The Real Story: The Gap Into Conflict

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Her state wasn’t particularly rewarding for him, however. After a moment, he keyed off the control. At once, a spasm ran through all her muscles, making her twitch like an epileptic.

  Helpless to do anything else, she burst into a fury of tears.

  Once again, she seemed to find a chink in his character, a small way in which he was unlike himself. He let her cry for a little while, gave her a chance to understand his power over her. Then, almost without gloating, he said, “You had enough? Go get clean. Down there.” He pointed along the passage toward the san and the head.

  She flinched as if he’d tried to put a hand on her. Hugging herself against the bulkhead, she looked up at him. So thinly that he could hardly hear her, she asked, “What do you want from me? You’ll get the death penalty for this. You might be able to get off with life imprisonment for what you did to those miners. You might be able to convince a court you had some kind of reason—or you were just crazy. But you can’t get away with this. Nobody ever gets away with ‘unauthorized use of a zone implant.’ Why are you doing it?”

  Without warning, he felt vulnerable to her—violent and angry. But he still didn’t hit her. Because of the chink she’d found in him, his answer was simple. “I need a crew. How else can I get a gap-sick cop to crew for me?”

  Eventually she nodded, as if what he said made sense.

  With misery in her eyes, struggling visibly against her fear, she got to her feet and did what he told her. She went past him down the corridor.

  For no reason he could explain—no reason he knew—he handed her a clean shipsuit before she entered the san.

  By the time she emerged, however, the inexplicable inconsistency of his own behavior had made him savage. He was a coward; and when he did things he didn’t understand, things that weren’t what he’d intended, things that weren’t what he wanted, he scared himself. When he was scared, he took action.

  He was being weak. He should have forced her to live in that fouled suit in order to humiliate her properly, teach her what his power meant. What was he doing? Was he feeling sorry for her? The idea made him want to break her arms. He would see her dead—he would crush her—before he would allow her to do anything that might make him weak.

  And yet he contained himself until she came out of the san of her own volition. Fuming, fretting, swelling into a fury, he still waited, storing up violence, until she opened the door herself and came out to face him.

  Then he lost his self-possession.

  He was already on the edge of his restraint: the sight of her pushed him past his limits. She was clean—and being clean brought back her fundamental beauty. She was probably the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen this close. And she showed a kind of courage simply by leaving the san; she had the capacity to face her fate. Her eyes shone with a heart-wrenching combination of fright and defiance, with a dread of what he could do to her mixed with a refusal to be cowed. And he could do anything he wanted. She was his: he had the control to her zone implant clenched in his sweating fingers.

  For that reason, he pushed the button which took away her ability to move. Then he put down the control and beat her bloody with his bare fists, marring her beauty so that it wouldn’t terrify him anymore.

  CHAPTER

  6

  Several hours passed before he came to the realization that he’d hurt himself as well as her.

  With the zone-implant control, of course, he could have overridden the damage to some extent. As soon as she regained any measure of consciousness, he could have forced her into motion, made her serve him in any number of ways. Certainly he could have muffled the sensations of damage for her. But she would still have been useless as crew: he had left her in no condition to learn the things he needed to teach her about Bright Beauty. He would have to give her time to recover before he could get any real use out of her.

  In other words, he’d increased the amount of time he would have to spend in hiding. He’d delayed the moment when he would be able—if not safe—to travel with Morn’s help instead of hindrance. And no matter how well hidden he was, the fact remained that a stationary target was easier to find and hit than a moving one.

  He’d increased the risk to himself for the satisfaction of beating her.

  And he’d hurt himself in another, subtler way as well. She was his. Wasn’t she? Like his ship, she was in his command. With the zone implant, he could make her do anything he wanted; perhaps by taking control of her body and directing it as he wished; perhaps by exerting neural pressure—pain and pleasure strong enough to coerce her. He could make her (now that she was unconscious and out of sight, his imagination began to tease him) do that. He could do that to her. So why was he afraid of her looks? Beauty only made it better—only increased her humiliation, demonstrated his power more completely. Anything that marred her took something away from him.

  He was so surprised—in a sense, so shaken—by this perception that he went to her without thinking, carried her back into the sickbay, and instructed the computer to treat her injuries.

  Another step.

  Soon his surprise became a visceral trembling, an ague in the core of his distended gut. New ideas were working on him. He wasn’t thinking about revenge now—about having a UMC cop as his crew, about making her suffer for what Starmaster had done to Bright Beauty. Now his thoughts were more visceral. He’d never had much to do with women. In the course of his piracies, he’d captured or kidnapped a few, used them hard, then gotten rid of them. But none of them had had Morn Hyland’s capacity to make him shiver, make him do things he didn’t expect. None of them had been so entirely in his possession—or so desirable.

  She was still unconscious, perhaps because of his beating, perhaps because of the drugs the sickbay computer gave her. She had no idea what was happening as he undid her shipsuit and peeled it off her limbs.

  He couldn’t stop trembling. After all, it was a good thing that he’d hit her. The darkness and swelling of her bruises made her bearable: if she’d remained perfect, he would have had no choice but to kill her. So he paid no attention to the firm lift of her breasts or the velvet curve of her hips. He concentrated exclusively on the livid hurt of her bruises as he climbed on top of her.

  His orgasm was so intense that he thought for a moment he’d broken something.

  Before he rolled off her, he had the satisfaction of seeing her eyes flutter open, seeing her begin to realize what he’d done. He filled her with revulsion, even though there was nothing she could do about it. That was good.

  Nevertheless he continued trembling.

  He could no longer tell whether he was excited or afraid.

  “Does that make you feel like a man?” She sounded bitter and miserable—and faraway, as though the aftereffects of his blows muffled her distress. “Do you have to destroy me to feel good yourself? Are you that sick?”

  “Shut up,” he replied amiably. “You’ll get used to it. You’ll have to.” He was grinning; but he still had to brace his hands on his hips to conceal the way they shook.

  As if she hadn’t heard him—as if she were still on the same subject—she muttered, “It’s because of men like you I became a cop.”

  It occurred to him that what he was doing to her might make her come apart. Maybe she had already begun. At the idea, he bared his teeth.

  “Is that so?” he drawled. “I thought it was because you like guns. Muscle. They make you feel like a man.”

  Maybe she was still stupefied by blows and rape and medication: maybe she didn’t hear him. Or maybe she really was trying to threaten him. “Forbidden space is bad enough. We don’t need any worse threats than that. But men like you are worse. You betray your own kind. You prey on human beings—on human survival—and get rich.” She didn’t look at him. Perhaps if she had looked at him she would have lost the courage for what she was saying. “I’ll do anything I can to stop you,” she recited like an article of faith. “No price is too high for stopping a man like you.”


  Angus had to respond. Involuntarily he remembered the insane bravado with which blind Captain Davies Hyland had tried to outface him. He couldn’t let the captain’s daughter think he cared about her threats.

  “Me?” he retorted, gathering anger or pleasure as he spoke. “I’m a danger to human space? What about you? I wasn’t the one who blew up your ship. I didn’t make you gap-sick. I didn’t hunt you down. I didn’t even fire on you. You killed all those cops yourself, you.” This was fun. He was going to teach her what her threats were good for. “I’m just a freighter captain. You’re a traitor.”

  He could see his words hit her: she winced and turned her head away. As if he’d switched her off—or as if she were trying to find some hidden place where she could still believe in herself—she seemed to sink out of awareness.

  Where she went, he couldn’t follow. For him, fear was a source of inspiration: it enabled him to make the sort of intuitive leap which had brought him to an understanding of her gap-sickness. But the same inspiration or intuition also blinded him to perceptions which involved emotions other than fear.

  The place where Morn went would have made no sense to him. He would have assumed it was a cynical lie—the kind of falsehood which conceals itself in order to sting more effectively.

  She was sinking down to her basic memories, to the place where she had become who she was; to her home and parents.

  Like a little girl, unselfconsciously, she appealed to her mother and father for help.

  In a sense, their power to help or hinder her, like their power to shape her life, came from the fact that they’d been so much absent. They were both cops; and the UMCP policy of crewing ships with families stopped short of children. In consequence, Morn was left with her grandparents (themselves retired veterans of Space Mines Inc. Security) while Davies and Bryony Hyland served missions in the deep void, risking their lives to protect humankind from violence and forbidden space.

  Morn kept the weight of this abandonment to herself. Of course, she grieved when they went away; she thrilled with joy when they returned. But the deeper impact she concealed. Perhaps she herself didn’t know there was any deeper impact. After all, her parents left her in a home where she was loved and attended to; a home where a strict affirmation of law and citizenship was complemented by warmth and affection. For her grandparents, as for her parents, children were the future which the UMCP labored and bled to secure.

  Virtually everyone Morn knew as a child either was or had been a cop. And they were believers: they esteemed their own work in the same way that they esteemed her, and for the same reason. They spoke of her parents with a fundamental respect, an unquestioning validation, which taught her that what her mother and father did was the most necessary and valuable job imaginable. Life beyond the hegemony of the UMCP thronged with profound perils, threats to the human species itself, which Davies and Bryony Hyland had the courage and the conviction to oppose. Vast space was deadly: it called for valor, determination, and idealism.

  How could a child question all this? Whom could she tell that she felt abandoned—or punished? By the time she was old enough to know the right words, they were no longer credible. Abandonment? Punishment? No. She’d been taught to see her father as an eagle, scouring the skies for predators. And her mother was a panther, sleek and soft for her kittens, but ready with fangs and claws to fight her kittens’ enemies.

  In addition, her grandparents, aunts, uncles—and her parents when they were on leave—conveyed the perfect assumption that Morn herself would eventually become a cop. Precisely because she was bright, capable, and loved, she would naturally choose to follow in her parents’ footsteps.

  Morn nodded solemnly, as if she were accepting her mission. Nevertheless she knew it was false. She would never be a cop. When the pain of her abandonment or punishment lost credibility, she learned resentment. But there was no place for that in her life, so it remained hidden. Instead of aspiring to be like her parents, she learned to hold a grudge.

  Even at that age, she was able to hold a grudge steadily—and give no sign of it.

  However, her resentment turned to shame—her whole emotional makeup changed—when she heard of her mother’s death.

  Of course her grandparents were the first to tell her that Bryony had been killed. But in her core, where her image of her mother’s invincibility resided, she didn’t believe the news until she heard it from her father. He came home on leave after the ship which he had served as first officer, the UMCP cruiser Intransigent, limped to the haven of Orion’s Reach. As soon as his debriefing at UMCPHQ permitted, he sat down with Morn and told her the story.

  She saved us all, he said. She’ll be given the Medal of Valor for it. He must have assumed that Morn would want to know this. If she hadn’t sacrificed herself, we would all have been lost.

  He held his daughter on his lap with his arms around her as he talked. Under the circumstances, she wasn’t too old for this. His voice was steady and clear—the voice of a man who valued what his wife had done too much to protest against it. Yet tears ran from his eyes, collected along the certainty of his jaw, and dropped like stains onto Morn’s small breast.

  We picked up a distress call from the ore transfer dump off Orion’s Reach. The dump was raided. An illegal came in on them hard, blasted most of the habitation and control centers, then took all the ore that was ready for shipping and headed away. They would probably have been safe if the illegal had known we were in the vicinity. But no one knew. We were hunting. We didn’t advertise our movements.

  We left medical supplies and personnel at the dump and took off after the illegal.

  She called herself Gutbuster. She wasn’t fast, and she didn’t show gap capability. But she was heavily armed—as heavily armed as a battlewagon. We’d never heard of her before. We didn’t know there were any illegal ships that powerful. We were only a day of hard g away from Orion’s Reach when we engaged her. But by the time we drove her off, we were so badly damaged that we couldn’t get back for a week.

  Of course, we ordered her to come about. We told her she was under arrest. And we didn’t charge in recklessly. We could tell by her particle trace that she was something we hadn’t seen before, so we were cautious. But she kept on running, ignoring us. Finally we had to attack.

  We were careful—but we should have been more careful. We were too sure of ourselves. And too angry at what Gutbuster did to the dump. And we’re cops, Morn. We’re the police. We can’t simply destroy illegals without giving them every conceivable chance to surrender. If we did that, we wouldn’t be any better than the people we’re fighting.

  Because we weren’t careful enough, and because we gave her too much chance to surrender, her first blast ripped one whole side of Intransigent open as if we had no shielding, and had never heard of evasive maneuvers.

  A pure super-light proton beam. It was no wonder she was slow. Every bit of energy she could produce must have been necessary to power that cannon. Captain Davies Hyland couldn’t resist lecturing for a moment. That’s why UMCP cruisers don’t use them. We need mobility and speed. We can’t afford the kind of energy-utilization priorities those cannon require.

  I was on the bridge. The bridge wasn’t hit. But that blast did us so much damage that we immediately lost targ. The cables were cut. We still had power, but we couldn’t aim our guns. Another beam like that would have finished us. As it was, the only reason we survived was that Gutbuster needed time to recharge her cannon.

  Your mother was on station in targeting control. And targeting control was in the part of Intransigent that Gutbuster hit. All the control spaces were close to the core, of course. But that whole side of Intransigent had been ripped open to vacuum. Even your mother’s station lost structural integrity. A bulkhead cracked, welds parted. Targeting control began to lose atmosphere.

  She could have saved herself—for a minute or two, anyway. The leak was slow enough. She could have left her station, sealed it behind her. The a
utomatic systems that locked the doors had enough override tolerance for that. But she didn’t. Instead, she stayed at her board. While her station depressurized and her air ran out, she worked to reroute targ function so that we could use our guns.

  She succeeded, Morn. That’s why Intransigent survived, why I’m here talking to you. She restored targ in time. We hit Gutbuster with everything we had. And because Gutbuster needed power to maneuver, she couldn’t use her proton beam again. We fought until she couldn’t stand any more damage. Then she pulled away.

  But your mother was lost. By the time she finished saving us, the automatic locks wouldn’t let her out of targeting control. Depressurization exceeded their tolerances.

  You know how people die in vacuum, Morn. It isn’t pretty. But it’s beautiful to me, as beautiful as your mother herself. She gave her life for her shipmates. If I die that way myself someday, I’ll die proud.

  And I promise you this. Now the look of an eagle shone through Davies Hyland’s tears, as familiar as his certainty and his strong arms. No one in the UMCP will ever rest until your mother has been avenged. We will stop Gutbuster and every ship like her. We will stop every illegal who sells out humanity.

  By the time his story ended, Morn had decided that she, too, would be a cop. She was too ashamed of herself to make any other choice. She already felt—an emotion which lost credibility as soon as it was put into words—that she’d killed her mother with her secret grudge. So she told herself that she owed it to human space, to her father, to the image of her mother, and to herself to join those who opposed the betrayal of humankind. But those were only words. The truth was that she was trying to recant.

  However, it was a matter of historical record that Gutbuster was never stopped. Morn learned this during her years in the UMCP Academy. Indeed, that ship was never encountered again. She died of her wounds in the void; or found the problematic safety of forbidden space and never returned; or transformed herself in some way (perhaps by replacing her datacore), changed her registration and codes so that she couldn’t be recognized. The promise Morn received from her father was never kept.