Hero!

by Dave Duncan

  “One other thing. Patch through a call now to whichever Patrol base is closest to Forhil and copy for my records. I have a report to file.”

  THE PATROL WOULD certainly send in its own people before it informed the civil authorities. Oppressed by the dead, silent house, Vaun wandered out into the sunlight and stood on the terrace, drawing deep breaths of the dewy morning. Amazingly, the sun was still not very high above the hills. He had most of the day before him yet.

  He was hungry, he remembered. He set off in the direction of the orchard, a little annoyed by his evident reluctance to return indoors, and amused by his reluctance to admit that first reluctance to himself. There was nothing in the galaxy more complex than a human brain, someone had told him once.

  He was going to miss Tham, a twenty-four carat guy. He would not waste precious living time in mourning him, though. That would not bring him back. And certainly Vaun need feel no guilt over the manner of Tham’s death, for what he had done was a kindness.

  No guilt. The brethren regarded guilt as a sign of failure, and remorse as a weakness. They were ever practical, never maudlin. But their friendship knew no limits.

  Forhil boasted a famous collection of fruit trees, and many were still laden. Apples he recognized, and ospers, but most of the others were a mystery to him—delicious products collected or invented on a dozen worlds as humankind progressed outward from ancestral Earth to Ult. Most of them would have long since traveled outward in symbiosis with their resourceful primate partners to the distant frontier worlds of the Bubble.

  The Ootharsis of Isquat…

  Years ago, when a thick-skinned, thin-witted girl at a party had been pestering Tham to tell her the latest news of other worlds, he had informed her that the Ootharsis of Isquat was dead. It was the most recent message to be intercepted, he had told her solemnly. No, he had no idea who or what the Ootharsis had been, or why his/her/its death should matter, especially as the message had been on its way at the speed of light for at least twenty-two hundred years, but he had it on excellent authority that the Ootharsis of Isquat had died.

  For a long time after that, Tham had been asked at frequent intervals for the latest news of the Ootharsis of Isquat. The joke had also become his traditional response when pressed to talk business. And there was the problem—Tham had been naturally reticent, and had firmly believed that parties were for fun.

  But he had obviously kept something out of Roker’s reach in that secret file.

  Gibberish, Tham had said. News that means nothing.

  But not all news from other worlds was meaningless, and who better to wrest information from it than Admiral Vaun? He was the expert on the brethren. Moreover, he knew of nobody smarter than himself. He had spoken with boys who had crossed the voids between worlds—Prior, and Abbot. Willingly or unwillingly, they had given him knowledge of the Brotherhood.

  He had gathered his first inklings from Dice and Raj, on a boat drifting along a sleepy river, when he had been sixteen, on a day that had felt like the first day of his life. Secondhand knowledge, certainly, but knowledge that had first opened his eyes to the Brotherhood, and the destiny for which he had been created…

  The destiny he had rejected.

  Truncheons and electric shocks…

  Raj, who had rescued him from hell.

  Oh, Raj!

  RAJ…

  “Multiply forty-three by seventeen and take away two hundred six,” says the teacher.

  “Five hundred twenty-five.”

  The teacher sighs. “You know all these problems by heart, Vaun. You know everything I have been given to teach.”

  “Then get more lessons!” Vaun begs. He feels desperate.

  “I can’t. I’m only a machine, you know.” The sim depicts a tall, slim girl with dark brown hair. It stands with its hands behind it, and it glows faintly so that Vaun can see it in the dark. Otherwise, it looks very much like the government agents who come by sometimes—trim, clean, neat, well-fed people, nobly serving the despicable peasants.

  The sim is worked by the big metal box in the corner. It breaks down often, and the village boys say that the wet air in the delta is bad for it. A real girl from the government came through yesterday and fixed it again, to Vaun’s delight and everyone else’s disgust. The pubcom never breaks down like that, and the pubcom doesn’t just make sims of one teacher—it shows soldiers and spacers, acrobats and performing poisonfangs. Right now everyone else is gathered around the pubcom in the meeting place, watching the evening entertainment. Tonight’s is a silly story about a female spacer who survives an endless series of very narrow escapes from monster aliens, usually losing parts of her clothing, but never any of her skin. Vaun’s seen that one so often that he can tell where it’s got to just from the sounds the audience is making. Every few minutes a monster rips her blouse, her breasts fall out, and the boys all cheer. Very dull and stupid.

  No, the pubcom works much better than the teacher. Kids are more use in the fields or the ponds than they are sitting idle in the schoolroom, no matter what the government says. The clay floor in that corner of the school shed is very battered, as if something heavy gets dropped there from time to time. This is the busiest time of the year, when the eels run, so the wet air will certainly get to the teacher again soon, probably right after the end of tonight’s pubcom show. Vaun will be very surprised tomorrow if the sim is not so blurry and jumpy and squeaky again that no one can bear to watch it.

  And if the parents come to meet the teacher tonight, Vaun doesn’t want them to find him here, sneaking extra schooling. That would be more strangeness. More punch-ups, likely. So he keeps an ear open for the distant laughter. He very rarely bothers to watch pubcom shows, and when he does, he stays in the background, not mingling with the others on the driftwood benches. He would much rather be here, alone with the teacher in the dark. He knows he is strange to enjoy learning, but that is just one more tiny strangeness among many. He is a freak and a butt and a monster; he has black hair and black eyes, and he likes to learn. He is good at it, but maybe that is just because he wants to learn, and nobody else does, neither kids nor grown-ups.

  He’s not a kid anymore, so he never gets to come to the school shed during the day now. He has more beard than Olmin, or Astos, or others his age, and not a boy in the village would dream of giving him a fair fight, although he is not especially big. At sixteen he is still growing taller, wider, and hairier, but in a couple of years he’ll stop changing and be one of the boys. Then he’ll be expected to marry. He tries not to think about that.

  “Teach me something else, then!” he begs the teacher.

  The young girl purses its lips. “I’ve taught you everything I can, Vaun.”

  Summer has barely arrived and yet the evening is still chokingly muggy. Angel still hangs low in the western sky, so the night is not truly dark, but inside the schoolroom there is darkness, except for the faint glow of the sim. Bugs chirp and the wind brings the smell of the river and distant laughter from the pubcom in the middle of the village. Alone, Vaun sits cross-legged on the dirt floor of the school shack and tries to learn, because it is the only thing that makes him happy.

  “There must be millions of things I still don’t know!”

  The sim flickers. “But not that you need to know,” it says vaguely.

  “Tell me about space.”

  “Again?” The sim sighs. “I have delivered that module…seventeen times in the last ten years, according to my records. Ten of those times you were alone, like this.”

  Vaun thumps a fist on the hard dirt floor. “Tell me again! Tell me!” Space, and spacers. The pubcom shows are often about spacers, but they’re fake. He wants to know!

  Sixteen—almost a grown-up. He dreams of leaving the village soon, but where can he go, what can he do? The teacher becomes very stern when Vaun asks about that, and says that the village is a good place to live, and the work the boys and girls do there is important, and he must stay and play his part in f
eeding the Commonwealth. If he runs away, he may be arrested and sent to a prison camp, which will not be a good place to live. Vaun doesn’t believe everything the teacher tells him, but he believes that.

  And there is Glora, his detestable, unbearable mother. Ever since the pepod killed Nivel, she has been getting worse. She says he must go away and save the world, but she had never been able to explain what she means by that, and he knows now what he didn’t know when he was small—that she is mad. No one else believes her stories of meeting God, and Vaun being a virgin birth, not even the priests in the nearby towns. Especially the priests. If he does leave the village, who will feed her, dress her, bring her back when she wanders?

  The teacher is explaining about the Bubble, spreading outward from the center, from ancestral Earth. Vaun could recite the words along with it, except that the teacher will stop then, and be angry. Five thousand elwies, twenty million stars, a million worlds.

  Vaun raises his arm in the dark.

  “You have a question, Vaun?”

  “If people have gone out five thousand elwies in all directions, that means the Bubble is ten thousand elwies across, doesn’t it?”

  “Very good. Yes, it does, Vaun.”

  “But you told us that the galaxy is a sort of flat, round shape, and only two thousand elwies thick.”

  There is a pause. “That is a detail,” the teacher says at last. “Please do not interrupt.”

  Which is what it always says. But the Bubble can’t be a bubble shape; it must be a ring, like a wheel.

  The teacher goes on with its lecture, word for word: the frontier worlds on the outside, the primitive worlds, and then the developed worlds, like Ult, inside. Vaun wonders what is inward of those, but that is another question that the teacher will not answer. Over-developed worlds, perhaps? Or are worlds like people—first babies, then kids, then grown-up boys and girls, who don’t change?

  A board creaks.

  There is someone outside the door, and Vaun is on his feet instantly, his belly spasming into a hard, sore knot of fear. He doesn’t get set upon very often now by Olmin and the others of his own age, not since they all got interested in girls, but the younger kids have learned from them to gang up on the freak. There are so many of them!

  The teacher stops and says, “Vaun? Is there something wrong?”

  There is plenty wrong. The windows are set high, to stop kids staring out of them. Vaun knows he can scramble out because he has done it before, but if the little monsters are watching the rear again, then he’ll come down in a snapper frenzy. The last time he almost lost an eye.

  The door creaks and starts to open. Vaun runs silently over to the back of the room and reaches both hands up to the opening…and stops, seeing the rough driftwood wall visible in front of his nose. The faint light grows brighter, and yet he has no shadow. He turns—puzzled, excited. The glow seems to fill the room, more like a winter-morning fog than any lighting he has ever seen. There is an unfamiliar boy standing in the doorway, and the inexplicable brightness pours like smoke from something he holds in his hand; he lifts it higher, and light gushes out even brighter. It illuminates every knothole in the walls, starkly revealing the dirty, bare little shed.

  He is not one of the village boys, especially with a tricky gadget like that. Instead of a grubby loincloth and sandals, he wears shorts and shoes and an open shirt. His face is beardless. So he must be a government boy, and Vaun’s relief is enormous. Tense gut relaxes into shivery limp feelings.

  The newcomer is returning Vaun’s stare.

  He has black hair.

  He cracks a big smile.

  “Hello,” he says.

  Black hair? Another freak?

  He is very like Vaun. Very like, in fact—the same lean, hard build, the same height, more or less. The light isn’t good enough to show his eyes, but…

  “My name’s Raj. What’s yours?” His voice has an odd lilt to it.

  “Vaun,” Vaun says. His mouth is dry. His hands are shaking. He can see the newcomer very well now, and he can’t believe what he is seeing. Before his mustache grew in, he saw that face every time he looked in the ponds.

  Raj walks forward slowly, holding out a hand. “I thought I might find you in the school. Most likely place, in fact.” He glances at the teacher, which is staring at him with a puzzled expression. “Authority override discontinue,” Raj says sharply, and the sim vanishes.

  Raj smirks at Vaun as if pleased with himself. He is not quite full grown—a little taller and heavier than Vaun, but not quite adult. His face and chest are hairless.

  And he arrives in front of Vaun, still smiling, still offering a hand. As if to reassure Vaun, he raises his other arm straight up, and the light brightens even more. He is quite clearly visible now, and Vaun trembles at the sight of those twinkling black eyes. Does God have other sons? He is pressing his bare back against the knobby, prickly surface of the wall.

  “Yes, Vaun, we are alike, aren’t we? In fact, we’re identical. Don’t be alarmed. I’m your brother. I’m very happ—”

  “I have no brother.”

  “Yes, you do. You were.…sort of lost. But I’ve come to take you away from here. I’ve got a boat waiting.”

  “Away?” Praise to the Bountiful Father! Lost? As a tiny kid, Vaun always cherished dreams that perhaps he did not truly belong here in the delta; that he did not belong to Glora; that he had a real mother and father somewhere…Crazy, childish, wishful thinking! No, this can’t be happening.

  “Dice is looking after it. He’s another brother. Come on—shake!”

  Gingerly, Vaun clasps the proffered hand. It’s real. Raj’s palm is smooth, but he squeezes, and they both squeeze, hard.

  And they both smile. “See? Evenly matched!” Raj says. He lowers the light gadget and hooks it on his belt, and the shack fades into dimness, but the shine of his eyes and teeth is enough to brighten it for Vaun like a summer noon.

  “It’s a shock, isn’t it? I was lost, too. Tong found me a coupla’ years ago—but at least I was raised in a half-decent little town. You don’t want to stay in this mudhole, do you, Brother Vaun? Weaving eels, or whatever it is you do? Eating garbage? Doped stupid by the staff they put in the booster? Frankly, Brother, you smell like the river. Come! The world is waiting! The galaxy is waiting!”

  Vaun will not believe this. Others like him? He is as mad as his mother. He is seeing things. This can’t be happening. If he takes one step, he’ll be admitting that he thinks this is all real, and then the disappointment when it isn’t will be even worse. His heart is pounding so hard he thinks he must be fevered, but it’s the wrong time of year for fevers, and he doesn’t catch fevers anyway. He pushes back against the wall, and Raj frowns, as if worried.

  “Trust me, Brother!”

  “Go where?”

  “First to Cashalix. Big city! We’re meeting Prior there in three weeks.” Raj s voice throbs with excitement. “He sent us to look for you! Brother Tong’ll be there too. They’ll both be so glad to see you! Very glad! Like I am!” Raj laughs nervously. “Like Dice will be! We’ll all be glad. You’re one of us, Vaun!”

  One thing at a time…“Brothers?” Lots of kids in the village have brothers but they don’t look as much alike as Vaun and this Raj do. That’s himself he’s looking at. A little taller and wider and thicker, a little tougher around the face, in spite of the lack of beard.

  “Brothers of a special sort. Vaun, oh, Vaun! It’s all right!” Suddenly Raj hauls Vaun away from the wall, throws his arms around him, and hugs him; and that feels strangely right, except it reminds him of the time he tried hugging Wanabis to find out why the other boys hugged girls, and Wanabis burst into shrieks of laughter.

  “What special sort?” Vaun demands, letting Raj squeeze him and very much afraid that he is about to start weeping. Scared of waking up, maybe.

  “A very special sort. Brother Dice’ll explain. Or Prior will. We’re all brothers, Vaun, and you don’t have to be alone eve
r again…” Raj’s voice breaks off in a sniff.

  He backs away, grinning and wiping tears from his cheeks. Vaun does the same, and they snigger ashamedly in unison.

  “Vaun? Brother Vaun! Come on, Brother!”

  “But the teacher says I must stay—”

  “Fornicate the stupid machine!” Raj seems as overcome at meeting Vaun as Vaun feels at seeing him. “The government programs it to produce peons, that’s all.”

  Whatever that means…“My…Glora? My mother?”

  “She isn’t your real mother! Just a foster mother. Never mind her, whoever she is. She’s not important and you are!”

  “I am?” Impossible. That’s what Glora says.

  “Yes! Very important! Just come! We’ve got food on the boat, and terrific beer, and Dice will explain everything. You’ll love Dice. He’s eighteen and Prior found him, coupla’ years ago. You’re sixteen?”

  “Almost.” Vaun wonders how this apparition knows that, and is certain he is mad, meeting his own self like this—being hauled over to the door by his own self, a strong hand gripping his wrist.

  Raj is both laughing and weeping with excitement. “You’re the youngest. I’m seventeen. Gotta do something about that chin, Brother! We’ve got a shaver on the boat, and we’ll get you done properly in Cashalix. Hairy faces are for savages. Vaun, Vaun! You belong with us! You’re going to be with real friends, now. Real brothers.”

  “But I haven’t got any brothers! Or sisters.” Vaun stumbles as the light vanishes completely, and he is pulled out into the muggy night and the faint purplish glow of the setting Angel. Laughter rolls across from the pubcom beyond the first row of shacks.

  “You have now! You can trust me! I’m closer’n any brother you can ever have!” Raj makes a happy, chortling noise in the darkness. He can hardly force out the words. “I know you inside and out, like you know yourself. And you know me. I’ll help you, Vaun, any way I can. I’ll share with you—anything I’ve got. I’ll fight for you. If I have to, I’ll die for you.”