Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  I want to wake up.

  3

  Hari shuffled along the hall, a little unsteady on his feet. Good as the bypass was, it would never be the same as a healthy spine; he would forever totter on secondhand legs, operating them by remote control. For the rest of his life, he'd be waxworks from the waist down: a numb, half-Animatronic replica of Caine.

  And how, the cold postmidnight of the empty hallway asked him, was he supposed to live with that?

  The way I live with everything else, he gritted to himself for the thousandth time, or the millionth. I'll deal with it. I'll just fucking deal.

  Rover paced him silently, its proximity sensors keeping it a precise two steps behind and to his left; it remained in the hallway, squatting beside the door, when Hari went into the office. Inside, he lowered himself gratefully into the bodyform gel-filled polypropylene of his most comfortable chair and rested his head on his hands. He felt hollow, but also somehow uncomfortably full, and frighteningly fragile, as though his guts were stuffed with eggshells.

  He rubbed grit out of his eyes and checked his deskscreen's time readout: 0340. His stomach twisted slowly, sending sour scotch rasping up the back of his throat. He swallowed it again and grimaced at the lingering acid burn it left behind. Some coffee, maybe? Maybe his life looked like shit from nothing more than fatigue and the opening bars of a familiar hangover theme.

  For a moment, he flirted with the idea of calling Tan'elKoth, over at the Curioseum. He could stand to talk, tonight, even with an enemy—and Tan'elKoth was hardly that, not after all these years. They had each done things to the other that could not be forgiven—Hari freely admitted he had done more wrong than he'd taken but somehow it didn't seem to matter.

  It's not like he'd wake the big bastard up; Tan'elKoth hadn't slept in something like twelve or thirteen years.

  No, goddamit. No, he told himself. I'm not doing it. Not this time.

  Calling Tan'elKoth would be only a distraction. That's all it ever was. Whatever-peace Hari found in the other man's company was a sham, all smoke and mirrors. It wouldn't last an hour after they parted. There was no mystery here; Hari was not so blind that he did not see the real reason he kept company with the former Emperor of Ankhana: Tan'elKoth was the only man alive who treated him like he was still Caine.

  That's something else I just gotta fucking get over.

  He swiveled his chair around to the mahogany sideboard behind his desk and keyed the coffeemaker for a twelve-cup Yucatan brew. The machine's whirr was only audible enough to let him know it was working as it measured out the mexiroast beans from its refrigerated hopper, ground them, and dusted them with cinnamon. Thick dark coffee drooled into the pitcher, so strong that the smell alone started his caffeine buzz.

  While he waited for the pitcher to fill, he idly played with the keypad of his deskscreen. He didn't decide to call up anything in particular, or so he told himself, but somehow his fingers seemed to know what he needed: they entered a long, detailed, specific code.

  The dark rectangle of his deskscreen slowly gathered a foggy greyish light: an overcast sky. A blurred patch of brown and cream resolved into a close-up view of a man with the face of a god. Hum and rumble from concealed speakers pulsed into the rhythm of speech; of words, now, in a voice soft and warm and impossibly deep: a voice that is not heard so much as felt: a subterranean vibration, the precursor shocks to an earthquake. Hari didn't need to listen to know what those words were; he remembered them vividly. Even as he remembered that sky, and that face.

  Ma'elKoth, framed against the clouds that he had called above Victory Stadium, rumbled his soothing, comforting hum: let it go, Caine. It's all right. Shh. Lie quiet relax, and let it go .. .

  Hari stared at the wall of his office while he listened to Caine's voice whisper from the speakers in the artificial speech of the Actor's Soliloquy. *Fuck letting it go. *Never surrender. *Never. And he hadn't. He hung on, still, every day. He was still fighting. He owed that much, at least, to the man he used to be.

  He sighed and reluctantly instructed his deskscreen to link to Studionet. He spoke the required phrases so that Studionet could verify his voiceprint; a moment later, fully updated hardcopy charts began to scroll out of his printer. He gathered them into his hands and shuffled through them. Hari had an innate distrust of data that existed only electronically, on the net; this probably came from growing up in the shadow of Duncan's lunatic libertarianism.

  At one time, Hari had possessed an extensive library of nonvirtual books, with real cotton-and-wood-pulp pages, cardstock covers—some that dated from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, bound in leather-covered fiberboard, pages edged with gold leaf. Whenever possible, Duncan had taught Hari from books, the older the better; Duncan claimed that nothing printed after the Plague Years could be trusted.

  "The print on the pages—it's an object, do you understand? Once it's printed, there it is, in your hand. It can no longer be altered, or edited, or censored—if it is, you can see it, see where it's been blacked out or cut away. Electronic text, though, is at least half imaginary; anyone can go in and make whatever changes they like, to suit whatever the politics of the moment happen to be. You don't believe me? Call up anything by John Locke on the nets. Call up anything by Abraham Lincoln. By Friedrich Nietzsche or Meister Crowley. Compare what you see on the screen with what you find in the old books. You'll learn."

  Those books were long gone now, of course; hundreds of thousands of marks' worth had been sold. Some of them, too sensitive to be sold—banned works, by unperson like Shaw, and Heinlein, and Paine—were in a sealed vault on the Sangre de Cristo estate of Hari's Leisure Patron, Marc Vilo. Hari couldn't keep books like that in the house, not with Duncan here.

  The commutation of Duncan's sedition sentence was conditional. At the first hint of subversive behavior—for example, possession of banned works of literature—Soapy would sink his teeth into Duncan's ass and drag him away, and not back into the Mute Facility at the Buchanan Social Camp. This time, he'd be cyborged, and sold as a Worker—and Duncan wouldn't last a week under the yoke; as ill as he was, he wouldn't last a day.

  He remembered an argument Duncan had had with Tan'elKoth, four or five years ago—back when Duncan still had enough fine motor control to speak aloud. "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights ..."

  Hari half smiled, remembering. Duncan had been quoting Jefferson with a high, acid-edged screech; that meant Tan'elKoth had been baiting him again. He often fell back on Jefferson when Tan'elKoth had boxed him into a logical corner.

  Hari could see the scene as though it unfolded once more before his eyes: Tan'elKoth at the table in the Abbey's kitchen, his bulk dwarfing it to the size of a child's playset. The coffee mug in his massive hand looked like an espresso cup. He wore an immaculately tailored Professional's suit, single-breasted in a stylish taupe, and his mane of chocolate curls was pulled back in a conservative ponytail. He carried himself with the suave cool of a male model, but his eyes danced with unconcealed glee: he loved tangling with Duncan.

  "Self-serving propaganda," he'd rumbled, and lifted a finger, pontifi­cating. "Whatever the intent of this hypothetical creator—whose mind you pretend to know—I can tell you this: The gods have no interest in rights. There are no rights. Or wrongs. There is only power, and weakness. I have been a god, and I am acquainted with several more; our concern is with the structure of survival. A human life is defined by its relationship with others: by its duty to its species. In the face of this duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. What you call individual rights are merely the cultural fantasy of a failed civilization,"

  "Fascist bastard; Duncan had croaked happily. His eyes rolled like misshapen marbles, but his voice was clear, and stronger than it had been in a month. "Can't trust a fascist truth is always your first sacrifice to the welfare of the state."

  "Hmp.
As you say. If you do not wish to take my word, ask your daughter-in-law; though she is a weak god, a flawed and failed god, she is a god nonetheless. Ask Pallas Ril where individual rights place in her hierar­chy of concern."

  "Not gonna argue gods with you, you smug sonofabitch," Duncan had croaked.

  Duncan had been sitting up that day, his chest strapped securely to the raised back of his convertible traveling bed, its wheels locked alongside the table where Tan'elKoth sat. Veins bulged and twitched among the translu­cent scraps of white hair that remained on his scalp; his eyes rolled, his hands trembled uncontrollably, and a line of frothy drool trailed down from one corner of his mouth, but he seemed mostly lucid.

  Arguing political philosophy was the only thing that had seemed to hold Duncan's attention, even then. Before the autoimmune disorder that was progressively eating his brain had become symptomatic, Duncan had been a professor of social anthropology, a philologist and an authority on the cultures of Overworld. He had always loved to argue, loved it perhaps more than anything else, including his family.

  He had nearly ended his life under a sedition sentence in the Mute Fa­cility of the Buchanan Social Camp for one overpowering reason: He could not learn to shut up.

  Hari had never been able to argue with him. He didn't have the right kind of mind to spin political fantasies back and forth across a table. Hari had always been too busy surviving the realities of his existence to waste time dreaming about how things ought to be. Sometimes a week or more would pass when he could barely get a coherent sentence out of Duncan, but somehow Tan'elKoth always seemed able to draw Duncan up from whatever nirvana into which his private madness had sealed him.

  Duncan had gone on, "Don't care about gods. Gods are irrelevant. What counts is people. What counts is having respect for each other."

  "I respect what is respectable," Tan'elKoth replied. "To ask for respect where none has been earned is childish maundering. And what is re­spectable, in the end, save service? Even your idol Jefferson is, in the end, measured by how well he served the species. The prize of individualism—

  its goal is self-actualization, which is only another name for vanity. We do not admire men for achieving self-actualization; we admire self-actualization when its end result is a boon to humanity."

  "Huh," Duncan said, wiping his chin with the back of his hand. "Maybe self-actualization is the only way to really serve humanity. Maybe it's people like you that harm it. When you try to `serve humanity; you end up making them into sheep. You serve them, all right: you serve them for dinner. People eat sheep." He rolled his clouded eyes at Hari, a distinct twinkle within them welcoming him to the table, to the discussion, as if to say, People like you. My son, the predator.

  Tan'elKoth hummed disagreement. "Sheep are very successful, as a species. Humanity, at least on my world, is not. Your individualism leads, inevitably, to men who place their own desires above the welfare of others—of any others, perhaps all others."

  "Men like Leonardo, and Mozart. Like Charlemagne and Alexander."

  "Hmp. Also," Tan'elKoth said with an air of finality, as though he had cunningly led Duncan into an inescapable rhetorical trap, "men like Caine."

  That was when Hari had decided he was done with this conversation. "That's enough," he said. He set his mug down too fast and too hard; coffee slopped across the table. "Change the subject."

  "I meant no insult—" Tan'elKoth said mildly.

  "I don't care. I'm not insulted. I'm just sick of listening to it."

  Duncan didn't seem to hear; or perhaps he heard, and chose to ignore. "Caine did a lot of good for a lot of people—"

  "Purely by accident," Tan'elKoth interrupted.

  "Aren't you the one who doesn't believe in chance?"

  "Hey," Hari said, louder. "Cut it out, both of you."

  Duncan swung his strengthless head toward his son. "I'm only trying to stick up for you, Killer," he said, a tremor leaking into his voice.

  "I don't need you to defend me, Dad; Hari told him. "I just need you to shut up."

  Deeper clouds had gathered behind the cataracts in his father's eyes, drawing a veil between his consciousness and the world. "Sorry ... I'm sorry . .

  Sitting now at his desk in the black morning, those last three words burned him. How could he have said such a thing? How could he have been so childish?

  And though he might pretend otherwise, the answer was all too clear. The wound left by the excision of Caine from his life had been too fresh, back then. He hadn't had a chance to adjust to the granite fact that he could never, ever be that man again. Never again would he be that strong. Never that sure.

  Never that free.

  He hadn't known, then, the source of his pain—he'd kept telling himself I got everything I wanted I won, goddammit! What the fuck is my problem? All he'd really understood was that he hurt all the time; all he had was blank animal incomprehension and the social grace of a wolverine with a toothache.

  Not long after that, Duncan's voice had gone forever. Right now, he couldn't remember if his father had ever spoken to him again.

  Hari spent a long time staring at the hardcopy charts spread across his desk. Gradually, he forced himself to make sense of the numbers. Christ, that's ugly, he thought. He rearranged them, gathered them up, shuffled them, and spread them across his desk once again. No matter in what order he stacked them, the brutal truth was unmistakable.

  He didn't know what the fuck he was doing.

  Of the six fiscal years that he had been Chairman of the San Francisco Studio, his Studio had lost money in four; three in a row, now, and getting worse. He had taken the number one Studio on Earth—the flagship of the entire Adventures Unlimited system—and he had pooched it so badly that now only the freight fees paid by the Overworld Company were keeping it afloat.

  This is a mystery? he thought bitterly. This was supposed to be a surprise?

  He had been given the Chairmanship—and its attendant upcasting to Administration—as a blatant public-relations stunt, a transparent attempt to counter the disastrous aftermath of Caine's final Adventure, For Love of Pallas RiL The fallout of that Adventure had toppled SF's previous Chair-man, Arturo Kollberg, and had blackened the reputation of the entire Studio system. At the time, briefly, Hari had been the most famous man on Earth—For Love of Pallas Ril was the single most popular Adventure in history, setting records for both viewership and receipts that still stood, nearly seven years later—and he could have done incalculable damage to the industry. So they bought him off.

  That's a little too generous, Hari thought. I wasn't bought off. I was just bought.

  Bought with the chance to live in peace with the woman he loved. Bought with the chance to raise his daughter as an Administrator. Bought with the chance to get to know his father again, as a man. And in return?

  All he had to do was sit down and shut up.

  One of his new colleagues, the Chairman of the St. Petersburg Studio, had put it cogently when they first met, a couple of weeks after Hari's upcaste: "Perhaps the most significant skill an effective Administrator ever develops is the ability to do nothing. Knowing when not to act is vastly more important than knowing what to do can ever be."

  And there he had it: a philosophical rationale for being a good boy, for sitting quietly and marking days till his pension. Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, Hari thought.

  He was strong enough to survive any given day. But when he looked down the long bleak tunnel of the rest of his life, he saw far too many nights like this one, sitting at his desk after 0300, staring into the cement-grey certainty that today would be exactly like yesterday, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeping in its petty pace from day to day, world without end, amen.

  If he was lucky.

  Another keystroke or two pulled up an abstract of the latest brief filed in Social Court by lawyers for Avery Shanks. Whenever Hari was in a really shitty mood, like tonight, he could access the growing archive of Bsn. Shanks
v. Adr. Michaelson, and brood about what would happen if Studio Legal ever dropped the ball.

  Businessman Avery Shanks—Karl Shanks' mother, Lamorak's mother, the head of the electronic chemicals giant SynTech—had personally filed capital Forcible Contact Upcaste charges against Hari within days of the climax of For Love of Pallas Ril—before Hari was even out of the hospital. She had used the SynTech legal department as her personal attack dogs, filing and refiling, contending that her son's caste of Professional had been only pro forma, attendant to his employment as an Actor. SynTech lawyers continued to argue that Karl should be considered a Businessman in the eyes of the court.

  Which, without the Studio's protection, would be enough to get Hari cyborged and sold as a Worker.

  On his worst nights, Hari suspected that the reason the Studio hadn't quashed this lawsuit altogether is that they planned to drop it on him like a hammer if he ever stepped out of line.

  He closed the lawsuit archive, rustled his hardcopy charts again, straightened them with an irritable snap, but his attention circled inevitably back .. .

  Legal fees alone could wipe him out. Shanna's income couldn't support the family by itself, even without the costs of a court battle; she still had a fanatically loyal core audience, but her overall receipts had been dropping for years. She didn't even have first-handers anymore. She spent each of her twice-yearly three-month shifts on freemod, her experiences being graved into a microcube: an ironic echo of one of Arturo Kollberg's innovations, the Long Form.

  The experience of being a goddess has a certain charm—the seamless serenity of her powerful connection to her entire world, the mind-bending awareness of every living thing within the Great Chambaygen watershed, the uplifting consciousness of boundless power perfectly controlled—but her fans had soon discovered they could get the same effect from her cubes. Even from a single cube. Since each day was much like another for Chambaraya, her rentals were shit. To keep first-handers coming back, for good rentals and cube sales, you need story. Story was exactly what Pallas Ril didn't have. She was complete; there was nothing she could need that the river did not provide. For Chambaraya, there is no necessity. Without necessity, all is whim.