The Forever Hero

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “Activate—status.” He followed the command with the activation codes.

  “Returning to active status,” the AI acknowledged for the ship, and the normal lighting, returned.

  Gerswin dragged himself into the fresher, standing there while the spray cleaned him of grime, sweat, and urine. By the time the charged air had dried him, he was leaning against the inside of the stall.

  After dragging himself back to the lockers, where he pulled out shorts and a black shipsuit, he struggled into the clean clothing.

  All the time Constanza slept, which told him how tired she was.

  Finally, he stuffed his filthy clothing into the cleaner, along with the quilt and the sheet, then collapsed onto the uncovered bunk to catch his breath. In time, he sat up and finished the last drops in the water beaker on the bunk ledge.

  A few minutes later he shuffled toward the controls, where he half leaned, half sat on the bottom edge of the accel/decel shell seat where Constanza lay curled into a half circle, her tiny white-haired figure fragile against the black yield cloth.

  “Interrogative power status.”

  The figures appeared on the data screen. He nodded. The loss wasn’t as bad as it could have been. He still had enough for liftoff and through two jumps, with minimum reserves.

  “Exterior views from the sensors.”

  The scenes in the screen had a reddish cast, indicating it was night and that infraheat was used for imaging. Outside of the footprints from the lock ramp, there was no sign of any activity. The rebels must have swept up their tracks every time they had brought food to Constanza.

  The lady moaned in her sleep and turned, her foot striking his back.

  He waited until she seemed settled again.

  The acrid scent of air recycled too little burned his nose.

  “Full interior recycle. Exterior air through filters.”

  All he could do now was wait. Even if he woke her, trying to find the rebels in the hours before dawn would be useless, except to find another batch of arrows aimed in his direction.

  “Wake me with the alarm if anyone approaches the ship or if she leaves the control couch.”

  With that, he shuffled back to the bunk and stretched out, not willing to make the effort to remake it.

  Cling!

  Gerswin started out of his sleep at the alarm, slowed his reactions as he sat up gingerly while Constanza peered through the arch at him.

  “You restored the power.”

  “While you were sleeping.”

  Gerswin felt guilty. She still wore a now grimy tan and white tunic and tan trousers, while he was relatively clean in fresh clothing.

  “Would you care to use the fresher?”

  He stood and headed for the control couch, by way of the water tap, where he refilled the beaker. His legs felt steady.

  “After you’re through,” he said, “we need to make some decisions.”

  “What about my clothes?”

  Gerswin remembered he had never removed his own outfit and bedding from the cleaner.

  “Put them in the cleaner—the brown and cream tab there. You’ll have to take out my things. Put them on the bunk for now.”

  “Why don’t you—” She broke off the sentence. “It is hard to remember how sick you are when you talk so clearly.”

  “Not that bad now.”

  “Hyveres says you are the first to survive the poison.”

  “Wonderful.”

  He turned away to devote his attention to the control readings and data displays.

  “Can you pick up any commercial news?” he asked the AI.

  “Negative. No satellite relay.”

  “What about audio?”

  “Byzania has no separate commercial radio.”

  “Armed forces tactical freqs?”

  “Imprecise command.”

  “Pick up the strongest armed forces tactical signal.”

  The only sound Gerswin could hear at first was static, which was barely audible over the hiss of the fresher. As he concentrated he began to be able to distinguish some phrases.

  “…Red command…blue attackers…”

  “…corvette down…Illyam…”

  “…flamers…flamers…”

  “…grid still down…Jerboam…”

  “…forest cell tiger…fire at will…”

  Gerswin shook his head slowly as he listened to the story play out with each fragmented transmission.

  “It is that bad?”

  He had been aware of Constanza’s return and her listening with him, but not how much time had passed until she touched his shoulder as she asked the question.

  Turning his head, he nearly whistled. The lady looked nearly as picture-perfect as before their first tour of the countryside.

  “Amazing what a ship fresher and cleaner can do,” he marveled.

  “Thank you. What is occurring?”

  Gerswin told her.

  “But why?”

  “My guess is that someone wouldn’t believe someone else. Once the secret is out, they can’t keep control the way it has been. Probably why the armed forces kept after the tree houses, because free shelter would have been a first step to escaping the generals.”

  “The house trees do not grow large enough.”

  “They would if they had more time and water. You can’t grow them too close to other trees. Need a lot of solar energy. But any time someone grew them out in the open, I’d bet the armed forces fried them.”

  “I still don’t understand why there’s fighting between segments of the armed forces.”

  “Someone believes there will have to be change, and someone else disagrees. Power shortages are going to get worse, and there’s no real backup system. The Empire will quarantine the system, as soon as they can get a fleet here. That’s another reason why I need to get some seeds or spores and lift out.”

  Constanza sat down beside him.

  “I don’t know whether I should like you or not. You rescued me from a prison, and then you destroyed everything I grew up with.”

  Gerswin shrugged. “Not much I can say to that.”

  He waited.

  She said nothing.

  He cleared his throat. “Do you want to leave Byzania with me? I’m sure you would be welcome on…in a number of places.”

  “You are gracious…and very cautious. But, no. No, thank you. I think I would be welcome with Hyveres, more welcome than in the cities, and happier than on a strange world.”

  Gerswin touched the controls and the screens filled with the exterior view and the morning sunlight.

  Constanza rose.

  “I will tell him, and we will get you your seeds.”

  “You know, Constanza, the future on Byzania rests with Hyveres.”

  “I know. You have determined that. Like a god, you change worlds. Yet you will never have what a man like Hyveres will, for you will never rest. You will never be content, no matter how long you live.”

  Gerswin stood and took her hand. He bent slightly and brushed the back of her hand with his lips. His legs remained steady, but he sat down as he released her fingers, afraid that his legs might yet betray him.

  She put her hand on his shoulder, squeezed it, before stepping back.

  “I think I am grateful to you. I can now look forward to the unexpected.”

  She reached forward to touch his shoulder again, gently, before moving toward the lock door.

  “We will bring you the seeds you need. And you will go. You will fight your fate, and we will fight ours. What else is there to say?”

  Gerswin lifted the screens and watched from inside the ship as the slender woman went out to touch hands with the rebel captain for the first time. A rebel captain nearly as slender as she, nearly as white-haired, and who sported a bristling white handlebar mustache.

  Although she had looked not at all like Caroljoy, neither when his lost Duchess had been young or old, Constanza reminded him of Caroljoy, though he could not say
why.

  Then, again, perhaps he did not want to know why. The young woman who had been his single-time lover and Martin’s mother had become a dream, and no man wants to examine his dreams too closely. Not when the dreams must constantly battle the realities of the present.

  Besides, in her own way, Caroljoy had made it all possible.

  Yet Constanza had some of the same iron strength.

  He shook his head slowly as he watched the screen.

  He watched. Watched and waited for the seeds of the house tree. Watched and listened to the beginnings of a society and an Empire crashing into anarchy.

  XI

  The pilot tapped the last control stud of the sequence and dropped his hand, which was beginning to tremble.

  He wanted to shake his head, but, instead, laid back on the black yield cloth of the control couch while the modified scout shivered…and jumped.

  At the instant of jump, as always, the blackness inundated the scout, blinding the pilot with the darkness no light could penetrate, then disappearing as the ship reappeared tens of systems from where it had jumped.

  Gerswin reached out tiredly and touched the control stud that would recompute the Caroljoy’s position. He could have asked the AI to do it, but even as exhausted as he was he still hated to ask the AI to do what he felt the pilot should.

  He could feel his hand shake, and he compromised.

  “Position. Interrogative possible jump parameters.”

  His voice even shook, and he wanted to scream at the weakness. His eyes flickered down at his right arm, where the slight thickness under the long sleeved tunic indicated a pressure-tight medpad. The ship’s medical system had assured him there was no infection. He was just tired—totally exhausted from fighting off the effects of the nerve poison.

  Constanza had questioned whether he was up to leaving, especially to handling a long flight, but he had insisted, not wanting to wait until there might be an Imperial quarantine force in place or until some faction of the Byzanian Armed Forces happened onto his ship, particularly given the shortness of his power reserves.

  Now there was nothing he could do but finish the trip.

  “Position at two seven five relative, distance two point five, inclination point seven. Ship is in opposition,” the AI announced in its professional and impersonally feminine voice.

  “Interrogative short jump. Power parameters.”

  “Short jump possible. Depletion of reserves to point five. Interface probability is less than point zero zero nine. Power consumption will leave ship with three point five plus stans at norm, plus half reserves.”

  “Jump.”

  “Commencing jump.”

  This time he let the AI handle the jump, with the milliseconds of apparent jump time so short he scarcely noticed them.

  “Time to Aswan?”

  “Two plus at norm.”

  “Normal acceleration. Notify, full alarm, if anything approaches the ship or if any anomalies appear.”

  The odds were that he’d hear the alarm at least three times before they hit orbit distance, but he obviously wasn’t up to watching himself.

  Four alarms later, the Caroljoy was in orbit, ready for planetdrop over the planet he called Aswan.

  None of the alarms had amounted to anything besides debris, not that Gerswin had expected them to, since the system was out of the way, to say the least.

  Aswan was the fourth planet, and the one of two that orbited the G-2 sun in the “life zone.” The third planet of the relatively young system might develop intelligent life someday, unless it already had, but without overt signs of such development. Gerswin doubted it, but since no one had intensively scouted the surface, who could say?

  The fourth planet, Aswan itself, offered a different dilemma. Certainly some intelligent life had built the wall of white stone across the flat plain of the perhaps once-upon-a-time ocean. Bridge? Dam? Who could say?

  With no moons other than tiny and captured asteroids, and a thin atmosphere mainly of nitrogen, Aswan was not on anyone’s list of places to visit. But someone or something had indeed built a bridgelike structure nearly two thousand kays long, straight as an arrow, running from northwest to southeast, or, if one preferred, from southeast to northwest. The bridge was clearly visible from orbit against the maroon dirt/dust/crystal that covered most of the planet, the two-thirds that was not out-and-out rock.

  While the dam, as Gerswin mentally identified it, rose out of the maroon crystalline to a height of nearly one kay, the high point was not at either end, nor in the center, but two-thirds of the way from the southeast toward the northwest end. As if to balance, in a strange way, one-third of the way from that southeast end, connected to the dam, rose a four-sided diamond-shaped tower—provided a set of unroofed walls rising more than three hundred meters skyward above the level of the dam itself could be called a tower.

  The tower itself was roughly two kays on a side, while the dam was only four hundred meters wide.

  The stones which composed both dam and tower seemed identical for their entire length. Identical and huge—each as large as the Caroljoy and each a glistening white shot through with streaks of black.

  When he had first scouted Aswan, he had taken scans and samples for analysis. Granite, that had been what the geologists at Palmyra had said, but a variety they had never seen, with an internal structure that suggested tremendous building properties.

  Gerswin had refrained from laughing.

  The samples he had obtained by trimming the interior of the tower. He had found no stone unattached to the dam or tower. None.

  The flush-fitted top layer of stones made touchdowns and take-offs easy, with nearly as much ground effect as on Old Earth.

  The pilot shook himself out of his reverie and began the descent that would take him to the base he had built within the tower, the core of which was the atmospheric power tap system, which had cost enough, but which produced power in abundance, in more than abundance.

  “Descent beyond limits,” advised the AI.

  Gerswin shook himself and made the corrections, forcing alertness until the Caroljoy was settled next to the power tap connection.

  Slowly, slowly, he unstrapped, and pulled on the respirator pack and helmet, dragging himself to the lock.

  Once the ship was connected to the power system, he could and would gratefully collapse.

  The cable system was bulky, obsolete, but relatively foolproof, and did not require constant monitoring, unlike the direct laser transfer systems used by most ports, and particularly by deep-space installations.

  “Still,” he muttered, under his breath and behind his respirator, as he touched the transfer stud to begin the repowering operation, “what isn’t obsolete? You? The ship? Your self-appointed mission?”

  He licked his upper lip.

  “Who cares about Old Earth? Do all the Recorps types really want the reclamation effort to end? Will anyone really remember the devilkids and the blood they spent on a forgotten planet?”

  He snorted. The thought occurred to him that, if by some remote chance, his biologics actually worked, that he would be the one in the legends and the devilkids who had made it possible would be the forgotten ones.

  As if that would ever happen!

  He glanced at the white stone rising overhead into the maroon twilight, stone that seemed to retain the light long past twilight, though that retained light never registered on the ship’s screens.

  He sighed, shook his head again, and trudged back to the ramp up to the Caroljoy, up to swallow ship’s concentrates and water, up to sleep, and to heal.

  XII

  Like the pieces of a puzzle snapping together, the fragmented ideas that had been swirling around in the commodore’s head clicked into place as a clear picture.

  He shook his head wearily.

  So simple, so obvious. So obvious that he and everyone else except, perhaps, the Eye Service had overlooked it. No wonder the Intelligence Service had not acted agai
nst him. No wonder the majority of the biologic innovations developed by the foundation had gone nowhere except when he had pushed and developed them. And he had thought the ideas had been accepted on their own merit!

  It might work to his own benefit, and to the benefit of the foundation and Old Earth. It might—provided he could lay the groundwork before the Empire understood what he was doing. Once they understood…

  He paced around the circular table on the enclosed balcony, stopping to look across the valley, over the black of the lake toward the chalet under construction on the high hill opposite his own retreat. That other chalet would be needed soon, he expected, sooner than he had anticipated.

  He smiled in spite of himself, before resuming his pacing, as he considered what to do next.

  “Profit isn’t enough. It never has been. Profit only motivates those who lead.”

  That wasn’t the whole problem. How could you motivate people toward self-sufficiency when the technology was regarded as magic by most, when few understood the oncoming collapse when the power limit was reached? Not that there had to be a power limit, but the current technologic and government systems made it almost inevitable.

  He halted and looked down at the small console he had not used, a console built into the simple wooden lines of the table, a console with a blank screen still waiting for input.

  Smiling briefly, he tapped the stud to shut down the system.

  “Since the political leaders follow the people, and the people follow the true believers, that means they need some new true believers to follow.”

  The commodore in the gray silk-sheen tunic and trousers that looked so simple yet could be afforded by only the richest pursed his lips as he began to plot the revolution.

  XIII

  The gangly man with the alternate braids of blond and silver hair squirmed in the hard chair, shifting his weight as he reread the oblong card once more.

  He studied the cryptic note attached to it yet again, trying to puzzle out what lay behind it.

  What would you do with the grant you requested? Be specific. Be at my office on the 20th of Octe to explain. Call for appointment.