Soldier, Ask Not

by Gordon R. Dickson

And Lisa was a working part of it.

  I began to notice that as I roused from my depression, not only did the colors and shapes of the furniture and of the dwelling itself alter day by day, but her choice of conversational subjects, her tone of voice, her laughter changed as well, to continue to exert maximum pressure upon my own shifting and developing feelings. I do not think even Lisa herself understood how the parts combined to produce the gestalt effect. It would have taken a native Exotic to understand that. But she understood-consciously or subconsciously-her own part in it. And played it.

  I did not care. Automatically, inevitably, as I healed myself I was falling in love with her.

  Women had never been hard for me to find, from the time I broke loose from my uncle's house and began to feel my own powers of mind and body. Especially the beautiful ones, in whom there was often a strange hunger for affection that often ran unsatisfied. But before Lisa they had all, beautiful or not, broken, and turned hollow on me. It was as if I were continually capturing song-sparrows and bringing them home, only to find the following morning that they had become common sparrows overnight and their wild song had dwindled to a single chirp.

  Then I would realize that it was my own fault-it was I who had made song-sparrows of them. Some chance trait or element in them had touched me off like a skyrocket, so that my imagination had soared, and my tongue with it, so that I had lifted us both up with words and carried us off to a place of pure light and air and green grass and running water. And there I had built us a castle full of light and air and promise and beauty.

  They always liked my castle. They would come gladly up on the wings of my imagination, and I would believe that we flew together. But later, on a different day, I would wake to the fact that the light was gone, the song was muted. For they had not really believed in my castle. It was well enough to dream of such a thing, but not to think of translating it into ordinary stone, and wood, and glass and tile. When it came to these matters of reality, a castle was madness; and I should put the thought aside for some real dwelling. Perhaps of poured concrete like the home of my uncle Mathias. With practical vision screen instead of windows, with economic roof, not soaring turrets, and weathered-glassed porches, not open loggias. And so we parted.

  But Lisa did not leave me as the others always had when at last I fell in love with her. She soared with me and soared again on her own. And then, for the first time I knew why she was different, why she would never retreat earthward like the others.

  It was because she had built castles of her own, before I ever met her. So she needed no help from me to lift her to the land of enchantment, for she had reached there before on her own strong wings. We were sky-matched, though our castles were different.

  It was that difference in castles which stopped me, which came at last to shatter the Exotic shell. Because when finally I would have made love to her, she stopped me.

  "No, Tam," she said, and she fended me off. "Not yet."

  "Not yet" might have meant "not this minute," or "not until tomorrow"; but, looking at the change that had come into her face, the way her eyes looked a little away from mine, suddenly I knew better. Something stood like a barred gate half-ajar between us, and my mind leaped to name it.

  "The Encyclopedia," I said. "You still want me to come back and work on it." I stared at her. "All right. Ask me again."

  She shook her head.

  "No," she said, in a low voice. "Padma told me before I hunted you out at the Donal Graeme party that you would never come just because I asked you. But I didn't believe him then. I believe him now." She turned her face back to look me squarely in the eyes. "If I did ask now, and told you to take a moment to think about it before answering, you'd say no all over again, even now."

  She sat, staring at me, by the side of the pool where we were, in the sunlight, with a bush of great yellow roses behind her, and the light of the flowers upon her.

  "Wouldn't you, Tam?" she asked. I opened my mouth, and then I closed it again. Because, like the stone hand of some heathen god, all that I had forgotten while I mended here, all of that which Mathias and then the Friendly Groupman had carved upon my soul, came back heavily down upon me. The barred gate slammed shut then between Lisa and me, and its closing echoed in the inmost depths of my being.

  "That's right," I admitted hollowly. "You're right. I'd say no."

  I looked at Lisa, sitting among the shatters of our mutual dream. And I remembered something.

  "When you first came here," I said slowly but unsparingly, for she was almost my enemy again now, "you mentioned something about Padma saying you were one of the two portals by which I could be reached. What was the other one? I didn't ask you then."

  "But now you can't wait to stop up the other one, can you, Tam?" she said a little bitterly. "All right-tell me something." She picked up a petal fallen from one of the flowers behind her and tossed it onto the still waters of the pool, where it floated like some fragile yellow boat. "Have you gotten in touch with your sister?"

  Her words crashed in upon me like a bar of iron. All the matter of Eileen and Dave, and Dave's death after I had promised Eileen to keep him safe, came swarming back on me. I found myself on my feet without knowing how I had gotten there, and a cold sweat had sprung out all over me.

  "I haven't been able-" I started to answer; but my voice failed me. It strangled itself in the tightness of my throat and I stood face to face in my own soul with the knowledge of my own cowardice.

  "They've notified her!" I shouted, turning furiously on Lisa where she still sat watching up at me. "The Cassidan authorities will have told her all about it! What's the matter-don't you think she knows what happened to Dave?''

  But Lisa said nothing. She only sat, looking up at me. Then I realized that she would go on saying nothing. No more than the Exotics who had trained her almost from the cradle would she tell me what to do.

  But she did not have to. The Devil had been raised again in my soul; and he stood, laughing on the far side of a river of glowing coals, daring me to come over and tangle with him. And neither man nor Devil has ever challenged me in vain.

  I turned from Lisa, and I went.

  Chapter 15

  As a full member of the Guild, I no longer had to produce an assignment as a reason for drawing travel money. The currency between worlds was knowledge and skills wrapped up in the human packages that conveyed these things. In the same way, a credit easily convertible into this currency was the information collected and transferred by the skilled Communications people of the Interstellar News Guild-which was no less necessary to the individual worlds between the stars. So the Guild was not poor; and the two hundred or so full members had funds to draw upon on each one of the sixteen worlds that might have made a government leader envious.

  The curious result of which in my case, I discovered, was that money as such ceased to have any meaning for me. In that corner of my mind which before this had concerned itself with spendables, there was now a void-and rushing in to fill that void, it seemed, through the long flight from Kultis to Cassida, were memories. Memories of Eileen.

  I had not thought that she had been so important a part of my young life, both before our parents' death, and especially after. But now, as our space ship shifted, and paused, and shifted again between the stars, moments and scenes came thronging to my mind as I sat alone in my first-class compartment. Or for that matter, still alone in the lounge, for I was in no mood for company.

  They were not dramatic memories. They were recollections of gifts she had given me on this birthday or that. They were moments in which she had helped me to bear up under the unendurable empty pressure of Mathias upon my soul. There were unhappy moments of her own that I recalled now as well, that I now realized had been unhappy and lonely, but that I had not understood at the time, because of being so bound up in my own unhappiness. Suddenly it came to me that I could remember any number of times when she had ignored her own troubles to do something about mine; and never-
there was no single instance I could recall-had I ever forgotten mine even to consider hers.

  As all this came back to me, my very guts shrank up into a cold, hard knot of guilt and unhappiness. I tried between one set of shifts to see if I could not drink the memories away. But I found I had no taste either for the liquor or for that as a way out.

  And so I came to Cassida.

  A poorer, smaller planetary counterpart of Newton, with whom it shared a double-sun system, Cassida lacked the other world's academic link with and consequently the rarefied supply of scientific and mathematical minds that had made the earlier-settled world of Newton a rich one. From Cassida's capital-city spaceport of Moro, I took a shuttle flight to Alban, the Newton-sponsored University City where Dave had been studying shift mechanics, and where both he and Eileen had held supportive jobs while he did so.

  It was an efficient ant-hill of a city on various levels. Not that there had been any lack of land on which to build it, but because most of it had been built by Newtonian credit; and the building method most economical of that credit had been one that clustered all necessary quarters together in the smallest practical space.

  I picked up a direction rod at the shuttleport and set it for the address Eileen had given me in that one letter received the morning of Dave's death. It pointed me the way through a series of vertical and horizontal tubes and passageways to a housing-complex unit that was above ground level-but that was about the best you could say for it.

  As I turned into the final hallway that led to the door of the address I hunted, for the first time the true emotion that had kept me from even consciously thinking of Eileen, until Lisa recalled her directly to my attention, began to boil up in me. The scene in the forest clearing on New Earth rose again around me as vividly as a nightmare; and fear and rage began to burn in me like a fever.

  For a moment I faltered-I almost stopped. But then the momentum I had built up by the long voyage this far carried me on to the doorway and I sounded the doorcall.

  There was a second's eternity of waiting. Then the door opened and a middle-aged woman's face looked out. I stared down into it in shock, for it was not the face of my sister.

  "Eileen ..." I stammered. "I mean-Mrs. David Hall? Isn't she here?" Then I remembered that this woman could not know me. "I'm her brother- from Earth. Newsman Tam Olyn."

  I was wearing cape and beret, of course, and in a way this was passport enough. But for the moment I had forgotten all about it. I remembered then as the woman fluttered a bit. She had probably never before seen a member of the Guild in the actual flesh.

  "Why, she's moved," the woman said. "This place was too big for her alone. She's down a few levels and north of here. Just a minute, I'll get you her number."

  She darted away. I heard her talking to a male voice for a moment, and then she came back with a slip of paper.

  "Here," she said a little breathlessly. "I wrote it down for you. You go right along this corridor-oh, I see you've got a direction rod. Just set it then. It's not far."

  "Thank you," I said.

  "Not at all. We're glad to-well, I mustn't keep you, I suppose," she said, for I was already beginning to turn away. "Glad to be of service. Goodbye. ''

  "Good-bye," I muttered. I was moving off down the corridor resetting the direction rod. It led me away and down and the door I finally pressed the call button on was well below ground level.

  There was a longer wait this time. Then, at last, the door slid back-and my sister stood there.

  "Tam," she said.

  She did not seem to have changed at all. There was no sign of change or grief upon her, and my mind leaped suddenly with hope. But when she simply continued to stand there, looking at me, the hope sank once more. I could do nothing but wait. I stood there also.

  "Come in," she said finally, but without much change in tone. She stood aside and I walked in. The door slid closed behind me.

  I looked around, shocked out of my emotion for the moment by what I saw. The gray-draped room was no bigger than the first-class compartment I had occupied on the spaceship coming there.

  "What're you doing living here?" I burst out.

  She looked at me without any response to my shock.

  "It's cheaper," she said indifferently.

  "But you don't need to save money!" I said. "I got that arrangement made for your inheritance from Mathias-it was all set with an Earth-working Cassidan to transfer funds from his family back here to you. You mean"-for the thought had never occurred to me before-"there's been some hitch at this end? Hasn't his family been paying you?"

  "Yes," she said calmly enough. "But there's Dave's family now to take care of, too."

  "Family?" I stared stupidly at her.

  "Dave's younger brother's still in school-never mind." She stood still. Nor had she asked me to sit down. "It's too long a story, Tam. What've you come here for?"

  I stared at her.

  "Eileen," I said pleadingly. She only waited. "Look," I said, snatching at the straw of our earlier subject, "even if you're helping out Dave's family, there's no problem anymore. I'm a full Guild member now. I can supply you with anything in the way of funds you need.''

  "No." She shook her head.

  "In heaven's name, why not? I tell you I've got unlimited-"

  "I don't want anything from you, Tam," she said. "Thank you anyway. But we're doing fine, Dave's family and myself. IVe got a good job."

  "Eileen!"

  "I asked you once, Tam," she said, still unmoved. "Why've you come here?"

  If she had been changed to stone, there could not have been a greater difference in her from the sister I had known. She was no one I knew. She was like a perfect stranger to me.

  "To see you," I said. "I thought-you might like to know-"

  "I know all about it," she said, with no emotion at all. "I was told all about it. They said you were wounded, too; but you're well now, aren't you, Tam?"

  "Yes," I said, helplessly. "I'm well now. My knee's a little stiff. They say it'll stay that way."

  "That's too bad," she said.

  "Damn it, Eileen!" I burst out. "Don't just stand there talking to me as if you don't know me! I'm your brother!"

  "No." She shook her head. "The only relatives I have now-the only relatives I want now-are Dave's family. They need me. You don't and never did, Tam. You were always sufficient for yourself, by yourself."

  "Eileen!" I said, pleadingly. "Look, I know you must blame me-partly at least-for Dave's death."

  "No," she answered. "You can't help being what you are. It was my fault, all these years, for trying to convince myself that you were something different from what you are. I thought there was something about you that Mathias never got to, something that just needed a chance to come out. It was that I was counting on when I asked you to help me decide about Jamie. And when you wrote you were going to help Dave, I was sure that what I'd always thought was in you was finally coming to the front. But I was wrong both times."

  "Eileen!" I cried. "It wasn't my fault we ran into a madman, Dave and I. Maybe I should have done something different-but I did try to make him leave me after I got shot, only he wouldn't. Don't you understand, it wasn't all my fault!"

  "Of course it wasn't, Tam," she said. I stared at her. "That's why I don't blame you. You're no more responsible for what you do than a police dog that's been trained to attack anyone who moves. You're what Uncle Mathias made you, Tam-a destroyer. It's not your fault, but that doesn't change anything. In spite of all the fighting you did with him, Mathias' teaching about Destruct filled you up, Tam, and didn't leave anything."

  "You can't say that!" I shouted at her. "It's not true. Give me just one more chance, Eileen, and I'll show you! I tell you, it's not true!"

  "Yes, it is," she said. "I know you, Tam, better than anyone alive. And I've known this about you for a long time. I just wouldn't let myself believe it. But I have to, now-for the sake of Dave's family, who need me. I couldn't help Dave, but I
can help them- as long as I never see you again. If I let you come close to them, through me, you'll destroy them, too."

  She stopped talking then and stood looking at me. I opened my mouth to answer her, but I could think of nothing to say. We stood looking at each other across a couple of feet of distance that was a wider, deeper space and gulf than I had ever encountered in my life.

  "You'd better go, then, Tam," she said at last.

  Her words stirred me numbly to life again.

  "Yes," I said dully. "I guess I'd better."

  I turned away from her. As I stepped toward the door I think I still hoped she might stop me and call me back. But there was no movement or sound behind me; and as I went out the door I glanced back for a final time over my shoulder.

  She had not moved. She was still standing where she had been, like a stranger, waiting for me to go.

  So I went. And I returned to the spaceport alone. Alone, alone, alone. . . .

  Chapter 16

  I got on the first ship out for Earth. I had priority now over all but people with diplomatic status, and I used it. I bumped someone with a prior reservation and found myself once more alone in a first-class compartment, while the ship I was on shifted, stopped to calculate its position, and shifted again between the stars.

  That closed cabin was like a sanctuary, a hermit's cell to me, a chrysalis in which I could lock and reshape myself before entering once more into the worlds of men in a different dimension. For I had been stripped to the very core of my old self and no single self-delusion remained, that I could see, to cover me.

  Mathias had cleaned the most of the flesh of self-delusion off my bones early, of course. But here and there a shred had stuck-like the rain-washed memory of the ruins of the Parthenon that I used to gaze at in the vision screens as a boy after Mathias' deadly dialectic had stripped away one more shred of nerve or sinew. Just by being there, above the dark, windowless house, the Parthenon had seemed to my young mind to refute all Mathias' arguments.

  It had been, once-and therefore he must be wrong, I used to comfort myself in thinking. It had existed, once it had been, and if the men of Earth were no more than Mathias said, it never could have been built. But it had been-that was what I saw now. For in the end it was no more than ruins and the dark defeatism of Mathias endured. So, at last now I came to it-I endured, in Mathias' image, and the dreams of glory and lightness somehow, in some way, for those born on Earth in spite of those changed and greater children of younger worlds, were ruins, like the Parthenon, filed away with other childish delusions, filed and forgotten in the rain.