Hero!

by Dave Duncan

  Still Vaun is silent.

  “If two contest,” Abbot says grimly,” and one will never accept the other’s existence, then that other’s only choices are suicide or struggle. Which will you choose? Which will you have us choose?”

  Vaun looks down at Pink on his lap, a cuddly, black-haired toddler. He can never father such a child. He can only work to support a hive that will manufacture more copies of himself, like this one. Seeing his attention, Pink smiles up at him trustfully.

  “Or answer this, Brother,” Abbot persists. “If we seek peace, if we now contact the Patrol on Ult and request some unused corner of a desert somewhere to establish ourselves—and we are only a few hundred among many billion—what will their answer be?”

  “They will accept eagerly, and then strike at you when you are least able to resist.”

  Abbot waits a moment, and then says, “So the only compassion we can offer is to kill ourselves. Is that what you recommend?”

  Silence.

  He persists, as soft as silk and as sharp as steel. “Brother, they are not of our species! We do not interbreed.”

  “That’s the whole point, isn’t it?” Vaun says hoarsely. “That excuses everything! What was done to the girl and the spacers and everything! They’re just animals.”

  “More than animals, but less than we.”

  “And to them, we are only artifacts and therefore less than they!”

  Abbot sighs. “Nobody picks his team in this game! He is born to it. Tell us now where your loyalty lies?”

  Vaun’s eyes have filled with tears. Valhal…riches and fame…carnal pleasure with Maeve…Those ambitions seem tawdry and shameful now, when his brothers are in danger.

  Pink reaches up in wonder to touch the tears on his cheeks.

  “You expect me to believe that you will trust me, after what I have done? You cannot! I came here to kill you!”

  “Then go ahead. Start with that babe on your lap.”

  “Me!” White says, baring teeth and hooking his fingers into claws. “Tear me to shreds!”

  “Good idea!” Black mutters, and cuffs his ear.

  Abbot walks closer to Vaun. “You acted from ignorance, and we can cure ignorance. We already have, I think. No brother will ever knowingly act against his brethren, his hive. Certainly we shall trust you hereafter. Do you want to be trusted?”

  So now Vaun knows the answer to Frisde’s question. He knows what the brethren tender. She offers fame and power and wealth, and they outbid her easily.

  Love!

  “Yes! Yes, please!”

  His two neighbors smile at him, and the hands on his shoulders squeeze hard.

  “We accept you gladly, Brother—but I do not think that is possible.” Again Abbot rotates slowly to survey his audience. He seems to find no comfort, and again addresses Vaun. “From what you have told us, we cannot hope to establish a hive on Ult.”

  “Then you must go on!” Vaun says. “Go on to the frontier worlds! Or else go back to Avalon!” And he will go with his brethren…

  Silence tells him that there is something wrong with his conclusions. The mood has changed. No one will meet his eyes now. One or two of the youngsters are whimpering, and the older boys whisper comfort and courage in their ears.

  “Those options are not available to us,” Abbot says softly. “We risked everything on Prior and on secrecy. Both have failed us. The ship must be realigned and allowed to cool before it can undertake another voyage. Forgive me!—of course a spacer knows that. No, hear me out. We should find the same problems back at Avalon, anyway.”

  “Bethyt is nearer—only two and a half elwies.”

  “Seven transit years…still too far, and still the same problems.” The baby whimpers; Abbot moves it back to the crook of his arm and carefully offers it the bottle again before continuing.

  “Let me tell you a story. The crew of the shuttle was murdered, all except you. Your attempts to pass as Prior were successful, and we accepted you. You watched from the bridge as we negated the Patrol’s attempts to destroy us. Believing you to be Prior, we did not guard you closely. Like all interstellar ships, this one carries a destruct device, for that is—”

  “No!”

  “Hear me out. Since ancient times, the Space Patrol has always insisted on that, in case of infestation by aliens. Unobserved, you were able to start the destruct sequence. You raced back to the pilot boat, disconnected—”

  “No! No!”

  “There is only one of us who may survive, Brother. Only one of us will be welcome back on Ult.”

  “Then choose another!” Vaun shouts. He tries to rise, but strong hands hold him in place. “I will stay!”

  “No other would be able to pass as you,” Abbot insists. “Qualified?”

  “Bio,” says an identical voice somewhere. “You are correct, Abbot. They will have tagged him somehow. Strontium, for example. Small doses will replace calcium in the bones, and leave an unmistakable signature. There are so many possibilities that we should need days to test for them all, but they will know at once if we attempt a substitution. Mind bleeding takes too long anyway.”

  “I won’t go!” Vaun yells. “I killed one of you, and wounded another! I cooperated in what they did to Prior. I betrayed Raj and Dice. I will not betray you anymore!”

  Abbot strides forward to confront him like a reflection. “Listen! By going back you will not betray us, you will serve the Brotherhood!”

  “What?”

  The face so like his own smiles his own smile at him. “You have an opportunity none of the rest of us have. Do exactly what they want, Brother Vaun! Serve their purpose that you may ultimately serve ours…which is also yours. You go back, and we perish. We are only a few hundred units—the Brotherhood can replace us easily. But you will be established as loyal to the randoms, and be honored. The Brotherhood will try again!”

  “What? When? How?”

  “I have no idea. But it will never give up. Maybe not for centuries, but maybe in your lifetime. And the next time you will be trusted, and you will have a better chance to aid our cause.”

  “I won’t! I can’t!”

  Abbot turns to look around the silent, somber company. “Has anyone an alternative to propose?”

  No one responds.

  “Are we agreed?”

  This time the response is a deep, sad rumble. “Agreed!”

  “Surely you can save some?” Vaun whimpers. “Some might survive a pogrom. The ship might make it back to Avalon!”

  “This way is better,” Abbot insists. “I have told you—we do not matter. You are truly on our side now?”

  “Yes, yes!”

  “Then this is your duty, Brother Vaun. If you feel you committed crimes against your brethren—and no one but you has said so—then this is your chance to redeem them. Perhaps it will be easier for you, but to any of us what I propose would be torture, a life alone, among wild stock. Blue…Black…take him back to the patrol boat, and then to the bridge, and lead him through the scenario. Go through it all twice or three times, if needs be, until he is sure of the story. Then see him on his way.”

  A scramble of limbs and bodies, and Vaun finds himself on his feet, with a brother flanking him on either side.

  “We shall come back here afterward,” Black says. “There will be time.”

  “Of course,” Abbot agrees. “Now go.”

  Later, as Vaun and his two companions are returning from the bridge where the destruct device now flashes seconds, heading for the patrol boat that will carry him away to exile, they pass by the domed hall, and along the entrance tunnel comes a sound Vaun thinks will haunt him forever—baritone and treble soaring together, the sound of the brethren singing.

  THE ANCIENT SETTLEMENT of Kohab was exactly what it seemed—deserted. Any stray visitor would naturally check the buildings first, and find nothing there but pepods and traces of other visitors years before. The hive was hidden in the old mine tunnels, with only its torches of
necessity kept aboveground.

  The salty wind gusted and blustered over the stony moor, forcing Vaun to lean into it as young Tan guided him. Trekking westward, they had it right in their faces. The three adult boys were following close behind, escorting Feirn and Blade at the lens of Vaun’s hand-beam. With the Sheerfire tucked away in the hangar and the countryside rife with pepods, the two randoms weren’t going anywhere anyway.

  Vaun had put them out of his mind for the time being. He felt almost light-headed, partly from lack of sleep, partly from the exhilaration of finding himself with his brethren, a long lifetime after he had parted from Dice and Raj. His kin. His people. He felt grateful for the wind to explain the watering of his eyes.

  Tan was bearing the Giantkiller, but then he slid it off his shoulder and peered at it. Frowning, he hefted it in both hands. “Sure is heavy!” He sighed, then staggered in a stray gust.

  “I’ll carry it for you,” Vaun said, glad of an excuse to remove such a catastrophe-creator from nimble adolescent fingers.

  “Oh no, I just meant that the Series Twelve are much lighter. They have two more charges in the magazine than this old relic, and the sighting is calibrated at forty-hertzian increments out to a range of—”

  “You’re a smart ass, you know that?”

  The lad grinned with delight. “Of course! We all are, and you old units are all nervous hens. That bushie over there, the pepod? I could pick it off for you with this, easy.”

  Vaun thumped his shoulder in boy-to-boy fashion. No one had ever called him an ‘old unit’ before, but of course he was, and of course he could not help liking this youngster. The youngster, for his part, was treating Vaun as he would any of his other adult brethren, as if they had shared toothbrushes all their lives. Back in the world of the wild stock, young males usually regarded Admiral Vaun as a demigod. The change was refreshing.

  And Vaun had no love forpepods. “Go ahead. Let’s see you.”

  Tan grinned, then sighed regretfully. “No shooting aboveground at Kohab. Too remote—shows up to satellites.”

  Something in that remark implied that there were other places where such activity was permitted. Other hives?

  “Besides,” Tan said wisely, “we try to keep on their good side, and shooting them isn’t part of our research program.”

  “Your specialty?”

  Tan nodded proudly, and slung the gun on his shoulder again.

  “Teach me,” Vaun said, mentally contrasting this lithe slip of a lad with the other pepod expert he had met, the late human haystack, Quild. The two had nothing in common except an obvious desire to talk about pepods. There were many of the vermin in sight, scattered around without pattern. He now believed himself to be immune, although he would like to have that supposition confirmed before he tested it.

  “Oh, they’re our biggest asset!” Tan said. “I mean look at the ground.”

  “What about the ground?”

  “Rocks, see? They keep turning over the slag, so our tracks never show. Keeps the hive hidden. And we don’t use screamers now, so any wilds that blunder in assume there’s nobody here. And they’re great guard dogs! We’re getting to know a lot of their communication, just lately.”

  “And they don’t attack the…us?”

  Tan shook his head. His dark eyes twinkled. “We didn’t know that until not very long ago. All the early work here was done behind screamers. Then one day a toddler wandered off and made friends with a pepod! Climbed right inside!”

  “Yes?” Vaun said, suspecting what was coming.

  “Actually…” Tan glanced behind him and then lowered his voice. “It was this unit.” He blushed. “Least, I think it was. I think I remember doing it, but I suppose I might have just seen another of my crop doing it, and be remembering that.”

  “Then your choice of specialty is understandable.”

  “Oh, that was just the luck of the draw. Lucky for me! I’m glad I’m a pepodist. I enjoy being a pepodist. Some units get stuck with specialties where they have to spend all their time reading books, for years and years, but there’s no book to read on the bushies! We’re writing it. There are four of us, and we’re doing very…or we were, until last night.” He pulled a face. “Weren’t counting on that!”

  Curious, Vaun just strode along, and in a moment Tan added, “Thirteen thousand dead? We’d expected a lot more. A lot more!”

  “It was almost twice that.”

  “Really? Great! Of course, it would have been a lot more than that, even, without you!”

  “Me? What did I have to do with it?”

  “You restored order! I know you had to! Bishop told us what a smart move it was.”

  “I don’t think I follow.”

  “Well, I mean…” Tan sounded surprised. “The way you put it down! We were watching the pubcom, and there you were! Even the randoms were saying that only Admiral Vaun could have done what you managed, and how lucky everyone was that the Patrol had you on hand to organize the relief. We all had a good laugh!”

  After a moment he added, “Well…to be honest, Brother…some of us wondered, even after Bishop explained. But you turning up here like this today…I mean, you don’t mind me saying this, do you? It just seemed so funny, seeing you helping the randoms.”

  “No, I don’t mind. I understand.”

  “Oh, good! It’s all right now, of course,” Tan said hastily. “Now you’ve come. No one’ll doubt any more. And Bishop did explain how it helped, and why you were doing it, taking their side, I mean, like, next time you won’t be there, will you? And without you, the stupid randoms’ll make their usual mess of things, and it’ll be much worse than they expect. So that’s good, but it was a shame it happened accidentally like that. The bushies never reacted that way before. Do you know why?”

  “Yes,” Vaun said, but he wanted to keep Tan’s busy tongue at work. “It’s a long story. How well can you control them usually?”

  “Not much. I mean, pepods aren’t smart. You can’t explain astronomy or evolution to a pepod, no matter how many you link up. And they’ve not much memory. You can say, ‘This biped good, that biped bad.’ That’s about as far as it goes. Next day it’s almost all gone again. Even the Great Pepod is dumber than a dog. Else it wouldn’t have attacked last night.”

  The Great Pepod was presumably the same phenomenon as the late Professor Quild’s “holographic continuum.” Vaun preferred Tan’s terminology.

  “How about, ‘Riot!’? Will that work? You going to be able to repeat last night? Can you rouse the Great Pepod deliberately?”

  “Sure!” Tan insisted. “They’ll play their part on Die Day.” He sighed. “There won’t be so many, though, will there?”

  “No,” Vaun agreed, thinking of the firestorms he had unleashed. “And the surprise won’t be so great.”

  “Pity.”

  Did the kid realize what he was saying? Had he thought through the consequences?

  “Tan, I mean Brother…Do you know what happens to people when pepods go berserk? You ever seen it?”

  “Yes.”

  Vaun shot him a startled glance, but the youngster did not seem to notice. He went blithely on, yelling over the gale. “Of course it’s unkind, but it has to be done, doesn’t it? I mean, we can’t let them make the planet totally uninhabitable. We have to get their population down to sustainable limits somehow. If they breed like vermin, then they must expect to be treated like vermin.”

  So that was what he had been brought up to believe? Prior had said much the same, Vaun remembered—the Brotherhood’s objective was to domesticate the wild stock. After seeing today what overpopulation had done to the once-fertile continent of Thisly, Vaun could admit that the argument had some validity.

  Not the same species, Abbot had said.

  “Hey!” said a voice at their back. “Nipper!”

  Tan spun around, scowling. “Meaning me?”

  “Yes, you,” said Orange. “Let’s detour around those.” He nodded at a grou
p of pepods scrabbling among the pebbles just ahead.

  “It’s all right. They’re far enough away.”

  “No, let’s not take any risks.”

  “I’m a pepodist, remember!” Tan announced grandly, raising his chin. “Prior sent me along to keep an eye on you and the bushies.”

  “I’m one too,” Orange said gently. “And he sent me along to keep an eye on you.”

  The lad deflated, and turned pink. Looking about three years younger than he had a moment before, he muttered, “Freckles!” as if that was an obscenity. Green and Violet were smirking.

  Orange laughed, but without malice. “Normally you’d be correct, Brother, but we’ve got two wild stock with us.”

  “Still awright,” Tan mumbled. “Outside attack radius.”

  “Normally, yes. But the bushies may still be edgy, after last night, and we don’t want them getting used to seeing us associating with randoms, okay? So let’s play it safe and go around.”

  Tan stalked off angrily at an angle to his previous course. The adults followed, grinning.

  The pepods continued their scavenging, paying no attention as the two processions walked by at a safe distance. Straight ahead now, a weed-choked tunnel mouth came into view.

  Vaun turned to his new neighbor, Orange. “That’s the hive, I assume?”

  “That’s it. Welcome home.”

  Home! Yes, he did feel as if he was coming home, home from a lifetime sojourn in foreign lands. Surely such a feeling must be just imagined? Could it be genetic?

  Orange looked chilled. The absence of a jacket might be mere bravado, or the need to let his companions see the color of his shirt—or the hive might be short of resources.

  “Er…Admiral?”

  Vaun gave him a hurt look.

  He smiled and said, “Brother?”

  “Yes?”

  “If we have to put down these randoms anyway…we use randoms in our conditioning program.”

  More than the wind caused Vaun to shiver then. He glanced around at the captives. Feirn was still clinging tightly to Blade, and having trouble with her impractical shoes on the stony ground. Blade was steadying her, but his eyes said he had caught the deadly implications of Orange’s remark.