Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  The Lost Swords: The Second Triad (1991) [O]

  The Lost Swords: Endgame (1994) [O]

  Book of Swords

  The First Book of Swords (1983)

  The Second Book of Swords (1983)

  The Third Book of Swords (1984)

  The Complete Book of Swords (1985) [O]

  Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict

  The Arrival (1999)

  Pilgrim

  Pyramids (1987)

  After the Fact (1988)

  Pilgrim (1997)

  1961

  VOLUME PAA-PYX

  Administration problems the Underground, a missing volume of his encyclopedia, and now an old love turned rebel—enough was enough!

  WHEN he was alone in his office with the prisoner, the director said: “Now, what is this secret you can reveal to my ears alone?”

  “Are you sure none of them are listening?” The prisoner was a young man with seedy clothing and an odd haircut. As he spoke, he managed to grin in a conspiratorial way, as if he already shared some vital and amusing secret with Director Ahlgren.

  And this is about the average of the Underground, thought the director, studying his victim with distaste. And in the next room Barbara waited her turn at being interrogated. How could she have ever become connected, however indirectly, with the ideals or the people of this Underground represented before him?

  “None of them are listening,” said the director, who took daily steps to discourage that sort of thing among his subordinates. It was not entirely unheard of for a Party member to turn traitor and join the Underground. “Quickly now, what have you to tell me?”

  “This—I will act as a double agent for you,” volunteered the young wretch, in a stage whisper, maintaining the idiotic grin. His voluntary muscles were still mainly paralyzed from the stun pistols of the Political Police, and so he sat propped erect in his chair by a stiff pillow the director kept handy for such use, his voluntary muscles still mainly paralyzed from the stun pistols of the Political Police.

  Director Ahlgren frowned thoughtfully. He took a cigarette from a box on his plain but highly polished desk. “Care for one?”

  “No, no. Do you understand what I am offering you? I am a highly trained agent, and I will betray them all to you, because you are the strongest here, and I must serve the strongest.” The young man nodded earnestly, as if he hoped the director would imitate the movement and so agree with him.

  The director puffed smoke. “Very well, I accept. Now you must show me that you will really do what you say. Tell me the address of your contact cell.”

  THE YOUNG rebel contorted his forehead, in an apparent effort to conceive a stroke of Machiavellian strategy.

  Ahlgren pursued him. “I know each cell of the Underground has its contact with the rest of the organization through one other cell and that you know the address of yours. How can I trust you as a double agent if you won’t tell me that much?”

  “Wouldn’t any of the others tell you? My dear comrades from my own cell?”

  All the dear comrades seemed to have taken memory-scrambling drugs, as captured rebels often did, though the director sometimes thought it a superfluous action on their part.

  “None of the others offered to act as a double agent.” Ahlgren was trying to humor this babbler out of the one piece of valuable information he was likely to possess.

  “Our comrades in the contact cell will have heard about the arrests this morning,” said the prisoner with a sudden happy thought. “They’ll have moved already anyway.”

  Quite likely true, Director Ahlgren knew. “So it can’t hurt them if you tell me,” he encouraged.

  The prisoner pondered a moment longer, then named an address in a quiet residential section about a quarter of an hour’s walk from the Party Building.

  “Anything else you can tell me?”

  Careful consideration. “No.”

  PolPol Chief Lazar and a couple of guards came into the office quickly after the director touched the signal button.

  “Take him down to conditioning,” said the director, leaning back in his chair. He felt his head beginning to ache.

  The rebel screamed and rolled his head, about the most violent motion he could make, as the two PolPol guards caught him gently by the arms and lifted him from his chair.

  “Traitor! You are the traitor, not I! You have betrayed my confidence, your own honor, you—” He seemed suddenly to realize what was going to happen to him. “Conditioning! No, not my mind, not my mind! Can’t you beat me or something instead? I won’t be meee any lonnnggerrrr . . .”

  The screaming died away down the corridor outside the office.

  “Careful with him!” Lazar called sharply to the guards, from the doorway. “Don’t let his legs bump, there! You bruised that man this morning; we want no more of that.”

  He came back into the office, closing the door, viewing Ahlgren with the proper expression of respect. “Would you like me to conduct the next interview, sir?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “I thought you might feel a certain reluctance, sir. I understand you knew the young lady years ago.”

  “Before I joined the Party. Yes, quite right, I did.” The director arose from his chair and walked toward the wide window, past the bookshelves that almost filled one wall, giving the office the air of a study and concealing his secret exit.

  FROM the window he looked put upon the sunset that reddened the sky over his prosperous city, whose bright lights were coming on against the dusk.

  I understand Lazar, he thought, because he is ambitious, as I am. Or as I was. Under one of the old dictatorships, I would have had to fear such ambition in a subordinate and consider taking steps against him. But I need not fear Lazar, because the Party claims his perfect loyalty, and he can do nothing against me until I begin to fail the Party. And is that time perhaps drawing near? Will my secret exit always be only a private joke?

  Watching his own eyes in the half-mirror of the window, the director told himself: Someone must govern, and the worldwide Party does better than the old systems did. There are no wars. There is no corruption, and no real struggle for power among Party members, because there is practically no disobedience in the carefully chosen ranks. The mass of the citizens seem content with their bread and circuses. There is only the Underground, and maybe some kind of Underground is necessary in any society.

  “Lazar.”

  “Sir?”

  “How do we do it? How do we attain such perfection of power that the essence of power is enough, that we have no need to constantly threaten or stupefy the citizens?”

  The gay and active city below was brightening itself against the gathering night. No giant signs proclaimed the glories of the Party. No monolithic statues deified the World Directors, past or present. The Party was invisible.

  Lazar seemed a bit shocked at the question. “The selfless obedience of each individual is the life and strength of the Party, sir.” A phrase from the catechism.

  “Of course . . . but look, Lazar. That Citizens Policemen directing traffic down there. He wears a stun pistol, because of nonpolitical criminals he must sometimes deal with; but if one of your PolPol agents were to walk up to him and arrest him, the odds are he would offer no resistance. Now why? The Citizens Police are as well armed and I think more numerous than your men.”

  Lazar studied the traffic cop below through narrowed eyes. “I can’t remember when we’ve had to arrest a Citizens Policeman.”

  “Neither can I. The point is—how do we do it?”

  “Superior dedication and discipline will prevail, sir.”

  “Yes.” But the parroted phrases were no real answer. The Citizens Police were presumably disciplined and dedicated too. Lazar was unwilling or unable to really discuss the subject.

  Such questions had not occurred to Ahlgren himself until quite recently. He could not remember ever seriously considering the possibility of himself opposing the Party i
n any way, even before that day five years ago when he had been accepted as a member.

  “And we of the Party control the means of Conditioning,” said Lazar.

  “Conditioning, yes.” Barbara. He had to fight to keep anything from showing in his face.

  He knew there was not one person in the gay and bright-lit city before him who could not be brought to the basement of this building at any time, at a word from himself, to undergo Conditioning. The Ultimate Pain, he had heard it called by Party theorists. But it needed no dramatization.

  The citizens had a slang term for it that he had heard somewhere: brain-boiling.

  The office intercom sounded on the director’s desk. “Chief Lazar’s office would like him to come in, if possible.” Tight security. No details would be spoken unnecessarily over even the director’s line. No risks would be taken at all.

  He was faintly relieved. “Your office wants you for something; I won’t need you here any longer. Good job today.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Lazar was gone in a moment.

  AHLGREN was alone in his soft-lit office. His eyes ranged along the bookshelves. The Party put no restrictions on reading. Aquinas—some of the Eastern philosophers—Russell. The encyclopedia, with the gap where that one volume had been missing for a week. Volume P. What the devil could have happened to it? Was there a kleptomaniac on his staff? It seemed absurd for anyone to steal an ordinary book.

  But he was only procrastinating. He went to sit again at his desk, leafed through papers. Bulky contracts and specifications for the new water supply for his city. And the Citizens Council had voted a new tax; he would have to hire collectors. Too much nonpolitical work, as usual, and now for the hundredth time. She had spoken in public against the Party this morning in the presence of a PolPol officer, the Underground flaring up again, and—

  He keyed the intercom and ordered, “Bring the girl in,” without giving himself any more time to think about what he was going to have to do.

  He sat waiting, his head aching, trying to hold nerves and face and hands steady. The PolPol report on Barbara was on his desk, mixed up now with the waterworks, and he read it.

  She came into the office quietly, between the blank-faced uniformed PolPol women. She walked unaided and Ahlgren felt a faint, smothered gladness that it had not been necessary to stun her.

  “Leave us,” he told the guards, who instantly obeyed. Would it look suspicious for him to want to be alone with another prisoner? It didn’t matter—in a few minutes he would send her to Conditioning, because he had to send her; there was nothing else the Party could do with her. He felt his heart sinking.

  He met her eyes for the first time and was vastly grateful to see no terror in them. “Sit down, Barbara.”

  She sat down without speaking and watched him as if more sorry for him than for herself. It was her look of that day years ago when he had told her of losing a job . . . If I had married her in those days, he thought, as I almost did, and never joined the Party, I would now be sitting in some outer office waiting, desperate to do anything to spare her the Pain, but helpless. Now I sit here, representing the Party, still helpless. But no, if I had married her I would have found some way to keep her from this.

  “I’m sorry, Barbara,” he said finally. “You know what I must do.”

  The waiting, unchanging sympathy of her eyes wrenched at him. She had never been beautiful, really, but so utterly alive . . .

  “I—would like you to come back when you are—recovered,” he heard himself maundering. “You’ll be all—”

  “Will you be able to marry me then?” Her first words to him burst out in a voice near breaking, like a question held in too long, that she had not meant to speak aloud.

  He sat up straight in his chair, feeling as if the world had suddenly shaken beneath him. “How can you ask me that? You know I can’t marry—I have chosen the Party!” He gripped the desk to stop his hands from trembling; then he realized that she must only be making a desperate attempt to save herself from Conditioning.

  “IN THE name of the Party, sir,” said City PolPol Chief Lazar in a hushed and slightly awed voice, shaking the hand thrust toward him by District Director Perkins. They stood in a small room in the basement of the Party Building in Ahlgren’s city. One-way glass in a wall showed a view of a Treatment Room where Conditioning was sometimes practiced.

  “Lazar, I’ve studied your record.” Perkins’ handshake was massive, like his bearing. “I think you may be taking over in this city very soon, so I had you called down here to watch something. The doctors called me in the District Capital last night about Ahlgren, and we’ve arranged a little test for him today—he doesn’t know I’m here, of course. We should be able to see the climax, if things go as planned.”

  “I—I hardly know what to say, sir.”

  Perkins eyed him shrewdly. “Think you’re the one being tested? No, son, not today. But it won’t hurt you to see this.” He frowned. “Ahlgren started out well in the Party, too. Seemed to have a fine future ahead of him. Now . . .” Perkins shook his head.

  A door leading to a corridor opened and a man dressed in the green smock of a doctor stuck his head into the room. “Would you mind if I watched from here, sir?”

  “No, no, come in. Lazar, this is Citizen Schmidt. Doctor Schmidt, I should say, hey?”

  Lazar acknowledged the introduction perfunctorily. A loyal non-Party citizen was neither a political danger nor a competitor for advancement, and therefore almost totally uninteresting.

  Lazar turned to study the Treatment Room through the one-way glass. It was not impressive, except for the treatment table in the center, a low monstrous thing of wires and power. There were soft lights, chairs, a desk in one corner, and above the desk a small bookshelf. Lazar could see that one book had been placed behind the others, as if someone had tried to hide it. Looking closer, he made out that it was part of an encyclopedia.

  Volume Paa-Pyx.

  AHLGREN was holding Barbara by the wrists; he pulled her around the desk and kissed her. His decision had been made with no real struggle at all. Maybe he had made the decision weeks or months ago, without knowing, and had just been traveling with the Party on inertia. Barbara trembled and tried to pull back and then let herself go against him. She was not merely acting to save herself now, she could not be.

  “They say life can be good again after Conditioning, Barbara,” he whispered to her. “They say many regain full normal intelligence. They say—no, I could never send you to that! Not you, not that!”

  “Oh, Jim, Jim.” Years since anyone had called him by that name. Or was it so long? A half-memory came disturbingly and fled before he could grasp it. But then a real memory came plainly to him, bringing with it a plan of action that was at least better than nothing: the memory of the address the young rebel had spoken to his ears alone.

  “Listen!” He grabbed Barbara’s arms and held her away from him. “There may be one chance, just one small chance for us.”

  “What?”

  “The Underground. I have an address.”

  “No, Jim. You can’t do that.” She backed away, looking toward the door as if she heard the guards coming to seize them both.

  “Why not? Don’t you understand what Conditioning means? Don’t you understand what you are facing?”

  “Yes, but . . .” Indecision showed in her voice and manner. “I don’t know if I should try to tell you.”

  “Tell me what? Don’t you realize what you’re facing?”

  “Yes, but you . . .”

  “Me?” So she could think of his welfare first, even while she faced the Ultimate Pain. She must have loved him all these years. “I’ve had enough of the Party anyway.” The words came so easily and sincerely to his lips that he was surprised as if by hypocrisy in himself, but it was not that. Somehow in the past few minutes his whole outlook on the world had shifted abruptly; the change must have been building for a long time.

  His mind raced ahead, plan
ning, while Barbara watched his face intently, one hand held up to her mouth.

  He pulled a stun pistol out of his desk, checked the charge, and thrust it into his belt. “Follow me. Quickly.”

  A section of the bookcase swung outward at his touch. He led Barbara into the narrow passage in the wall and indicated an unmarked phone set into a small niche. “Private line to District HQ. This may buy us a little time.”

  She reached out tentatively as if to restrain him, but then clenched her fingers and made no objection.

  He picked up the phone and waited until he heard someone on the other end, then said: “Ahlgren here. Rebel plot. They’ve infiltrated. I must flee.” He hung up. Of course District HQ would doubt the message, but it should divide at least for a time the energies of the Party that would now be arrayed against him—and against the frightened girl with him. He led her now to a tiny secret elevator that would take them down to street level. In revolt against the authority he had so long accepted, he felt less alone than he had for years.

  THEY emerged into open air by coming out of the wall in a little-used entrance to a rather shabby apartment house a block from the Party Building, after Ahlgren had studied the hallway through a peephole to make sure it was unoccupied.

  He had discarded his insignia inside the secret passage; his jacket hid the butt of the pistol in his belt. If no one looked too closely at him, he might pass in the half-dark streets for a plainly dressed citizen.

  They walked the side streets toward the Underground address, not going fast enough to attract attention. Barbara held his arm and from time to time looked back over her shoulder until he whispered to her to stop it. Other couples strolled past them and beside them; the normal evening life of the city progressed around them as if the Party and the Underground were no more than fairy stories.

  The young rebel might have told someone else the address, before or after Conditioning had wrenched and battered his mind out of human shape. Ahlgren could not rely on the place being even temporarily safe. Barbara and he could only pause there in their flight, warn any Underground people they could find, and try to flee with them to some place of slightly less danger, if any existed. It was a weak chance, but their only one. There had been no time at all to plan anything better. Rebellion against the Party had burst in Ahlgren with the suddenness of a PolPol raid. His very lack of preparation for this step and his good record to date might make District think for a long time that he was indeed the victim of infiltrating Underground plotters.