The Forever Hero

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  The insects resumed their twitters immediately, even before he stopped moving, but the heavy and moist air brought no sounds of birds or other larger species.

  As the rumbling of the roller grew from a whisper into a grumbling, the cargo vehicle topped a hill and gathered momentum to plunge down its slope on its eastward route.

  Within minutes, the grumbling roar had dwindled back into a whisper.

  The traveler stood, flexing his shoulders as if to remove the tightness, reshouldered his backpack, and picked up his heavy, but wellworked staff.

  Soon, he would need to refill his water bottle, and to see what he could find to supplement the food he carried. Soon—but not for another five or ten kays, at least.

  His steps were even as he returned to the road, where the heavy red dust had already settled back to blur the wide traces of the cargo rollers where they had flattened the right of way even more smoothly than before.

  The respite had refreshed him, and his steps were brisker. He began to whistle one of the newer tunes he had composed in the last few years. Although he recalled the older ones, and whistled them now and again in his blacker moments, he usually avoided them and the memories they brought back.

  At the top of the next hill, he paused to survey the gentle hills that rose into the eastern Noram mountains. He could see the darker green of their forested slopes, where the ecological recovery had been quicker than on the slower draining and clay-based hilly plains where he stood.

  How long had it been since he had overflown this area?

  He pushed the thought away and started down the western slope of the hill, his booted feet leaving barely a trace on the shoulder of the packed clay road.

  Three kays westward, he paused again upon a hilltop, when he saw a single man standing beside a machine—a locally built tractor type pulling a tilling rig.

  He shrugged and continued downward, until at last he stood beside the machine, observing the man who struggled with an assembly that controlled the tilling bars dragged by the tractor. The tractor, obviously of local design and manufacture, bore more patches than the traveler’s singlesuit, but appeared clean and in good repair.

  “Hades…,” muttered the operator, refusing to pay any attention to the traveler.

  In turn, the traveler seated himself in the midafternoon shade of the large wheels and waited, taking a sip from his nearly empty water bottle.

  “Hades…double Hades…grubbin’ Impie design…”

  The blond man finished the water and replaced the bottle in the harness attached to his pack, stretching his legs out to wait for the other to complete the repair or surrender to the need for assistance.

  Clank!

  Plop!

  A large hammer dropped beside the traveler, who looked up without curiosity.

  “Perfectly good machine…useless because some idiot tech decided it was easier to copy from a stupid Imperial design…”

  “That bad?” asked the blond-haired man as he watched the operator clamber down from the tractor.

  “Wouldn’t be hard at all if I had Imperial tools, three hands, and a graving dock to immobilize the whole stupid assembly!”

  The operator had the long-armed and narrow-faced look of shambletown ancestry, but wore a relatively new jumpsuit, which carried only recent dirt and grease. His black hair was short, and he wiped his forehead with a brown cloth, which he replaced in a thigh pocket of the jumpsuit.

  “Mind if I take a look?” asked the traveler.

  “Be my guest. Not scheduled for a pickup for hours yet. Don’t seem to have the tools to fix it.”

  After nodding sympathetically, the traveler climbed up to the assembly with an ease that spoke of familiarity with both equipment in general and repairs in awkward locales.

  The man in the olive jumpsuit frowned as he surveyed the jammed assembly. In one respect, the operator was correct. The Imperial design, obviously adapted from a flitter-door system, was far too complicated.

  Still—Imperial designs usually had more than one solution.

  He bent over the assembly, looking at the far side upside down. A wry smile creased his face as he straightened and checked the small tool kit which the operator had left.

  Not ideal, but he thought what he had in mind would work. Even permanent connections could be removed, if you knew their structure.

  Click. Click.

  With the right angle, the hidden releases, and an extreme amount of pressure, he managed to get the “permanent” coupling released.

  The loss of pressure on the line allowed the assembly to drop into place. With the pressure off the line, he was able to release the other end of the connector.

  As the operator had probably known, the check valve was jammed with debris and hardened fluid. Within a few minutes he had it clean again, and ready to reconnect. Doing the best he could, he cleaned out the tubing and the fittings before he reassembled them.

  Finally, he closed the tool kit and climbed back down to the puzzled operator.

  “Think it should work now. Want to try it?”

  The operator shook his head, wiping his forehead once more with the brown cloth.

  “How did you do that?”

  “Had some familiarity, once, with that sort of design. A few tricks I happened to remember.”

  “That Hades-fired assembly gives us more problems than the rest of the equipment put together. I’ve never seen anyone fix one that quickly.”

  “Luck, I suppose.”

  “Where are you headed?”

  “West.”

  The operator surveyed the traveler, looked from the patched and faded singlesuit to the western mountains, taking in the backpack and staff resting against the tractor wheels.

  “On foot?”

  “Simpler that way. No hurry. Feet don’t break down if you rest them now and again.”

  The operator shook his head. “Still a few wild Mazers loose. I wouldn’t recommend going much beyond the next check station. Better to catch a ride with one of the road rollers. They’d be happy to take you. They like the company.”

  The traveler nodded. “Appreciate the suggestion.”

  “You sure look familiar. Swear I saw you someplace.”

  “Not likely. Been a long time since I passed this way.”

  “Well…whatever. I appreciate the help. Appreciate it a lot. Anything I can do for you? Like to give you a lift, but…” The Recorps operator surveyed the half-tilled field.

  “Understand. You’ve got a job.”

  The operator nodded. “Stet. Beats running the hills. Even if I don’t see the lady more than once a week. Kids always have enough to eat. Not like the old days, bless the captain.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Not like the old days, I said.”

  The traveler smiled faintly, nodded, and bent to pick up the pack and staff. Straightening, he twirled the staff one-handed and inclined his head momentarily toward the Recorps tech.

  “Good luck,” he called to the operator as he set out toward the road and the mountains toward which it led.

  “Sure not like the old days…captain and all…” He could hear the operator murmuring as the tech began to check out the equipment before returning to his tilling.

  The traveler waited until he had crossed the next hilltop before resuming his whistling.

  LVI

  The commander ran his eyes over the screen, trying to focus on the words, finally letting them settle midway down the text.

  “…mysterious traveler on the Euron continent has been blamed for the overthrow of two local rulers, at least, for the death of a score of bandits, and for the establishment of a ‘devilspawn’ settlement on the Inland Sea…

  “…settlement verified, location on grid three, named Stander, allegedly founded in memory of the traveler who departed in a wagon of fire…

  “…not all events reported can be verified, but all verified references fall within a three-century period…some evidence to indicate travel
er was real Imperial, perhaps a wandering scholar of some sort…but…would not explain ability with weapons…particularly with native arms…”

  The commander bit his lip. No sooner had he managed to purge the superstitious gobbledygook from the main base records than it was turning up elsewhere on Old Earth.

  Reclamation was a serious business, dependent far too much on worn-out equipment—equipment modified so much the original specs were useless—too few supplies, and too few trained personnel. As the Empire continued to shrink, with each subsequent cutback, there were fewer replacement parts, fewer visiting ships of any sort with which to trade for the needed technical equipment the Empire failed to supply.

  With all the drawbacks, there was less and less incentive to push back the landpoisons.

  His hand touched the screen and sent the report to the system files.

  Bad enough that the early captain, whoever he had been, had been turned into a godlike legend. Now he had to contend with other magical forces and legends.

  How could he explain the improved environmental monitoring reports from places where Recorps had never been? It had been hard enough to justify the limited Imperial support with the bad reports from the out-continents.

  Despite his efforts, and the efforts of the commandants before him, Recorps was shrinking, and the rate of progress slowly but surely declining.

  The records showed that four centuries earlier, Recorps had been operating the now-closed Scotia station, and that two centuries before that the Noram effort had crossed the Momiss River. Yet they still had not completed the eastern sections of Noram, despite the efforts in the Brits and on the fringes of Euron.

  There never were enough techs, let alone enough officer-grade types, to fill the positions necessary. The Admin complex was filled with empty offices, empty quarters, empty labs.

  Still, the spouts were less severe, and far less frequent, and there hadn’t been a stone rain in Noram in over a century, and summer ice rains were a rarity, rather than the norm they had once been.

  “Hard work…,” he muttered. Hard work, that was what had caused the improvement, not the magic of some traveler in mysterious Euron, or some long-dead captain.

  Even that captain, he rationalized, had worked hard. He hadn’t used magic, no matter what the old locals insisted, no matter what the Corwin tapes had said, no matter what the old songs said.

  It would be so easy to give up, to assume things would still get better without Recorps. But until the Imperial and Recorps effort had begun, what had there been? Savages and shambletowns, a declining local population, and despair. Who wanted to go back to that?

  He ran his fingers through his thinning hair, then touched the centuries-old console, the once-gray plastic sheathing now nearly black, not with dirt, but from the continued exposure to the radiation of the interior lights, designed so long ago to supplement the sunlight that had been virtually nonexistent.

  Would there be a time when Recorps would not be needed?

  He hoped so, but was glad it would not be soon, would not be in his time.

  He flicked off the console, and stood, stretching, before he straightened his uniform and headed for his empty quarters. Unlike his predecessor, he lived in quarters, not in New Denv.

  He frowned and shook his head as he went out through the open portal.

  LVII

  The slender blond man halted his work on the painstakingly squared golden log and stood up as he watched the agent vault from the flitter with the grace of the trained hunter.

  The uniformed man moved with an easy stride from the flats where he had landed the flitter, a narrow space requiring more than mere skill, more even than recklessness or nerve.

  The blond man nodded. He recognized the step of the other. He did not bother to touch the knives hidden in his wide belt, knowing that the other could not have immediate violence on his mind or hands.

  He continued to wait until the agent, wearing a sky-blue uniform he did not recognize, with the Imperial crest that he did, halted several meters from him.

  The woodworker smiled and set down the tool with which he had been smoothing the log.

  “Commodore Gerswin?”

  “Answered to that once.” He nodded at the uniform. “Corpus Corps?”

  “Yes. But not on official business—not the kind you mean.”

  “No uniform on those missions.”

  The agent smiled faintly and half nodded in acknowledgment.

  “Nice location here.”

  “For me…under the circumstances.”

  The agent looked around the partly built structure, noting the perfect joint where each golden log had been fitted into place, the dark stones that seemed to fit precisely without mortar, and the way the home-to-be nestled against the cliff behind it.

  “You do good work, Commodore, not that you always haven’t.”

  The blond man smiled wryly, dismissing the compliment.

  “One way of looking at it.”

  The agent looked down at the stone underfoot, then back at the man who looked no older than he did.

  “Why did you put in the change of address for your retirement pay with the Recorps base here? And why did you use coded entries?”

  “Why not? No sense in the Empire having to keep searching. Waste of resources. You either get me, or decide it’s not worth it. Too tired to play god much longer.”

  “You? Too tired? Why didn’t you use those tacheads? There were nine left…somewhere…wherever they are. Not to mention the hellburners.”

  “Assuming I had any,” sighed the thinner man. “Just wanted to get home, not that it is, you understand.”

  “It isn’t? Thought you were from here.”

  “Was. But you know better. You can’t really go home. So long no one really remembers. Why I used codes. Be worse if they knew for sure I was the captain. Won’t matter someday. Doesn’t matter to the Empire already, I suspect.”

  The agent frowned, started to shake his head, then stopped, fingering the wide blue leather belt, centimeters from the stunner in the throw-holster.

  “You win, Commodore, just like you always did.” The words carried a tinge of bitterness.

  “Didn’t win. Lost. You lost. We both lost. Lerwin, Kiedra, Corwin, Corson—they won. So did the children, those lucky enough to have them…and keep them.”

  “That may be,” answered the agent, “but you won. The Empire is coming apart, and the Ydrisians, the Ateys, the Aghomers—you name it, you’re their patron saint.”

  The slender man pursed his lips, waiting.

  The Corpus Corps agent studied the wiry man in the thin and worn singlesuit, but kept his lips tightly together.

  “You drew the duty of having to tell me?”

  “No. I asked. I wanted to see a living legend. I wanted to see the man who single-handedly brought down the Empire.”

  “I didn’t. May have hurried things. But not me.” He smiled wryly once more. “Disappointed?”

  “No.” The agent’s tone said the opposite.

  The slender man’s hands blurred.

  Thunk! Thunk!

  Twin knives vibrated in the temporary brace by the agent’s elbow, both buried to half their length.

  “Does that help?”

  “A little…” The agent took a deep breath. He could not have even touched his stunner in the time the commodore had found, aimed, and thrown the heavy knives. “…but how—it couldn’t have just been the weapons skills.”

  “No. Helped me stay alive. Any man who cared about Old Earth, about life…any man could have done the rest…if he sacrificed as many as I did…”

  The man in the blue uniform nodded.

  “Now. A favor.”

  “What?” asked the agent cautiously.

  “Better that the locals know I’m just a retiree. Don’t know more, and they don’t need to. Your records will go when the Empire falls.”

  “Should I? Why? Let you suffer in notoriety…”

&nbs
p; The hawk-yellow eyes of the commodore-who-was caught the agent, and in spite of himself, he stepped back.

  “Why?” he repeated, more softly.

  “Because, like the Empire…out of time…out of place…”

  The agent watched as the commodore’s eyes hazed over, looking somewhere, somewhen, for a minute, then another. He waited…and waited.

  A jay screamed from a pine downhill from the pair, and a croven landed on the rock above the flitter, but the commodore noticed neither the birds nor the man in blue.

  Finally, the Corpus Corps agent stepped forward.

  Thunk!

  A third knife appeared in the brace, and the former I.S.S. officer shook himself.

  “Sorry…reflex. Hard to keep a thought. Too many memories,” apologized the commodore, who still looked to be a man in his middle thirties.

  The agent, despite his training, shivered.

  “I understand, I think, Commodore.” He paused, then saluted, awkwardly. “Good day, ser. Good luck with your house.”

  He turned and slowly descended the even-set and smooth stone steps, then walked along the precisely laid stone walkway, still shaking his head slowly as his strides carried him back to the flitter.

  “We all lost. Him, too.”

  He was yet shaking his head as the flitter canopy closed and the turbines began to whine.

  Behind him, the blond man picked up his tools and returned to smoothing the golden log, smoothing it for a perfect fit, a perfect fit that would last centuries.

  LVIII

  Weary. Old. Either adjective could have applied to the still-buried building that served as the landing clearing area for the few travelers to visit Old Earth.

  The historian/anthropologist took another step away from the shuttle-port entry before stopping. Her recorder and datacase banged against her left hip as she halted to survey the hall. Compared to Imperial architecture, the ceiling was low, and despite the cleanliness of the structure, a feeling of dinginess permeated the surrounding. That and emptiness. There had been two passengers on the annual Imperial transport—most of the space was for technical support equipment for Recorps.