Mercenary

by Piers Anthony

  I was telling my story in nightly installments, for next to singing and poker that was the prime entertainment. Most of the others knew each other’s histories, but I was new and unfamiliar, so was the present object of attention. It was like having a new holo show for them to watch, instead of an old, familiar one. I told how my family had to depart our city of Maraud at night and catch a bootleg bubble to Jupiter, and the betrayal and tragedy that ensued. On the first night only half a dozen people paid much attention, but my audience grew on succeeding nights, and when I got to sixteen year old Helse, all thirty of them, including the foreman, were listening raptly. I did not spare myself, for I wanted to forget none of it: my gallant family, my first experiences with sex, the rigors of the hell-moon Io, and Helse’s horrible death.

  “Say,” Rivers said. “For a tale like that, Trixie’d give you tail for free!” Trixie was the generic name for prostitutes.

  I was silent. The thought of sex with any other woman appalled me. Helse, Helse! I was not even conscious of the tears streaming down my cheeks.

  Joe Hill launched himself at Rivers. His fist scored on the man’s gut. Rivers buckled, gasping for breath. “You had no call to say that!” Joe cried, standing over the fallen man.

  I jumped up, frightened at what I had unwittingly instigated. “He meant no harm!”

  Rivers caught his breath. He was a larger man than Joe, and more powerfully constructed, and it was already evident that the two were not friends. But this time he backed off. “I had no call,” he agreed. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  Joe turned away, satisfied. I was to learn by experience that fights were often this way, inchoate, terminated as quickly as they began; an unwritten code among the pickers militated against extremes of violence. But at this time I wasn’t aware of that; I feared there could be a continuation. I went to Rivers. “There’s no offense! I didn’t mean for this to happen!”

  “Joe’s wrong about most things,” Rivers said gruffly. “This one time he’s right. I owe you one, Worry.” And he, too, turned away.

  Why had he backed off? It had been a fairly innocent remark, and he surely felt no personal awe of Joe Hill. Rivers had accepted a spot humiliation, a certain loss of status, and that bothered me because I didn’t understand his motive. Mysteries of motive are always important to me, because I encounter so few of them.

  Gallows began his song, effectively changing the subject:

  Hangman, hangman, slack your rope

  Slack it for a while

  I think I see my father coming

  Riding many a mile.

  After the first refrain, the others joined in, and the song session was on.

  Papa, did you bring me silver?

  Papa, did you bring me gold?

  Or did you come to see me hanging

  By the gallows pole?

  According to the song, Papa had no money to free the victim, and neither did the mother; but the sweetheart did, and so the victim was saved. I appreciated the aptness of the song, for Gallows was the one who counted out the money for the hapless workers. Without that money they would perish.

  We went on to other songs, mine included, and I felt more strongly than ever the camaraderie of this group. I knew this collection of people was essentially random, just those who had been looking for work when this job was available, but the grueling day labor and the songs by night unified it rapidly. And, of course, the subculture of the pickers spread its broader unity over all such groups.

  There is no need to dwell unduly on this aspect of my life. We completed our ten-day stint, and my work improved, but I remained in debt to Joe. So when we returned to Leda on the space-bus, I told him I would take another tour with him, to repay that debt. But that was only part of the reason. The rest of it was this: I had been cast adrift by circumstance, and migrant labor gave me a home and a livelihood and companions. It wasn’t much, but it was what I needed.

  But I knew that eventually I would have to heed Helse’s warning in the vision. There was no real future for me in this life. As a child grows out of the comfort and security of his family, I would have to grow out of this.

  I took the next tour, to a bubble growing potatoes, and this was grueling work. Some of the crew overlapped that of the pepper bubble, and some were new, but the songs continued. Rivers was there, and he and Joe had another altercation, for Joe openly condemned the low wages and hard work, while Rivers said that if a man didn’t like it, he was a fool not to go elsewhere.

  I caught up on my debt to Joe, but I wasn’t ready to leave. My replacement ID card had not yet arrived, and this was the only type of work I could obtain without it. Anyway, I still needed that migrant culture.

  So it continued for months, and the people changed while the nature of the employment did not. The bad blood between Joe Hill and Old Man Rivers intensified as pickers got sick with degenerative, malnutritive, and stress-syndrome diseases and lost ability to work. The bubble-farm guards were not always aloof; sometimes they beat the pickers. Sometimes the bubble-farmers cheated the work crews, and there was very little to be done about it. Joe’s talk of forming an effective migrant labor union became more strident, and Rivers’s opposition more implacable, and the two fought and fought again. Somehow they always shared a job, though; they never split to separate ones. That, too, I wondered about.

  Gradually the union sentiment spread, for Joe’s analysis was compelling: Only unified force could bring the tyrannical bubble-farmers into line and make them improve conditions and pay for the laborers. “A strike!” Joe urged. “If all the workers refused to pick and the crops started rotting in the fields, that would bring them into line soon enough! All we want is a living wage, a bit more of the fruits of our labors!”

  “All you want is to take over the power for yourself!” Rivers objected. “A corrupt union boss is the worst thing there is!” But the tide was turning against him as the unfairness of the system became more apparent to the body of the laboring force.

  Joe led them in a new (though old) song:

  Men of the soil! We have labored unending.

  We have fed the planet on the grain that we have grown.

  Man ne’er shall eat again, bread gained through blood of men!

  Who is there denies our right to reap where we have sown?

  Of course, it wasn’t exact, though updated for space. We were in fact reapers, not sowers. But the essence was there: that the laborer should share the fruits of his labors. I felt it, as the power of the song took me. In unity there was strength, and in strength there could be justice. We had to unify and act!

  “You’re crazy!” Rivers warned. “Do you have any idea what would happen if you pulled a strike? They’d bring in the goon squads and beat your heads in!” Rivers was no advocate of the present exploitation; he merely believed that what Joe was doing would make things worse, not better, for the pickers.

  “Not if we outnumbered the goons-and stood together)” Joe retorted.

  There was no decision yet, for though the union sentiment was gaining, it was far from unanimous. Slowly the pressure increased while the work continued. Each shift of jobs brought contact with new faces, and these people were increasingly interested.

  One memorable, if not critical, episode occurred after about six months. I was in a potato-bubble, part of a large crew with a number of unfamiliar faces and several new songs. I had been sleeping early, for grubbing potatoes is a dirty, wearing business. I woke early when I heard someone singing Worried Man Blues. Electrified, I bounced off my bunk and charged into the group. “That’s my song!” I cried indignantly. The theft of a song was a serious business, sure provocation for a fight. I had to defend my song, or I would be in poor repute.

  The man stopped. He was old and grizzled, with deep lines around and through his face. “It’s my song,” he said mildly. “Had it for thirty years.”

  I backed off, embarrassed. Of course, songs could duplicate; I had seen it happen to others. There were hundr
eds of songs, and thousands of workers. It just hadn’t occurred to me that mine could have another owner. I now look back at this adolescent naïveté with a certain wonder; but the loss of innocence does seem to be a lifelong chore.

  The man smiled. “It’s good to meet a brother,” he said, and extended his lined hand. “Haven’t run into one in three years.”

  I took his hand, grateful for his attitude. “Mine’s only six months.”

  “It’s still authentic. Who named you, Worry?”

  “Well, really, it was Joe Hill and Old Man Rivers. They’re on another shift right now.”

  “Them brothers!” he exclaimed. “If them two agreed on anything, it must be right!”

  Brothers? Not in the sense of matching songs. Song-brothers were those who shared a song, and they did not.

  “Well, come on, Worry,” he said. “It don’t matter how long anyone’s had it, it’s ours. We’ll sing it together.”

  And sing it we did. His voice wasn’t any better than mine, but we complemented each other and made a richer song than either could have alone, and perhaps that is a suitable analogy for any type of cooperation in life. His version differed slightly from mine, but that only added to the appeal.

  After that we talked, exchanging information and attitudes. We really were not much alike, but the rules of this society bound us together, and this man was rather like an uncle to me, and I like a nephew to him. He had been a migrant laborer all his life and knew nothing else. He was largely illiterate, so could find no other work. Much of the time, he confessed, he was on the bottle; it eased his mind, but his liver was starting to go, and that worried him—of course!—but what’ else was there?

  And I learned that there was a duty as well as a friendship that went with the sharing of a song. If one of us died, and the other heard about it, he was supposed to come and investigate and set things to right if they needed it. Usually a few questions sufficed, and sometimes personal effects had to be taken to a blood relative, but once in a while there was foul play, and vengeance had to be sought. “But don’t worry, Worry, ‘about that,” he reassured me. “My liver’ll take me out within five years if not sooner, and I don’t have no living relatives and nothing worth saving. I’ll never be a caution to you. See that you ain’t to me.”

  I promised not to be a caution to him, and that was it. We parted ways on the next tour, and I never saw him again. But the experience buoyed me. There was someone who would look out for me, not from proximity or friendship, but because the migrant society required it. It was the code of the song. That gave me an odd, deep comfort.

  It was almost a year after my entry into the migrant labor circuit when things got ugly. My replacement identification had never come through; all I had was a temporary card that listed only my name and planet of origin: Callisto. The bureaucracy ground exceeding slow. The bubble-farmers and labor foremen didn’t care, but this prevented me from seeking better employment elsewhere. So I was locked in, but as long as I was with Joe Hill, I didn’t really mind.

  The people changed, but Rivers was always with us. Fascinated for more than incidental reason now, I studied the relations between Joe and Rivers. Though their politics were opposite, and the two often came to blows, I noticed that the quarrels were never serious. Neither man ever drew his knife or tried for a mutilating blow. Other men in other controversies sometimes went the whole route, and once I saw one killed. The migrant code was strong, but not absolute; passions of the moment could erupt disastrously. No one seemed overly concerned about the dead man. The bubble-guards picked up the one who did it and turned him over to the police, and he did not return; maybe he was brought to trial, maybe just bounced to another orbit. It was the nuisance of violence the police objected to, not the loss of a worker or two. But Joe and Rivers never went that far. Could they, in fact, be brothers, bound by a more subtle tie than they advertised? I concluded that they did hold each other in a certain veiled respect.

  Rivers was well named. He sang his song, and it was him:

  ...Tired of livin’, and feared of dyin’!

  But Old Man River, he just keeps rollin’ along.

  There was something about the way he sounded the word “dyin’” that sent a shiver through me. It signaled an enormous and terrible comprehension of the concept. I had seen my father treacherously and brutally slain; I had seen my fiancée’s body cut open, her guts drawn out. I knew what death was.

  But Rivers was no death-dealer, but the apostle of peaceful change. He argued that the condition of the pickers, which he deplored as much as Joe Hill did, would not change until underlying economics and social factors changed. Until the climate was right, he said, overt action could only be counterproductive. Joe, by inciting open resistance to oppression, was more apt to bring the storm down upon his own head, and increase the suffering of the rest of us.

  I sided with Joe, of course, though in retrospect I feel I was mistaken. As the Jupiter-System economy wallowed in the ebb tide of an economic recession, and things tightened up all over the Juclip, and the slop the bubble-farmers fed us got worse, and the work harder for no increase in pay, my anger boiled up along with that of the others. Now Joe’s reception was serious, not polite; the pickers were at last ready to organize, and the ones with this militant attitude were becoming a clear majority. The union songs became more strident, and the first open signs of rebellion manifested.

  Then Joe got sick. His harvesting suffered, and he missed his quota. Now I carried him, paying for his meals and bunk. I was glad to expiate my social debt this way, owed for the manner in which he had rescued me from the concourse at Leda and given me support and a kind of family. I was a good picker now, well able to stay ahead, and on good terms with most of the other workers. I was, for one thing, thoroughly literate; when others had paperwork to decipher, I helped, sometimes saving them grief. Had either Joe or I asked for help, it would have been provided, but I preferred to help him myself.

  I brought Joe his supper, which the foreman had served out especially for him, a generous portion. But he consumed only a mouthful and relapsed into his lethargy. There was no doctor; I could only sit by him and hope he got better.

  I waited, finishing some of his meal for him, rather than let it go to waste. But my own appetite was gone, and so most of the stew was lost, anyway.

  Others came by to express concern, but no one knew what to do. There were no contagious diseases in the Juclip; the bad days of personal contamination had been eliminated when man went out into the Solar System, with its natural quarantine. Only on septic Earth itself did the ancient maladies still flourish, and in occasional pockets in the major System cities. But there were degenerative maladies, such as the other Worry’s declining liver. This one of Joe’s was not familiar to any of us. We carried him back to his bunk in the ship where he lay unconscious.

  In the night I got sick myself, vomiting out the stew I had taken. I felt awful, hurting and weak all over. I told myself it was nerves, or a sympathetic reaction, and forced myself to relax, and I got through the night, improving.

  But I dreamed. I dreamed of a faceless man whom I realized was QYV, my private nemesis. He held out to me a goblet, urging me to drink, but I didn’t want to because I knew he only wanted me dead. I spilled the goblet, and from it stew heaved out like my own vomit.

  Stew?

  I wrenched myself awake. “Poison!” I screamed.

  Rivers appeared beside my bunk. “What?”

  “Poisoned stew!” I said. “I ate some of Joe’s stew, and it made me sick. It was served special for him—”

  “For several days,” Rivers said grimly. “Damn! I warned him not to stir up the animals!” He put his hand to Joe’s forehead and froze.

  “Is he better?” I asked.

  “He’s dead,” Rivers said.

  Numbly, I put my hand on Joe’s face. It was cold. In a moment I was sure. He really was dead.

  The other workers gathered around, their faces blank with
uncertainty and horror. Joe Hill had been their tacit leader, and now, just like that, he was gone. My face was as blank as theirs, anesthetized by the first stun of grief. In the past year I had grown unaccustomed to death; now I had lost my friend and could not quite encompass the horrendous significance.

  “Poison,” Rivers repeated. “I thought he was wrong, but I guess he wasn’t. Not if they had to take him out like this.”

  “But who—?” I asked, my lips fumbling numbly over the words, my tongue feeling thick, my face a chilled mask.

  “The farmers,” he said, “who must’ve paid off the foreman. They murdered my brother.” He was silent a moment, staring at the dead man. There was no tear in Rivers’s eye, no tremor to his chin; he simply stared. Feared of dyin’...