Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  Helen, the woman Sabel had known as Helen, walked into his field of vision, turned her face to him as if to deliver a final taunt.

  What it might have been, he never knew. Her dark eyes widened, in a parody of fainting fright. In the next moment she was slumping to the ground.

  Sabel had a glimpse of the other, suited figures tumbling. Then a great soundless, invisible, cushioned club smote at his whole body. The impact had no direction, but there was no way to stand against it. His muscles quit on him, his nerves dissolved. The rocky ground beneath the shelter came up to catch his awkward fall with bruising force.

  Once down, it was impossible to move a hand or foot. He had to concentrate on simply trying to breathe.

  Presently he heard the airlock’s cycling sigh. To lift his head and look was more than he could do; in his field of vision there were only suited bodies, and the ground.

  Black boots, Guardian boots, trod to a halt close before his eyes. A hand gripped Sahel’s shoulder and turned him part way up. Gunavarman’s jovial eyes looked down at him for a triumphal moment before the Chief Deputy moved on.

  Other black boots shuffled about. “Yes, this one’s Helen Nadrad, all right—that’s the name she used whoring at the Parisian Alley, anyway. I expect we can come up with another name or two for her if we look offworld. Ready to talk to us, Helen? Not yet? You’ll be till right. Stunner wears off in an hour or so.”

  “Chief, I wonder what they expected to do with suspended animation gear? Well, we’ll find out.”

  Gunavarman now began a radio conference with some distant personage. Sabel, in his agony of trying to breathe, to move, to speak, could hear only snatches of the talk:

  “Holding meetings out here for some time, evidently . . . mining for berserker parts, probably . . . equipment . . . yes, Sire, the berserker recording was found in his laboratory this time . . . a publicity hologram of Helen Nadrad included in it, for some reason . . . yes, very shocking. But no doubt . . . we followed him out here just now. Joro, that’s the goodlife organizer we’ve been watching, is here . . . yes, Sire. Thank you very much. I will pass on your remarks to my people here.”

  In a moment more the radio conversation had been concluded. Gunavarmen, in glowing triumph, was bending over Sabel once again. “Prize catch,” the Guardian murmured. “Something you’d like to say to me?”

  Sabel was staring at the collapsed figure of Joro. Inside an imperfectly closed pocket of the man’s spacesuit he could see a small, blood-red cylinder, a stub of cut wire protruding from one end.

  “Anything important, Doctor?”

  He tried, as never before. Only a few words. “Dr-aw . . . your . . . wea-pons . . .”

  Gunavarman glanced round at his people swarming outside the tent. He looked confidently amused. “Why?”

  Now through the rock beneath the groundsheet of his shelter Sabel could hear a subtly syncopated, buzzing vibration, drawing near.

  “Draw . . . your . . .”

  Not that he really thought the little handguns were likely to do them any good.

  VICTORY

  In which a representative from the Peace Foundation is sent to the planet of Lorenzoni, the scene of a mysterious conflict, the most one-sided war in the history of the galaxy.

  Along with everyone else on the Shearwater interplanetary ship, Nicholas Shen-yang had a bad five minutes or so of waiting to die, not knowing whether the Condamine patrol craft had decided to blast them or board them. Not until they heard and felt the clunk of hull against hull were the would-be blockade runners reasonably certain that the enemy had chosen to capture them and let them live.

  Hands behind his head, face to the bulkhead along with the Shearwater crew, Shen-yang got through the next five minutes in silence, even when something that must have been a gun barrel was rammed into his back hard enough to leave a bruise. That was after the first quick personal search and was meant to emphasize an order that he should get the hell over there with the others who had been searched and sit down. The voice issuing the order sounded strangely accented to him, but the message was quite understandable. Condamine, Shearwater, and the multitude of other states making up the so-called civilized galaxy shared at least one common language, inherited from old parent Earth, which fact tended to make events like this boarding a little less difficult for all concerned.

  More minutes passed before Shenyang got the chance to show his diplomatic card when a junior officer of the boarding party came around checking identification. After the officer had glowered at him in suspicious fury for half a minute—only a born troublemaker would be carrying such a card, to upset the officer’s smooth routine—Shen-yang was quickly transferred to the boarding party’s launch. His brief passage through the flexible tunnel connecting the two craft allowed him a glimpse of space through its transparent windows. There was Shearwater, the planet he had left yesterday, a full bright dot looking like Jupiter as seen from Earth—except that Shearwater appeared against a backdrop of pearly, soft, faint clouds of whitish nebula, the nebula whose slow drift had cut this solar system off from the galactic world for almost fifty standard years. And somewhere in the dazzle sunward must be the crescent of Lorenzoni, the war-tom world that was his goal, but he had no time to try to pick it out.

  He was calmly unresisting as burly marines aboard the launch shoved him into a space that must have been meant as a closet and locked the door on him. Capture meant nothing essential to Shen-yang, as far as the success of his mission was concerned. He had been going to visit both sides on Lorenzoni anyway, and if fate insisted that he drop in on the aggressors first, so be it.

  He had just been beginning to know and like the Shearwater crew, a half-dozen experienced blockade runners whose swagger still had something self-conscious about it, and he hoped they would manage to come through this in good shape. Likely they would remain as prisoners aboard their own ship, while a Condamine prize crew brought her in. From what Shen-yang had heard of the war so far, there was some hope that they might get home later in a prisoner exchange. . . .

  At last he heard the sounds of separation, as the launch departed from the captured smuggler. A minute later came the solid chunk of her arrival at her berth in what must be a sizable war vessel.

  When Shen-yang was brought off the launch, the Condaminer captain was there to introduce himself, in stiffly correct style, and treat him to another penetrating glare. A minute or two later, in a room or cell almost big enough to be called a cabin, the captain—naturally enough wondering just what sort of diplomat he had bagged so accidentally and what the effect was going to be upon his own career—came to talk with him a little more.

  “Your government does know Lm coming, Captain, though they’ll no doubt be surprised when I show up in your custody. By the way, I hope the crew of the ship you just captured are being cared for properly?”

  “Better than they deserve, in my opinion.”

  “What did they really have aboard as cargo? They told me it was only medical supplies, and I’d like to know if you found anything else.”

  The captain frowned, and his heavy jaw twitched, as if he might be having a hard time trying to re-program himself for diplomacy. “From the little bit I’ve seen so far,” he admitted finally, “it looks as if that might be so. On this particular ship.”

  “Nobody denies that Shearwater ships bring in military cargo too. At least once in a while.”

  “Once in a while, huh?” And that ended the conversation for the present.

  Faster-than-light travel being impossible this deep inside the gravitational well of a solar system, the approach to Lorenzoni took the patrol ship two more days. Free to spend a good deal of his time out of his tiny cabin, Shen-yang during this time got a good look at the nearing planet. It was an Earth-type ball circling a Sol-type sun, and it had been colonized, directly from Earth, a good many centuries ago.

  With the slight magnification available from a viewport, he studied the land mass of Condamine when it was
on nightside and drew the immediate conclusion that the Condaminers feared no attack from space. The glow of a thousand cities and towns shone forth with open cheerfulness.

  Some ten hours later he took another look, at considerably closer range, and caught Ungava, the other sizable continent, in darkness. The blackness enfolding it was eerie—it was not a cloud cover, for there was the ghostly reflected sparkle of the nebula off the great poisoned lakes, and the coastline showed distinctly. But there was not a sign of human civilization, under conditions where the light sparks of every town of twenty thousand or more should have been visible. Shen-yang was a traveled man, and this reminded him of Stone Age worlds and worlds where mindless creatures ruled supreme.

  Even as he meditated upon the meaning of this darkness, there came a sudden pinpoint dazzle right in the middle of it. The flash was over in a moment, but he knew it had been there. Yet another nuclear strike from Condamine, he thought, as if they still feared the very space where their enemies’ cities had once stood—feared that in that deep night one building stone might still be raised upon another.

  The captain later confirmed his thoughts about the flash. “Yeah, we still hit ‘em that way from time to time, when recon confirms some kind of buildup that would make a worthwhile target.”

  The captain drank some coffee and seemed not about to say more; so Shen-yang prodded him: “But isn’t it obvious that the war is really over? I mean you hit them, as you put it, forty-six years ago, with everything you had. That’s the way I’ve heard it.” The captain’s eyes flicked over at him, but not denying anything, and Shen-yang went on: “Their cities are all wiped out—right? Your cities are untouched. Their casualties in that first strike were more than one hundred million—isn’t that so? God knows what they’ve been since or how many people are still alive inside Ungava.”

  A little snort. “Too bloody many.”

  “Your casualties in the whole war are nowhere near that figure. Condamine has a population of between two and three hundred million people.

  Your industry is intact—”

  “There’s the terrorists,” The captain’s voice was milder than his looks. “Every week something is blown up.”

  “So? Maybe there’s more of that than I’ve heard about. Look, I’m here trying to learn, to understand. When I say something you know is wrong, please straighten me out. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Now isn’t your industry essentially intact?”

  “Well, yes.” The captain looked at him, and amplified: “But theirs is too, more than you’d think. They’re dug in like you wouldn’t believe now, and dispersed. Nothing centralized any more.”

  “You’ve seen how it is over there?”

  A shrug. “Common knowledge.”

  “Ungava’s not going to blast you, are they? And they’re not going to invade you. I mean, if your three invasion tries on their continent couldn’t settle the war—?”

  “By God, I wish they’d try that.”

  “But they won’t. So, they’re not really all that dangerous to Condamine, not now at least. Hasn’t the war really been over, Captain, for the last forty-six years!”

  The other stood up, outraged though not surprised. His face had been grim before, but now it was beginning to look dangerous. “Tell that to my buddy, who was killed last month. He’ll have a good laugh.”

  At the military spaceport on Condamine, Shen-yang walked down the ramp from the great sphere of the patrol ship, under a sunny sky tinged green near the horizon. A sprightly wind made banners snap; a good day, he thought, for a parade.

  Three harried-looking civilians stood at the foot of the ramp, looking up it anxiously. At first glance Shenyang knew they had come for him. Hurtling with them in a buried tubecar toward the capital city, Vellore, and the foreign minister who waited there to see him, Shen-yang chatted with the three and lamented the fact that this mode of travel kept him from appreciating the beauties of the countryside. Aboard ship he had been told this was the best season to see the blooms.

  They assured him that he would have a chance, tomorrow or the next day. They were relieved that he accepted his capture in space so equably and had no real maltreatment to complain of. His own thought was that he who chooses to ride with smugglers must take some chances. He had not come for a sterile protocol tour but to find out what was going on.

  “Have you read Orwell?” his boss at the foundation, a hundred light-years distant, had asked him just before he left.

  “Orwell. Yes, a little anyway.”

  “Remember the bit in 1984, where a man is asked to envision the future as a boot, stamping on a human face, forever? That bit’s always stuck in my mind.”

  “I can well imagine.” Now that it was mentioned, he did recall it.

  “I think the world I’m sending you to look at may furnish an example. Nick—what’s the most terrible conclusion you can imagine for a war?”

  “I don’t know. Everybody killed on both sides.”

  “That’s bad, all right. But what we’re looking at on Lorenzoni may be something more Orwellian and therefore—I think—even worse. What about no conclusion at all? The winner knocks out the loser with the first punch and then goes on beating until his victim dies—and then goes on beating some more.”

  “Ungava’s certainly not completely dead.”

  “That’s what the Condaminers say. I think they’re keeping the so-called conflict going, to distract their own people from other matters. Just what, I don’t know.”

  “That ploy is common enough in history. What did you think of the Ungavan envoy?” The first ship out of the Lorenzoni-Shearwater system when the nebula parted had brought such a personage, pleading the cause of his tormented people to the galaxy.

  Dr. Nicobar considered, brushing back long gray hair from her eyes. “He’s a very good talker. He tells how, somehow, dug in against the hail of missiles, working wonders of medical research against radiation poisoning—all good achievements due to the High Leader, of course—Ungavan life and heroic resistance go on. He understates, or gives the impression that he’s understating. He—I don’t know, I wanted to like him and I couldn’t, quite. For a man who represents an absolute dictatorship, he’s perhaps just a little too good, too gentle-saintish, to be taken at face value.”

  “And what about the man from Condamine?” He had come out on the second ship.

  “In the brief exchange I had with him, he didn’t seem to want to talk about the war at all, just about Condamine’s rejoining the League of Galactic Nations. I’m going to talk to him again, of course. But, meanwhile, there’s a ship leaving tomorrow to go in, and I want us to have a representative on it. Here’s your diplomatic card. Go there and see for yourself, and think for yourself, and report personally to me when you come out.”

  On the streets of Vellore the war—if it was a real war—seemed as remote as something on another planet. In every block electronic posters burned energy from street level up to twenty stories high or higher, urging the people to smash Ungava, not to waste, not to talk loosely of military secrets, not to grumble about the rules. But all these exhortations seemed to Shenyang to be largely set at naught by the stores, full of good things to buy; the theaters and houses of entertainment, varied enough to suit any taste and any credit balance, doing a mass business; and by the people themselves.

  The streets were full of folk who obviously enjoyed a wide choice of clothing and personal decoration and of vehicles in which to travel. They were busy, and they looked basically healthy and certainly well-fed. Just a touch glassy-eyed, perhaps—but Shen-yang saw that often enough at home, in the larger cities at any rate.

  The people from the foreign ministry had a hotel room ready for him in one of the bigger and fancier inns on a main street of the capital. With the small bag of personal effects he had so far retained through thick and thin, he moved in, announcing a tiredness which certainly seemed likely enough under the circumstances, and was left alone. Five mi
nutes later he moved right out again. In the first place, he was morally certain—although he had no technical means of proving it—that they had bugged his room. In the second place, he wanted to see just how his hosts would react. And in the third place, he wanted to make what free and unofficial contact he could manage with the citizens.

  He left word at the desk of his departure and mentioned that he would call back, saying where he could be reached when he had picked himself another hotel. Reason for leaving, he gave none.

  Apparently free of all restraint and even observation, he walked the crowded thoroughfares briefly, then settled himself in another hotel, chosen at whim from half a dozen that looked inviting. The men from the ministry had thoughtfully established electronic credit for him, and there was no problem about paying. The room he got this time was a lot smaller but looked just as comfortable. He left his bag in it and walked out again, to try a little mingling with the people.

  Across the street, in the public bar of yet a third hotel, a young woman with a startlingly beautiful face gave him the eye so insistently that he decided to accept Fate again. Shortly she was walking with him back to his room.

  When the door had closed behind them, he cleared his throat and said, “You may have heard this before.”

  “You’re not a stickman,” she opined, raising an eyebrow.

  “If that means am I with the police, no, I’m not I just meant that all I really want to do is talk.”

  In her face amusement began to struggle with other things and eventually prevailed. “As a matter of fact,” she said at last, “that’s all I really wanted to do myself.”

  He started to offer money, but she pantomimed it away, at which point he began to watch her very alertly.

  She said, “Mr. Shen-yang . . .” and paused there to let him appreciate the fact that she already knew his name. “I am sorry your trip was interrupted so unpleasantly but glad that you got to Lorenzoni in one piece. I represent what the rulers of Condamine call the Underground. Dirty Ungavan sympathizers.”