The Lights of Skaro

by David Dodge

  The lightning died suddenly when my clip of shells ran out. I snatched another gun from a dead guard as we stumbled over the bodies. The reek of gunpowder and hot metal was incense in the god’s nostrils. I wanted to kill again. I had tasted the sacrifice, and it was wonderful.

  The guards in the middle of the bridge did not open up on us immediately. One of them squeezed off a nervous spurt of shots that went over our heads because of the rising curvature of the bridge. Somebody with a cooler head shouted a command and the firing stopped. They were waiting for us, waiting for me to fire first and give our position away. They couldn’t miss us in the narrow slot of the bridge, once they knew the range.

  That was good, and the shorter the range the better. I went towards them, holding Cora’s wrist, tugging her along impatiently when she held back. I was eager for blood, death, and the successful outcome of my scheme to beat Bulič and the rokos, once and for all.

  It was a genuine eagerness while it lasted. I felt no fear. I was, I suppose, irrational at that point, but I was certainly fully prepared to kill and be killed. I dragged Cora on against an increasing backward pull that only irritated me,

  She was trying to say something. I whispered impatiently, “Come on! Come on! We’ve got to get closer to them!” and yanked her forward.

  “Jess ! Jess ! Listen to me!” She had come near enough with my urgent yank to make her own whisper heard. “I’ve lost the rug! But we’re above the river. All we have to do is drop over and swim! Don’t you understand? We don’t have to fight our way across the bridge! We’re above the river!”

  I was immediately sane and afraid. When you have accepted death, got over cringing from the idea and written yourself off, it’s a horrible thing to be dragged back to hope of life. Gooseflesh broke out all over me. My knees shook. A cold ball of fear formed in my stomach. Behind us, men were shouting orders. Hand-lights had begun to flicker, bobbing jerkily and swiftly towards us through the square. Ahead of us, men with levelled weapons waited to touch trigger at the first glimpse of our shadows. The machine-gunners in the minaret waited for the same glimpse. We were naked and alone and helpless, within moments of the death I had worked for, and safety lay below us in the rushing, unseen darkness of the river that was at once armor, screen, and a vehicle to carry us away if we could reach it from the brink of annihilation. The split seconds it took me to drop the gun, boost Cora to the bridge parapet, scramble up beside her and leap with her out and away as far as we could jump were a part of my existence I will remember as dragging eternities of wincing terror.

  We were suspended, for a moment in mid-air, between life and death. It was that close. They saw us on the parapet, either outlined against the stars or in a flash from one of the hand-lights. Automatic weapons hammered in a long roll. There were flashes of fire that we sensed as winks of light above us while we were falling.

  Jumping feet first, the only way we could hope to drop an unjudgeable distance without breaking our backs, we went very deep. Floating to the surface, I swam hard with the strong pull of the current, staying under until my breath gave out. When I at last had to come up for air I was even farther downstream than I had hoped. Unharmed, free, and confident of my capabilities in the water, I risked a call to Cora. She called back from somewhere behind me, not far.

  They couldn’t have heard us above the rush of water around the bridge piers and their own noise. They were shooting, spraying the river with methodical patterns of fire that reached out, radius after successive radius, to the farthest range of their weapons, roman candles of flame following our probable movement with the stream. But they misjudged the speed of the current. We were beyond and below their fire all the way. When the speedboats under the bluff finally roared into movement and came after us, their searchlights poking for us across the water, we were five hundred yards below the bridge and being carried ever closer to the far bank by the wide sweep of the current.

  I wasn’t worried about speedboats at that distance. The middle of the river marked the extent of Free Territory. They would hesitate to cross it with their lights showing even if they caught up with us before we reached the bank. I wasn’t worried that they could do that. I wasn’t worried about anything, only dully aware that we had made it and that I felt about Cora as I had at the beginning. I no longer hated her. I had no real right to hate her. She was only a girl I had never pretended to care for, a burden and a responsibility I had to bring safely ashore before I could abandon her. I kept calling to her, demanding answers so I could keep her located: “Are you all right?” and, “Take it easy. How is your wind?” and, “Keep pushing to your right. Can you feel the current slackening?” and, “How are you doing?” until she panted, “I’m – all – right. Don’t – make -me – talk.” After that I swam at her left side, shouldering her crosswise out of the current to safety, completing the job I had to do without pride that I had brought her through it all, that it was I who had protected and supported and sheltered and shepherded and saved her with my brains, strength, and cleverness, until we swam into a slow swirl of slack water and touched down on a mudbank.

  A screen of bush and trees beyond the mudbank hid us from probing searchlights and the remote risk of a long rifle shot when the speedboats got that far. They went by once, far out, again going home. We rested on a rotten log and watched their lights through the screening bushes, exhausted and shivering. It was bitterly cold.

  After a while Cora said, with a poor attempt at brightness, “Well, we did it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Some gesture of celebration seems appropriate.”

  I knew what she meant, but I wanted no part of her charm turned on for me, then or ever. I said, “Let’s celebrate by moving along before we freeze to death.”

  She made no more suggestions that we kindle warmth between us.

  Search parties were out patrolling the roads before we started walking. The Free Territory command knew from the fireworks on the bridge that a breakout of some kind had been attempted. It made them look around on their side of the river. Breakouts had succeeded before, although we were told that nobody else had ever come through Skaro with a full-scale send-off like ours.

  We were picked up by a jeep-load of soldiers, not Americans this time but Britishers, four Tommies who took off their blouses to cover us and brought out from under the jeep seat a bottle of rakia, strictly against regulations and very welcome to people in our condition. Everyone pretended not to notice the rakia fumes when we reached headquarters. We were questioned by a board of officers representing the U.N. authority; an English major, an American major, and, most luckily, a French captain who knew Cora by sight. He had met her in Paris. As soon as they had satisfied themselves that we were what we claimed to be, they had the good sense to give us quarters and let us sleep, putting the real questioning off until the next afternoon.

  It was a thorough job when they got down to it. It lasted for several hours. We had to lead them step by step into the People’s Free Federal Republic, through it, and out again, with names, dates, and places. We both protested the questioning. As civilians and working reporters we had every right to put our own stories on the cables before the news about us leaked to other press services. The board guaranteed that there would be no leaks, and that once we had supplied them with whatever information we could they would not only give us a free hand, but set us up with radio contact to the nearest cable office and a place to work, as well as free board and room. With that understanding, we co-operated. Not too freely, and not volunteering any information that was also news except in answer to direct questions, but enough to get them excited. There had been no uncensored news from the Republic for a long time, a complete blackout for several days. All they knew was that every other press correspondent in the Republic had been jailed for espionage, and diplomatic relations were strained very thin. We had considerably more to report than their own intelligence service.

  After it was over they gave us what they had promised.
I drew a room at Bachelor Officer’s Quarters, a typewriter, even an orderly to run messages page by page to the radiocenter. Also cigarettes and a pot of coffee. It was veryde luxe.

  Cora had equivalent accommodations somewhere else. I didn’t see anything of her for a while. To match the story I knew she would be writing, I sent off two thousand words about the upset that had taken place in the Republic. Yoreska’s death, Bulič’s seizure of power, and an analysis of the political trend which could be expected as a result of the palace revolution. The political analysis would have every expert in the field calling me crazy in print until time proved me right and they had to eat their words. I led with my chin, wide open, making flat predictions which were against all apparent probabilities. We, Cora and I, weren’t important spot news at Double Double Urgent cable rates, so I left us out of it. I saved our story for the follow-up. I intended to write the follow-up of all time. My first flash was only to attract attention to it. I meant it to be a piece of journalism that would be held up as an example to generations of newspapermen. Not just another I-Was-There-As-Told-By-Big-Name-To-Small-Name, but I Was There And Caused It To Happen. I, Jess Matthews, Maker of History as well as reporter of news.

  It went well, at the beginning. I found it easy to hit the capital I’s. Bulič had nothing on me. I did this, I did that, I consistently outfoxed the opposition. I saw that such and such was about to happen, with remarkable foresight, and took proper steps to circumvent it in such a way that I always landed on my feet. I was really clever, in retrospect, and when the chips were down I strong-armed my way out like a hero. To slug your way through thirty-two thousand thugs and an army while dragging a helpless female along practically by the hair is no small feat, as anyone would realize as soon as my story hit the presses. I drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and enjoyed myself pounding the “I’ key.

  The thrill didn’t last. The key grew progressively less useful. Thinking about your own story, even telling it orally in reasonable good faith, is not the same as putting it down in cold black and white. It’s like being under oath, with every word permanently recorded and your sworn signature attached. Before you write it, you think: Wait a minute, wait a minute. Is this the way it really happened? Am I telling it as a neutral observer would have seen it?

  Trying to be neutral, I found Cora creeping into my story with increasing frequency; not as a helpless female dragged along by the hair, the way I wanted her to appear, but as a mind and will and driving force. I began to see, first with irritation and then with what amounted to shock, how much she had done to guide, push, pull, cajole, trick, and fight us all that long hard road to the mudbank. I don’t mean that I wrote myself down, either. She could never possibly have made it without me. But more and more I saw myself as the horse, not the driver, with a bodiless bit in my mouth and a cool, calculating hand on the reins. It wasn’t my story I was writing. It was Cora’s.

  I damned all neutral observations and tore up what I had written. Objective writing is not the only means for telling a story. Interpretative journalism or constructive reporting or plain out-and-out news slanting, whatever anyone wants to call it, was a field in which I had had plenty of experience. I set out to slant Cora right out of the picture.

  It still wouldn’t come off. I could write fiction round her, but I couldn’t write history. And history was what I was working with. I wrote, tore up, rewrote and tore up again for hours, all through a terrible afternoon and into the dark of evening, without producing a page in which I shone as I wanted to shine. The end of the story was my own, certainly. I clung to that knowledge to keep me going. But I couldn’t get to the end without Cora’s help. I looked pretty strong in the beginning, when I was dragging her bodily away from Danitza, or forcing her to humble herself behind the yashmak, or making her take off her shoes to let me bandage her heels. In those pages I was the dominant male, will against will and mine winning over hers because I was physically her superior. If I disliked her, how she must have detested me for my threat of force to have my way. What bitter pills she must have swallowed in bending to those threats, taking flat orders without question or discussion, meekly following where I led as long as I led with confidence, then using her charm, intelligence, understanding of character, and finally her ultimate coin not to oppose my will but to bolster it when it faltered, direct me when I had lost direction, strengthen me when I weakened, and when I was about to throw our lives away in sheer crazy senselessness, bring me out of it with cool sanity and save us. Both of us. She could have pulled loose from me at any time on the bridge and jumped. Instead, she had tugged me away from the waiting gun muzzles at the risk of her own life. It had been she who boosted me to the parapet and into the safety of the river, not I who boosted her. Without her, I would have died.

  I was down to spiritual bedrock by the time I got that far. I looked naked truths in the eye, not liking what I saw and with a bad taste in my mouth, but beyond the point where I could deceive myself. I knew why I had come to hate her, why my growing admiration and attraction and affection for her had curdled. She had offered herself, who had been mine, to Bulič in a vain and useless attempt to buy our lives, and I couldn’t take it at that price. It was the one and only thing that could have driven me voluntarily to elect death instead. Honor, reputation, patriotism, the power of my by-line – I had been willing enough to sell those for whatever they would bring. I couldn’t sell Cora Lambert, or let her sell herself. With this stunning realization in my mind, an awful question followed: Had she known it? Had the provocation which sent me at Bulič’s throat been deliberate, to goad me into desperate action, not a betrayal but another weapon in her bag of tricks? Had she played me off against Bulič, water against fire to produce steam and an explosion instead of wet ashes and failure?

  It was black night when I ran from my room to look for her.

  She wasn’t in her quarters when I learned where they were. The typewriter, coffee-pot, and cigarettes were there. A blank piece of paper was in the typewriter, without a mark on it. Half a dozen cigarette butts had been stubbed out in an ashtray. A cold cup of coffee hadn’t been touched.

  It took me another few minutes to find the orderly who had been assigned to her. He said, “I don’t know where she is, sir. She left her quarters hours ago. Told me I needn’t wait. She didn’t say where she was going.”

  “When did she send off her first dispatch?”

  “She didn’t send off any dispatch, sir.”

  “What?”

  “Not by me, sir. She may have—”

  I didn’t wait for him to finish.

  I found her by searching all the remote corners of the Army post. Whatever was eating at her strongly enough to keep her from filing coverage on one of the great news breaks of our time, I guessed it would be something that took her off to think by herself.

  I guessed right.

  She was sitting on a tree stump by a disused road that ran down a hill to the river. The Skaro bridge was a few hundred yards below, about the same distance and in the same perspective from where she sat as it had been from our hilltop graveyard on the other side. The lights were on again, the guards posted. The brilliant band of illumination along the prohibited river bank, with its shimmering duplicate reflected in the water of the river, made the town look more than ever like a carnival setting, except that no merrymakers moved in the lights. Only armed guards. The searchlight from the minaret was trained in our direction, and although its beam was focused downward on the bridge, enough diffused light came across the river and up the hill to show Cora sitting on her roadside stump staring at the People’s Free Federal Republic.

  The post command had dug up a WAC uniform for her, without insignia. Coming up behind her I couldn’t see the lack of regulation brass, but she was the only woman on the post who would be wearing WAC clothes and have her hair tied, back with a ribbon. There were other indications by which I could have recognized her in a far more anonymous dress than the one she wore. Even in yashmak an
d pantaloons.

  I said, “What are you doing here?”

  “Sitting.” She answered without turning her head.

  “Why haven’t you filed your story?”

  “I couldn’t write it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It wouldn’t jell.”

  “That’s silly. Even if it doesn’t jell, you can at least put words together.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “You’ll lose your job if you don’t file something, you know. I’m a couple of hours ahead of you already.”

  “I suppose so.”

  She wasn’t interested. She went on staring at the lights of Skaro.

  “I’ll write it for you, if you like. I’ve got nothing else to do’.

  “Would you, Jess? I’d be grateful.”

  “You’d be more grateful if I went away and left you alone. What’s the matter?”

  A minute later I said, “If something I’ve done or failed to do has anything to do with it – I suggest the possibility only because I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching during the last couple of hours – I apologize for a number of stupid mistakes.”

  A minute after that I said, “You might as well tell me.”

  It was still another minute before she let go.

  “Danitza,” she said at last, miserably. “Heinz and Graham and Léon. Piotr and his girls. The farmer who fed us, and his family. Sixteen million others.”

  “What about them?”

  “Have you, in your soul-searching, stopped to think what we’ve done to them?”