by David Drake
“I move,” cried a Councilor whom Slade did not recognize, “that Donald Slade be confirmed by acclamation as Councilor and heir of his father in accordance with evidence presented at our last meeting.” The man who spoke was old and slender with dissipation rather than health. His teeth were perfect. Only the way his face moved when he grinned suggested they were rotten.
“No!” Don Slade was shouting. Marilee’s fingers were tight on his left arm. What he heard was a nightmare, a demon repeating words that Slade himself had spoken only in his own mind, over and over as he paced through the courtyard he had won by force of arms. “No, I don’t—say that. Guardian for my nephew Edward, Councilor and heir of the Slade Estate. To his majority. That, Via, only that.”
“So moved,” said Councilor Hauksbee, “by acclamation.” He continued to meet Slade’s eyes.
There was a rattle of agreement and clapping, even some cheers. If there had been a formal second, it was lost in the noise . . . as the problem would be lost in the formal record.
“One other thing,” said Slade, raising his voice over the babble that followed the action. “There’s some problems at the Port. If you’ll give me six months and a free hand, there won’t be problems anymore.”
“So moved!” cried the Councilor who had earlier tried to make Slade Councilor in his own right.
“Wait a minute!” the big man added as concern again blanked the faces of many of those around him. “The Port is an enclave, not part of the Slade Estate. Nothing’s changing except that everybody’s goods are going to be moving through again without screwing around.” Slade raised his hands to keep the silence while his words marshalled themselves. “I don’t want what you have. I don’t even want what Dyson has. His estate will pass by law, wherever. But I’m Don Slade, people. What I have, I hold!”
The hush that followed was broken by Hauksbee’s dry voice saying, “I second the motion of Councilor Gardiner.”
The rattle of agreement which followed was again whole-hearted.
Slade put his arm around the woman beside him. “That’s all I have to say,” he remarked. The relief and elation he felt softened his voice. “I suppose whatever arrangements were planned for after the meeting are still on.”
There were a half dozen cheers. Councilors surged forward to clasp the hand of the man from whom they had edged in terror moments before. Through the chorus of flattery and congratulation, Slade alone really noticed what Councilor Hauksbee was shouting. “Wait a minute!” the tanker roared. He raised his hands again. “Wait a minute!”
Hauksbee had not stepped forward, though he had been the nearest to Slade of the Councilors when the meeting began. With the background noise low enough for everyone now to hear him, Hauksbee said, “What happens to Dyson, Councilor Slade? What happens to the people who supported him? I was nominating him as guardian, you know.”
And by the Lord! Dyson hadn’t picked a coward for that task, Slade thought. Aloud the big man said, “Bev goes into exile. He can’t be here and me be safe, it’s that simple. Or any of you safe either.”
Slade glanced sternly around the gathering. “Most of the servants he’d gathered up, they’ll go too. Lot of them aren’t from Tethys to begin with, and we sure as hell don’t need them around. For the rest—”
There was a collective intake of breath from the Council. Even Hauksbee swallowed as he tried not to look away from the tanker.
“For the rest, I’m not asking questions and I’m not listening to tales. We’ve all done things in our past we don’t want to be reminded of. Forget about—Via, the past twenty years on Tethys, if you like. I will.”
“Why of course—” and “I always said the Slades—” were the only phrases the tanker could hear clearly in the sycophantic chorus. Hauksbee pursed his lips and nodded acceptance, not joy.
“Jose, all of you!” Slade said, using his voice to hammer its own path of silence. Men were grasping his hands. He did not snatch them away, but the slighter fingers fell away from Slade’s scarred, powerful ones as he spoke.
“I’m not a saint,” Slade went on in the new silence. “I’ve done terrible things.” He swallowed.
Only a few of the faces turned toward Slade understood the sort of things he meant. The profession of slaughter, like others, has its arcana. No one could doubt Slade’s sincerity when he went on. “I don’t need to lie, people. If somebody’s going to be shot, I’ll tell you. Bev isn’t, and neither are his boys.”
There was another roar and surge of agreement. This time Slade responded to every hand, every enthusiastic greeting with the comment, “I appreciate that. You’ll want to get down to your people right away and explain that the trouble’s over.”
He himself was walking slowly toward the door. Marilee paced just ahead of the tanker to boost Councilors to escape velocity with her own handshake and grim smile. She had not promised to forget.
Councilor Hauksbee was the last. “I owe you an apology, Mister Slade,” the pudgy man said. He extended his hand but did not snatch at Slade’s the way so many others had done.
“It was Don when we were kids, Jose,” Slade said with a smile. They had not been friends, but each boy for his own reasons had a circle of enemies which often overlapped. “And you needn’t apologize for honesty. Not anymore.”
The handshake was a little more than formal. The trio poised by the door out of the room. “Not for being honest,” Hauksbee said, “but for assummg you weren’t. I—just wanted to be sure of the rules.”
Slade nodded. His hand was now touching Marilee’s again. “There’s an Alayan ship in orbit,” he said to Hauksbee. “The—Bev and the rest, they’ll go aboard. Some may be released on Friesland, if Danny and the Colonel think they’d be useful. Most’ll stay with the Alayans for—use.” The tanker cleared his throat. How in the hell had the Alayans known there would be a cargo for them on Tethys? “They won’t be mistreated, but they won’t leave the ship.”
“We’ll talk later,” Hauksbee said as he stepped through the door. When he was already out of sight of the anteroom, he called back, “I’m glad you’ve come home, Don.”
“Are you glad, Don?” Marilee asked coolly. She stepped to the door to close it. She did not move back into his waiting arms.
“I came home because I wanted to be on Tethys,” Slade said. He spoke as he would have walked through a minefield, slowly and with the greatest care. “For various reasons. And if you mean ‘glad I came just now’—yeah, I suppose I am. Somebody needed to put things straight. I guess it’s worked out as well as anybody was going to make it.”
“Guns do make it easier to run things, don’t they?” the woman said in the same brittle tone. She began to walk back along the trophy wall, skirting the man as she passed him.
“Listen, curse it!” Slade said. He paced behind the woman, fists clenched, the image of a carnivore at heel. “The guns were there before I was born. The only difference now is there’s a man behind them again. I’m not going to melt down those gun-trucks, but they’ll stay parked till they rust away for anything I do in the next two years.”
Marilee spun. “Can I believe that?” she snapped. Her blue gown had not torn in the fighting, but there was a bruise showing already on her left cheekbone.
“Anything we’ve got left is an administrative problem,” Slade said quietly. “I’m not real good at those, but I know how to recognize people who are. You don’t use guns to solve admin problems.”
He took a deep breath that trembled with the emotion he was trying to keep out of his voice. “But there’s gun problems too, Marilee. Don’t ever forget it. And don’t blame me for seeing that there are.”
She moved slightly, away from the wall. He saw the trophy that her body had screened as they walked back from the door. The argus larva was no more than the length of Slade’s adult arm, but its spines still bristled with the vicious intensity of life. Old Man Slade had replaced each one of those which the boy’s bare hands had shattered.
&nbs
p; “I don’t blame you,” said Marilee as she extended her arms. “Welcome home, Don.”
AFTERWORD:
Where I Get My Ideas
If you decide to write about far-famed Achilles, make him active, hot-tempered, inexorable, and fierce; let him deny that laws were made for him, let him think his sword rules all.
—Horace, The Art of Poetry (lines 120–2)
My undergraduate double major was history and Latin, and I continued to take Latin courses while I was in law school in a laughable attempt to stay sane. Reading Latin centers me. (Note “laughable” in the previous sentence.)
A story doesn’t depend on the language in which it’s told, and a story that’s been around for several thousand years is likely to be a very good story. While rereading The Odyssey (in translation; Ben Jonson would be even more slighting about my Greek than he was about Shakespeare’s) I remarked to a friend that the story would make an excellent Western.
And as I said that, a light dawned: The Odyssey would make a heck of a space opera as well, though translating Homer’s story to an SF idiom would take some subtlety if I were to avoid being absurd. For example, I couldn’t just have my hero land on a planet of one-eyed giants who shut him and his crew in a cave. But what about an automated city that . . . ?
I did a precis of The Odyssey and plotted my story around that armature, focusing always on situations that would serve the same structural purposes that Homer had achieved in his medium. Then I wrote Cross the Stars.
By the way, the Cyclopes appear twice in The Odyssey: once in direct conflict with Odysseus (which everybody remembers) and once as the creatures whose savage attacks drove the Phaecians out of their original home. If you’ve just finished reading Cross the Stars, you may recall a passing reference to giant one-eyed mutants. The latter, like the local creature called the argus and other asides in my novel, is homage to the man/men/woman who wrote The Odyssey; and who is, for my money, the greatest literary genius of all time.
As I was writing Cross the Stars I commented to the same friend that while The Odyssey translated easily to other media, The Iliad (perhaps an even greater achievement) was too fixed in its own cultural idiom to be used the way I did the other. For a long time I believed that meant I couldn’t use The Iliad at all in my fiction.
One day I was rereading Horace’s Ars Poetica and came to the quotation I’ve translated as the epigraph to this essay. Homer is the only source for the character of Achilles (which Horace summarizes with his usual succinct brilliance), but the character can have a life outside the cultural confines of The Iliad. There are and always have been men (and here I mean “male human beings”) like Achilles; Alexander the Great made a conscious attempt to model his life on the character (and succeeded, in my opinion, only too well).
So I thought about the problem for a long while, then wrote The Warrior. I set the piece (a short novel) in the Hammer universe, as I had Cross the Stars before it, but The Warrior was straight military—as surely as The Iliad is. I used the milieu of modern warfare, of tanks rather than armored spearmen, and the background has no connection with the Siege of Troy.
But remember, Homer didn’t say he was writing about the Siege of Troy: I sing the wrath of Achilles. . . .
Not all of my plots come from classical (or even historical) sources, but most of them do. That’s not only because of my personal taste, but because I believe (with Shakespeare) that literature which survives the buffeting of time is worth a second or thirty-second look.
I opened with a quote from Horace. I’ll close with another one: I have builded a monument more lasting than bronze. . . . Horace did; and Homer did, and Apollonius did, and so many others did. I’m proud to be able occasionally to stand on their magnificent structures.
—Dave Drake
Chatham County, NC
THE
VOYAGE
DEDICATION
To Clyde and Carlie Howard
Because they’re friends—
and in hope that it was worth the wait.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It’s amazing the number of people who helped me on this one. As I edited my manuscript, I kept noticing places where a friend had been of direct assistance (and there were others that I don’t recall, I’m sure).
Among the folks I owe on this one are Dan Breen, Sandra Miesel, John Rieber and Kent Williams, Mark Van Name, Allyn Vogel, Clyde and Carlie Howard, and my wife Jo. As I said, there were others as well.
I owe a particular debt to Tom Doherty. Not because he bought the book (which I appreciate, but somebody was going to buy it) but rather because he saved me from myself when the size of the project became clear to me.
It’s good to have friends.
TELARIA
As Ned Slade walked toward the dockyard building with the Headquarters—Pancahte Expedition sign on the door, a line of six human males and a squat, shaggy alien from Racontis jogged past.
“You wonder why I’m a private,” the leader sang.
“And why I sleep in the ditch,” sang-wheezed the remaining joggers in several keys. The Racontid had a clear, carrying voice which would better have suited an angel than a creature which could pull a strong man apart with its bare hands.
A metal saw shrilled within the starship in the adjacent frames, overwhelming the song. Ned’s mind supplied the words anyway: “It’s not because I’m stupid, but I just don’t want to be rich . . .”
The door was ajar. Ned knocked, but he couldn’t hear the rap of his own knuckles over the saw, so he let himself in.
“Shut the curst thing!” ordered the man at the electronic desk, cupping a palm over his telephone handset. He was paunchy and at least sixty standard years old. “I can’t hear myself think!”
As he spoke, the saw blade coasted back to silence. The fellow at the desk returned to his call. The rangy, somewhat younger man leaning against the office wall prevented Ned from swinging the door to. “Leave it, kid,” the man said. “I like the ventilation.”
Ned looked from one stranger to the other. Neither of them paid him any attention. “No,” the older man said into his handset, “I’m Adjutant Tadziki, but it will not help if you call back when Captain Doormann is here. She’s already made her decision on a supplier.”
Tadziki looked like a bureaucrat. The other fellow wore a stone-pattern camouflaged jumpsuit with Warson, T over the left breast pocket. Ned didn’t recognize the uniform, but Warson was as obviously a soldier as the men and the Racontid jogging around the starship outside were. Warson continued to gaze out the window, singing under his breath, I could’ve been a general and send out folks to die . . .”
“No,” said the adjutant, “since she’ll be eating the rations herself, your offer of saving three-hundredths per kilo isn’t very important to her—and it bloody well isn’t important to me!”
“But the sort of things a general does,” Ned murmured, watching the soldier, “they make me want to cry.”
Warson turned sharply. “You know the song?” he asked.
Tadziki slammed down the handset. “Fucking idiot!” he said.
“Yeah, but in an armored unit it’s ‘You ask why I’m a trooper,’” Ned said. “That’s the way I learned it.”
“Where?” Tadziki asked. “And for that matter, who the hell are you?”
“On Nieuw Friesland,” Ned said. “In the Frisian Defense Forces. I’m Reserve Ensign Slade, but I’m from Tethys originally.”
“Slade?” Warson said in amazement. “You’re Don Slade? Via, you can’t be!”
Ned’s lips tightened. “You’re thinking of my uncle,” he said stiffly. “I’m not Don Slade, no.”
The voices of the jogging troops became faintly louder. They were making circuits around the vessel under construction. Warson nodded disdainfully toward the window and said, “Herne Lordling’s got us doing an hour’s run each day to shape us up. They’re singing that to piss him off.”
“Lordling’s a general?” Ned asked.
“He was a colonel,” Warson said. “He’s a pissant, is what he really is. Sure you want to join a rinky-dink outfit being run by a pissant, kid?”
“Lordling isn’t running anything,” Tadziki said sharply. “Captain Doormann gave the order, and she gives all the orders.”
He suddenly smiled. “Via, Toll,” he added, patting his gut. “I’m twenty years older than you and I’d never run across a room before this stuff started. It’s still a good idea.”
“I could have been a colonel,” the joggers chorused, “but there it is again . . .”
“I want to join the Pancahte Expedition, yeah,” Ned said, handing an identification chip across the desk to the adjutant. “Whoever’s running it.”
“We’re pretty full up,” Warson said without emotion. He could have been commenting on the color of the Telarian sky, pale white with faint gray streaks.
“The plush seats colonels sit on, they tickle my sensitive skin . . .”
“The captain makes all those decisions, Toll,” said the adjutant as he watched the data his desk summoned from Ned’s ID. “Especially those decisions.”
“I never met your uncle,” Toll Warson said, eyeing Ned with quiet speculation. His look was that of a man who had absolutely nothing to prove—but who would be willing to prove it any way, anytime, anywhere, if somebody pushed him a little too far.
Ned recognized the expression well. He’d seen it often enough in his uncle’s eyes.
The door to the inner room opened. A man in fluorescent, extremely expensive clothing looked out and said, “Did you say Lissea had . . . ?” He seemed to be about Ned’s age, twenty-four years standard. A quick glance around the outer office, empty save for the three men, ended his question.
Tadziki answered it anyway. “Sorry, Master Doormann,” he said. “I’m sure she’s coming, but I’m afraid she must still be in the armaments warehouse with Herne.”