The Man Who Never Missed

by Steve Perry

  There was a flat yard of thick grass trimmed short behind the building in which Pen had his rooms. Khadaji felt the that sink under his dotics as he walked on it, like a plush carpet. He turned and faced Pen, who stood two meters away.

  “Before you can properly influence others, you must control yourself,” Pen said. “Body control is the easiest but it must be mastered. You are trained as a soldier, with weapons. And, I assume, some unarmed skills?”

  “Oppugnate,” Khadaji said. “Military boxing, with hands and feet.”

  “Good. Attack me, using your training.”

  Khadaji hesitated. It was hard to determine Pen’s age from his hands and eyes alone, but he was easily old enough to be Khadaji’s father—maybe his grandfather. “I am still circulating bacteria-aug,” he said. “For another six months, until the colonies die, I will be considerably faster than an unaugmented human.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Pen said. “Launch your attack.”

  Khadaji shifted into a fighting stance, left foot forward, his left hand held high, his right low, fingers extended and stiffened, thumbs curled tightly. He edged forward slightly, keeping his legs wide for balance. He had been training in the unarmed combat for nearly six years; he was young, strong, and practiced. He didn’t want to hurt Pen, so he figured to snake in and tap the man lightly a couple of times and then back off. He kept his eyes impassive, focused on the entire figure, and held his breathing even, so as not to reveal his intent.

  Pen stood quietly, looking relaxed, his hands by his sides.

  Khadaji jumped suddenly, half again as fast as a normal man, and jabbed his stiffened hand at the other man’s solar plexus; it was fast, but not hard.

  Pen pivoted, caught Khadaji’s wrist lightly with his thumb and forefinger and did a kind of two-step dance, ending in a twirl. Khadaji felt himself lose balance and start to fall. He twisted and managed to roll out of the fall, but he hit the ground harder than expected; it jarred his teeth together. He came up, spun, and crouched, to face Pen again.

  Pen stood as he had before, looking unconcerned.

  Khadaji considered the throw. Some sort of wrestling technique, rather than boxing. All right. One of the judo or jujitsu or aikido variants. Well. That could be handled. If he kept his weight centered and only used muscle-strikes, he could avoid being thrown.

  He moved in, snapping his right foot up toward Pen’s groin, still fast but without real power, then stepped down and swung his hand around in a sweeping chop. His stance was solid, it was unlikely he’d be pulled off-balance at this angle.

  Pen shifted, spun again and seemed to wave his hand past Khadaji’s shoulder with only a light touch. Khadaji went over backwards. He reached out to slap at the soft grass with both hands, but he still hit hard, on his back. It knocked the wind from him. He twisted to one side, rolling, and scrambled up, trying to inhale tiny sips of air. Maro’s sun beat upon him and he felt his face go hot. The air was heavy with moisture and sweat rolled down his neck and spine. This was all wrong. He was faster than Pen, he could feel that. Okay. The problem was in his attack. An initiated strike left one more open than defense, an attacker had to commit himself while a defender only had to wait. He would stand his ground and wait for Pen’s move, then.

  The two men stood facing each other for what seemed like a long time to Khadaji. He kept his stance wide and powerful, his hands raised to cover himself high and low, and waited. Pen, meanwhile, simply stood in his neutral stance.

  Finally, Pen moved. He raised his hands and clasped them together. He began to knit his fingers together in an intricate weave, crossing and uncrossing, locking and unlocking the digits in strange and complex patterns. Khadaji stared at Pen’s hands. What was he—?

  Pen stepped forward, almost slowly, Khadaji thought. He reached out with one foot and kicked, a kick aimed at Khadaji’s leading leg, behind the knee. The younger man couldn’t seem to move in time to parry or block. Pen’s instep smacked solidly into Khadaji’s leg, lifting it high. For the third time, Khadaji fell, arms flailing. This time, he stayed on the grass. He sat up and stared at the other man.

  Pen laughed, a deep belly rumble.

  Khadaji shook his head. “I suppose I’m missing something funny.”

  “Only a cliché,” Pen said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “This whole scene.” Pen waved one arm to encompass Khadaji and the surrounding landscape. “The old martial arts master defeating the young student. It’s classic. Problem with clichés is, they get to be that way because they tend to be more or less valid. I couldn’t devise a better means to show you I have something you need to learn than the old routine. Sometimes older is better, it seems.”

  Pen bent and extended a hand to Khadaji, then helped lift him back onto his feet. “The art is called sumito,” he said, “and the idea is to learn to control your own body, not defeat somebody else. When you can make your hands and feet go where you want them to, it doesn’t matter if you have an opponent or not.”

  Khadaji shook his head. He had always been taught that muscle memory required specificity—if you wanted to learn to play nullball, you practiced in zee-gee; if you wanted to improve boxing skill, you boxed with a partner. Anything less was good only for general conditioning, not specific skills. On the other hand, Pen had been tossing him around as if he were feeble and brainless, instead of a trained and augmented professional soldier. Had to be something to what the man said. Had to be something.

  Chapter Eight

  KHADAJI STARED AT the floor. There was a strange pattern of footsteps drawn there, laid out like some madman’s dance. He looked up at Pen. “What am I supposed to do here?”

  Pen smiled. “It’s simple enough. Walk the pattern.”

  Khadaji shrugged. He began to step on the drawn figures. They seemed to be exactly the size and shape of his own feet. The first five steps were simple. He looked at the sixth with disbelief. “I can’t reach that one from here.”

  “Certainly you can.”

  “Not without twisting like a contortionist, I can’t.”

  “Try.”

  Khadaji tried. He kept his weight on his left foot while he stretched his right leg and attempted to twist his ankle to make his right foot conform to the diagram. He lost his balance and almost fell. “Can’t do it,” he said.

  “No?” Pen motioned for Khadaji to stand aside. He stood at the beginning of the pattern and began to walk it. When he reached the sixth step, he simply did it. Khadaji wasn’t sure how. One second he was facing this way, the next second, that way. The man was shorter, had shorter legs, and if he could stretch that far, Khadaji should be able to also.

  It took nine tries before he succeeded, but Khadaji finally made the sixth step. He looked at Pen and smiled.

  Pen’s face was invisible within the shroud, but he did nod. “Very good. The seventh step?”

  Khadaji looked down. Buddha! It was impossible, nobody could get there without falling! He glared at Pen, mentally daring him to do it.

  Pen did. This time, he walked the entire pattern, almost a hundred steps. Ninety-seven, to be exact. It was a number Khadaji would grow to detest. In six weeks, he could manage to make it to step fifty. Sometimes. It was radically different than the oppugnate training he had learned in the military. It didn’t seem to make any sense.

  During that time, Pen began to teach Khadaji other things. They hopped around on one leg. Sat motionless for long periods. Did stretching exercises which hurt him in places Khadaji didn’t even know he had. He was learning something, Khadaji knew. What, he didn’t know. But something.

  Somewhere along the way, Khadaji began to lose the sense of foreknowledge he’d had. He still had the memory, but the sense of oneness he’d felt with the universe during the slaughter faded and became less sharp. There were some moments when he could touch it, but they became fewer and shorter. It was as if he’d passed through a magical door on a conveyer; he continued to move and the door grew small
er behind him. He wanted to stay at the portal, but he could not. And he didn’t know where he was going.

  So, when Pen began one particular teaching, Khadaji found himself puzzled.

  They were sitting in the largest of Pen’s rooms, a low-ceilinged square six meters on a side. The room was cool, despite the heat of Maro’s summer outside, kept that way by a strip of lindex filter set under the opaqued window. There were three foam chairs, a desk with a comp terminal on it, and a large chest against one wall; no other furniture.

  “Pubtending? Are you serious?”

  Pen laughed from within the folds of his gray shroud. “To be sure,” he said. “One must make a living.”

  Khadaji had a little trouble picturing Pen behind a bar, or window, mixing drinks and dispensing tablets. He said as much.

  “Ah, but it is a perfect job for a priest, even one so un-priestly as I. Consider: who has a better opportunity to see people with their masks lowered than a pubtender? Men will confide things to you drunk they wouldn’t tell a brother when sober; stoned women will reveal secrets they’d never speak as pillow talk while straight. More than one pubtender has come from the ranks of practicing psychologists—or gone there from some bar.”

  Khadaji shook his head. “I don’t know…”

  Pen waved one hand. “What’s to know? You’ll have to do something to feed yourself—I won’t be around forever. A top-ranked pubtender can always get a job and as I said, there are few places better to study the human condition. More, it’s a skill I can teach you.”

  Khadaji stood and walked to the plastic window. He touched a control on the sill and the window shifted from near black to clear. The light was too bright, bringing a blast of reflected heat with it. He darkened the window again. “Somehow, it doesn’t seem exactly what I had in mind.”

  “And what did you have in mind?”

  Khadaji turned to look at Pen. “I-I don’t know. Something…”

  “Ah. I see. Well, until you figure out what, precisely, perhaps it would be wise to learn what is available.”

  Khadaji considered it. Pen was right. He only had vagueness where he felt he should have some plan. Pubtending? It was as good as anything, he supposed. And easy enough, he figured.

  He was wrong about how easy it would be. He found that out quickly.

  Pen stood and walked to the comp terminal. He removed a small steel marble from his robe and held it out so Khadaji could see it. Khadaji recognized the ball as a recording sphere, a storage device for information. Though the sphere was small, it would hold several hundred volumes of hard copy.

  “This contains seventeen years of experience as a pubtender,” Pen said. “Every drink I know how to mix, every chem, planetary and local laws regarding dispensing, favorites on different worlds, everything. Cross-referenced, indexed, annotated and illustrated. Come and see.”

  Pen dropped the vacuum-formed steel ball into a circular slot on the computer’s terminal and stroked the unit to life. The operating system acknowledged the format of the sphere with a wash of colors and words across the holoproj image above the keyboard, then went into mode-select.

  “Verbal,” Pen said, “standard Interstitchi, float it.”

  “Acknowledged,” the computer said. It had a deep, feminine voice.

  “Index-categories, primo screen—give me this one visual.”

  “Running.”

  Two seconds after the computer spoke, four words splashed into the air over the unit. Khadaji blinked and stared at the projection. The words were:

  LIQUIDS, SOLIDS, GASES, RADIANTS

  Pen turned to Khadaji. “Pick a category,” he said.

  Might as well keep it simple, Khadaji thought. “Liquids,” he said.

  Pen turned back to the computer. “Liquids—give me the total number, please, verbal will do.”

  “Nineteen thousand three hundred sixty-nine,” the computer said.

  Khadaji raised his eyebrows. “Buddha! You’ve made that many different kinds of drinks?”

  “So it seems.”

  “You can’t remember them all.”

  “I probably could, but there wouldn’t be much point to it. That’s why I have the sphere. Usually, it’s enough to learn the ten or twenty most popular ones in any given pub to get by—you can call up anything else if you need it.”

  Khadaji shook his head again, something he seemed to be doing a lot lately. “I wouldn’t have believed there could be that many different kinds of drinks.”

  Pen chuckled. “People or mues will drink almost anything. Some very strange stuff.” He said to the computer, “Liquids—Shin’s Kiss, give the ingredient list, visual.”

  “Running.”

  Two seconds later, the holoproj lit up with:

  SHIN’S KISS

  30CC BLENDED LIQUOR - WHISKY STOCK (QUADRANT COMFORT) 30CC FRUIT EXTRACT - COCONUT MILK (ISLE OF WENT)

  30CC VEGETABLE EXTRACT - CUCUMBER SOAK (SHIN)

  40-45 GRAMS SUCROSE POWDER

  DIHYDROGEN OXIDE/CARBON DIOXIDE BLEND, QS TO TOP.

  Pen said, “It should be pretty obvious how I have them organized—I go from general to specific, ending with a brand name, if there is one.”

  “Interesting,” Khadaji said. “But it looks pretty tame. I would think there’d be a lot stranger stuff.”

  “Don’t let the names fool you,” Pen said. “Computer, give me an ingredient list of Shin—skip the cucumber.”

  “Running.”

  Another list lit the air, this time mostly chemical compounds. Water, ammonia, sodium chloride, potassium chloride, uric acid, creatinine, creatine, urea, phosphorus, magnesium—the list ran on. It didn’t mean anything to Khadaji.

  “Don’t recognize it?” Pen chuckled again. “You should. It’s common enough. Urine.”

  Khadaji blinked. “Piss?”

  “Human urine, to be precise. Shin is made by soaking a cucumber in urine for a week, then blending it into a nice frothy texture.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Not at all. The drink is quite popular on some worlds—Thompson’s Gazelle, for one. They even drank a version of it on Earth at one time, as a remedy for snakebite. And there was one culture which drank the urine of those intoxicated on certain mushrooms—to get the effect without some of the nasty side effects of the mushrooms themselves.”

  “Shit.”

  “As I said, there are some strange beings who will drink even stranger drinks.” Pen’s voice was dry. Khadaji didn’t know if he was being had or not. He suspected not.

  “There are fewer chemicals used for recreation in the solid and powder categories, fewer still in gases and radiants. And, of course, which ones are legal on which worlds determines their use. Is it a bit more complex than you thought?”

  Khadaji stared at the formula for Shin’s Kiss, still glowing in the air half a meter away. “Yeah. A bit.”

  “You don’t need a degree on most worlds to challenge the pubtender’s exam, but you do need to learn a few things. We might as well get started.”

  Khadaji nodded. Well. It wouldn’t be dull, not if there were other chemicals like Shin’s Kiss. My.

  Khadaji had learned a good deal about falling, rolling and tumbling, he realized, as he found himself flying through the air for the tenth time that day. He nicked, hit the grass at a good angle, and came up, without injury or even mild pain.

  “You were sleeping,” Pen said. He stood three meters away, enveloped in his ever-present shroud. The wind was chilly, it was late fall shading into winter and snow was expected in the mountains within a few days. Khadaji nodded. He hadn’t been concentrating and the result showed it. Sumito required total attention for it to work; anything less was cause for instant loss of control. After five local months, he was getting better, but he still had a long way to go. Muscle memory had to be trained, Pen told him, and concentration had to be sharpened to a needle’s point. He could walk to the seventy-second step.

  As for the planet, he was getting us
ed to it, as well. The smells of the air no longer seemed alien, nor the slight differences in gravity, nor the actinic quality of the local sun’s light. The people still waged their war against the Confed, with no success. More troops had been sent to the world and the numbers of the ready-to-die attackers could not overcome the firepower of the Confederation machine. Khadaji wondered sometimes if he and Pen would eventually be the only people alive except troopers…

  The snow was piled half a meter thick upon the frozen ground. Khadaji and Pen walked over it on flat, thin sheets of enforced plastic radiating from their slushboots like artificial spider’s webs. There was a flaw in the heating system of Khadaji’s suit—a spot over his left buttock the size of his hand so cold it was going numb.

  “Primary routes of administration?” Pen didn’t wear a conditioned suit, only the shroud of his order.

  Khadaji’s breath made frosty clouds as he spoke. “Oral, anal, vaginal, nasal, ophthalmically, otically, cutaneously.” He hit a patch of soft snow with his left web and sank in that direction, almost toppling.

  “You forgot poenile—the meatus urinarius,” Pen said. “Use the mnemonic and you won’t.”

  Khadaji blinked. Damn. The memory device—flashed across his mental screen. On Aqua, crafty people never open virginal orifices. The first letter of each word stood for one of the primary routes of drug administration.

  “Secondary,” Pen said.

  “Sub-Q, IM, IV, IC.”

  “Good. We’ll do nine kilometers today, so we should have time to cover nasal adequately. Let’s start with powders.”

  Khadaji nodded. It was going to be a long walk.

  Khadaji sat nude in the hot swirling waters of the local immersion tub, next to Pen, who was fully clothed in his robes. Nobody seemed to think anything of that, a man dressed to the eyeballs, and Khadaji was quite used to it by now. The thickened water stroked Khadaji’s sore muscles and the aroma of mint floated up from the surface with the steam. A plastic roof kept the snow and most of the cold out; it was late, and only a few people enjoyed the water with them.