Hero!

by Dave Duncan

  He may not need to kill her, though. Her lolling tongue and uncoordinated eye movements are a sure indication of hallucinosis. Paradoxically, even her fast return to consciousness is a sign that he may have overestimated range and target weight. Complete recovery will follow much later than usual, if at all.

  The girl rolls her head around, scanning the room. She comes from a world of driftwood shacks and utter squalor; she will never in her life have seen anything like this jeweled seraglio, and she must be viewing it through a jangling blur of psychotic distortion. What can she think of the place?

  Then her wobbling gaze comes back to him, and he wonders what she makes of him. Has she ever seen any male other than the shaggy, fur-faced mudslugs of the delta? Well, likely. The Commonwealth must send agents through this wasteland often enough, for the eelskin crop is a valuable export. They will be figures of power to her.

  Now what? To assume that she is too confused to remember him is a gamble, but to slay her out of hand does seem unfair, and he is reluctant to waste the whole evening’s work.

  She makes a gasping, choking noise, and her head lolls back. He thinks she has fainted, but then she grips the sides of the table with her hands and pulls up her knees.

  He recoils in revulsion. “No!”

  She lifts her head awkwardly again, peers at him between her scrawny thighs, and tries to speak around a limp and slobbering tongue. He thinks she says, “Lord?”

  “I don’t…” He feels too nauseated to speak now. He points at the door. “Go!”

  More wet noises, then, “Go?”

  “Yes, go!”

  She wails. “I have…have…offended my Lord!”

  He rubs his forehead with a bare arm. “You have not offended. You do not understand…I…Oh, God!” He learned that meaningless expletive from the wild stock aboard Green Pastures.

  There is a long pause, and then she says apprehensively, and with great effort, “Gladly will…I bear a…child to Your glory, Lord, if it be Thy will.” She squints doubtfully at his flaccid condition.

  This is absurd! But he remembers that political control of randoms is often achieved with the aid of state-backed superstitions. Evidently he has stumbled on some primitive incarnation religion, and it will solve the problem nicely.

  “Gods do not lust as mortals do. You already bear the seed. Go and raise My son.” He points at the doorway.

  The girl gasps, whirls in an ungainly scramble of limbs, and falls off the table onto her knees. She presses her face into the pile of the rug. “Blessed be the—”

  “Go! And take your clothes with you.” The absurdity of her reaction is irresistible. He bursts into helpless laughter, and can say no more. She wails and cowers lower, and that makes him laugh harder yet. Throwing open the door, he pushes her out into the night. He has forgotten the instructions he gave the control board, and the resulting splash sprays muddy water over him and the fancy carpet bath. No harm done, though—she will benefit from a bath, and already she is rising to her feet, immersed only thigh-deep. The door closes, plunging her into darkness, and he gasps out a word of command that sends the drifter skimming swiftly and silently away.

  The Dreamer reels across to a chair and collapses into it. He laughs until his ribs ache. The thought of what he almost did is sickening, but he wishes he could hear the tale she will have to tell when she returns to her village. He wishes even more that he had some of his brothers around to share the joke.

  The worst part of his job is the loneliness.

  NO! NO! NO!

  Vaun woke with a scream, thrashing in the cramped seat of the stuffy little torch. Ajar of pain as his wrist struck the control board brought him fully back to reality. He wiped his sweating face and gawked around like a moron. His heart raced madly.

  Dreams! Always he dreamed when he had not had a girl before he slept. That one was the worst of them all.

  “Location?” he demanded with a sour-tasting mouth.

  “Midway between Ajoolton and Besairb. Starting descent in approximately seventeen minutes.”

  He grunted. The ETA reading showed that he had almost another hour to spend in this airborne kennel. Feeling grubby and thick-witted from his nap, he eased to a more comfortable position and thought about Citizen Feirn and her freckles. He promised himself no more dreams for a long, long time.

  Ajoolton was the site of the famous battle that brought down the Yiparian Empire. And Besairb was where Maeve had her fancy estate. He had forgotten its name.

  He had forgotten Maeve! He had forgotten Maeve and her long years of treachery—serving him by night and Roker by day. Spy! Think of Feirn instead.

  He would certainly be hearing from Roker soon. The big oaf must really be sweating over that Q ship. The idea of Roker trying to outthink the Brotherhood was ludicrous.

  Roker had won the last time only because Prior had been cursed with a string of atrocious bad luck, culminating in an ignorant country yokel blundering into the clutches of Tham and Yather, two of the very few spacers in the whole force with more intelligence than a pondful of spawning eels

  “IT ISN’T HER fault,” Nivel says, wiping Vaun’s tears. “She was all right until that one night.” He hugs Vaun tight, and he has stopped the blood flowing, but he cannot stop the tears…

  He clutches Vaun hard against his smelly shirt, but he cannot stem the tears.

  “We none of us believed her,” he says another time, probably later, when Vaun is older. “Because the girls examined her and there was no sign…But then she started bulging. A stranger. Some government boy. Must’a been some government boy.”

  And yet another time—a time that must have been a very early time. “Yes, God makes your mommy say such things…Don’t mean they’re true, though.”

  Always it is to Nivel that Vaun goes when the other children set on him.

  Raj said, “He put the babies out to good homes to foster.”

  But…She started bulging.

  Someone has been lying.

  Vaun has been thinking a lot, because he has nothing else to do. The cell is just long enough to lie down in it. The light never goes off. There is a hollow thing to sit on, and when you shut the lid it disposes of whatever you have put in it. There is food, passed through a hatch.

  But there is no one to talk to.

  He has no clothes. The room is all right for sitting, hunched up in a knot, but not quite warm enough for sleeping.

  He does not know how long he has been there.

  Now the spacer is back again, the one with the button nose and curly hair that grows down to a funny point on his forehead. Communications Officer Tham, he calls himself. He leans against the wall and studies Vaun quizzically.

  “You still don’t want to talk?” he asks.

  Vaun hugs his knees and stares back and says nothing. His own bruises have mostly gone away, and the spacer’s face looks better, too. Vaun is sorry that he hit this boy; he has a gentle, friendly voice, and he seems to mean well.

  “You won’t even tell me your name?”

  Vaun just looks. He will not betray Raj and Dice, his kin, his brothers. He will not betray Prior. Raj had said he would die for Vaun if he had to.

  “This isn’t very sensible, you know. People go mad if they’re left alone long enough.”

  How long already? By the fuzz on his face, it must be several days, but he doesn’t know how fast stubble grows.

  The spacer has an empty holster on his hip. He sees Vaun look at it, and chuckles. “Oh, I’m not dumb enough to come and talk to a prisoner with a loaded gun. You’re not much to look at, lad, but that was some fight you put up. Yather must outweigh you two for one, but you broke his jaw, you know.”

  That’s good.

  The spacer sighs. “You’re a tough one all around. Four days’ solitary and still not a peep out of you? We can get much rougher, you know.”

  Vaun will not betray his brothers. He does not know if he walked into the wrong torch, or if Prior had been caught
earlier and the two spacers were waiting to see who would turn up to meet him. He yearns to know if Raj and Dice have been caught, too, but he can’t ask without speaking. He is not going to speak.

  The spacer sighs and straightens off the wall. “All right. You win, Vaun. Yes, we know your name now. We know a lot. Come on.”

  He raps on the door. Someone must be watching through the little spyhole, because the door opens at once. A bundle is passed in. “Get dressed,” the spacer says, tossing the clothes at Vaun irritably. “Then come out, and we’ll show you a few things.”

  The shirt is all right, but the pants are so huge that Vaun has to hold them up. That keeps at least one hand occupied. He walks out, barefoot on the cold floor, and Tham is waiting in the corridor, alone. Without a word, he leads the way.

  He throws open a door, stands aside. Warily, Vaun walks by him, into a big, dun room.

  A dozen or so chairs arranged around a machine that looks like a complicated table, and that’s all…except for the other spacer, the one called Yather, sitting on the far side. He is big and beefy, dark and surly, and the lower part of his face is hugely swollen. His eyes are definitely not friendly. “Dammit, Tham,” he mumbles, “I’m crazy to go along with this.”

  “Sit, lad,” Tham says, closing the door. “Anywhere you like. And you be patient, Yath. He’s a tough one, and it would be a shame to damage him.”

  “It would be a pleasure to damage him.”

  Tham takes a seat also, and pulls a control board toward himself. “Give me half an hour. If he isn’t singing lovely songs by then, you can have him. Remember, though…he may be as ignorant as moss, but he’s probably smarter than either of us.”

  Yather grunts disbelievingly.

  “Watch this, Vaun,” Tham says. He does something with toggles, and the air above the machine in the middle seems to grow darker. Then a shadowy figure appears in it, smaller than life-size, and wavery, like a doll under water—muddy water. “Lousy quality,” the com officer says.

  Vaun knows this is a sim. He knows that the alien monsters he has seen on the pubcom are fakes, so this may be a fake, also. But he can’t help watching.

  The figure becomes clearer, gloom within murk. It is a very skinny boy, wearing only a rag, sitting cross-legged—a bearded savage. It raises one arm above its head. Vaun shivers with recognition even as the image speaks, in a squeaky, unnatural voice: “If people have gone out five thousand elwies in all directions, that means the Bubble is ten thousand elwies across, doesn’t it?”

  The sim dissolves, leaving the room brighter. Scared, Vaun looks to Tham for explanation. The spacer’s gaze is bright and intense, dangerously wise.

  “The teacher has a two-way…It can record, as well as project. Understand? That’s supposed to be so that any exceptional students get detected. The Commonwealth…the government…most countries have that sort of equipment. They just never seem to get around to doing anything with the information, that’s all. But you were recorded all through your schooling; such as it was.”

  He smiles, and Vaun feels a stab of anger that he does not understand.

  “That was how Prior found you, Vaun,” Tham says in his soft voice. “And how he found Tong, and Dice, and Prosy. It had been a long time—twenty years in some cases—and, of course, he had spread you well around, you understand…Not all of his efforts would have succeeded, and he needed to determine which ones had. We know he gained access to those educational records in several states.”

  Vaun has never heard of Prosy, who must be another brother. But they don’t know about Raj!

  Tham studies Vaun carefully, then says, “Now we know your name, and your village, and we know you disappeared from it twenty-five days ago, right after that scene we showed you. Who came, Vaun? Who turned off the teacher? Dice? Tong?”

  Vaun says nothing.

  Tham watches him for a moment, then says, “Well, leave that for now. Look at this one.” He adjusts controls again, frowning.

  “Dammit, Tham!” shouts the big boy on the far side. Then he yelps and claps a hand to his sore jaw. “We’re wasting time!” he mumbles. “I’ve got stuff upstairs that’ll get talk out of a nickel-iron asteroid.”

  “Patience, Yath, patience! Vaun, you know that com works by radio waves? There are millions of messages buzzing around the planet, and around all the settled worlds. Sometimes it’s possible to look in on other people’s corns, if you’re lucky, or sneaky. Got that?”

  Vaun nods before he realizes that nodding is a sort of talking and he has promised himself he will not talk, ever.

  “In theory, we should be able to communicate with all of the other worlds of the Empire—the Bubble. But in practice, it never works out that way.” Tham completes his adjustments, but holds one finger ready on a button, still talking to Vaun while the other boy glowers in silence.

  “There’s too much chatter, and all the Q ships among the million worlds put up interference. And radio takes time. It takes years for messages to cross between worlds. The Patrol is supposed to keep in touch. Ultian Command ought to report to—”

  “Tham!” growls the Yather boy.

  Tham ignores him, watching Vaun intently as if even his eyelashes may give off signals. “I’m going to show you a piece of a signal we picked up on a freak reception a couple of years back. It came from a world called Avalon…You’ve heard of that one? No? Sure? Well, never mind. Avalon is four elwies away, so whatever this shows, it happened six or seven years ago, when you were but a little tad.”

  He touches the button, and sound roars, making Vaun clap hands over his ears, and recoil in his seat. A fuzzy brilliance fills the room, completely obscuring the far wall and the other spacer and the chairs beside him, as though the building has just been chopped in half. The imaging is galaxies better than the pubcom back home—he is sitting in the middle of a sunlit street, filled with smoke. Motor noises, explosions, screams…and a girl’s voice shouting over it all in words he does not understand. Trees explode in balls of fire, houses collapse, even the ground seems to rock and sway. Something like a giant beetle comes looming out of the smoke, knocking down walls and crushing smaller vehicles. Flashes and bright streaks come and go. None of it seems to make any sense, and the rocking is enough to give Vaun queasy feelings. He looks inquiringly at Officer Tham, who is still watching him, not the display.

  Tham shouts over the din. “It’s a war, apparently. We don’t know who’s fighting who. We know nothing at all, except that there was a battle. We suspect that some of that big equipment is being run by spacers, though. Now, watch this bit!”

  The scene is shifting as though Vaun himself is running, coming closer to one of the ruined buildings, which is burning so fiercely that he thinks he should be able to feel the heat. He nears an empty window; a face appears in it—a bare-chested boy is trying to climb out before he is cooked; his hair is on fire; he is screaming; his face explodes in a scarlet flower. He topples back, out of sight.

  Then smoke mercifully blurs everything, the sim vanishes, and the room is plunged into darkness and hard reality. Vaun feels horribly rattled, and his ears are ringing. Tham leans back in his seat, eyeing him thoughtfully. Time goes by in heavy heartbeats.

  “We don’t know what the commentary says. The grammar has the machines baffled, but they think they can pick out a few key words repeated here and there. Hive is one of them. Brotherhood is another.”

  Vaun hopes his face is showing what he wants it to…which is nothing at all. How much can he take? How long will he resist torture if they start on that? He wishes he could read what lurks behind Tham’s odiously cheerful smile.

  “And that boy in the window. Did you recognize his face? I think you did, Vaun. I know you should! When I first saw this, I thought he seemed oddly familiar. But how could I recognize a boy who died years ago and light-years away? I didn’t know, and I daren’t suggest such a crazy thing to anyone. But it bothered me so much I finally asked the Patrol computers to run an iden
tity check on that image.”

  Vaun can guess what the answer was.

  Tham’s smile dissolves into darkness. “They said it was Commodore Prior of Ultian Command, attached to the high admiral’s personal staff.”

  Still Vaun says nothing. He had just seen another of his brothers, obviously. Dying.

  Tham crosses his legs and leans back without taking his eyes off his prisoner. “And I knew that, of all the spacers on Ult, only four had been born on other worlds—Q ship crews usually go onward with their ships or settle down in landlubber jobs, but there are four who have joined Ultian Command at one time or another, in the last century or so. One of those four was Commodore Prior, who came from Avalon in Green Pastures. But that could hardly be him. Even if the intercept was old history being rebroadcast, that could not be him, because he was only a kid when he left Avalon…not to mention that the boy in the clip obviously died. Yet DataCen said it was him!”

  “So the ComOff came to me,” the Yather boy growls, “and we started to do some checking on Commodore Prior. In secret.”

  Vaun clasps his hands on his lap and stares hard at them. Sweat trickles coldly down his ribs.

  “We found him doing some very curious things for a Patrol officer,” Tham says gently. “And when we went around to the places he’d been visiting, some very curious patterns began to emerge.”

  Silence falls. He put the babies out to good homes to foster?

  Vaun looks up inquiringly, but this time Tham does not speak. Yather does not speak. The silence and the staring grow to screaming point.

  After about four days of this, Vaun’s own voice grates in his ears and his chin trembles. “Like what, sir?”