Tom Paine Maru - Special Author's Edition

by L. Neil Smith

  Naturally, most of what I had to tell the Scavians did not make sense. Even sane, physically whole, how do you explain air-power or overlapping fields of machinegun fire to some primitive in knitted iron underwear whose notion of leading-edge martial arts is to poke at his enemies with a metal-shod stick? At last they gave up, dragging me away until some agreement could be arrived at about what to do with us. The Bailiff personally saw me bolted into a hole in the dungeon wall.

  The Lieutenant had remained completely unconscious during the eternity—perhaps a week—that I had been put to question. That had not stopped them torturing him. The forms must be followed, after all.

  They had not invented locks on Sca. The door, a crudely-hammered meter square of iron sheet, was fastened at its hinge-like hasps with soft metal rivets a centimeter in diameter, quite beyond reach of the palm-sized grating in its center, or the slopping-slot below. These were the castle’s lower-class accommodations, at the literal bottom of the heap. Down here, the walls dripped constantly, when they were not frozen solid, with seepage from the luxury dungeons high above us. We were fed occasionally. Someone came to replace the torches in the passageway.

  I estimated three weeks’ passage by making small tears in the edge of my flight jacket every time I awoke to the drip, drip, drip of the polluted stone around me. Very rapidly I became too weak to keep such a calendar, except that my uniform jacket obliged by getting easier to tear.

  Twenty-two rips in the rotted fabric later, the Hooded People came.

  Farewell to Eleva

  The heavy woven synthetic restrainers cut painfully where they rode across my midsection. It was hardly noticable after the grandly hollow send-off we had received, or the crushing four-gee eternity from the desiccated surface of our native Vespucci up to stationary orbit.

  Nighttime reigned in this position. To the right, several kilometers away, the new space station lay, still under construction, a wild hodge-podge of beams, containers fastened to the hull of the ancient colonial ship which had brought our ancestors here. Between the interstices in the new construction, she could still be seen, a micrometeorite-pitted dull metal sphere, dozens of meters in diameter, dead, cold, empty for fifteen hundred years—until lately rediscovered by her creators’ children.

  Already copies of her fusion powerplant were being installed in Vespuccian cities all over the planet.

  Reflexively, I smoothed the creases from the trousers of my special, fancy, useless uniform. Tailored just for this occasion, they were a violent shade of lavender to photograph well on CC, tricked out with silver braid, a deep maroon stripe running down the pants leg, a short, waist-length jacket which kept riding up, exposing the place where the shirt crept continuously out of the beltless waistband of the trousers. The knee-length silver boots were clumsy, would have to be jettisoned for weight’s sake before the Asperance shipped out.

  At least I sat unburdened, as were the rest, with the awkward matching pistol belt. As the sole enlisted man among the crew, I was not entitled to carry a sidearm, merely charged with keeping them all in good repair, making sure the officers did not shoot themselves in the foot before I could stow the ordnance aboard-ship. I carried my mandolar in its collapsible fabric case; it used up every gram of my personal freight-allowance—luckily I do not grow beard enough to need a razor desperately—but I counted on the mandolar to keep me sane during nine weeks’ endless voyage.

  I shifted the safety-straps once more, trying vainly for comfort, peered forward to the end of the long, cylindrical transfer-canister where they were showing the festivities on a large ColorCom screen. At least they were interrupting the blaring military bands, the posturing politicians, long enough to give us a clear view, for the first time, of the Asperance where she lay a few klicks off the new space station. She looked like nothing else in Vespuccian history, not like any kind of vehicle at all—certainly not like this stubby, heavy-winged orbiter which had flung itself down a long, long runway earlier this morning, into the purple sky from the port just outside the capital, Volta Mellis.

  From some vantage-point, probably another shuttle, we could even see ourselves approaching the starclipper, the shuttle’s bay doors opened already, exposing the tube which temporarily, uncomfortably, housed seventeen officers, along with their single, general-purpose flunky.

  No, the Asperance resembled a huge antenna of some kind, A single long, extruded titanium mast no larger in diameter than a big man’s thigh, crossed perpendicularly at intervals with complex, tightly-guyed spars. At her forward end were the shackles for her photon sails, kilometers-wide umbrellas she would unfurl to catch the solar winds which would sweep us to our destination. Aft, she bulged with a half dozen multipurpose spheres, heavily armored for the landing, stuffed full of consumable supplies for the voyage.

  The entire fragile assemblage resembled a child’s toy. Draped from end to end in tough, loose, transparent plastic tenting, at the end of every cross-spar, there clung either a skeletal one-man seating-rack, or cluster of instrumentation.

  The Asperance gleamed dully in the reflected light of the sun, her titanium core housing the inertia-canceling field-coils, the re-entry spheres concealing the field-generator/power-plant. Thirty meters long, not counting her sails, she would prove far more uncomfortable than the shuttle we now occupied.

  Four more exactly like her were under construction. We could see the torches flaring, the spacesuited figures swarming over them off to our left.

  Asperance was the first completed. If something went wrong with her, something which came to light—perhaps fatally—during our “shakedown cruise”, it would be too late to make significant changes. The design—along with the four other ships—would have to be scrapped. Something else newer, undoubtedly more expensive, would have to be undertaken, all over again.

  The freshly-conquered provinces, the ordinary citizens who had conquered them, would groan a little more under the increased weight of taxation. Perhaps another division or so of peacekeepers would have to be sent to quiet the groaning.

  Or perhaps a flotilla of Navy aerocraft might be dispatched on another “good will tour” to drive the point home unmistakably.

  We would not care. We would be far away.

  Or dead.

  -2-

  “I just do not know, Corporal O’Thraight, three years is a long time...”

  I watched Eleva Dethri through the smeared transparency, hating the quarantine procedures at the base, wishing I were on the other side of the plastic where her voice would not come to me through an electronic filter, yet, deep inside, a little grateful for the regulations which saved me from potential humiliation.

  I never touched her; I never knew if she would want me to.

  Behind her on the corrugated metal wall of the shed, garish posters proclaimed the glory of our coming leap to the stars, informed visitors of the many rules governing their brief, highly-supervised stays, exhorted them to tell their friends, their co-workers, their families, how their voluntary tax contributions were building a magnificent future for unborn generations of Vespuccians.

  “Yes, I know, Eleva, darling, if you could only...besides, when I come back, I will be an officer.”

  Dim red sunlight trickled through the windows on her side of the barrier. The shed stretched forty or fifty meters. At the door, a heavily-armed Army guardsman stood at parade-rest, watching each conversing couple closely. There were a dozen stations like this one where we Starmen could have a short, unsatisfactory glimpse of those we loved, of the lives we were leaving behind.

  She was right, of course. Women generally are about these things. Three years is a long time, a lifetime, almost the same amount of time I had loved her, since an Officer’s Club dance where she arrived come on the arm of some slavering lieutenant. Since I had last played the mandolar in public. Even then it came as a temporary assignment, an unlooked-for break in my regular duties.

  Changing my life.

  “An officer?” Her pale blu
e eyes brightened a little, she licked her lips uncertainly. “Why, Corporal, how wonderful! An astronaut, one of the first eighteen...but three years?”

  Eleva the beautiful: fair, lightly-freckled skin, tightly-curled copper- colored hair, taller than I by a centimeter or so, unless I stood up very straight. I stood up very straight. Combat boots helped, except when she wore high heels. I suppose, as the only offspring of a warrant officer—worse yet, descended from an upper-class family whose demotion, after a lost battle, had been the scandal of the previous century—she never fitted, either among the enlisted class of my beginnings, or the officer class she desperately aspired to rejoin.

  I shifted uncomfortably on the tractor-seat bolted in place before the counter they had divided down the middle with a plastic partition. We eighteen would spend two weeks here, with our alternates, until we proved to carry no diseases which might compromise the mission. Air pressure measured slightly higher inside the buildings to insure our isolation. We communicated with the outside world by wire.

  Eleva looked unhappy. “Corporal...” She glanced around to see whether anyone listened, a futile gesture, as, in addition to the guardsmen, our conversation would be line-monitored by the psychiatric staff. “...Whitey, I—I do not know what to say. I, well, I had my plans, my life sort of laid out in front of me. Now you...”

  Now I... I had thrown her an unpinned grenade by promising to become the officer she wanted. What else could I do? Did I want a commission for its own sake, for my own sake? I knew I wanted Eleva. Like most individuals of my class, I had learned not to want much of anything else.

  “Say you will wait for me, Eleva,” I answered, trying hard to cover the anger, the frustration I felt, “Or say you will not. Either way. You will not say you love me. We have never... But let me know, now.”

  “Please do not force the issue, I do not know what to say! Whitey, I do not know what I feel. Three years? Why, by then, I will be...”

  “Three years older. Eleva, go marry a captain. I will learn not to care. Anyhow, it is too late, I am stuck here with this mission, all on account of—”

  “Do not dare blame me!” she pouted. The door-guardsman looked our way, raised eyebrows under his titanium helmet. “I never asked you to volunteer for the Asperance, did I? I did not ask you to do anything at all—except let me alone!”

  This was turning out all wrong, not at all as planned, as dreamed about. Saying goodbye to the only girl—woman—I ever loved, I had expected something different from her, something warm to take with me to the cruel stars. Now I watched myself ruining it, heard myself say all the wrong things, helpless to stop myself saying them.

  “Then what the Ham are you doing here, Eleva Dethri? Why did you come?”

  “I do not know!” she cried, flinging herself off the stool. She ran out of the room while I could think of nothing to say but “Eleva! I love you! Please do not go like this!”

  But of course she could not hear me. The press-to-talk switch popped up the moment she released it.

  -3-

  Three years earlier, I stood before the battered desk of my CO/conductor, Colonel Gencom, trying hard to understand what they were doing to me. The office walls were lined with photographs of the band over two generations, half a thousand men in uniforms of varying obsolescence, half a dozen wars of varying unbearability. On the window sill behind his desk lay a tarnished trumpoon with a bullet-hole through its bell; the unit color-cords hanging from it were stained with something which matted the braids together. Something dark, nearly black.

  “Whitey,” the Colonel shuffled through the sheaf of paperwork as if he, too, could not comprehend the reasoning behind this order, “You are the best damned mandolar player in the band. I hate to see this happen; you know how it is: ‘Ours not to reason why...’”

  Never mind that, in an orchestra, nobody hears the mandolar except the other musicians who rely upon it for harmony, chord-progression, rhythm even the percussionist depends on.

  Never mind that the papers on the Colonel’s desk were reassigning me to training as a field-armorer, a sort of meatball gunsmith—something I knew nothing about, possessed no background for. There was a war on; there was always a war on; war imposes its own reasons, its own demented logic. There existed a greater need, in the eyes of the State, for field-armorers than for mandolar players no one except the other musicians could hear.

  Never mind that I had been trained to play the mandolar, by edict of the same government, since the age of seven.

  I doubled as company supply-clerk, meaning in the first place that I was in charge of spare reeds, mouthpiece-covers, mutes, assorted junk like triangles, ceram-blocks, train whistles, sand whistles, slide whistles. In the second, it meant I billeted with what I was in charge of, spending my days—except for rehearsals, performances—among endless shelves of odd-shaped semi-musical detritus, inventory forms, the storeroom dust of a hundred military years.

  In the third place, I was de-facto repair officer: if a thumb-key broke off a picconet, if the bass saxonel got dented, if the xylotron threw burnt insulation all over the xylotronist, they brought it to me, for soldering, hammering, emergency rewiring—even a little first aid. I got to be pretty good—undoubtedly the reason I had been chosen for retraining.

  “It is not all so bad,” the Colonel shattered me of my reverie, although I thought he spoke more to himself than to me. “While you are in training, you will be available should we need you. I suspect there will be no replacement, not in a hurry, anyway.”

  I nodded. Nothing he said required—or justified—a reply.

  “There may be other opportunities, even after you are rotated out into the field. I shall try to see there are, if it would please you, Whitey.”

  “I would like it very much, sir.”

  “Good. Also, you will always have your musical talent to fall back on, as a comfort to yourself, your comrades. It could be worse, could it not, Corporal?”

  I saluted, snapped my heels. “Yes, sir, Colonel, sir, it could be worse, sir.”

  He gave me a very unmilitary grin, shook his head ruefully. If one thing the Navy—or the Army, for that matter—could arrange, it was for things to be worse. He knew it. I knew it.

  I turned smartly, started out of his office.

  “Whitey?”

  I turned again, curious. He removed his spectacles, rubbed his eyes, looked back up at me. “Since we will not be getting a replacement, take your mandolar with you. You will need to stay in practice, anyway.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “Do not thank me, son, I am not authorized to give away Navy property. I do not know what happened to Corporal O’Thraight’s mandolar, just before he got reassigned. Thank the Navy, boy. I do it every day. You could never print the words I use to do it.”

  -4-

  The voice in the corridor outside said, “Here it is: YD-038.”

  Nobody knocked. The door opened. Miss Sixte, ninth-floor mother for the local Navy Reserve creche stepped inside.

  I snapped to attention.

  It was a gray room, three meters by three, with a gray door, six little gray bunks, YD-036 through YD-041 inclusive, smoothly tucked to regulation tautness. Miss Sixte kept pretty much to herself. Sometimes you could hear her sobbing in her own room after lights-out. None of the kids ever managed to discover why.

  Everybody else had gone to calisthenics that morning; I had been told to wait. It made me nervous. I had never spent much time here in the daylight. Behind Miss Sixte, a tall, thin man carried an odd-shaped plastic box by the handle. “Whitey, this is Sergeant Tenner of the Twenty-third Aerofleet Band. He is going to be your teacher.”