Carrion Comfort

by Dan Simmons

  Barent braced his legs wide and gripped the railing until the steel wire cut into his palms. “Goddamn you, Willi,” he said through gritted teeth.

  The second shell, radar-corrected and radar-guided, struck the Antoinette’s fantail twenty feet from where Barent stood, penetrated two decks, and exploded the aft engine compartment and both main tanks of diesel fuel.

  The original fireball consumed half the Antoinette and climbed eight hundred feet before curling into itself and beginning to fade.

  “Target destroyed, sir,” came Executive Officer Leland’s voice from the bridge.

  In the Combat Information Center of the Richard S. Edwards, Captain James J. Mallory, U.S.N., lifted a growler phone. “All right, XO,” he said, “bring it around so the SPS-10 can acquire our shore targets.”

  The antisubmarine warfare and gunnery officers stared at their captain. They had been at general quarters for four hours, battle stations for forty-five minutes. The captain had said it was a national emergency, top secret. The men had only to stare at the skipper’s pale, lifeless face to know that something terrible was happening. They knew one thing for sure; if to night’s work was a mistake, the Old Man’s career was definitely in jeopardy.

  “Stop and search for survivors, sir?” came the XO’s voice. “Negative that,” said Mallory. “We will acquire targets B three and B four and commence firing.”

  “Sir!” cried the air defense officer as he hunched over his SPS-40 air-search radar screen. “Aircraft just appeared. Distance: two-point-seven miles. Parallel track, sir. Speed: eighty knots.”

  “Stand by the Terriers, Skip,” said Mallory. Normally the Edwards carried only 20-millimeter Phalanx guns for air-defense, but for this summer’s picket operations it had been configured with four Terrier/ Standard-ER surface-to-air missiles aft of the bulky ASROC launchers. The men had griped for five weeks because the Terriers had usurped the only space large enough and flat enough for their Frisbee tournaments. One of the Terriers had been used to destroy the attacking helicopter three minutes earlier.

  “It’s a civilian aircraft, sir,” said the radar officer. “Single engine. Probably a Cessna.”

  “Fire Terriers,” ordered Captain Mallory.

  From the cramped CIC, the officers could hear two missiles launch, the reloader clunk, another missile launch, and the reloader cough on empty.

  “Shit,” said the fire control officer. “Excuse me, Captain. Target dropped below the cliff’s edge and Bird One lost it. Bird Two impacted on the cliff face. Bird Three hit something, sir.”

  “Is the target on the screen?” asked Mallory. His eyes were those of a blind man.

  “No, sir.”

  “Very good,” said the captain. “Gunnery?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Commence fire with both turrets when the airfield acquisition is confirmed. After five salvos, direct fire on the structure called the Manse.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “I’ll be in my cabin,” said Mallory.

  All of the officers stared at the empty door when the captain exited. Then the fire-control officer announced, “Target B-3 acquired.”

  The men put aside their questions and did their jobs. Ten minutes later, just as Executive Officer Leland was ready to rap on his door, there came the sound of a single gunshot from the captain’s quarters.

  Natalie had never flown between trees before. The fact that it was a moonless night did not make the experience more enjoyable. Black masses of foliage would rush at them and then fall below as Meeks jerked the Cessna over another line of trees and dove for another clear area. Even in the dark, Natalie could make out cabins, pathways, a swimming pool, and an empty ampitheater as they hurtled beneath and beside the plane.

  What ever mental radar Meeks was using evidently was superior to the merely mechanical sensors in the third missile; it struck an oak tree and exploded in an incredible shower of bark and branches.

  Meeks swung right above the bare strip of the security zone. There were fires below, at least two vehicles smoldering, and muzzle flashes winking in the forest. A mile to the south, shells began falling on the single landing strip. “Wow,” breathed Jackson as the fuel tanks near the hangar went up.

  They flew over the north dock and headed out to sea. “We have to go back,” said Natalie. Her hand was in her straw bag, finger touching the trigger guard of the Colt.

  “Give me one good reason,” said Meeks, lifting the plane to a safe fifteen feet above the ocean.

  Natalie took her empty hand out of the bag. “Please,” she said.

  Meeks looked at her and cocked an eyebrow at Jackson. “What the hell,” he said. The Cessna banked steeply to the right and came around in a graceful turn until the blinking green light of the dock lay dead ahead.

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  Dolmann Island Tuesday,

  June 16, 1981

  In the silence that followed the departure of Barent’s he li cop ter, the Oberst remained standing with his hands in his pockets. “So,” he said to Saul. “It is time to say good night, my little pawn.”

  “I thought that I was a bishop now,” said Saul.

  The Oberst chuckled and walked to the high-backed chair Barent had sat in earlier. “Once a pawn, always a pawn.” said the Oberst, seating himself with the grace of a king assuming his throne. He glanced at Reynolds and the tall man came over to stand next to the Oberst’s chair.

  Saul did not look away from the Oberst, but out of the corner of his eye he saw Tony Harod crawl into the shadows and lift the head of his dead secretary onto his lap. Harod made sick, mewling sounds.

  “So, a productive day, nein?” said the Oberst.

  Saul said nothing. “Herr Barent said that you killed at least three of his people to night,” said the Oberst, smiling slightly. “How does it feel to be a killer, Jude?”

  Saul measured the distance between them. Six squares and another six feet or so. About thirty feet. A dozen paces.

  “They were innocent men,” said the Oberst. “Paid security people. Undoubtedly they left wives and families. Does this bother you, Jew?”

  “No,” said Saul.

  The Oberst raised an eyebrow. “So? You understand the necessity of taking innocent lives when it is required? Sehr gut. I feared that you would go to your grave filled with the same sickening sentimentality I sensed when we first met, pawn. This is an improvement. Like your mongrel nation, Israel, you have learned the necessity of slaughtering innocents when your survival depends upon it. Imagine how this necessity has weighed on me, my little pawn. People born with my Ability are rare, perhaps no more than one in several hundred million, a few dozen each human generation. Throughout history my race has been feared and hunted. At the first sign of our superiority we are branded as witches or demons and destroyed by the mindless mobs. We cut our teeth while learning to hide the brilliant flame of our difference. If we survive the fearful cattle, we fall prey to the few others with our power. The problem of being born a shark amidst schools of tuna is that when we encounter other sharks we have no choice but to defend our feeding grounds, eh? I am, as you are, first and last a survivor. You and I are more alike than we care to admit, eh, pawn?”

  “No,” said Saul. “No?”

  “No,” said Saul. “I am a civilized human being and you are a shark— a mindless, moral-less, garbage-eating killing machine, an evolutionary obscenity fit only to chew and swallow.”

  “You seek to provoke me,” sneered the Oberst. “You are afraid that I will draw out your end. Do not fear, pawn. It will be quick. And soon.”

  Saul took a deep breath, trying to fight off the physical weakness that threatened to drop him to his knees. His wounds were still bleeding, but the pain had faded to an encroaching numbness that he found a thousand times more ominous. Saul knew that he had only minutes left in which to act.

  The Oberst was not finished with his tirade. “Like Israel, you prattle about morality while you behave like the Gestapo. Al
l violence flows from the same source, pawn. The need for power. Power is the only true morality, Jew, the only deathless god, and the appetite for violence is its only commandment.”

  “No,” said Saul. “You are a hopeless and pathetic creature who will never understand human morality and the need for love that is behind it. But know this, Oberst. Like Israel, I have come to know that there is a morality that demands a sacrifice and imperative above all others— and that is never again to allow ourselves to be victims of your kind and of those who serve your kind. A hundred generations of victims demand this. There is no choice.”

  The Oberst shook his head. “You have learned nothing,” he spat. “You are as stupidly sentimental as your idiot relatives who went passively to the ovens, grinning and tugging at their sidelocks and beckoning at their idiot children to follow. You are a hopeless, filthy race and the Führer’s only crime was in not achieving his goal of eliminating all of you. Still, when I terminate you, pawn, it will not be a personal thing. You served well, but you are too unpredictable. That unpredictability no longer serves my purposes.”

  “When I kill you,” said Saul, “it will be totally personal.” He took a step toward the Oberst.

  The Oberst sighed tiredly. “You will die now,” he said. “Goodbye, Jew.” Saul felt the full force of the Oberst’s power hit him like a massive blow to the brain and to the base of his spine, as intrusive and irresistible as being impaled on a sharpened steel spit. In an instant, Saul felt his own consciousness being stripped away like flimsy clothing being ripped from a rape victim as somewhere near the base of his brain a theta rhythm leaped to life and triggered a waking REM state in his cerebellum, leaving Saul as unable to control his actions as a sleepwalker, a walking corpse, a Müsselman.

  But even as Saul’s consciousness was flung to the darkened attic of his own mind, he was aware of the Oberst’s presence in his brain, a fetid stench as sharp and painful as the first scalding lungful of poison gas. And while sharing that consciousness in that first second, Saul was aware of the Oberst’s surprise when the rapid onset of REM state triggered the flow of memories and impressions hypnotically buried in Saul’s subconscious like land mines in a field of winter wheat.

  Having thrown aside Saul Laski’s consciousness, the Oberst was suddenly confronted with a second persona— flimsy, to be sure, hypnotically induced and wrapped around the delicate neurological control centers like a pathetic suit of tin pretending to be true armor. The Oberst had encountered this kind of thing only once before, in 1941, while with the Einsatzgrüppen during the termination of several hundred patients at a Lithuanian mental hospital. Out of sheer boredom, the Oberst had slipped into the mind of a hopeless schizophrenic seconds before the SS guard’s bullet shattered the man’s brain and sent him tumbling into the cold pit. The second personality embedded there had surprised the Oberst then too, but it had been no more difficult to overcome than the first one. This artificially created second personality would pose no greater problem. The Oberst smiled at the pathetic futility of the Jew’s little surprise and took a few seconds to savor Saul’s hopeless handiwork before shattering it.

  Mala Kagan, twenty-three years old, carrying her four-month-old daughter, Edek, toward the Auschwitz crematoria, keeps her right fist closed around the razor blade she had hidden all these months. An SS officer shoves his way through the crowd of naked, slowly moving women. “What do you have there, Jewish whore? Give it to me.” Thrusting the baby into her sister’s arms, Mala turns toward the SS man and opens her hand. “Take it!” she cries, slashing at his face. The officer shrieks and staggers backward, blood spurting from between his raised fingers. A dozen SS men raise their weapons as Mala advances on them, the small blade clenched between her finger and thumb. “Life!” she screams as all the machine guns fire at once.

  Saul felt the Oberst’s sneer and the unspoken question. You try to frighten me with ghosts, pawn?

  It had taken Saul thirty hours of self-induced hypnotic effort to recreate that final minute of Mala Kagan’s existence. The Oberst knocked the persona away in a second, as effortlessly as a man slapping away cobwebs in a darkened room.

  Saul took a step forward.

  Relentlessly, the Oberst reentered Saul’s brain and reached for the centers of control, easily triggering the required REM state.

  Sixty-two-year-old Shalom Krzaczek crawls on his hands and knees through the underground sewers of Warsaw. It is pitch black and excrement tumbles on the silent line of survivors as the “Aryan toilets” flush above them. Shalom had entered the tunnels fourteen days earlier, on April 25, 1943, after six days of hopeless fighting against thousands of crack Nazi troops. Shalom has brought his nine-year-old grandson Leon with him. The boy is the last living member of Shalom’s extended family. For two weeks the ever-dwindling line of Jews has crawled through the reeking maze of narrow sewers as the Germans poured bullets, fire from flamethrowers, and canisters of poison gas into every ghetto manhole and latrine. Shalom had brought along six pieces of bread and these he has shared with Leon as they crouch in the darkness and excrement. For fourteen days they have hidden and crawled, trying to get outside the walls of the ghetto, drinking from dripping effluents they hope are storm sewers; surviving. Now a lid of a sewer opening slides back overhead and the rough face of a Polish resistance fighter stares down. “Come!” he says. “Come out. You are safe here.” With the last of his strength, blinded by the sunlight, Shalom crawls out and lies on the cobblestone surface of the street. Four others emerge. Leon is not among them. Tears running down his face, Shalom tries to remember when he had last spoken to the boy in the darkness. An hour? A day? Weakly thrusting away the hands of his would-be rescuers, Shalom descends into the dark pipe and begins crawling back the way he had come, calling Leon’s name.

  The Oberst destroyed the thick protective membrane that was Shalom Krzaczek.

  Saul took a step forward.

  The Oberst shifted in his chair and struck with a mental force of a dull ax piercing Saul’s skull.

  Seventeen-year-old Peter Gine sits in Auschwitz drawing as the long line of boys files past him toward the showers. For the past two years in Terezin, Peter and his friends have produced a newsletter, Vedem—“We’re Leading”— which he and other young artists have filled with their poetry and drawings. Peter’s last act before being transported had been to give all 800 pages to young Zdenek Taussig to hide in the old forge behind Magdeburg Barracks. Peter has not seen Zdenek since the boys arrived at Auschwitz. Now Peter uses his last sheet of paper and stub of charcoal to sketch the endless line of naked boys passing him in the frigid November air. With bold, sure strokes, Peter catches the protruding ribs and staring eyes, the shaking, fleshless legs and hands held shyly over fear-contracted genitals. A kapo with warm clothing and a wooden club strides up. “What is that?” he demands. “Get with the others.” Peter does not look up from his drawing. “Just a minute,” he says. “I’m almost finished.” Furious, the kapo strikes Peter in the face with the club and grinds the boy’s hand under his heel, breaking three fingers. He grabs Peter by the hair, pulls him to his feet, and shoves the boy into the slowly advancing line. As Peter cradles his hand, he looks back over his shoulder to see his sketch being lifted by the brisk November breeze, catching briefly on the upper strand of barbed wire on the high fence, and then blowing free, tumbling and skipping toward the line of trees to the west.

  The Oberst swept aside the persona.

  Saul took two steps forward. The pain of the Oberst’s continued mind-rape seared him like steel spikes behind the eyes.

  In the dark holding cells of Birkenau, on the night before they are to be gassed, the poet Yitzhak Katznelson recites his poem to his eighteen-year-old son and a dozen other huddled forms. Before the war, Yitzhak had been known throughout Poland for his humorous verses and songs for children, each celebrating the joys of youth. Yitzhak’s own youn gest children, Benjamin and Bension, had been murdered with their mother at Treblinka eighteen
months earlier. Now he recites in Hebrew, a tongue none of the listening Jews except his son understands, and then translates in Polish:

  I had a dream

  A dream so terrible:

  My people were no more,

  No more!

  I wake up with a cry.

  What I dreamed was true:

  It had happened indeed,

  It had happened to me.

  In the silence that followed the poem, Yitzhak’s son slides closer in the cold straw. “When I get older,” whispers the boy, “I also will write great poems.” Yitzhak sets his arm around his son’s thin shoulders. “So you shall,” he says and begins singing a slow, sweet Polish lullaby. The other men pick it up and soon the entire barracks is filled with the gentle sound of their singing.

  The Oberst destroyed Yitzhak Katznelson with a flick of his iron will. Saul took a step forward.

  To Tony Harod’s stunned, staring eyes, it was as if Saul Laski was moving toward Willi the way a man would wade upstream against a terrible current or walk into a raging windstorm. The battle between the two was soundless and invisible, but as tangible as an electrical storm; and at the end of each silent surge of conflict, the Jew would raise a leg, move it forward, and set a foot down like a paraplegic learning to walk. In this way the torn and bleeding man had crossed six squares and reached the last row of the chessboard when Willi seemed to shake himself out of his waking dream and glance toward Tom Reynolds. The blond killer leaped toward the Jew with his long, powerful fingers extended.

  Three miles away, the Antoinette exploded with a force powerful enough to shatter several panes of glass in the french doors. Neither Willi nor Laski took notice. Harod watched the three men come together, watched Reynolds strangling Laski, and listened to more explosions begin in the direction of the airport. Gently, ever so gently, Harod lowered Maria Chen’s head to the cold tile, smoothed her hair, and stood up to walk slowly past the struggling forms.