Onward, Drake!

by Mark L. Van Name

  “I can’t dance.”

  “I can’t either. Well, at least not that. But doing it wrong is a prerogative of those out of time, and no one knows there anyway.”

  We walked towards the gate. So, the job might suck, but sometimes there were interesting men and chocolate cake.

  I realized I’d stopped when he turned to look at me. “I’ll never find the way on my own, come on. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I just realized I can do this job, after all.”

  Sarah A. Hoyt writes science fiction, fantasy, mystery and historical fiction. At last count she had two dozen novels and over a hundred short stories published (in anthologies, magazines like Asimov’s and Analog, and collections). Her novel, Darkship Thieves, won the Prometheus Award in 2011. Without David Drake’s advice and encouragement, she would have published three books and maybe a dozen short stories. She’s hard at work on the next two space operas and the next fantasy novel.

  At my request, she provided this afterword.

  I first approached this story all wrong, trying to make it David Drake fanfic, which I couldn’t possibly write, even if I love reading him.

  Then I decided to shamelessly Tuckerize him, starting with how we met at a Tor party (sorry, guys, we’re not Time Guardians).

  I decided to make it a time-travel story because that is one of the things that Dave and I share: a love of history. And in a way the reason I like his books, both fantasy and science fiction, is because he takes you on a form of time travel, and makes history (and reflected history, which is what Space Opera is in large measure) come alive for you.

  In a way too, this reflects how our friendship started because Dave told me the truth about the job—no, no, writer. I swear we’re not Time Guardians—and thereby in many ways convinced me to continue with it, though I’m not sure that’s what he intended to do (or what anyone sane would do. But then Mr. Sanity hasn’t been seen around my place for a long time.).

  I threw in two of Dave’s characteristics that amuse me: his very useful ability of telling the truth, which can also be uncomfortable as heck, and his inability to find any place.

  Oh, and the viewpoint character isn’t me. If it were, we’d both still be lost somewhere in the Time Guardian’s complex. My sense of direction is about like his.

  Fortunately most days we can find our desks and write.

  All That’s Left

  Mark L. Van Name

  Crane froze a step short of the doorway. The room screamed indifference and menace. He looked at his husband and shook his head.

  Bobby—always Bobby, never Robert, even through the years of their youth when all their friends were sticking with the formal versions of their names, even though he himself always, always used his full first name—smiled and took his hand. “We talk ed about this, Joseph.”

  Crane shook his head again. “You don’t understand.” Bobby couldn’t possibly understand. He hadn’t been in the Army, hadn’t walked into hundreds of institutionally bland rooms filled with institutionally calm superior officers who dispensed the fates of others as if they mattered no more than paper clips—which they didn’t, in the end. Nothing really did.

  Bobby held his hand tighter. “So you can help me understand later, you know I’ve tried and will try again, but right now we need to go inside.” Bobby smiled again. “It’ll be fine. I’ll make sure of it.”

  Crane had always been a sucker for that smile, and for the sincerity behind it, even when Bobby was wrong. The Army wasn’t in the business of making things fine.

  But he had promised. He’d told Bobby he’d investigate the therapy, and so he would. At seventy-five years old and fifty-two years into his relationship with Bobby, he wasn’t going to start breaking promises now.

  He nodded.

  They walked inside the room.

  The drab of the moment was sand, the walls a desert of Army false calm. Centered on three of the walls were posters about the new therapy; the fourth, the one behind the desk in front of him, sported a framed medical school diploma.

  The man behind the desk, Captain Johnson if his nameplate was accurate, stood and extended his hand. “Corporal Crane, it’s good to meet you.”

  Crane trembled with the adrenaline that surged through him. He wanted to yank the young man over his desk and onto the floor, stomp on his throat, and ask him where the hell he got off treating him like they still had some kind of control over him. Instead, he kept his hand at his side. “I haven’t been a corporal in over fifty years.” He heard the tremor in his voice and hated himself for the weakness.

  After a moment, Johnson withdrew his hand and sat. “My apologies,” he said. “Many of the men of your generation I’ve met appreciate the recognition of their former rank.”

  Did you ever ask them? Crane thought. He turned to leave. He had no time for idiots.

  Bobby sat in the chair on the right and pulled Crane into the other one. “Thank you for taking the time today,” he said to Johnson. He let go of Crane’s hand after Crane sat.

  Johnson gave a slight smile and nodded, an officer moving past the unintended slight of a lesser man.

  Crane more than ever wanted to hurt him.

  Johnson tapped his tablet, read for a few seconds, and looked at Crane again. “So you have trouble both falling asleep and staying asleep?”

  Bobby stared at Crane until he nodded.

  “Night sweats?” Johnson said.

  Crane nodded again. “Sometimes.”

  “Do you remember the dreams that wake you?” Johnson watched him carefully.

  Crane stared for a moment at Bobby. Bobby had always wanted him to share his dreams—thought he wanted him to talk about those nightmares—but Crane knew better. No good would come from that. He faced Johnson again. “Sometimes.”

  Johnson waited, his eyes never leaving Crane’s face.

  “Often,” Crane said.

  Johnson nodded and smiled again. He pushed away his tablet and leaned back in his chair.

  Crane felt the sales pitch coming and wanted to run out of there, go home, and climb the stairs to his studio, where it would be just him and his paintings and music playing from the speakers all around the room.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice to sleep through the night?” Johnson said. “To fall asleep easily? To not have those memories from Viet Nam haunt you?” The man leaned forward, folded his arms on his desk, and gave Crane what was certainly a practiced look of sincerity. “Wouldn’t it be great to put that war behind you—no, not behind you, but out of you, to finally let it go?”

  It’s never out of you, Crane thought, the anger rising in him again. It can’t be. It changes you, and you and it are never again separate. If you’d ever seen action, you’d know.

  When Crane didn’t answer, Bobby touched his shoulder. “You have to admit that sleeping through the night would be a great change.”

  Crane tilted his head ever so slightly. That wasn’t the point, but it was true enough on its own, and agreeing would stop this part of the discussion.

  Johnson nodded in return, a vigorous, “good man” gesture. “We can make this happen,” he said. “We can remove all of your traumatic memories from the war. You can be free of them.”

  “Have you ever been in a combat zone?” Crane said.

  “My experience is not the topic here,” Johnson said.

  Crane leaned forward. “Have you?”

  “No,” Johnson said, “I have not.”

  “Then where do you get off talking about being free, putting the war behind you? What can you possibly know?”

  “I’ve never broken my arm,” Johnson said, “but I know how to fix someone else’s broken arm. It’s the same thing. We’ve been conducting trials for almost two years, and the results are uniform and conclusive: we can make the bad memories go away.” Johnson leaned back again. “Removing those awful memories is a huge step in the healing process. Our post-treatment surveys and follow-ups consistently show total removal of trauma-rel
ated memories from time in combat.”

  Crane flashed on a ride in a jeep, he and three others stripped to the waist and baking in the mid-afternoon sun, the vehicle jarring their spines as it bounced in the ruts and holes in the dirt road, a gray-mottled early Sixties tan Mercury Comet rounding the curve ahead of them, guns emerging from the open passenger-side rear window, Benny, their driver, yelling and pointing, all of them lifting their rifles—

  He shook his head.

  “So I wouldn’t remember what I did?”

  “Not if it was related to any of the trauma you suffered,” Johnson said. “All of that would be gone. You’d remember the normal stuff, the regular routines—just not the times in battle.”

  Crane again yearned to slam his fists into the man’s face. He had no clue. Normal times? Normal was knowing you could die at any time. Normal was never having a clue when the next shot would come from out of nowhere. Normal was going to sleep and hoping you’d wake up. Or not hoping for that, on many days. What passed for normal was the trauma.

  Johnson clearly took his silence for consideration. “So,” the man said, “what do you think? Should we sign you up?”

  Crane looked at Bobby. Bobby’s stillness, one of his husband’s greatest strengths, calmed him. He knew Bobby wanted this, knew Bobby thought it would be best for him, but he wasn’t ready for it, wasn’t sure he ever would be.

  “I don’t know,” he said at last.

  “If you’re concerned about the state of the treatment,” Johnson said, “let me reassure you that we’ve had nothing but success erasing traumatic memories. We can show you the results of previous trials if you’d like to see the proof. And, though this procedure is still technically experimental, we’re within six months of FDA approval. By signing up now, you’d not only be helping yourself, you’d also be helping make the therapy available for others.”

  Crane said nothing.

  “How about this?” Johnson said. “Just agree to let us do the preliminary assessment, to make sure you’re a good candidate for the treatment. You wouldn’t have to commit to anything more than letting us run some tests.”

  Crane flushed hot and felt as if the walls might at any moment squeeze him into nothingness. He had to leave. He stood. “I’ll consider it.”

  He almost ran out of the room and waited outside while Bobby no doubt smoothed Johnson’s ego and made everything better. It’s what Bobby did. Bobby fixed the damage Crane sometimes left behind, said the soothing words he could not bring himself to utter.

  Bobby walked up to him, leaned in close, and said, “You know I love you, right?”

  Crane nodded.

  “And you also know,” Bobby said, “that you can really be an asshole sometimes, right?”

  Crane smiled. “Yeah.”

  Bobby squeezed his shoulder. “Just so we’re clear on that.”

  As they left the building, Crane took his first full breath since they’d entered it, the hand of the Army no longer squeezing his throat. He couldn’t wait to get home.

  As soon as Bobby parked the car in their garage, Crane bolted into the house and climbed the two flights of stairs to the third floor, a single huge room that served as his studio. Light flooded into it from a dozen skylights and the floor-to-ceiling windows that occupied most of the walls of the space. With a single remote he could close the blinds on any or all of the windows, but he almost always left them open. They lived in the country on a forty-acre plot ringed with tall trees, so anyone who wanted to watch him would have to go to a great deal of trouble to do so. Not that he cared: as long as they stayed away and left him to his painting, he was happy.

  Canvases filled the walls between windows and stood on easels all around the room. Scenes of villages, jungles, dirt roads, and small towns filled them, but none showed a single person. Sometimes, barely visible gray outlines shimmered where people might have stood, or fallen, or been shot. Some viewers barely noticed the absence of humans; others found it a heart-rending omission.

  Crane could paint people. Before the war, he had. Afterward, in his mind’s eye everyone in the moments he captured lived as he did: as a shadow, a presence always on the verge of extinction, a near vacancy moving through the world but never really part of it.

  He flicked on the stereo. Jim Morrison and the Doors screamed from the speakers all around him. He assembled tubes of paint and brushes. Painting made the world go away. It didn’t make sense of the world—nothing could do that—but it graced him with a calm that nothing else could match.

  The memory of the Mercury Comet clung to his mind, so once again he painted the dusty dirt road and the old car and the guns, the roaring sun, the huts standing along both sides of the road, everything but the people. No two versions of this scene ever came out the same. He didn’t care. He painted what he saw and felt in the moment, wondering as he often did whether each new canvas represented a different split-second snapshot of his memory, or if his mind created the moment anew in a spasm of active remembering.

  When Bobby called him for dinner, he checked his watch and saw that he’d been working for almost three hours. He swallowed, noticing for the first time how dry his throat was. Three hours. He smiled. When he was working he knew who he was, he existed, he mattered, if only because the work deserved all he had. The rest of the time, well, he passed through those moments, another gray presence waiting only for the end so he could finally vanish.

  Downstairs, Bobby had prepared the meal, as he often did. Crane took in the steak, the angel hair pasta with tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, and a dusting of Parmesan, the simple green salad, the glass of fresh iced tea—all of his favorites.

  Bobby wanted something. Most of his husband’s dinners were vegetarian, as healthy as possible, one more way to fight off the additional weight that they both battled every day.

  Crane kissed him, sat, and raised an eyebrow.

  “Eat,” Bobby said, “before the steak gets cold.”

  Not one to waste a good cut of meat—and when they ate red meat, it was always a good cut, Bobby made sure of that—Crane sliced off a small bite, smelled it, savored the richness of the beef, and chewed it happily. “Thank you,” he said. “This is delicious.”

  Bobby smiled and took his own first bite. This small ritual—the person who didn’t cook eats first and praises the chef, the other goes second—was one they’d followed for as long as Crane remembered, longer than that Captain Johnson had been alive. A simple practice, but a nice one, an exchange they both enjoyed.

  Bobby waited until both of them had finished before he got around to what he wanted. “So,” he said, “what do you think about the treatment?”

  “We didn’t learn anything today that we didn’t already know,” Crane said. “That man was useless.”

  Bobby nodded. “All true, but that’s not an answer to my question.”

  Crane straightened in his chair. “I’m seventy-five. How much longer am I likely to have? Is it really worth trying something experimental now, at my age?”

  “At our age,” Bobby said. “I’m every bit as old as you are, and we’re both in excellent shape—even allowing for the occasional indulgence in food sin like what we just consumed. We could easily live into our nineties, or longer. Which would be better: twenty more years of nightmares and poor sleep and night sweats, or those same years without all that pain?”

  I earned that pain, Crane thought but did not say. I deserve it. I did what I had to do, we all did, but I paid for it—I have to pay for it—and now it’s in me. Now it is me. I can’t escape myself. All he said was, “It’s not that simple.”

  Bobby reached for Crane’s hand and held it. “I don’t claim to understand what you endured. You know I never make that claim. But I’ve been your partner for all these years, your agent for most of them, and I’ve seen—and loved—all those hundreds and hundreds of paintings. I have some small inkling of what you must be carrying.”

  At that, Crane looked away.

  Bobby
gently grabbed his chin and turned his face until the two were staring into each other’s eyes. When Crane started to break contact, Bobby held his chin tighter.

  In the fading twilight, Bobby’s skin, always so beautiful, so even in tone, as close to black as Crane had ever seen on a person, shined like glowing night. Crane could feel Bobby’s love like a blanket, and a hug, and a punch, and he deserved only the last one.

  “Will you at least think about it?” Bobby said. “Just the assessment.” Bobby smiled, that crazy wide smile that had always melted Crane’s heart.

  Crane nodded. “Yes. I promise.”

  Bobby leaned across the table and kissed him. “Good. Now, I cooked, so you clean.”

  Dirt sprayed over him as the sounds of the explosions slammed into Crane’s ears. He huddled against the side of the foxhole, men on his right and left doing the same. The explosions hit all around him. You never knew when they would begin, or when they would cease and the base would return to what passed for normal.

  A man flew over his head, crashed into the opposite dirt wall, and slid to Crane’s feet. “Oh, god,” the man said. “I made it.” He stared at Crane. “Are we gonna be okay?” Before Crane could answer, the man looked down at his stomach. Crane’s gaze followed the man’s. The man’s guts were spilling all over his legs and onto the dirt. “Oh, shit,” the man said. “Help me.”

  Crane leaned forward and tried to shove the man’s insides back into him, but his hands turned slick with blood, and more escaped than he could push inside. Crane pulled back and stared at the man. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t. I can’t.”

  As Crane watched, the man’s head tilted to the left, and the man died.

  Crane twisted and screamed wordlessly, his mouth open but no sound coming out, as he sat up in bed, eyes open, the dream gone but its tendrils still snaking through his mind. The room was cool, but sweat beaded his chest and face. He shook his head, forcing the nightmare from his memories.