What came from the water, splashing up out of the waves and then flying low over the gentle surf, would be invisible to Michael Devlin. A kindness, that.
The heavy silver chain holding the cross around Devlin’s neck exploded, spraying bits of glowing white molten metal across the beach. Some of it struck Devlin, and some Gregory, and neither noticed, Gregory because it didn’t hurt, and Father Mike because he had no time. The cross itself neither heated nor shattered, but it fell to the sand as Devlin, howling, rose to meet the barely-seen figure rushing toward him through the night sky –
GREGORY STOOD QUIETLY and waited for his cousin – it was easier to think of him that way – to finish.
He was the best? Zoth-Ommog asked, after a while.
“In this last decade, yes.”
There was not much there.
“He knew it, too,” Gregory said. “Deep down, I think he did.”
Zoth-Ommog regarded Gregory Diavolo. Gregory stood very still. Then his cousin threw himself into the sky, and a moment later was gone, and Gregory shuddered, having survived again, and took his clothes off so that he might let his human form drop away, and fell upon the leftovers.
END
Uncle Jack
MY NAME IS Jack Anderson. I’m told Anderson is a northman’s name, on Earth; on Barsoom (and especially in Helium) it’s merely an alien one. Jack isn’t unheard of, though John is commoner – common to the point of tedium. I must have known two dozen Barsoom-born Johns in my life, most of them named after our long-dead Warlord.
I was the second child born on Barsoom of Earthman parents, Angelique Gutierrez having preceded me by two days, back before the turn of the century. I’m told the media on Earth had speculated about our future together even before either of us had been born. No one in Helium cared at all, of course, and they were correct not to: I never liked Angelique, and never married her, or anyone else; and never had children.
And now it’s late in the twenty-first century, and I’m dying, alone and forgotten in the Ptarthian Home for the Elderly in Lesser Helium.
THE YOUNG MAN who’s begun visiting me is named Jack too, Jack Voerman.
“I had an Uncle Jack when I was a boy,” I told him. “Named for him.” I peered at him. “You look a bit like him, if I recall.”
“Do you recall?”
I looked away – couldn’t say why the question irritated me, but it did. At eighty-three I was younger and stronger than humans of previous generations. Modern medical technology couldn’t cure the cancer I was fighting, but it had kept me fit enough otherwise.
“I’m eighty-three, young man. Memory is treacherous.”
Jack nodded as if he understood, and sat by my bedside in apparent comfort. I had the bed tilted up until he and I were at eye level. I had two chairs and a small table in the room, but I wasn’t feeling well that day – the drugs more than the disease. I was thinking about stopping taking them. It would hasten things, but I was almost ready for that.
Jack was a tall fellow, handsome in a rugged way, with black hair and colorless eyes. He wore old-fashioned Earthstyle clothes, unusual these days when most humans aped the fashions of the red Martians of Greater Helium, and appeared unarmed. He’d a belt from which he might have hung a sword or gun, but hadn’t.
I’d been reluctant to let him visit. Those of us in the home who lack family still have the option of visitors – they were almost always Earthborn or the first-generation descendants of Earthborn. Earthborn and their children still have some sense of the sacrifices we made, those of us whom the United States Space Force sent to Mars in the late twentieth century. While I appreciate what those volunteers are attempting to do, there’s nothing wrong with my mind – it’s my body that’s betrayed me. With the cube at my bedside containing a thousand times more books and movies in its atomic matrix than I could possibly consume in my remaining months of life, I didn’t feel much of a need for company.
But young Jack was persistent. I don’t know why. He’d come by twice and the nurse, a manic-depressive green Martian whose name was either Zaavog or Jill depending on where she was in her cycle – Jill, lately – turned him away without mentioning it to me. Tim Burke, my next-door neighbor, an engineer from San Diego who’d come to Barsoom as a grown man back around 2050, told me about it over a game of chess. “Did she let you know?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “but she was right. I don’t need to be cheered up and I don’t want to entertain some stranger with my dying.”
Tim nodded sympathetically. He was dying of colon cancer himself and the last ship from Earth hadn’t brought the new treatments we’d both heard of, and in which we’d placed our last, faint hopes. They’d probably arrive with the next wave of ships, the next time the two planets were in conjunction – two years from now, roughly, and since neither Tim nor I were going to see another New Year’s Day, it didn’t matter to us.
Tim beat me on the fifty-third move with a discovered check I hadn’t seen coming, and then gloated about it until I declined a rematch and went back to my room.
The next day I told Jill to send the stranger on up if he came back again. She peered at me doubtfully. “You’re sure?”
“Unless he cheats at chess,” I told her. “I’ve had enough of that from Tim.”
“I DON’T CHEAT at chess,” Jack informed me. “I’m not sure I can see how you could.”
“Distract a man with idle chatter,” I said. “Move when he’s not prepared, sort of thing.”
Jack grinned at me. “Some men are without honor.” He said it in a joking tone, but still as if he meant it.
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I’ve been a water engineer my whole life. With waterworks you’re competent or you’re not. Courage doesn’t keep the canals flowing.”
He shook his head. “I spoke of honor, not courage. Honor and courage are merely cousins. A man can be brave and dishonorable, though it’s hard to be an honorable coward. At some point honor holds you to commitments, to sacrifice, and that requires bravery.”
“You’re opinionated, Jack. I’m not even saying you’re wrong, but life isn’t about those things most of the time. Mostly it’s work. It doesn’t require bravery to get through, just consistency. Getting up even when you’re tired, working even when you’re bored. Consistency.”
“Well, yes,” Jack said slowly, “I suppose that’s true in some cases. But didn’t you make choices that put you into the circumstances where that would be true?”
I thought about it. “I’m not sure I ever made any choices worth making. My father was an irrigation engineer – originally just for the immigrants, but later all over Barsoom. I learned enough of it from him that it seemed the sensible career, when I came of age.” I looked at him. Oddly, I felt like I was justifying myself. “It’s had its moments, as a career. I’ve seen almost every part of Barsoom worth seeing, traveling to repair and extend the canals.”
“But no adventures to speak of.”
I shrugged. “The age of adventures is over. It was over by the time Space Force first landed on this world. The Warlord pacified this planet, before he and Dejah Thoris died.”
“Dejah Thoris,” he said softly, and left it at that. “The Warlord didn’t pacify the entire Solar System, though. Jupiter is out there, and Saturn. Why do you think the Prince of Helium died?”
“Couldn’t begin to guess. Old age, a bullet, a bl
ade –”
“Why do you think he died at all?”
“Their tomb” – his and the Princess’s, both – “is less than five klicks from here,” I said mildly. “I’ve seen it.”
“His body is not there.”
That was true; only the Princess’s was. “No one lives that long, Jack. Not humans, not red Martians – not even with today’s medical technology. Look at me dying, lad.”
Young Jack was a bit of a crank. “Doctors,” he said dismissively. “Scientists, doctors, all too proud of what they know. Often wrong,” he added.
They weren’t wrong about the cancer eating me.
“Look,” I said, “John Carter was thirty or so in the late eighteen sixties, no? The painting that hangs in the tomb shows him that age, and it was painted not long afterward.” I peered at him. “You look like my Uncle Jack, if I remember, but you also look like John Carter, at least like the painting.”
I’d seen the painting a lot more recently than I’d seen Uncle Jack – I was ten, the last time I’d seen Uncle Jack, the day of my mother’s funeral.
He shrugged. “So I’ve been told. I don’t see it myself.”
“Anyway, the Warlord is long dead, whatever happened to his body.” I laughed. “It’s 2100, man!”
IT WAS THE day of my mother’s funeral.
There was only one Christian church in Helium, in those days, and one Jewish temple, and one Muslim mosque, and they were all the same building. Today it was a Jewish temple, that being my mother’s religion.
Uncle Jack showed up at our house as my father was leaving. He was a tall man, dark-haired and grey-eyed, and he wore a gun – unusual even then, when things were a bit unsettled following the beginning of immigration from Earth.
Even under the circumstances seeing Uncle Jack made me feel better. He’d been a constant in our lives, and I didn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been there.
“How long do we have to wait?”
Uncle Jack shrugged. “An hour, boy. No more. Your father has business to conduct before the funeral, he didn’t want you there for it.”
I didn’t care. I just wanted everything over with – I wasn’t angry, wasn’t even really sad, yet, though later I would be both. I was in a sort of shock, I suppose. Uncle Jack tried playing Jetan with me, but I couldn’t keep my mind focused, so we switched to chess, and I did no better, so we just sat quietly, in the living room my mother had decorated. I wished I were still young enough to sit in Uncle Jack’s lap, but it had been two or three years since I’d done that, and I wasn’t going to embarrass myself by asking now.
We took his skyship to the temple and parked it on a structure across the way from the temple.
And then we had to cross the street.
It was eight lanes wide, one of the broadest avenues in Lower Helium, and busy enough that I was scared to cross it. Uncle Jack stepped out into the street and I froze on the walkway. Uncle Jack looked at me curiously, and to my humiliation I started to cry.
He came back to me and held out his hand. “Come on, son,” he said softly. “We’ll cross the street together.”
“I DREAMED ABOUT Uncle Jack last night,” I told Jack the next day. “You do look like him.”
He smiled. “Thanks, I suppose. You liked your uncle?”
I thought about it. “It was a long time ago. I was just a boy, but he was kind to me. He and my mother are the only people I can recall who were, when I was a child.”
That seemed to surprise him a bit. “Your father wasn’t?”
“Dad....” I shook my head. “He had something against me. I don’t know what.”
Jack seemed to think about that. “Perhaps he thought you might not be his?”
In eighty-three years the thought had never occurred to me. “No,” I said slowly, “he had to know I was. Back around my sixteenth birthday everyone in the colony had their DNA sequenced with gear just arrived from Earth.”
“You were a man by then,” he said.
I smiled. “Sixteen.”
“A man,” he repeated. “Old enough to carry a sword and gun, and use them. But you say he wasn’t kind to you as a child –”
“He wasn’t unkind. Just … distant. As if I were an obligation.” I shrugged. “Maybe he wasn’t sure, before the DNA sequencing. I don’t know. I don’t know if he loved me. Before he died he said he was sorry he hadn’t been a better father, but I never held that against him. He worked hard. He did his best for me, however he felt.” I shook my head a bit irritably, abruptly aware that I was doing the old man thing, chattering away about times long past as if they mattered.
“What do you do, Jack? Where are you from?”
“I’m a fighting man,” he said, “when I can find a fight. That’s not as often as it used to be. You’re right, about things getting civilized hereabouts. I suppose that’s a good thing –”
He didn’t sound convinced. “Where was your last fight?”
“Moons of Saturn, a few years ago. The Methane Men of Titan.”
I looked him over. It was possible. The Titanians had been whipped more than once, but they didn’t learn, and they kept coming back for more. “How was that?”
He shrugged. “Boring, to tell the truth. Not like in the old days. Practically a ‘police action.’” He spat the phrase with real contempt.
“The old days look good to you, do they?”
He was slow answering. “I suppose they weren’t good for everyone. But for a fighting man ... cunning foes, desperate odds,” his voice got faster and stronger, “great chases, running battles, good God, Jack,” his voice rang out, “who wouldn’t prefer that to this?”
WHEN HE CAME back the next day I had Jill tell him I was too ill for visitors. It was true. I’d just had my drug therapy, and I lay flat on my bed, dizzy and having difficulty breathing.
THE FOLLOWING DAY I was out on the balcony, sitting in one of my two chairs, when he came to see me again. It was noon – not Earth’s noon, the Barsoomian day is twenty-four and two-thirds hours long, more or less, and we hadn’t tried keeping Earth time since the very earliest days on Mars. Barsoom noon, and warm as the nights were icy cold. I’d shucked my shirt and wore only a pair of shorts.
Jack called out my name, our name, when he entered the room, and then I heard him moving things about. Not much in the room to move – just the bed, table, and two chairs, one of which I’d already brought out onto the balcony.
After a few minutes he came out onto the balcony to stand. He stood silently a while in the sunlight, watching the skyships move across Helium. Finally he said, “You don’t look like a dying man. Dress you like a red Martian, give you a man’s weapons, they’d think twice about crossing you even in the worst cities on Barsoom.”
“May not look it, but I am.” I knew what he meant, though – I’d practiced various martial arts even into my middle years, and as I’d aged had shifted to yoga, tai chi, and weight work to stay fit. I was still muscular and hadn’t lost a lot of weight – and wouldn’t, before I died. “Mostly my wind’s gone. I can’t run, can’t walk long distances. I’ll likely be in good shape when I die, except for my wind.”
“Have you ever held a sword?”
“Me?” I laughed at him. “No. I spent my whole life working with water, Jack.”
He looked at me. “Not even as a
boy?”
“No, my father –” I hesitated. A ghostly memory had risen up. Uncle Jack ... Uncle Jack had taught me to hold a sword. Taught me some basics of stance, some strokes –
“Come back inside with me.”
He’d pushed the bed into the corner of the room, turned the table over and put it on the bed, and put the second chair onto the table. It left a large empty space, maybe four meters in length.
A pair of swords, still in their sheaths, lay in the middle of the room. Jack picked one up and tossed it to me. I caught it out of the air and he grinned. “Not dead yet,” he observed.
“Where on Barsoom did you get these?”
The sheaths were new – hardened leather – but the blades, once removed, radiated age. The blades had seen use, the bronze guards and pommels were nicked and scratched. The hand grips were dark green leather, darkened further by years of sweat.
“The Barsoom longsword. The blades are carbon steel,” Jack said. “The guards, silicon bronze. The grips are banth skin, dyed green.”
Banths were extinct on Barsoom – near a hundred years.
I gripped the sword he’d thrown me, hand within the guard. It felt light, like an extension of me. I waved it, just a bit, let the point drop toward Jack.
He tapped it aside with the barest flick of his wrist. “Do you remember the stances?”
I had to think. “The ox,” I said slowly, “the plow, the fool, the roof, and the tail.”
“Show me.”
I moved through each position, holding it as best I could remember – it must have been close enough, because he grinned. “Your Uncle Jack would be pleased you’d remembered this much of his teaching, after all these years.”
I let the point of the sword drop. “And how would you know he was the one who taught me?”
Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories Page 22
