The Forever Hero

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

“Thanks, York. Thanks, loads.”

  “Grit level at ten percent and stable. Permanent power loss at ten percent.”

  Gerswin frowned. The fans in both thrusters would have to be repolished and retuned. Either that, or replaced with another set, if there was one to be had.

  “Prime outrider. Less than one minute to sheer impact.”

  The pilot’s eyes flickered from the thrust indicators to the balance lines, to the speed readouts, to the radalt, and down to the VSI, which still indicated a constant rate of climb.

  He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and squared himself in the padded shell seat.

  “Stand by for impact.”

  Even as he glanced through the armaglass of the canopy at the indistinctness of the western hills, blurred as they were from the clouds and the fog, the flitter lurched, throwing him against the broad harness straps.

  Not only his stomach, but the instrument balance lines showed the flitter nearly ninety degrees nose down. The VSI pegged momentarily, then dropped back to a descent rate of two hundred fifty meters per second.

  Gerswin twisted the thruster throttles around the detente into overload while bringing the stick back into his lap.

  “Ground impact in fifteen seconds!” screeched the console.

  A thousand kilos piled onto Gerswin’s muscles and slender frame, and his vision blurred around the edges.

  “Ground impact in thirty seconds!” screeched the console mindlessly.

  Whhheeeeeeee!

  “Prime outrider. Interrogative status. Interrogative status!”

  “Stuff your status,” he grunted without keying his transmitter. Instead, he eased the stick forward and to the left to bring the flitter level and back on course for Prime Base. Next came the down-throttling of the thrusters.

  “Prime outrider. Interrogative status. Interrogative status.”

  Gerswin sighed.

  “Status summary. Flying strike. Flying strike. Fusilage over-stressed. Fans set for repolishing. Assorted external damage. Flitter down. I say again. Flitter down.”

  “Interrogative ETA.”

  “Estimate arrival in fifteen plus.”

  “Understand fifteen plus. Interrogative special procedures.”

  “Prime Base, that is negative this time.”

  Gerswin sighed again and checked the homer. Forty kays to go, and the screens showed clear skies between him and the foothills base.

  Clear skies between him and base, but not overhead, where the high clouds still brooded. Clear sky, except for the ground fog.

  He readjusted the thrusters and returned to his normal scanning pattern.

  Another few minutes and he would begin the landing check list.

  XX

  Gerswin took another step toward the Maze.

  Did he want to go through the twisting and turning tunnels, where anything might wait in the upper reaches? Or where rats the size of Imperial cats lurked in the darkness for their next chance at dinner?

  He laughed. There was no reason to face the Maze, not while wearing an Imperial uniform and stunner, but the old instincts died hard.

  Overhead, the clouds rolled eastward in banks of darkened gray, but the air was dry and cold.

  He circled more to the north, along the outcroppings that felt like rock, but were, instead, massed metal and bricks and compressed purple-red clay. Between the upthrust chunks grew an occasional patch of the purple grass or a small grubush, with its thin branches and straggly leaves.

  Eventually he had worked his way north and west far enough to get around the pile of rubble from which the Maze rose southward and stood in the cleared area beneath the northern wall of the shambletown. He stood looking southward and uphill to the roughly four meter height of the shambletown wall, running as it did slightly more than half a kay from the eastern end of the Maze to the western corner.

  The shambletowners kept the area immediately downslope of the wall clear of debris, grubushes, and skinned carcasses. The debris and bushes offered too much concealment for both rats and coyotes, while carcasses, those too poisonous to eat, would have attracted the rats.

  His nose twitched. In the confines of the more fastidious Imperial society, the odors were muted. Machine oil and deodorants, while strong, were blandly dulling as well. The mix of unwashed shambletowners, excrement, assorted garbage, and the underlying bitter stench of omnipresent rat all reached him, although he was well outside the walls and a good three hundred meters east of the gate.

  The lone wall sentry had marked the Imperial uniform and passed the word, so well that by the time he had reached the gate, several others awaited him.

  One—older by years than the last time they had crossed paths—he recognized immediately. Fynian, still squat and hulking, stood behind the conslor. Gerswin had not met the conslor, not this one or any of his predecessors, and he was amused by the indrawn breath as the man looked into his eyes.

  While the conslor said nothing, Gerswin could hear Fynian’s muttered “devulkid.”

  “Lieutenant Gerswin, Imperial Service,” he announced.

  “Conslor Weddin. What you want?” answered the other in clipped shambletalk.

  “Want see shamble,” Gerswin replied in kind, even getting the lilts in the right places.

  “Devulkid,” repeated Fynian under his breath, loudly enough for Gerswin to hear clearly.

  “All right, stand? No kill, stand? No woman, stand?”

  Loosely translated, “You’re welcome, but keep your hands off everyone, and don’t try to make off with anyone’s woman or all bets are off.”

  “No kill. No woman, stand,” repeated the pilot. “You no kill, no fun, stand?”

  Conslor Weddin frowned. That a visitor should place reciprocal conditions on a shambletowner was unheard of.

  As the conslor debated, Gerswin discarded the idea of displaying the stunner and its powers. Using it would only induce some idiot to try to take it. He wished he had developed a few other weapons skills besides stunners, lasers, and hand-to-hand. None were exactly suited to his situation. The Imperial policy stated clearly that advanced and lethal weapons were prohibited for use against any civilians. And hand-to-hand combat was chancy merely as a display of force.

  At last the conslor, presumably after meditating on the flitters and skitters that crossed the cloud-covered skies, nodded.

  “Stand.”

  Gerswin bared his teeth in response, and to signify his agreement.

  Weddin and his party stood aside, but Gerswin motioned for them to precede him, which, after a moment’s delay, they did.

  Inside the gate, a cobbled-together mass of twisted metal and woven grubush that screeched as it was dragged back into place, the stench was as high as Gerswin had remembered. He swallowed hard to keep the contents of his stomach in place and thanked himself for his foresight in eating only a light meal before setting out.

  The one-, two-, and occasional three-story clay brick buildings were crammed together, with narrow streets, narrower alleyways. Unlike the plains clay, the building clay was reddish-brown, without the purple tint that usually signified some degree of landpoison.

  The pilot nodded. He had seen the outside clayworks often enough, had even stolen a food basket or two from the clayworkers as they turned the clay into a slurry and let it settle, then repeated the process time after time.

  The “finished” clay was lightly fired in grubush-fueled ovens. Once the bricks were mortared in place, the walls were covered with a sandpaint mixture that hardened the bricks further and gave both interior and exterior walls a dingy white appearance. The few times the sun did shine, the walls sparkled, and that sparkle gave the shambletown a glitter totally unwarranted by its interior occupants, human and otherwise.

  All the houses in the upper shamble, the newer section, had porches, not for people, but for the continual plant flats, designed to allow in light but not the continual rain or ice rain. The precipitation was collected off the inclined roofs and funneled to
either the clay collecting barrels or the main settling ponds.

  Outside of the stink of unwashed bodies, the people appeared relatively healthy, though uniformly thin. The men all had beards, usually straggly. An occasional limp or twisted arm showed a broken bone that had not set properly.

  From the open space inside the gate, Gerswin strolled down the narrow street toward the square, watching to see if Conslor Weddin continued to keep an eye upon him.

  The square, an oblong paved with rough stone fragments and measuring no more than forty by sixty meters, contained only a single platform, used for a variety of purposes, surmised Gerswin. It was vacant except for a few passersby, and for Gerswin and Fynian, who had apparently been instructed to follow the Imperial officer.

  The muted sounds of children drew Gerswin to a freestanding porch off the southwest corner of the square, where close to a dozen toddlers were gathered. Gerswin stood by the brick wall enclosing the space under the roof and watched.

  Two children, dressed solely in rough stained leather tunics, used miniature clay bricks to build a wall. Behind them, an even smaller child sat on the smooth brick flooring and sucked on the end of a wooden rattle. None of the children’s hair appeared more than roughly cut, nor did any wear more than a loin cloth and sleeveless, patched-together leather over-tunics, despite the brisk breeze. The chill from the morning’s frost had yet to leave the air.

  A somewhat older child sat on the bricks at the feet of a shriveled and gray-haired woman and used a battered wooden pipe to produce a series of shrill squeaks, some of which resembled musical notes.

  A toddler barely able to walk caught sight of the gray Imperial tunic and the touches of silver-embroidered insignia on his collars and pointed at the clean-shaven pilot.

  “Ummm! Ummm!”

  Gerswin looked at the wide gray eyes, and finally grinned.

  She frowned and closed her mouth. Finally, she repeated the phrase again. “Ummmm!”

  The wind shifted, and a new stench wrenched at Gerswin’s gut, an acidic odor burning into his nostrils from the lower section of the shambletown.

  He took a last look at the toddler, waved, and turned toward the half dozen steps that stretched the three meter width of the street that led southward to the older part of the shambles.

  “Ummmm! Ummmm!” Was there a plaintive ring to those words?

  Gerswin nearly stumbled on the first step, but caught himself and continued downward.

  The street remained level for another fifty meters, flanked on both sides by the relatively newer and larger dwellings of the upper section, before narrowing at the top of another set of steps.

  The officer could hear the uneven sound of Fynian’s dragging limp as they continued downward.

  Beyond the second set of steps, the narrow grid pattern of the upper shambletown dissolved into the twisting lanes of the lower town. The houses were no longer uniformly sand-painted, since in places the old facade had crumbled or been washed away.

  More plant flats appeared in sheltered and glassless windows or on rooftops under patched old leather tenting, rather than in the relatively ordered porticos of the upper town. But the relative silence prevailed—a few whispers, a word here and there among the handful of people passing in the lanes, and few shambletowners at all.

  Gerswin nodded. The old patterns had not changed, not yet, and perhaps never.

  He turned down a lane he thought he remembered, glancing over his shoulder to see if Fynian still followed. The old guard trailed ten meters back, mumbling under his breath.

  From a crossing lane appeared a woman, carrying an empty pottery crock half as tall as she was.

  Gerswin stepped back barely in time to avoid colliding with her, intent as he had been on watching Fynian and trying to recall the path he had taken the single other time he had traversed the shambletown.

  Like the others, the woman wore the sleeveless patchwork tunic that reached halfway between waist and knee, with a braided leather neckring to signify she had a mate.

  She stumbled as well, and her eyes involuntarily made a momentary contact with Gerswin’s.

  As she recovered her jar and her balance, she froze, as if afraid to move either toward or away from Gerswin.

  Gerswin stepped back another pace, until his back brushed the wall behind him, then walked around her, and continued on his way as if nothing had happened.

  “Devulkid,” explained Fynian in a rasping whisper, as he in turn passed her in his shadow trail of the Imperial pilot.

  In the quiet broken only by murmurs and whispers, her indrawn breath whistled in the still morning air.

  Gerswin shook his head and followed the lane through another series of turns, glancing upward at a familiar window only in passing, as he moved into totally unfamiliar regions of the lower area. He glimpsed a gray head through one window and a shadowy figure through another, but did not stop or increase his pace.

  In the dimness of the lower shamble his breath formed a thin white cloud, like his own personal ground fog.

  At the next turn, the reek of the leatherworks jarred him to a halt with the solidity of a wall.

  He smiled, ruefully, and turned to the left. The last thing he needed was an in-depth look at or smell of the facility that converted rat and coyote and other skins into the leather that was one of the few materials resistant to the acidity of the rain.

  The eastern end of the lower shamble ended abruptly in a three meter wide cleared space, followed by a two meter high wall. Beyond and above the wall, he could see the twisted beams and heaped bricks, stone, and clay where the Maze towered.

  The single eastern gate, barred and manned by a single sentry, was to his right. He did not approach it, but turned back toward the upper town, seeking another route to avoid retracing a path close to the tannery.

  Fynian followed, still mumbling and muttering, every third word some pejorative elaboration on “devulkid.”

  Three twists later, Gerswin halted at the small open area surrounding the covered settling ponds that ran like steps from the upper side of the shambletown into the lower section.

  The woman he had upset earlier was at the lowest pond, along with a boy and an old woman. All three had brought large crockery vessels and were skimming water from the open section of the pond and pouring it into their own crocks.

  Without retracing his steps or passing the three, he did not see any way to return to the upper square and the northern gate. So he waited in the gloom, his breath still a thin fog in the chill that seldom left the narrow lanes until late in the summer afternoons.

  The older woman was the first to leave, staggering under the burden of the water.

  The boy, who bore a smaller crock, was next.

  Finally, the brown-haired woman finished dipping into the pond and stepped away, gracefully, Gerswin noted. She tugged and eased the heavy pottery vessel into a harness. Despite the lack of light, he could see the cleanness of her profile clearly.

  For reasons he would not try to understand, for an instant he was reminded of another moment in darkness, another silence in time, another woman in another place barely familiar to him.

  He shook his head to clear the image.

  Caroljoy? To see her again? Not likely. Not at all likely, and even less likely that he would be successful if he made such an attempt.

  A cough, and the whispered “devulkid,” distracted Gerswin, called him back to the present, all at once. He glanced over his shoulder to see Fynian, still four meters behind him, like a tracking coyote, eyes bright.

  When Gerswin looked back at the settling pools, the woman was gone. He shrugged and started for the steps that rose beside them to the level of the upper shambletown.

  Behind him the shuffle of uneven steps reminded him that Fynian followed, stalking the devilkid through the shambletown.

  Gerswin regained the square, this time from the northeastern corner and glanced over at the covered portico where the children had earlier played. They still
played, from the sounds and motions, but he started for the northern gate from the far side of the square, avoiding the children, and the toddler who had cried out, “Ummm!”

  The walls and the narrow streets felt more like a prison with each passing step, and he wanted out.

  Forcing himself to maintain an ambling walk, he continued toward the gate, ears alert for any change in Fynian’s conduct or pace.

  The gate was closed, but the two guards leaped to push open the massive patchwork as if they were all too ready for the Imperial stranger to depart.

  Gerswin could hear from the sounds behind him that Fynian was moving closer, but he was surprised that the older man followed him outside the shambletown and onto the flat beneath the wall.

  Gerswin faced the shambletowner and watched Fynian pull a stone from his pouch as the gate squealed shut.

  “No kill, stand?” Gerswin snapped sarcastically, as Fynian straightened the sling straps.

  “Devulkid out shamble.”

  Gerswin pulled the stunner.

  Thrummmm!

  The sling and stone dropped on the hard clay, followed by the inert form of the shambletowner.

  Both guards peered over the wall from their posts beside the gate.

  “Guard. No kill, stand? Fynian try kill. Dreamtime, stand?”

  Gerswin kept the stunner in full view until he was certain both guards understood that the shambletowner was only stunned. He retreated downhill, pace by pace, facing the wall as the gate squealed ajar and a single guard ventured out and began to drag the unconscious Fynian within, by his foot.

  Gerswin glanced toward the discarded sling and stone, then at the closed gate and blank wall. Blank, as it had always been.

  He turned and walked down the long slope through the scattered bushes and to the north.

  XXI

  The pilot peered into the work area.

  “Still down?”

  “Yes. It’s still down,” answered the gray-clad technician. “Some of the fans looked like fuel strainers, and we have one gilder/polisher. That was meant for touch-up work, not for rebuilding an entire fan structure. That’s just the beginning.