Exile

by Al Sarrantonio

  They loved him!

  This was something that Prime Cornelian had yet to fully understand. He knew it was possible; as a student of history he understood the phenomenon well. But these adoring, wildly happy, tear-stained faces to whom he had merely brought a victory he had expected all along—this was something new and unknown to him. And he found that he was enjoying it.

  Waving now to the endless crowds, lifting two and sometimes four limbs in acknowledgment, to the extent that his joints began to ache for an oil bath (oh, how good that would feel later!) he had to admit that it was much better to be liked than hated. Not quite as good, or useful, as being feared—but it could take second place.

  And to the horizon, to either side of the grand thoroughfare which had been built by the early Martians to celebrate their independence and their democracy, he saw only Martian faces, filled with love for him.

  For the briefest moment, his own heart felt something like love for these, his people, to whom he had brought greatness for his planet.

  Proudly, he stood up on his rear limbs and waved high to the crowd, knowing that they would enjoy the rest of what the day held in store, the rest of the victory parade.

  Behind Cornelian's armored float came another display, at eye level. As the ancients had done, so, too, now marched, in the modern equivalent of chains, the vilified loser of the recent conflict: Targon Ramir, lately Venusian leader, now conquered and humbled.

  And behind the prisoner and the mile of sharply dressed, crisply marching Martian Marines, a veritable circus of wonders: miles of captured goods already imported from Venus: carts filled with fruits and vegetables; expensive fishes and animals rarely seen on parched Mars, not even in zoos—otters, seals, the massive, tanked sleek body of a tiger shark swimming angrily and ceaselessly, a penguin (all but extinct on Earth, a quick failure at Mars' north polar cap, but thriving in the doctored southern wastes of Venus' growing ice shelf)—and tomatoes as large as big fists, cabbages like leafy gods, red peppers the size of heads, bananas so yellow they hurt the eyes. All of these were wonders to the thin Martians. And there were other goods as well: trees, sequoia breeds pulled up at the root and transported whole, displayed on trailers like fallen rockets; they would make expensive houses and be worked by Martian craftsmen into marvelous carvings. Indeed, there had been a time on Mars when wood itself had proved better barter than precious metals; these days, it was merely pricey and rare. There were carvers out in that crowd, Cornelian knew, who now wept with joy and thanksgiving. Feeling their eyes on him now, he made his wave even more imperious.

  There came caravans of Venusian equipment. Though much had been left on Venus to aid Carter Frolich in his continued work, much had been stolen away to find new uses on Mars. The prize of the lot: a feeder station, whose parts, now displayed, would be reassembled in the Syrtis region and aid in Mars' own continual renewal. It represented the finest in all the Worlds, and though Frolich had been loath to part with it (not that he had had much choice), he had contented himself with Cornelian's promise of aid to build even bigger and better facilities. At this, Frolich's eyes had nearly washed over with grateful tears.

  My, my! Cornelian thought. Everyone loves me these days!

  And then came eight massive plasma detonators; their tubes, bluer than any ocean or sky, straddling three trailers each. They made the sequoias look like toothpicks. But here they were, serving a threefold purpose as testaments to Targon Ramir's failure, as spoils of war, and (though no Martian was aware of it) as useful weapons on the home front.

  If any of these adoring millions, traveled here today from say, far-off Argyle Planitia, should plan open revolt in the future ...

  The High Leader smiled to himself: so many weapons! So many ways!

  And on and on came the parade, the miles of goods, the nearly endless stream of booty that made Wrath-Pei's pirating look puny by comparison.

  Wrath-Pei

  For a moment the High Leader's demeanor darkened, as all of his remaining problems lined up in his mind: Wrath-Pei, who would be dealt with in the future; Kris's daughter; and that infernal boy Dalin Shar, apparently still alive, though inconsequential; and then that other problem.

  There it was again--that tickle at the back of Cornelian's mind that he could not scratch. What was it? From the beginning of the enterprise, there had been this feeling of something else, something hidden....

  What was it?

  What the devil was it?

  The High Leader came back to himself, realizing that, for a moment, the grand parade had stopped and that he stood, frozen and angry, roaring like a metal lion on his high perch. Down below him, the crowd stood suddenly mute and frightened. As well they should be. Cornelian could imagine how he looked: the depths of terror he was capable of instilling, as well as beneficence.

  Loosening his iron fists, allowing his mouth to relax from its bellow of anger and frustration, he showed a kindly face and said, "Proceed!"

  Instantly, the fear turned once more to cheering, and the procession continued: the child-slaves from Venus, hundreds and hundreds, in ranks of fifty and files of a hundred, in their new red uniforms, the new Martian Youth who would someday return to Venus, thoroughly indoctrinated, and run it in Mars'—in Cornelian's—name.

  Oh, such a day!

  Such a spectacle!

  But here they were, already at their destination! The high, pink sandstone facade of Olympus Stadium already loomed before them. To either side of the massive gates, which had been opened wide to accommodate today's procession, spectators were massed to gain entrance to their seats. Cornelian could see the frenzy in their eyes.

  Not to be missed! Not this!

  And then Cornelian was passing beneath the portal, his head nearly touching the crown. There was the cool darkness of the entry tunnel—and then they burst out into sunlight, and the bathing roar of cheers that greeted the High Leader as he was slowly borne into the high, deep bowl of the structure.

  Oh, the green of the field—geener than any lawn on Mars, sprinkled with precious water day and night for days to bring it to succulent thickness! And then, how carefully it had been clipped! As the High Leader regally looked down, the smell of that grass reached his brain, and he nearly swooned with delight! Here was something nearly unknown on Mars—the odor of cut grass!

  Magnificent!

  And finally, his armored float, now a dais, was moved into place at the far end of the stadium, and the crowd hushed as one, the gasp of their silence an audible sound, as they waited for his words.

  The High Leader paused for a moment and drank it in: the green grass, with its waiting gallows gantry in the center; the ring of stiffly standing, raser rifle-bearing Red Police circling the perimeter of the field; the seats packed with expectant faces all the way up to the high lip of the stadium; the flags of the three worlds—Earth, Mars, Venus—flapping in the languid breeze high above that lip: the new Martian flag—a black sickle in a black circle, in a field of crimson—in the center and higher than the other two. The blue-green of Earth's flag, and the yellow of Venus', seemed to stand in subjugation and gratitude to Mars—to the High Leader himself.

  He gripped the edge of his platform with his front digits and looked out over them.

  And then he spoke.

  He spoke, and shouted, and waved his fists, and their cheers rose, higher than his dais, higher than the lip of the Olympus Stadium, and higher than the yellow and blue-green and red flags.

  He screamed at them, told them of their power and destiny, how they were made to rule. "Yes! Yes!" they screamed back; it was their fate to rule, and it was their joy for him to lead them!

  He went on and on, for an hour and nearly two, until twilight came and dropped into darkness; until the stadium lights took over for the departing sun; until his voice was dry and his fists tired of beating at the air. And then suddenly he turned from them, at the height of their ecstasy, and the lights went out, except for one brilliant spot which fell on the gallo
ws gantry in the center of the stadium.

  And the lone figure who was bound to the top, as fires were lit beneath.

  Targon Ramir fell asleep three times during Cornelian's speech. He knew that whenever he awoke, he would be able to tell exactly what the so-called High Leader was saying. The harangue was such a mishmash of ancient rhetoric, such a theatrical display of jingoism, worldistic blather, and twisted patriotism that it literally put Targon to sleep. There were sections of it that had been lifted whole from other such speeches of the past.

  When the chemical fires were lit below him, however, Ramir came fully awake. He knew what would follow. He had expected Prime Cornelian to at least offer him a good drugging to dull the searing pain to come, but he should have known better.

  Luckily, he had been able to devise something himself (thank you for those chemistry tutorials back in his early days with Carter Frolich!) from the various putrid meals he had been fed (cocoa, distilled from the rancid substance the Martians called krint, had finally done the trick), and now he was well on the way to feeling little when the fires reached him.

  No doubt the insect was out there somewhere in the darkness, licking his metal lips over the show to come.

  The gantry's metal had been treated with a layer which allowed the flames to creep upward, growing as they rose. Targon had heard that Cornelian had even considered using some of his precious stolen Venusian wood to stoke the fires, but Sam-Sei had been brought in instead to simulate a wood burning and thereby save money.

  Targon almost laughed at the thought.

  Targon's last days had been philosophical ones. The obligatory torture had taken much of his outer existence away, leaving him only with private thoughts. He decided he was a good man, and so could go to his death with pride—even if his body no longer looked very appealing.

  Whatever sadness he had left he had saved for Venus—the planet itself, and on what it would now become. The stolen children, which would have been Venus' legacy, would still be that, though in a horribly mangled form. Perhaps there was one or two among them who would resist the indoctrination to come and hold hope in a secret place....

  The heat was beginning to grow—to the point where, even with the drug, Targon could not ignore it.

  Targon thought of Carter Frolich and found that he could no longer find hatred for the man. While Targon was about to taste hell and then pass on to whatever else there was, Carter had made his own hell and would live in it until Prime Cornelian had no further use for him. That Frolich did not realize he was in hell made him only that much more pitiable.

  There—a hint of high heat now, making breathing difficult. It was like that moment in the dentist's chair when all his potions fail and the laser hits a still-sharp nerve.

  Targon knew that the end was near. He would mercifully suffocate before he burned. His body, as unappealing as it was now, would be quite unattractive roasted to a cinder.

  The stadium's cheers were beginning to fade. Flames were licking at Targon's legs. The drug was working, at least for the moment. He began to gulp at hot air, fighting with the flames for oxygen. "God help Venus!" he cried out hoarsely.

  And then he felt himself rising. It was as if he were being lifted on a column of heat and cloud. There was pain, but it was distant—as if the dentist had done his work.

  All at once he felt a surge of hot memory and saw himelf back in his early life, on a street in Delhi, on a golden day when a man saved him from himself and the entire future of a planet opened up to take him up on golden wings.

  Chapter 29

  Beyond the outer reaches of the Five Worlds, beyond their outermost world, in a region of darkness but not emptiness known as the Kuiper Belt, Kay Free met with her two companions once more.

  Again, Mel Sent was last to arrive, with blusterings and lack of apology.

  "So much to do—always so much to do! There was Mother to attend to briefly, and then once again . . ."

  She went on, but there was an undercurrent of melancholy to her complaints that Kay Free both understood and mourned.

  "I was here when requested—as always," Pel Front snapped.

  Mel Sent began to defend herself, making Pel Front even more waspish.

  Kay Free said nothing, though normally she would referee and find contentment in the act. But her mind was on other things.

  "You've both attended to your other duties?" she asked when finally the sparring between Mel Sent and Pei Front ended on its own.

  "Yes," Pei Front said shortly.

  "Mother was not happy--but, yes, of course."

  "None of us is happy," Kay Free said.

  "True," Mel Sent said, and even Pei Front did not disagree.

  "Then we are agreed that the calling was not a false one," Kay Free said.

  "Agreed." Mel Sent sighed.

  Pei Front nodded.

  "Very well," Kay Free said, with a sense of finality.

  There were no creatures here, no life-forms to inhabit. Kay Free herself was but a whisper of pale light, a shimmer on the border of the visible and infrared spectrum. Seen by an optical telescope, she would be all but invisible, a scatter of particles excited by the faintest of solar winds. With the aid of an instrument studying the infrared band, she would appear more substantial; in a radio telescope, she would give evidence as a blot Of the faintest noise.

  For some reason, perhaps sadness, Kay Free wished that she was embedded in a life-form at the moment. She sensed the same in the others. In her mind's eye, she still saw the bloated, blackened dead thing she had shared in the water; and now she knew the source of her despondency.

  "I wish this were not so," Mel Sent said; and if she had been in a life-form capable of tears, she would show tears at this moment.

  "Wishing will not make it go away," Pei Front said, his peevishness muted.

  "There is work to do," Kay Free said, seeking to break the spell.

  The others acceded; and work was done.

  Kay Free thought of farming. Or, specifically, of harvest.

  She had studied farming once, early in her days here, had studied it with the fascination she held for all life. On the third planet, where she had begun her study, she had first been drawn to the regularity of it: rows of planted things, cultivated with almost worshipful diligence, because, to these creatures on the third planet, this cultivation meant life itself. For a brief time she had studied the hunt—but had quickly lost interest, because hunting was only the extension of the end of all life: death. Death did not interest her, except as a process; it was the struggle of life to stay alive that she found fascinating, and elegant. Noble was a word she had favored.

  Pei Front had argued, and persuasively, that the growing of crops was only another form of hunting: that one form of life, vegetation, was raised with care not out of love but only to sustain another form of life. "It's the same as the raising of livestock," he had said, "only vegetables don't moo."

  His reasoning had been persuasive, and yet it had not won Kay Free over; to her, vegetables, though life, were not in any way sentient. They were more a hybrid of life and nonlife; even a cow could think, on its own terms (she had once inhabited a cow, just to test this theory), but a vegetable was nothing more than response to stimuli.

  But this was all play: what really interested her was the excitement that the end product of farming engendered in the farmers themselves. The harvest was, on the third planet at that time, an actually mystical experience something that would later be called religious. There were festivals to the natural world, to water and earth, blessings for rain and temperance of climate, worship of the star that gave the farmers, and their crops, warmth and needed sustenance.

  "Hogwash," Pel Front had said—pointing to these same primitive farmers beating in the skulls of rival tribesmen when in the least threatened, when Kay Free had tried to argue their nobility. "They just do what they do to stay on their mudball as long as possible, before turning back to dust."

  But Kay Fre
e had kept her thoughts and had a!-ways taken a kind of schoolmarmish pride in the witnessing of any harvest, be it a row of fat kale in Mesopotamia or the first hydroponic tomatoes, tiny and pallid, on Mars.

  And here, now, was a different kind of harvest.

  While performing her task, something unknown to her dropped over her like a shroud. In all of the millennia of her existence, she had only felt doubt once or twice. Always, it had dissipated almost before it was sensed.

  This time, it rose into her thoughts and stayed. Instantly the calling came to her.

  It came to the others, also. A light-year to her left, Pel Front stopped his task; and a hundred light-years beyond him, Mel Sent did the same. Without living bodies to inhabit, they became merely particles frozen in space. It was more a silence through their being than an outer silence here, where there was no sound.

  As always, everything was lifted away from Kay Free: All thought and awareness were gone; she was freed of everything save being itself.

  Without thinking or speaking, she said, "Yes, my Life."

  Blissful nothingness filled her, drowned her doubts, washed her clean.

  "Yes, my Life," she repeated.

  As instantly as it had come, the moment of calling went away.

  Kay Free sensed in her companions, also, a removal of doubt and a cleansing.

  No longer did she wish for a living thing to inhabit, in order to produce tears. There was still a sadness but with it now, making it whole, was understanding.

  In a little while they were finished.