionately and clinically, as if she had known him well, and had thought about him a great deal since, even though she claimed to have stopped thinking about him as soon as he had left her. She gave the impression of having analyzed him minutely and interpreted him assiduously, but I could sense something in her that she dared not reveal. She was keeping secrets from herself. There were depths in Hawker Fagan that she had never even glimpsed.

  The next man I found who had something to contribute to my quest had been a star wanderer himself—a man who had once had some aspiration to match my father: to be accumulated in legends and to leave his name in the minds of lesser men like a signature. There was no lingering proof of his course through life, though. He was a failure. Nobody knew his name as they knew the name of Richard Orpheus or King Fury or Sigor Belle Yella. Nobody remembered the things he had done. No one would ever write novels or compose song-cycles about him. It was simply not that he had done too little, but rather that he had not done it in the right way. He used up too much effort in his exploits, and had shown too little flair.

  “It’s almost impossible consciously to ensnare the attention of legend-mongers,” he told me, “because they’re firm in the belief that men can only have greatness thrust upon them. Fame can’t be earned, in their way of thinking—it has to be won in a different way, by means of gambling against all odds.”

  He wasn’t a bitter man, though; he still had hope, even though he knew what he was and how little chance he had of becoming anything more. I liked him, and I believed him to be as honest as circumstances permitted him to be. Other men in his position might have been forgiven a little foolishness, and their accounts might have been contaminated with wholly understandable fantasy, but I thought that I could accept what that man told me without too many reservations. He told me a little about Hawker Fagan’s inner needs, especially the need that he had to absorb everything he could from his encounters with reality and unreality alike—the need to listen and to hear, to touch and to feel, to look and to see, to search and to find.

  I knew even then how rare it is for a man to accept even a tiny fraction of his environment. “Most men are cowards,” I told him, in return for his own confidences, “desperately afraid of their opportunities and the consequences of their most insignificant actions. They lock themselves away within themselves, and will not see what is immediately outside them, let alone what there in the wilderness of Ultra. They aren’t interested in truth, in reality, in understanding. They seek only to live in pious peace with the power lurking in our souls. They search for the safe bliss of ignorance rather than the fearsome freedom of personality—and perhaps they’re wise to hid
e from the wholeness of the universe, and of themselves within it. They are, after all, small men, microbial men. But men like Hawker Fagan are more than that, and even men like you and me might be more, if only we could find the trick of it.”

  The failed star wanderer thought that I was too self-confident, and too ambitious. He tried to show me the gulf that existed, and always would exist, between my father and myself—but I wasn’t convinced. Hawker Fagan, I knew, had not been content to be a microbial man. Malachi, his loyal son, could not be content with it either.

  “Can a failure like you judge anyone else’s chances of success?” I asked him, in order that I would not have to share his doubt. In any case, his mere existence seemed to be proof of Hawker Fagan’s greatness. Every man and woman that had been left in the wake of Captain Fagan’s passing seemed to have glimpsed some aspect of his enormous presence. They had looked up to him, and had viewed him from a distance. The failed star wanderer had understood what he was trying to be and do, but not how or why—and it was the latter incapacity that disqualified him from passing judgment on me.