The Forever Hero

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  She debated taking a holo shot of the receiving area, then decided against it. She squared her uniformed shoulders and stepped up to the console.

  A bored clerk in a uniform vaguely resembling hers waited for the lieutenant to present her orders.

  He took the square green plastord and eased it into the console.

  “Your access code, please, sher.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “You have special orders, Lieutenant. Service doesn’t trust us poor cousins. For me to verify your arrival, you have to punch in your own access code.” He pointed to the small keyboard built into the counter. “Right there.”

  The lieutenant shrugged. Her precise features, thick, short, and lustrous black hair, and an air of command gave her more of an “official” presence than the Interstellar Survey Service uniform.

  Stepping over to the keyboard, she tapped in the access code and waited.

  Several seconds later, another console beside the clerk beeped. He retrieved the plastord square and handed it back.

  “Welcome to Old Earth, Lieutenant Kerwin.”

  “Thank you. What’s the best way to reach the old Recorps Base?”

  “Old Recorps Base? Didn’t they tell you? You’re in it. There’s never been more than one main base. Outside of the work ports in Afrique and Hiasi, this is it. Oh…we have a few detached officers in Euron and around the globe, but here’s the center.”

  Lieutenant Kerwin looked around the open gray hall, again, even more slowly.

  “You want base quarters…go to the end of the hall. Take the left fork. That leads to the tunnel to Admin. Plenty of room these days.”

  “These days…,” she murmured.

  “Days of the captain are gone, Lieutenant. Lot of nostalgia, especially with the big Atey report,” added the suddenly loquacious rating. “Their Institute sent a team last year, but haven’t seen a report. May not have one, Captain Lerson says. Lots of nostalgia. Sensicubes all romance it. Don’t believe it. Never was a captain, not like that, anyway…if you ask me. You’ll have to make your own decision.”

  “Who told you that was my job?” asked the officer softly, with a touch of ice in her tone which pinned the man back against his console.

  “Told you what?”

  She smiled, and the smile was a cross between sudden dawn and the pleased look of the reintroduced hills cougar sizing up a lost beefalo calf.

  “Surely you’re joking?” she asked with a laugh, and the laugh had a trace of silvered bells in it, with steel behind.

  In spite of himself, the rating failed to repress a shiver.

  “Just around, Lieutenant. Someone from the Empire coming in to study the myth of the captain. To check our records. Two passengers, and the other was a hydrologist recruited from Mara. Had to be you.”

  “Around? That’s interesting.” She pursed her lips before continuing. “Don’t put down myths, Reitiro,” she concluded, picking his name off the tag on his tunic pocket, “they all started with reality. You might think about the reality of the captain.”

  Reitiro frowned as the Survey Service officer turned and left, moving with an easy stride down the hallway toward the tunnel to the Administration building, the tunnel a relic from the days when the environment had been totally out of control.

  From before the days of the captain, if the myths were indeed correct.

  LIX

  The face in the screen was gray. Whether grayed by the age of the tape or whether the gray reflected the actual physiological age of the man could not be answered.

  The tape itself came from a databloc out of the sealed section of the Recorps archives, from a tape that should have been blank, and was not. The exterior had contained neither date nor other identifiable information. Why it had been left remained as much of a mystery as what it contained.

  “Commander Lerwin said I ought to scan this and leave it in the back of the archives. Someone should have it.”

  The silver-haired man had an unlined skin, and neither beard nor mustache. His voice was so soft, even with maximum gain, that the I.S.S. officer and the base archivist/librarian had to strain to catch his words.

  “Already, people are doubting what the captain did, or what we all did. As the land improves and there are fewer spouts, they forget the days of the stone rains and the ice that could strip a flitter bare in minutes. The old crews are scattering, dying, having children, and the captain’s not here to hold it together. Soon, no one will remember that there was a captain. They’ll doubt the records, or change them.”

  The narrator looked down, blinked, and lifted his head to face the viewers.

  “But there was a captain. And he brought the earth back to life when it was dying.

  “Am I mad? I suppose I am. But a madman has nothing to tell but the truth. Who designed the river plants? The captain. Who commandeered the dozers when the Empire wrote Old Earth out of the Emperor’s budget? The captain. Who forced the creation of Recorps?

  “I could go on, but already none of this shows in the histories. How could it? Only a devilkid could have carried it off, and none of them knew he was a devilkid, or what a devilkid was. We knew—”

  The man’s face was replaced with a swirl of color, and then by an even gray.

  “Is the rest of the tape like that?” asked the lieutenant.

  “I’ve run it through twice. That’s the only fragment left intact. It was deliberately scrambled, and probably in a hurry.”

  “Why did they leave the beginning?”

  “They didn’t know they had. The man who made the recording didn’t understand the recording limits. On these older blocs, you were supposed to run twenty to thirty centimeters before beginning the recording. This starts with the first millimeter. Everything beyond thirty is blank.”

  “But wouldn’t a scrambler catch it all anyway?”

  “No. The outer layer of the tape expands against the casing. The reason for the procedure is that you can’t blank the first lead of a bloc without actually running it.”

  “Why would anyone want to erase something like that?” Why indeed, wondered the historian.

  “It’s a pity,” observed the librarian. “Now that the days of the captain have become a myth, it would be helpful to have firsthand reference material. Amazing how quickly the process took place. Less than four centuries, and no one knows what really happened back then. Would be nice to know.”

  “Someone didn’t think so.”

  The rating shrugged. “What can I say, Lieutenant? I finished training less than a year ago, and it’s pretty dull. Most of the reclamation here on Noram is done, and they say the natural processes are taking care of the rest.

  “No minerals, and with the Empire almost gone—excuse me—with the Empire taking a less aggressive position, we don’t get much interest in the archives these days.

  “Everyone else just wants to know if we’ve gotten any of the Imperial sensitapes. Probably have to close Recorps before too long. Not much Imperial funding, and the export trade is down. Two-thirds of the old quarters are already empty.”

  “Can you tell when the erasure was done?” asked the lieutenant, bringing the issue back.

  “Could have been done a hundred stans ago, or two. That swirl pattern doesn’t happen when you use what we have now, and our stuff’s at least fifty years old. Besides, you saw the dust on that rack.”

  The officer rose. “You mind if I just browse through the rest of the old blocs?”

  “Regs—but who cares. Just don’t blow it around.”

  She smiled at the young rating.

  “Thank you. I won’t.”

  The librarian scratched his head as he watched the lieutenant head for the master indices for the archives.

  He rewound the old cube and closed down the viewing console before he picked it up to carry it back into the storage area. After that, he’d have to go back to the main console, not that there would be much business.

  The word was already o
ut that the Imperial ship hadn’t brought any sensitapes.

  LX

  Stark—that would have been the politest word she could have used to describe the interior of the dwelling.

  Neat it was, and light enough, though age had darkened the golden wood that comprised the walls and matching roof beams. But there were no hangings on the walls and no coverings on the floors. The air was cool and clean, but the starkness made it seem almost chill.

  The hawk-eyed man turned in the antique swivel, but did not stand as his eyes ran over her. The directness, the blaze, of his gaze sent a chill down her spine.

  He added to that chill with an odd two-toned whistle so low that she could barely hear it even as she felt its impact.

  “First time someone like you has come looking for me.”

  His eyes flickered as he took in the uniform.

  “Service. Don’t recognize the specialty insignia.”

  “Research. I understand you might be able to answer some of my questions.”

  “Doubt it.”

  “Would you try?”

  “So what does the wonderful and crumbling Empire want with me?” He looked away from her and out through the circular bubbled window that she recognized as having come from an alpha-class flitter, despite the painstaking custom framing that made it seem an integral part of the structure.

  She frowned, letting the fingers of her left hand wrap around the styloboard more tightly than she intended. Shaking her right hand loosely to relax it, she hoped she would be ready to use the stunner if she had to, but that it would not be necessary. The whole idea was not to upset someone as unbalanced as he was reputed to be.

  His head snapped back toward her.

  “Forget about the stunner. You couldn’t reach it in time. Too close.”

  Automatically her eyes gauged the distance from her feet to his relaxed posture in the antique recliner/swivel. More than three meters.

  She lifted her eyebrows.

  “Could prove it. Will. Maybe. Later.”

  He glanced back out the bubble window, the only outside view from the dwelling.

  The Imperial officer took the time to study the structure, noting the fit of the native logs, squared so evenly that there seemed to be no space at all between them. The wide plank flooring showed the same care, despite the hollows worn by years of use. There was more than enough light, thanks to the four skylights. The more she studied the structure, the more she began to realize the effort and design that had gone into it, an effort and design that seemed strangely out of place on Old Earth.

  She shook her head. There were so many strange examples, as she was learning all too quickly.

  This hideaway south of the Recorps Base was yet another, a seemingly rustic cabin whose design, orientation, and construction demonstrated more expertise and knowledge than she had expected, far more.

  Her attention drifted back to the man, now regarding her with an amused smile, as if he had read her thoughts. He was clean-shaven, and the faded gray tunic and trousers, once probably of Imperial issue, were spotless, though worn.

  “It’s said you’re native to Old Earth,” she began.

  The amused smile remained, and she did not realize she had stepped backward until her shoulders brushed the wood behind her.

  “It’s also said that you were an Imperial officer for a long time. One rumor is that you once commanded the Recorps Base.”

  “Who would say anything that fantastic? Never commanded the Recorps Base.”

  “The Maze people…some of the older New Denv families…” She tried to match his light tone.

  He sat upright, leaning forward. “Every place has its stories. When it doesn’t, it’s dead. Nearly that way here once. Now they tell stories.”

  In a silent flash, he stood upright, next to the swivel, which slowly returned itself to a position not quite upright. His feet, wearing Imperial-issue boots, had not made a sound as they hit the wooden floor.

  “What do you really want?”

  What did she want? To track down a rumor? To chronicle the debunking of a myth to put the Service at ease? She shook her head again. Her mission seemed less and less clear.

  “Your thoughts, your recollections about how things really were,” she said, trying to recapture the sense of purpose that had driven her to Old Earth, back to a forgotten corner of a world the Empire would just as soon forget.

  She took a step sideways, as much to remind herself that she would not be backed into a corner as to get closer to the former officer, and waited for his response.

  His eyes raked over her again, as if he could see beneath the undress tunic and trousers. She could see his nostrils widen, as if he were drawing in some scent.

  Hawk or wolf…or both?

  “You smell familiar.”

  “Familiar?” Istvenn! He’s got you off-balance and keeping you there. “I don’t see how. I’ve never been here or on Old Earth before.”

  His lips tightened, and his eyes narrowed.

  “Could be. But somewhere…”

  “Is it true you were an Imperial officer?”

  “True as anything else you’d hear.” The intensity with which he had regarded her subsided, and he turned so that he faced neither her nor the bubble window, but a narrow tier of inset wooden shelves that reached from ankle height to the base of the roof beams.

  Her eyes followed his. She could see that a number of the antiques on the shelves were actual printed publications, which indicated their age. Printed pubs were used only on frontier worlds or in remote locations where the use of energy for a tapefax or console was not feasible, and there had been sufficient energy on Old Earth since the rediscovery.

  Without being able to read the faded letters on the spines of the volumes, she knew that most were Imperial manuals.

  “Why did you leave the Service and settle here?”

  He gestured toward the wall behind her, then laughed a short laugh.

  “Nowhere to sit.”

  “It’s not really necessary—”

  He brushed past her and did something to the wooden panel behind her.

  The lieutenant stepped aside as the blond man lowered a double width bed from the wall and pulled a quilted coverlet, red and gray, from a recess over the bed, and spread it over the Imperial-issue colonist’s pallet.

  She could see his nostrils quiver as he straightened and motioned toward the couch/bed.

  “Still familiar.” His low statement was made more to himself than to her.

  He frowned, but with three quick strides returned to the swivel and dropped into it, turning toward her as he did.

  “Two questions. One asked. One unasked. Last first. The Imperial supplies? Maintain some credit balance at the base. Lets me buy what I need. First last. Why here? Nowhere else to go.”

  His words answered one question, but not the other. Only a retired or disabled member from Recorps or one of the Imperial Services had base-purchasing privileges. But he had not answered why he had settled on Old Earth.

  “Why did you settle here?”

  “Why not? Didn’t settle. Born here. Not that anyone would remember. No place for me in the Empire. No place for me in Recorps, either. Not when all the barriers are crumbling.”

  “Barriers?” The single-word question tumbled from her lips. Why did she sound like such a simpleton? Why? Why? Why?

  “You can take the stress so long. Had to be civilized. That meant barriers…if I wanted to survive. I built them, but not strong enough. Time wears down all walls. Remember. Grew up when the shambletowners hunted the devilkids.”

  “Shambletowners?”

  “Old Mazers…what they called them then.”

  She could see that the hardness was gone from his eyes, the terrible intensity muted, misted over.

  The lieutenant waited for him to go on, wondering why he was so obsessed with age. He had to be a mental case, or disabled. He didn’t look much older than she was, and she certainly wasn’t ready for re
tirement, not just five years out of the Academy. But the dwelling was undeniably his, and the locals called him old. Why?

  “Watch out for the old devil,” at least three of the reclam farmers had told her. “He knows everything, but he moves like the lash of the storm, like the old storms.”

  She studied his face, the so-short and tight-curled blond hair, the tanned and smooth skin of his face, trying not to stare, waiting for him to go on.

  The afternoon wind whined, but the cabin did not shake, unlike some of the town buildings. While their native wood bent, it never broke, not with the local design.

  “When the Empire rediscovered, they were lucky. Between storms of summer and howlers of winter. No landspouts that day.

  “Could be we were lucky. Time should tell. Couldn’t see the sky then, just the gray and gray of the clouds, and purple funnels of the landspouts. Screaming and ripping through the hills and plains. Rock rains all the time. Sheerwinds could cut rivers in half.

  “Silver lander. Went hunting and found a devilkid.”

  He laughed, a short hard bark of a laugh that contrasted with the soft penetrating intensity of his light voice.

  “That was six centuries ago. You act like you were there.”

  He ignored her interruption. “Great Empire decided they had some obligation to poor home planet. Guilty conscience. Decided to fix us up. Till the local budget got tight, and they decided to recruit locals. Couldn’t find anyone, except a devilkid. Other couldn’t hack it. Devilkid ended up in charge. Called him captain. Still a devilkid in soul. Scared the Impies until the day he walked out. End of story.”

  “You haven’t told me anything.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Me?”

  “No matter. Told you everything. Now listen. My turn.”

  She frowned, then leaned back as he began to whistle in the strange double-toned sound she had heard him let out momentarily when she had arrived.