The Forever Hero

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Finally, he took a deep breath and a quick dozen steps until he stood before the tumbling wall fragment that failed to reach his waist.

  It had been higher, he recalled, but, then, he had been shorter, and it had been years earlier. How many he never knew, for time had no meaning to a devilkid on the run, forced from the only home he knew by shambletowners with torches, running and hiding, burying himself beneath grubushes in the pouring rain that had hidden the killers’ approach.

  He bit his lower lip and studied the rough wall of hewn red rock. At last, he looked over the edge and down the steps—to find them half-covered with drifting sand.

  The wooden cover he remembered was gone, and only the nitches in one line of stones supported that memory.

  With a sigh, he stepped over the stones, tapped them to insure they were solid. None moved with the taps, nor even with a push, and he eased himself down into the dimness.

  After twenty rock-hewn steps and a half-turn west, he was past the drifted sand and in the tunnel where he could stand, just barely. A faint hint of grubush oil tickled the edge of his senses. Memory, or a residue of what had been?

  Another fifteen steps and another turn, this time to the south, took him into the main room.

  The embrasure and now-uncovered window slits filled the space with more than enough light. Two piles of leather fragments and dust sat across from each other in the southwest corner, the dust spilling across the corner of the permanent clay brick table whose surface was covered with glazed tiles. Each handmade tile had a slightly different design, but all bore a sun/cloud motif.

  Gerswin swallowed and turned to the other outside corner, where a second waist-high clay brick counter topped with the crude fired tiles stood. Beside it was what could only have been a ceramic oven, equipped with a chimney and handmade clay piping. One section of the pipe, where it entered the brick wall, had broken apart, and the fragments were scattered across the golden brown floor tiles.

  Outside of the centimeters-thick dust and the two piles of leather fragments, nothing perishable remained in the room.

  He looked up at the ceiling—a good half-meter above his head. Faint grease-smoke lines traced themselves across the smooth surface, smoke lines he did not remember.

  His feet took him to the room that opened northward off the main room, but with one glance he turned away.

  The drifted dust outlines of two skeletons on a thicker pallet of dust were all that inhabited the room.

  He did not enter the small room next to his parents’ room, but did dart a look at the dusty outline that had been his pallet.

  The one remaining space was the south room, the one which had looked out over the canyon. Gerswin found himself standing there.

  The single window gaped open, the hide covering long since gone, above the flat tile-topped brick expanse where his father had done so many strange things.

  Gerswin nodded, more to reassure himself than anything else.

  He turned his palms up, looked at his hands, a young man’s hands, then at the dust on the floor, and finally at the alcove in the narrow corner behind the archway, the alcove that contained the air duct that a small boy had crawled up so many years earlier.

  How many years earlier? How many?

  For a time he studied his hands, then stared out the unglazed window at nothing.

  He looked once more at the dust on the floor tiles, sniffed again the total emptiness, and turned back toward the tunnel to the mesa top. He did not need to take the other stairway, the one that had led down to the spring, the one through which the shambletowners had poured one distant night, slings and spears in hand, with their rat grease torches flaring.

  As he entered the tunnel leading upward, he looked at his hands still yet again. He shook his head to clear his vision.

  Later, at the top step, he paused, but turned away and did not look back, and stared instead at the clouds overhead, which reminded him of night, not morning.

  The clouds were thicker than when he had brought the flitter down, as if they had decided against allowing the sunshine to break through. And the wind was stronger, the chill more pronounced, as the click of ice droplets began to pelt his jacket and burn his face.

  XXXII

  Gerswin glanced up from the Operations oversight console. Captain Altura, the Imperial auditor, was leaving Major Matsuko’s office. She did not appear particularly pleased.

  Her lips were set even more tightly than when Gerswin had met her at the hangar-bunker right after the shuttle had dropped her three days earlier. The captain’s fists were half-clenched as she marched out toward the tunnel to the number one hangar-bunker.

  “Opswatch, this is Outrider three. Interrogative permission to lift.”

  Ferinya, the duty controller, looked at Gerswin. His eyebrows raised questioningly. “Permission to lift?”

  “Why not? Met status is clear now. Squall line coming in.”

  “Outrider three. Cleared to lift. Interrogative destination and fuel status.”

  “Artifact survey run. Plan on file. Estimate air time at two plus stans. Fuel status is plus four.”

  “Stet. Understand survey run for plus two. Fuel status four.”

  “Stet. Outrider three lifting.”

  Ferinya turned to Gerswin. “Do you know what that was all about, Lieutenant? She already had clearance.”

  Gerswin shrugged. “No. No passengers or cargo on the schedule.”

  “What was what all about?”

  Lers Kardias stood by the console, his stubby fingers tapping on the hard console top.

  “Lieutenant Starkadny requested clearance to lift twice. No explanation,” explained Gerswin.

  “Oh…That is funny.” Junior Lieutenant Kardias shook his head. “You ready to be relieved, ser?”

  “More than ready.”

  “You stand relieved.”

  “I stand relieved, and you have it.”

  Gerswin picked up the light pen from the console and slipped it into the arm pocket of his flight suit. “Good luck, Lers. There’s a squall line coming in.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Which of you was responsible for sending that flitter off without me?” The chill voice of the Imperial auditor stopped Gerswin in his tracks.

  He turned back to face both the console and Captain Altura. Lieutenant Kardias had swiveled in the chair, but had not stood.

  “I was, Captain,” answered Gerswin.

  “Could you explain why?”

  “First, no passengers listed. No cargo either. Second, pilot requested clearance. Third, no one notified Opswatch that you were to be included.”

  The sandy-haired captain said nothing, but clamped her lips together until they were nearly white.

  Gerswin waited a moment, then asked, “Is there anything I could do, Captain?”

  He caught the “now what have you said?” look from Lers Kardias as Captain Altura glared at him.

  “Mister Senior Lieutenant, you have done quite enough for the moment. Anything else would only compound that.”

  Gerswin laughed—a single harsh bark.

  “Ms. Captain, I followed the order book. I would have gladly delayed the flitter if anyone had asked me.”

  “I told the pilot.”

  “On every Imperial base, schedules and clearances are controlled by Operations. Bases are not ships, Captain.” He paused. “Would you like a tour of the maintenance facilities?”

  “I’ve seen them. The conditions and status are better on Charon.”

  “Charon’s an easier planet.”

  “Than Old Earth?”

  Gerswin nodded. “I’ll show you. Come on with me.”

  “Show me what?”

  “Not what. Why.”

  “Why what?”

  Gerswin had already turned away, as if to lead the captain, his quick steps heading toward the southwest base exit.

  The captain looked at Lieutenant Kardias, then at Gerswin’s back, before, with a shrug, she followed
the senior lieutenant.

  At the inner portal of the exit he turned to wait for her.

  “Your home system?”

  She clamped her lips shut tightly, then released them.

  “New Augusta.”

  He nodded and stabbed the portal release. Once in the small room between the inner and outer portals, he walked over to the line of lockers. He checked one, then another, rummaging through several until he located a double-lined jacket with thermal gloves.

  “You’ll need this.”

  “It’s summer.”

  “You’ll need it. Ice rain.”

  “Hail, you mean?”

  Gerswin shook his head in disagreement and offered the jacket to the captain, who donned it but stuffed the gloves into the side pockets and did not seal them.

  As the outer portal opened and the two stepped through, a gust of wind from the east, sweeping along the edge of the berm, caught the captain unaware, knocking her into the lieutenant.

  Gerswin steadied the woman with his left hand, submerged a grin, and continued toward the point where the ridgeline began to slope away toward the south.

  “Watch the clouds.”

  Captain Altura said nothing, looked at the bare clay interspersed with grassy humps. Finally, she took his advice and raised her eyes to the roiling and speeding mass of varied gray that hurtled toward the mountains in the distance to her right.

  Gerswin watched her, not the clouds, as the winds quickly turned her pale cheeks reddish with the cold, and fluttered her short and sandy hair with each gust above the steady chill breeze that whipped around them.

  The darker cloud that presaged ice rain was nearly overhead before the droplets began to sound against their clothing and the hard clay.

  Click! Click! Click, click, click!

  The captain held one in her bare right hand. So cold was the droplet that it did not begin to melt for several moments.

  “Why don’t you put on the gloves?”

  “I might, thank you.”

  As she struggled with the two gloves too large for her long-fingered but narrow hands, Gerswin glanced at the clouds. Not quite dark enough for a landspout, but the wind velocity would continue to rise and the temperature to drop.

  As she finished donning the gloves and looked back at the darkening clouds, Gerswin whistled the first three notes of a tune, the one he thought of as a lament for Old Earth.

  The melody had come to him after he’d seen the black Gates to Hades. With the auditor’s impatience, the chill, and his own wondering what he was even doing trying to explain Old Earth to a number-cruncher, the first three notes had slipped out before he cut off the melody.

  “What sort of instrument was that?”

  “What?”

  “That you were playing.” Captain Altura was still adjusting the too-large gloves, trying to make them fit and to keep them from falling off her hands.

  “No instrument. Sometimes I whistle.” Gerswin gestured, as if to change the subject. “Warm day. Wind is still lighter than normal, only about twenty kays here.”

  “What’s normal?”

  “Here? Around thirty. Hundred’s not uncommon. Had two hundred a couple of times. Once or twice we lost the measuring tubes. Spout threw a two-ton chunk of rock through the number four hangar-bunker door one time.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  Gerswin shrugged. Why bother? “Check the logs. About two years ago.”

  He gazed out to the southeast, still lighter than due east, then back to his left, toward the main body of the ice storm.

  “Lieutenant?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Why is everyone so prickly here? I ask Matsuko to justify some costs, and he throws a databloc listing of logs and damage reports at me and tells me to search out anything that would contradict the official reports. He practically dared me to question him.”

  Gerswin frowned, glanced down at the damp clay, and said nothing.

  “Lieutenant?”

  Gerswin shrugged again. “What can I say? Doesn’t sound like him. He’s punctual, proper. Polite.”

  It was the captain’s turn to look down at the clay underfoot, to scuff at a tuft of purpled grass.

  “I overstated the case. He was proper, very proper. I questioned, and he politely referred me to the databloc containing every single listing that supported every single item.”

  Gerswin looked at her oval face and strong nose, at the scattered freckles that seemed blanched in the gloom, and raised his eyebrows.

  “Don’t you understand? He didn’t explain. He didn’t even take the time to show me an ice storm. In effect, he said, ‘Waste your own time. Don’t waste mine.’”

  “He’s like that.”

  “But everyone is like that here. At least, that’s how it seems. Even when you want to explain, you don’t. You just say ‘Follow me’ and head off into a storm. A few sentences about how cold it is, and you think that explains something.”

  Gerswin sighed, scuffed the clay with his right foot.

  “I’ll try to put it in perspective. Old Earth is something you experience. You don’t explain it. How could you? People think that it’s just like the his-tapes, except nothing will grow, and some fertilizer and a little technology sprinkled over the clay will do it.

  “How can you explain landspouts that rip the tops off hills, that turn all-weather flitters into crushed metal in microseconds? You try, and someone says that it’s just a tornado. But it’s not. There were ten million people within three hundred kays of here right before the collapse. Maybe three hundred shambletowners and a couple dozen devilkids left. Not a single building or a ruin more than a meter high left standing. Place flattened by the spouts, except in one or two valleys.

  “You try to tell someone, and they say that it was just the collapse. You stand here, and you don’t believe me when I say it’s summer. Winter here…You think it’s cold on the poles of Charon? Winter ice rain will sand off three mills of metal from a flitter in a single flight on the exposed side, and that’s just on ground or stationary time.”

  Gerswin looked over at the captain, who did not raise her eyes from the ground.

  “Right now, more than twenty percent of the pilots sent here are casualties. Those who make it through become the best in the Service, and you can check their records if you doubt it. That’s the young ones. Older pilots avoid flying around here. Better for them and us.

  “Get a good dozen cases of toxic shock every year, just from the hot spots no one has found. But it’s not glamorous, like scout duty or combat.

  “The rain’s so acidic that outside uniforms don’t last a tour, and you should know what replacement costs mean to a junior officer.

  “But that’s the story no one tells. How could anyone on New Augusta believe that Man’s home planet is dangerous to Man’s existence?”

  Gerswin laughed once, and the bitterness echoed against the whistle of the rising wind.

  “Why are you here?” Her voice was nearly lost in the wind, so softly had she spoken.

  “Another question. Most people here believe there’s something to save. Something that should be saved.”

  “I think that’s what you believe. This is nowhere. Oh, yes, it’s Old Earth, and the home of Man. But everyone here is either local, a problem child, or on a preretirement tour.

  “Can’t you see it, Lieutenant? The great crusade to save the home planet was over before it began.”

  “Is it? Just got three arcdozers on the ship that brought you. Decon teams have cleaned up most of the toxic hot spots around the headwaters of the two nearest rivers on this side of the continental divide. Starting on the big one now. Years before the results come in, but it’s a start.”

  “Nobody on New Augusta really cares. The new Emperor…”

  “Long as they keep funding, we’ll keep plodding.”

  “You’re just like Major Matsuko.”

  Gerswin shook his head, then noticed the whiteness
at the tip of her ears.

  “Time to go in. Frostbite.”

  “We haven’t been out that long. And you only wore your uniform.”

  “That’s me. Not you. Face a bit numb? Ears?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Inside.” He took her left arm and firmly guided her back to the portal.

  Once inside, he helped her take off the heavy, ice-encrusted jacket and placed the jacket and gloves in the heated equipment locker.

  The Imperial auditor half-shivered, half-shook herself. “Is there any place to sit down and relax, get a cup of cafe or liftea?”

  “J.O.’s lounge, off the mess.”

  “That sounds fine. Is it warm?”

  “Same as anywhere else.”

  He tapped the inner portal release, and they stepped through, Gerswin leading the way up the tunnel until it intersected the outer perimeter corridor. Gerswin turned right, quick steps clicking on the smooth floor.

  Neither said a word until Gerswin stopped at the lounge portal and touched the access plate.

  “After you, Captain.”

  “Dara, please.”

  Instead of replying, he inclined his head momentarily as if posing himself a question. He did not answer the unthought question, but followed her through.

  He went straight to the sideboard.

  “Cafe?”

  “Liftea.”

  He poured two and set both mugs on the narrow table where Dara sat. He seated himself across from her.

  “You’re from where?”

  “Here. Local. First, last, and only, so far. Except for some of the kids from the civilian techs on the farm.”

  “The farm?”

  “That’s what they call the research center south of here.”

  She put a forefinger to her chin, then dropped it as a furrow appeared momentarily in her forehead.

  “Wasn’t there a report—”

  “—about the training and education of an Old Earth native. Yes. There was. I was. Education Review, New Augusta, Volume 87, number three, if you want to look it up. End of subject.”

  The auditor closed her mouth and studied his face. Gerswin looked at the sideboard and the two steaming pots—one for cafe, one for liftea.

  “Oh…I think I understand. Do you talk about your impressions of the Empire?”