Reave the Just and Other Tales

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  “We would have died!” he countered at once, urgently. “You lacked the means to keep us alive. It is not a crime to ask for help—or to need it. Do you think less of me because I came to you when I was in need?”

  She shook her head. “But Jessup did not choose to feed us the second time. The children did not choose to feed us. You chose for them. You cast images into their minds which they did not understand and so could not refuse. You made me a thief.”

  “A thief?” Suriman sounded incredulous—and daunted. “You stole nothing!”

  “But I lived on stolen things. I grew healthy and comfortable on stolen things. The fault is yours—but you feel no shame, and so the shame is mine.”

  “What are you saying?” His voice came close to cracking. “You did not know the food was stolen because you could not comprehend it.” He had another nakedness, which signified more than his lack of garments. “It was beyond your abilities to see consequences which did not take place before your eyes—and you could not remember them when they were past.

  “I do not say this in scorn, Fern. You simply were not able to understand. And now you are. I have given you that. You accuse me of a fault which would have meant nothing to you if I had not given you the capacity to see it.”

  His need touched her so deeply that tears came to her eyes, and the ring of fire blurred against the dark night. And still she did not falter.

  “But you could see it,” she replied. “You knew all that I did not, and more besides. You knew me—you saw into my mind. You saw the things which shamed me. And yet you caused the children of this village to go thieving for my benefit.”

  As though she had pushed him beyond his endurance, he snapped back, “Fern, I was desperate. I was a pig, in hell’s name! If I did not die on the road to be devoured by dogs, I would be slaughtered in the village to be eaten by clods and fools!”

  At the same time, she heard his voice in her mind, as she had heard it so often when he could not speak.

  Fern, I implore you.

  “So is the lady Florice desperate,” she answered him. “So am I.”

  Florice could no longer keep silent. “Yes, desperate, Suriman—as desperate as you were. I am desperate for you, though it breaks my heart. But more than that, I am desperate to understand.

  “What is this willingness you prize so highly? Why must you extract it from women who can neither comprehend nor refuse? You do not desire us as women—you desire only tools, subjects for research. Why must you make us to be more than we were, when what you wish is that we should be less?”

  Suriman did not turn from Fern. He concentrated on her as though the circle of riders and villagers and fire had ceased to have any import. When he responded to Florice, his words were addressed to Fern.

  “Because, my lady, no woman but a half-wit is able to give herself truly. You say I do not desire you as women, but I do. If I had not failed, you would have lost your flaws—the limitations which prevent you from sharing my dreams and designs—but you would have retained your open heart, your loveliness of form and spirit.

  “If that is a crime, then I am guilty of it.” Finality and fear ached in his tone. “Do what you came to do, or leave me be. I am defenseless against you.”

  At the same time, his silent voice said beseechingly, Oh, my Fern, tell me I have not failed.

  “We will,” Titus announced loudly. And Prince Chorl echoed, more in sorrow than in anger, “We will.

  “I care nothing for your protests or justifications, Suriman,” the Prince continued. “We are not here to pass judgment. That has been done. Our purpose is only to see you dead.”

  “Dead,” the warlocks pronounced. “Finally and forever.”

  “Yes,” growled the lords and minions on their mounts.

  The silver fire leaped up, encircling Suriman more tightly.

  “Do not harm Fern!” a farmwife cried out. It was Meglan. Fern could no longer see her: all the villagers were hidden by flames of ice. “She has done nothing wrong!” Then, abashed by her own audacity, she pleaded more quietly, “My lords and ladies, if you say that he is evil and must die, we do not protest. We have no knowledge of these matters. But she is ours. There is no harm in her. Surely you will not hold her to account for his crimes?”

  Titus might have answered, but Prince Chorl stopped him with a gesture. “Good woman,” he replied to Meglan, “that is for her to say. Until now, she has made no choices. Here she will choose for herself.

  “My lady Fern,” the Prince said across the fire, “the warlock at your side is condemned for precisely such crimes as he has committed against you. Knowing what he has done, and having heard his answers, would you stand between him and his punishment? Or will you stand aside?”

  Fern had been changed by fire. Even now, she could not stop making connections which had never occurred to her before. She had said what she must: that was done. Now she took the next step.

  Letting go of Suriman, she backed away.

  “No!” At the sight of her withdrawal, he flinched and crouched down as though his destruction had already begun; he covered his face with his hands. Spasms of cold shook and twisted his naked limbs.

  To abandon him wrung her heart. Softly, so that he only might hear her, she murmured, “My thanks.”

  He must have heard her. A moment later, he lowered his arms and drew himself erect. For the first time in the ring of fire, she saw his eyes clearly—the one almost blind, the other marred by a slice of silver. Shivers mounted through him, then receded. He could not smile, but his voice was gentle as he said, “I regret nothing. You were worth the risk. You have not asked me what loveliness is—in that I was wrong, as in so many other things—but still I will tell you.

  “It is you.”

  Because he did not try to compel her with images or colors or supplications, Fern answered, “Yes.”

  “Suriman!” Florice wailed in despair.

  She was too late. The masters of magic had already raised their periapts and apparatus, summoned their powers. In silence the white fire raged abruptly into the heavens: mutely the flames towered over the ring and then crashed inward, falling like ruin upon the warlock.

  He did not scream now, as he had when he was transformed. The force mustered against him surpassed sound. As voiceless as the conflagration, he writhed in brief agony while retribution and cold searched him to the marrow of his bones, the pit of his chest, the gulf of his skull. Then he was lifted out of the circle in a swirl of white embers and ash. The fire burned him down to dust, which the dark swallowed away. Soon nothing remained of him except the riders in their triumph, the shocked faces of the villagers, and Florice’s last wail.

  As though bereft of language, images, and will, Fern sprawled on the ground with her face hidden in her arms. Her heart beat, her lungs took air. But she could not speak or rise or uncover her face—or she would not. At Prince Chorl’s bidding, two of his minions and one of the warlocks came forward to offer their assistance. Meglan, Karay, and others had already run to Fern’s side, however, and they spurned help. Unexpectedly dignified in the face of lords and magic, Meglan farmwife said, “She is ours. We will care for her.”

  “I understand,” said the Prince sadly. “But I give you this promise. At any time, in any season, if you desire help for her, only send to me, and I will do everything I can.”

  “And I,” Florice added through her grief. “I promise also.”

  Titus was too full of fierceness and vindication to find his voice; yet he nodded a promise of his own.

  When the riders were gone, Meglan and the others lifted Fern in their arms. Like a cortege, they bore her to Wall’s house, where a clean room with a bed and blankets was made ready for her. There she was comforted and cosseted as she had once cared for Sarendel’s pigs. Unlike the pigs, however, she did not respond. She lay with her face covered—as far as anyone knew, she slept with her face covered. And before dawn, she left the house. Meglan searched for her, but to no avail,
until the farmwife thought to look out toward the refuse-tip beyond her garden.

  There she saw Fern scavenging.

  After Meglan had wept for a time, she bustled out to the village. She told what she had seen; men and women with good hearts—and no knowledge of warlocks—heard her. Before Fern returned from her scavenging, a new shed had been erected on the exact spot of her former hovel. A new curtain swung as a door; a new pallet lay against one wall; new bowls and cups sat on the pallet. And the bowls were full of corn and carrots, cured ham and bread.

  Fern did not seem surprised to find her hovel whole. Perhaps she had forgotten that it was gone. Yet the sight of Meglan and Horrik, Veil and Salla, Karay and Yoel standing there to greet her appeared to frighten her. With a familiar alarm which the village itself had forgotten, she cowered at the nearest hedge, peering through her hair as though she feared what would happen if she were noticed.

  In rue and shame, the villagers left the hovel, pretending that they had not noticed her. At once she took the fruits of her scavenging inside and closed the curtain.

  From that moment onward, her life in Sarendel-on-Gentle became much the same as it had been before she had been adopted by a pig. From dawn to dusk she roamed the village refuse-tips and the surrounding hills, scavenging scraps and herbs, and storing them against the coming winter. The changes which marked her days were few—and no one spoke of them. First out of kindness, then out of habit, Sarendel’s folk gave her as many gifts as she would accept. The children learned to ignore her; but if any of the younger ones thought to tease or torment her, the older ones put a quick stop to it. As the days became fortnights, even Horrik forgot that he had once desired her. And she no longer seemed to know or care anything about pigs. Her love for them had been lost among the stars and the cold white fire. By slow degrees the present became so like the past that men and women shook their heads incredulously to think the continuity had ever been disturbed.

  In this way she regained the peace and safety which had been lost to her.

  If the villagers had looked more closely, however—if Fern had worn her mud-thick and straggling hair away from her face, or if she had not ducked her head to avoid meeting anyone’s gaze—they might have noticed one other change.

  Since the night when she had transformed her only love from a pig to a man, just in time to see him caught and taken by his doom, one of her eyes had grown warmer, brighter, belying her renewed destitution. The other bore a strange mark across the iris, a thin argent scar, as though her sight had been cut by silver.

  What Makes Us Human

  Aster’s Hope stood more than a hundred meters tall—a perfect sphere bristling with vanes, antennae, and scanners, punctuated with laser ports, viewscreens, and receptors. She left her orbit around her home-world like a steel ball out of a slingshot, her sides bright in the pure sunlight of the solar system. Accelerating toward her traveling speed of .85c, she moved past the outer planets—first Philomel with its gigantic streaks of raw, cold hydrogen, then lonely Periwinkle glimmering at the edge of the spectrum—on her way into the black and luminous beyond. She was the best her people had ever made, the best they knew how to make. She had to be: she wasn’t coming back for centuries.

  There were exactly three hundred ninety-two people aboard.

  They, too, were the best Aster had to offer. Diplomats and meditechs, linguists, theoretical biologists, physicists, scholars, even librarians for the vast banks of knowledge Aster’s Hope carried: all of them had been trained to the teeth especially for this mission. And they included the absolute cream of Aster’s young Service, the so-called “puters” and “nicians” who knew how to make Aster’s Hope sail the fine-grained winds of the galaxy. Three hundred ninety-two people in all, culled and tested and prepared from the whole population of the planet to share in the culmination of Aster’s history.

  Three hundred ninety of them were asleep.

  The other two were supposed to be taking care of the ship. But they weren’t. They were running naked down a mid-shell corridor between the clean, impersonal chambers where the cryogenic capsules hugged their occupants. Temple was giggling because she knew Gracias was never going to catch her unless she let him. He still had some of the ice cream she’d spilled on him trickling through the hair on his chest, but if she didn’t slow down he wasn’t going to be able to do anything about it. Maybe she wasn’t smarter or stronger than he was, better-trained or higher-ranking—but she was certainly faster.

  This was their duty shift, the week they would spend out of their capsules every half-year until they died. Aster’s Hope carried twenty-five shifts from the Service, and they were the suicide personnel of this mission: aging at the rate of one week twice every year, none of them were expected to live long enough to see the ship’s return home. Everyone else could be spared until Aster’s Hope reached its destination; frozen for the whole trip, they would arrive only a bit more mature than they were when they left. But the Service had to maintain the ship. And so the planners of the mission had been forced to a difficult decision: either fill Aster’s Hope entirely with puters and nicians, and pray that they would be able to do the work of diplomats, theoretical physicists, and linguists; or sacrifice a certain number of Service personnel to make room for people who could be explicitly trained for the mission. The planners decided that the ability to take Aster’s Hope apart chip by chip and seal after seal and then put her all back together again was enough expertise to ask of any individual man or woman. Therefore the mission itself would have to be entrusted to other experts.

  And therefore Aster’s Hope would be unable to carry enough puters and nicians to bring the mission home again.

  Faced with this dilemma, the Service personnel were naturally expected to spend a significant period of each duty shift trying to reproduce. If they had children, they could pass on their knowledge and skill. And if the children were born soon enough, they would be old enough to take Aster’s Hope home when she needed them.

  Temple and Gracias weren’t particularly interested in having children. But they took every other aspect of reproduction very seriously.

  She slowed down for a few seconds, just to tantalize him. Then she put on a burst of speed. He tended to be just a bit dull in his love-making—and even in his conversation—unless she made a special effort to get his heart pounding. On some days, a slow, comfortable, and just-a-bit-dull lover was exactly what she wanted. But not today. Today she was full of energy from the tips of her toes to the ends of her hair, and she wanted Gracias at his best.

  But when she tossed a laughing look back over her shoulder to see how he was doing, he wasn’t behind her anymore.

  Where—? Well, good. He was trying to take control of the race. Win by tricking her because he couldn’t do it with speed. Temple laughed out loud while she paused to catch her breath and think. Obviously, he had ducked into one of the rooms or passages off this corridor, looking for a way to shortcut ahead of her—or maybe to lure her into ambush. And she hadn’t heard the automatic door open and close because she’d been running and breathing too hard. Very good! This was the Gracias she wanted.

  But where had he turned off? Not the auxiliary compcom: that room didn’t have any other exit. How about the nearest capsule chamber? From there, he’d have to shaft down to inner-shell and come back up. That would be dicey: he’d have to guess how far and fast, and in what direction, she was moving. Which gave her a chance to turn the tables on him.

  With a grin, she went for the door to the next capsule chamber. Sensing her approach, it opened with a nearly silent whoosh, then closed behind her. Familiar with the look of the cryogenic capsules huddled in the grasp of their triple-redundant support machinery, each one independently supplied and run so that no systemwide failure could wipe out the mission, she hardly glanced around her as she headed toward the shaft.

  Its indicators showed that it wasn’t in use. So Gracias wasn’t on his way up here. Perfect. She’d take the shaft up to out
er-shell and elude him there, just to whet his appetite. Turn his own gambit against him. Pleased with herself, she approached the door of the shaft.

  But when she impinged on the shaft’s sensor, it didn’t react to her. None of the lights came on: the elevator stayed where it was. Surprised, she put her whole body in front of the sensor. Nothing. She jumped up and down, waved her arms. Still nothing.

  That was strange. When Gracias had run his diagnostics this morning, the only malfunction anywhere was in an obscure circuit of food-sup’s beer synthesizer. And she’d already helped him fix it. Why wasn’t the shaft operating?

  Thinking she ought to go to the next room and try another shaft, find out how serious the problem was, Temple trotted back to the capsule-chamber door.

  This time, it didn’t open for her.

  That was so unexpected that she ran into the door—which startled more than hurt her. In her nearly thirty years, she had never seen an automatic door fail. All doors opened except locked doors; and locked doors had an exterior status light no one could miss. Yet the indicators for this door showed open and normal.

  She tried again.

  The door didn’t open.

  That wasn’t just strange. It was serious. A severe malfunction. Which didn’t show up on diagnostics? Or had it just now happened? Either way, it was time to stop playing. Aster’s Hope needed help. Frowning, Temple looked for the nearest speaker so she could call Gracias and tell him what was going on.

  It was opposite her, on the wall beside the shaft. She started toward it.

  Before she got there, the door to the chamber slid open.

  A nonchalant look on his dark face, a tuneless whistle puckering his mouth, Gracias came into the room. He was carrying a light sleeping pallet over one shoulder. The door closed behind him normally.