The Forever Hero

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  He stared at the empty beaker and set it precisely in the center of the table.

  Once more, he leaned back in the chair, aware how his posture irritated the always proper orderlies of the club. He began another song, with the off-multitoned whistle that no one else had ever seemed able to imitate.

  This one—he’d composed the basic melody years ago, not long after he’d been picked up by the Torquina. While he’d elaborated it over the years, the sense of loss, the lack of identity, were more refined, a shade understated, but still the same basic theme. His theme, and it always would be.

  Waiting to go home, he wondered if he ever could, as the notes spilled from his lips and whispered their clear wistfulness into the darkening twilight:

  As he finished, he leaned forward and let the front legs of his chair touch the smoothed stone of the terrace. By now, the drier cool of the true evening was arriving on the hill breeze, with the scent of raisha. The long shadows had merged with the forerunner of night.

  “Beautiful,” a soft voice said.

  He started, and looked to his left.

  Sitting on the stone wall, her skirted legs hanging over the outside edge and over the grass a meter beneath her feet, the woman was half-turned and looking at him.

  With an athletic motion she lifted her legs and turned so that she was still sitting on the wall, but facing him directly.

  “You must be Lieutenant Gerswin.”

  With the terrace lights not on, and the last glimmer of twilight fading behind her, it took a moment for Gerswin to focus on the dimness of her face.

  He stood.

  “Would you care to join me?” He gestured to the empty chair, but did not move.

  “I’m comfortable right here, and that might be best.”

  Her voice was young, but husky, and he judged from her profile, as she turned her head toward the staircase that led to the upper terrace, that she was little more than a girl.

  In his loneliness, he had hoped for a woman. But she had heard the melody.

  “As you wish,” he answered, inhaling slightly as he reseated himself, not moving toward her. Her scent indicated she was a woman, but, as he had guessed from her profile, young. Obviously, the daughter of an officer, a very senior one. Few officers pulled accompanied tours anywhere.

  “Would you please do another?”

  Gerswin surveyed the terrace. Even the orderlies were gone. The girl had a pleasant voice, and the request was neither patronizing nor wheedling.

  “Anything special?”

  “Whatever pleases you.”

  He began to whistle softly, so low that no one more than a few meters away could have heard him, a greatly amended version of an old ballad he had learned at the prep school.

  He recalled some of the words, and they flitted through his mind, though he could not, nor did he wish, to sing them.

  …and I met my love, and I learned her worth,

  on a faraway planet, a faraway planet called earth…

  When he halted at the end, there was silence. For an instant, he thought she had gone.

  “Are your songs always so sad?”

  “No. Feeling down tonight. I just whistle what I feel. Not sophisticated enough to lie in my songs.” He frowned. “How did you know who I was?”

  “You whistle, and you’re from Old Earth. There’s only one pilot with that combination, isn’t there?”

  Gerswin laughed, a bark again, but softer yet, and forgiving. He had his night-sight now that the twilight was gone and the terrace lights remained out. He studied the girl.

  Short dark hair, cut just below her ears, large eyes, broad forehead, small ears, and a jaw that stopped just short of being square. Smallish, more handsome than pretty, but she smelled good and had a lovely voice, Gerswin decided, both qualities as important, to him, as mere looks.

  Too bad she was the young dependent of some flight commander or marshal. Touch her, and he’d end up on some isolated station, or suicide assignment, if not planted under a shambletown.

  “Your name?”

  “Oh…I’m…Caroljoy.”

  “Carol Joy.”

  “No…Caroljoy.” She firmly made the name one word.

  “Sorry.”

  He looked away from her and into the western darkness.

  “Lieutenant? Are you really from Old Home?”

  Gerswin did not look away from the silhouette of the distant hills, where no light marred the blackness.

  “I suppose so. That’s what they tell me.”

  She let the silence be, and waited.

  At last, he spoke.

  “I am from Old Earth. That is what those who picked me up have told me. The place I knew does not resemble the Terra of the old tapes and stories. You cannot see into the sky beyond the clouds. The grass is purpled, what grass there is, and the trees are few, and only in the sheltered hills. There are some ruins, but most have been leveled. The people…some still remain, mostly in the shambletowns. And the others, the devilkids, hold the high plains, and, in turn, are hunted by the shambletowners. When I was not dodging the landspouts, or the ice rains, or the rivers of death, I was dodging the shambletowners and their slings.

  “Sometimes that is a dream, only a dream, and sometimes this is.”

  From the stillness, her voice came back, husky soft now. “Do you want to go back?”

  “Sometimes…but there I have to go, first, to become what I am…. To do what must be done….”

  “To remain a dreamer after all you have seen…” Her voice trailed off.

  He laughed, a chuckle that was not.

  “You sound older when you laugh.”

  “Perhaps I am.”

  “I must be going.”

  “Good night, Caroljoy.”

  “Good night, Lieutenant.”

  Gerswin watched her slip off the stone wall and onto the grass. His eyes followed her as she circled the pines and took the sheltered path that would lead her back to the side entrance to the club.

  He knew the ladies’ lounge was off that entrance, and wondered if her father or mother, whoever the senior officer she belonged to was, had suspected where she was.

  Caroljoy—a pretty name. He had enjoyed her presence, and her voice.

  He glanced down at the empty beaker once again. Should he wait for the orderly? Should he go back to the main bar for a refill? Was he really that thirsty?

  There were sure to be the few regulars there, and all would fall silent once he walked in, except for a few conversations in secluded booths. Not one of the handful of junior officers would ever meet his eyes. Few enough had even through the Academy years.

  He shook his head and eased himself out of the chair, leaving the beaker on the table.

  As he did, as if the slight scraping of his movements had been a signal, the terrace lights went on, destroying the welcome shadow of the night.

  Gerswin had to blink hard, squinting his eyes tightly against what seemed glaring floodlights, although he knew that the lighting would have been regarded as dim by most. His eyes were still unaccustomed to abrupt shifts in light intensity.

  He held himself erect, refusing to stagger and admit any weakness, as his eyes adjusted and as he continued across the terrace toward the walk away from the club and toward his temporary quarters. He had already tabbed the drinks, the simple juices he had drunk.

  For the time, and until he embarked on the Churchill, he was billeted in the farthest of the transient officers’ quarters from the club, and he was the only one in his entire wing. While he enjoyed the isolation, he doubted that his room assignment was for his personal convenience.

  The stone walks were dimly and indirectly lit, for which his eyes were grateful, and he saw no one as he walked the two hundred meters plus toward his billet. On his left were empty rooms, windows blanked and reflecting the glow of the walk lights, and on his right, sloping downhill, was the Terran grass that was no longer native to Old Earth.

  From his own quarters
a small glow lamp beckoned, and the old style door creaked as he opened it.

  The room was empty, as always.

  After slipping out of the still-unfamiliar officer’s uniform, he stood in the small fresher unit to wash up. Then he pulled a robe around himself and turned to the standard planetside officer’s bed. Back came the uniform coverlet, and he piled up two pillows before turning off the lights and stretching out in the darkness.

  He had rearranged the furniture in order to be able to view the greens of the valley below from the bed, since the two straight-backed chairs were less than comfortable for any extended period.

  Downslope, as his eyes adjusted, he could pick out the faintly luminescent shapes of the glowbirds as they began to dive for the emerging nightworms.

  Every so often he could hear the hum of an electrobike making its way up or down the gentle slope that led up to the officers’ quarters from the skitter fields and the training areas. The trainee barracks were shielded by an artificial berm, but he could pick out the glow above the darkness of the man-made hills that concealed them.

  New Colora was a quiet planet, not that Gerswin minded that, but the stillness grated on some. There was always background music in the club, sometimes loud enough to be heard from his room.

  Gerswin’s eyes narrowed. Something, someone, had slipped across the corner of his vision. He sat up and put his feet on the floor, more puzzled than alarmed, as he checked the time. Almost local midnight.

  He hadn’t realized so much time had passed since he’d gotten back to his small billet.

  Tap. Tap.

  Gerswin sniffed the air automatically and stood, his bare feet welcoming the chill of the floor tiles.

  Tap. Tap.

  He had seen someone, and that someone was at his door. The tap was gentle, almost delicate, but he did not know any woman, not since Marcella had left with the rest of the Fifteenth. And she’d been a friend, not a lover.

  He stood beside the door, ready for anything, he hoped, and opened it.

  His mouth dropped.

  “Not a word, Lieutenant.”

  She slipped past him and into the darkened room. When he did not move, she turned, took the edge of the door from his hand and closed it quietly.

  A rustling sound followed, and he found her hands unloosening his robe, circling him, and drawing him to her.

  “Why…?”

  “Don’t ask…my choice….” And her mouth left no room for words.

  He stood, locked against her, returning the warmth of the kiss she had given, his ears pricked for the sound of footsteps, for an outraged parent, a marshal’s duty officer. But only silence filled the air outside, silence and the distant murmuring of the birds hunting nightworms.

  As that lingering kiss ended, as the outward silence stretched out and outward, he bent and gently, oh, so gently laid her upon the narrow bed, and folded himself into her scent, her warmth, and the huskiness of her murmurings.

  He could not have spoken, had he wished to do so, nor would the woman have let him, for while her hands were gentle they were insistent, in the timelessness that is forever between two souls.

  Later, much later, when she had gone as silently as she had come, Gerswin stared into the darkness, listening, unable to sleep, unable to dream.

  Caroljoy Kerwin. The marshal’s daughter. An innocent, he was sure, innocent no longer.

  Why him? Why now? Why such intensity?

  He was awake as the gray grass turned blue-green with the dawn, his questions still unanswered.

  XVIII

  That key from the tower of time? Yes, that one, the one whose pages can unlock the mysteries of the myths? Could any words be that immortal in spanning the gulf between the days of chaos and the quiet order prevailing on Old Earth today?

  Not words…not exactly, for the key is a small volume of coded entries, the order book of the operations center of Imperial Reclamation Corps base one [Old Earth].

  What does it say? The words might be dry, but the stories told between their lines must be grander than the myths that surround them, if we could but decipher those order codes and sterile words.

  The Myth of the Rebuilding

  Alarde D’Lorina

  New Augusta, 4539 N.E.C.

  XIX

  “Five right,” Suggested the voice from the console.

  Gerswin eased the stick right.

  “Ten right,” insisted the distant voice.

  Gerswin ignored the latest suggestion as he felt the flitter rock, automatically leveling it while studying the vortex that loomed off the nose and above the ground fog that shrouded the prairie.

  “Tall mother…,” he muttered, not caring whether the relay was open.

  “Scan indicated probable effective height of twenty kilometers.”

  “Spread?”

  “Less than a kay at the spout, maximum before altitude dispersion is eighty kays.”

  “Range?”

  “Twenty kays.”

  Gerswin wanted to wipe his forehead with the back of his gloved right hand, but did not. Both hands stayed in position, the left on the stick and the right on the thrusters.

  Beep!

  He glanced at the trim warning and bled enough from the starboard fan to correct the incipient yaw.

  “What’s the closure?”

  “Half kilo a minute.”

  The pilot shook his head. He was headed east at damned near two hundred kays. The spout was tearing across the high prairie south and westward at more than one fifty.

  “We got the data in the cube?”

  “Need another five on this heading, Lieutenant.” That comment was from the Ops duty officer at Prime Base, although Prime was the only base so far.

  “That’s cutting it close.”

  “Your choice. If we don’t get another five, then we’ll have to scrub and rerun tomorrow.”

  “What’s Met say about tomorrow?”

  “Could be worse than today. The jetstream’s dropping and dipping south, and the ground level temperature will be higher.”

  “Hades! We’ll do it!”

  Beep! Beep!

  Gerswin used both the fan bleed and the hydraulic boosted rudders to straighten the yaw while leveling the flitter again.

  The purple black of the landspout now filled nearly half of the flitter’s windscreen.

  “Grit intake at ten percent,” announced the console’s warning system.

  Gerswin could feel the dampness on his forehead.

  “Three minutes to go, Lieutenant. Sure you can hold it?”

  The voice belonged to Major Sofaer, coming in from Prime.

  “Fourth time on the same flamed line. No landspout…going to back me out.”

  “Port thruster in the yellow. Running time three point five.”

  THUD! THUD!

  “Impact on rear port stub. Impact on forward port stub.”

  “Flame!”

  Ding! Ding! Ding!

  “Starboard thruster in the yellow. Running time three point five. Port thruster in the yellow. Running time three point zero. Closed system reserve two point four.”

  THUD! THUD! THUD!

  The flitter slewed left, the nose jerking up, then from left to right.

  “Multiple impacts, main fuselage.”

  Twisting full turns into both thrusters, Gerswin stamped nearly full right rudder and leveled the nose again. Then he dropped the power back to eighty percent.

  “Prime outrider. Prime outrider. Data’s in the cube. In the cube.”

  “Stet. In the cube. Flaming clear. Flaming clear.”

  THUD!

  Ding! Ding! Ding!

  “Starboard thruster in the yellow. Running time two point five. Port thruster in the yellow. Running time two point zero.”

  Gerswin blinked, blinked again, from the sting of the salty sweat running into the corners of his eyes, even as he completed the left hand bank away from the towering purple vortex of the landspout.

  THUD!
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  Beep! Beep! Beep!

  “Grit level at fifteen percent. Five percent power loss on port thruster.”

  THUD!

  “Unidentified impact on forward port stub.”

  “Flame. Flame. Flame,” grunted the pilot.

  Gerswin eased the flitter back level and twisted up the power on both thrusters with a half turn more to the left. The sweat kept dripping into the corners of his eyes, but he left both hands in place, gave his head a quick downward snap to drop the helmet’s impact visor.

  The purple of the spout dominated almost the entire armaglass windscreen.

  Gerswin flicked his eyes to the lower right corner of the bubble toward a spot where the ground fog had thinned momentarily.

  Had he seen some sort of structure?

  He caught himself before he shook his head, resuming his normal scan of the instruments.

  THUD!

  Beep! Beep!

  “Impact on upper starboard stub.”

  “Grit level approaching twenty percent.”

  “You’ve got one minute, Lieutenant. Just one.”

  “Stet, Prime. Stet.”

  Ding! Ding! Ding!

  “Impact on the rear port stub.”

  “Grit level at fifteen percent and dropping.”

  “Prime outrider. Wind sheer at ten kilos, two nine five and closing.”

  Gerswin glanced at the homer. Fifty-six kays to Prime.

  “Interrogative closure rate.”

  “Three point five per minute.”

  “Interrogative course line of the sheer front. Interrogative sheer angle.”

  “Sheer angle unknown. Course line estimated at one zero five.”

  “Stet. One zero five.”

  The pilot edged his own course to two eight five, lifted the flitter’s nose, and twisted in full turns.

  “Grit level at twelve percent and dropping.”

  With the flitter stable for a moment, Gerswin snapped his head to retract the helmet’s impact visor, and with his left hand wiped the sweat away from his eyes, and off his forehead.

  That done, he snapped the clear impact visor back in place.

  “Should have opted for arcdozers,” he muttered.

  “Where would the glory be, Lieutenant?”