by Glenn Grant
Niravati clears his throat disapprovingly. “Your Holiness…” he murmurs.
And suddenly, Vasudheva is angry, righteously angry, at Niravati, at himself, at all those who try to lever people away from love. All the scheming conniving bishops, and others like Bhismu’s father who trample over affection on their way to meaningless goals. Love demands enough sacrifices in itself; no one should impose additional burdens. One should pay the price of love and no more.
And no less.
Vasudheva touches Bhismu’s arm. “Take the wings off,” he says. “Give them to me.”
A stricken look of betrayal crosses Bhismu’s face. “No!”
“You can have the second flight. Warders!”
They grab him before he can jump. One warder looks at Niravati for confirmation of Vasudheva’s command; already the bishop has followers under his thumb. Let him. Let him have the whole damned temple. “Give me the wings!” Vasudheva roars.
They slide onto his arms like musty-smelling vestments, each as heavy as a rug. Vasudheva can barely lift his arms. A warder helps him up to the balcony’s parapet.
Vasudheva would like to turn back, just for a moment, and say something to Bhismu, something wise and loving and honest. But that would only burden his beloved with confusion and guilt. Best to leave it all unsaid.
“With wings like these,” the high priest calls out to the crowd, “a man could fly to heaven.”
He laughs. He is still laughing as he leaps toward the rising sun.
THE CAULDRON
Donald M. Kingsbury
Donald M. Kingsbury moved to Montreal in 1948 to study at McGill University and between 1956 and 1986 taught math there. He had imbibed the essences of Golden Age SF (characterized by the stories editor John W. Campbell published in Astounding in the 1940’s and 1950’s—the work of Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and others) and managed to sell one story to Campbell in 1952. He also became involved, as did Campbell, A. E. Van Vogt, and many others, in L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics movement, later Scientology, from which he was ultimately excommunicated. Then, in 1978–79, three striking hard SF novellas were published in Analog (Astounding retitled), all reprinted in Best of the Year volumes, and one, “The Moon Goddess and the Son,” was nominated for the Hugo Award in 1980, later becoming the kernel of his second novel in 1986.
His first novel, Courtship Rite (1982—U.K. title: Geta), established him as a major figure in science fiction, confirmed by a Hugo Award nomination for best novel. It was compared favorably to Frank Herbert’s Dune, the most popular SF novel of modern times. Almost all his work shares a common future history, which he is still expanding and developing. The major exception is his third novel, The Survivor, which is set in the “known-space” future history conceived by Larry Niven and has been published only in a collection of shared-world stories, The Man-Kzin Wars IV (1991). Regardless of the publishing setting, The Survivor is an inexorably powerful and logical SF novel of future war.
“The Cauldron” is an excerpt from a novel in progress, tentatively titled The Finger Pointing Solward, which takes place five hundred years later than the events of Courtship Rite. While lacking final polish, it has the energy, imaginative power, and ambition of Kingsbury’s best work.
* * *
For strategic reasons it was necessary that the Getans use human soldiers to fight on the human world of Enclad. Being biologists they manufactured their soldiers as one might manufacture any other item of military equipment. Their factory lay far from any sun, at the confluence of the Remeden Drift and a wisp of stars that the human foe called The Finger Pointing Solward.
It hung in space, a black sphere, pimpled by troop ships loading for the trip to Omicron Samekh, layered inside like an onion, Getan administrators crowding its surface where time was normal, overseeing the cauldron below that, layer by layer, gradiently dropped from normal time to a seething one hundred seconds per second where the troops were born and forged. A new soldier went from conception to fully trained adulthood in eighty days. The tailored warriors carried many Getan genes, for the Getans had once been human, but their mother-genes were Encladian, they looked Encladian, they could breed with Encladians and they carried only forty-six chromosomes.
A soldier had no mother or father; he was raised by a fighting family. The older soldiers of the family guided the younger soldiers and nursed the babies. Their gospel came from the tales of The Forge of War. “Then Judah went up and the Lord gave the Canaanites and the Perizzites into their hand; and they defeated ten thousand of them at Bezek.” Each of the families was named after an ancient battle on the planet Earth. Tuagi had been a soldier of the family of Bezek for all of the five thousand days of his preadolescence. Tuagi Bezek.
Tuagi never remembered a time when he had not been in command of his own training program. Obedience required only that he make for himself a balanced path toward the Art of Action. Indolence was not tolerated by his older brothers, neither was he allowed to neglect body or senses or mind. Failures were culled. Other than that he was on his own.
His life had been the cyclic honing of those three cardinal edges which every warrior had to wield—body and senses and mind. He took the path toward a strong, swift, limber body. He took the path which developed eyes that saw and ears that heard and fingers that felt. He took unquestioningly the path giving him the kind of mind that put together winning moves.
With serious eyes he would attach accelerometers to his limbs and practice for kilosecs to break one of his own speed records. He belonged to a group of five who were using dancing to bring that speed under coordinated control. Sometimes he would spend days in the sense-perception labs. He could identify every kind of tree that grew on Enclad and he could tell how much adrenaline was in a man’s blood by watching the faint pulsing at his throat. He knew by sight the meanings of all the common nonverbal gestures and nuances of facial expression used on Enclad and was adept at duplicating most of them.
Tuagi’s hobby was shaping weapons, and whenever he could, horseback riding in the cauldron’s slower higher levels. He had made English longbows, a Mongol bonebow, and a Byzantine crossbow. His older brother Kartiel Bezek had helped him machine an ancient M-1 rifle and taught him how to take its recoil against his small shoulders. A good mind was capable of good workmanship. He wanted to get together a team to build a Sopwith Triplane, for which he had the plans, but there was no place to fly it in the caves of their gigantic training base which hung in the dark of space leagues from any sun.
Instead he built a flying scale model, one and a half meters long. He spent days at the microscope machining and assembling the engine and machining the tiny working Vicker’s guns, and further days at the wind tunnel testing its flying capabilities. He felt an affection toward the triplane because a (simulated) flight of these Sopwiths had once strafed a cavalry brigade of his, decimating it while he was leading a charge in the simulator. The surprise had taught a very arrogant young soldier a lesson he was not liable to forget.
Cavalry had held a romantic fascination for Tuagi since, as a young child, he had admired the horse of one of the officer historians and that gentleman had spent an afternoon teaching him how to shoot his bow from horseback in the Byzantine style which the general Belisarius had used so effectively against the lance-equipped cavalry of the Goths.
His discovery of equestrian warfare made a sudden centaur out of him. He spent time at the forge drawing wire and crafting his own chain mail while his brothers merely hammered out swords and what-not. He became a horse trainer. He watched cavalry thrillers for entertainment and spent days in the very realistic horse-battle simulator (which smelled of manure and sweat) where he was able to kill a variety of foes from horseback or, if he wasn’t skillful enough, was himself mock-killed in some painful fashion and ejected from the simulator for the rest of the day.
In time he graduated to the study of cavalry tactics and had to direct his cavalry forces in vast simulated battles. He
became very good at it. He could direct cavalry under Roman or Medieval or Napoleonic constraints with a flair that earned him attention. He began to boast.
Amused, his Getan teachers, who lived in the slowness of the cauldron’s rim, put him in command of a German cavalry brigade on the French battlefield in 1914—against tanks which he wasn’t expecting since they hadn’t been invented in 1914 though the technological base for them existed. He got slaughtered. Like all cavalry officers before him who loved horses, he defended his brigade fiercely during the battle postmortem. Smiling, his instructors gave him a second try. That was the time he had been strafed by four Sopwith Triplanes who came and went—at a time when he knew the British were flying only unarmed and truculent pushers. At the visual display on his console he had cried.
The key concept wasn’t horses, it was mobility. What is the best kind of mobility that your technology can give you? For a while he became an avid student of Heinz Guderian, the German who first developed the concept of the Panzer Division and the tactics to go with it and put them brilliantly to use in the invasion of Poland in 1939 and of France in 1940. But once Tuagi thought that he understood mobility, he found himself in command of the Roman Xth Legion during the siege of Masada in ancient Judea. There he was in the desert against an impregnably fortified and well supplied rock. Mobility was meaningless.
In time he learned that his distant Getan officers would always do that to him. As soon as he had mastered some strategic concepts he would find himself in a simulated battle where no tactical solution known to him could work. In the game rooms with the computers Tuagi began to expect the unexpected. It might be a replay of some ancient battle on Earth that required knowledge of the military constraints of the time, or it might be a battle from one of the fourteen mock worlds which had been programmed each with their own peculiar constraints, but whatever the tactical situation, always there was the promise of surprise.
The Getan training officers didn’t believe in teaching their soldiers how to fight the war on Enclad, they believed in teaching strategic concepts which were usable at any time and any place from any technological base.
Each member of the Grand Army of Geta was a dedicated individual, but it was made very clear to him that individualistic behavior was not always appropriate. Sometimes a soldier had to function as a well-coordinated piece of a machine whose operation was on a scale vaster than he could comprehend. And so every few hundred days the Bezek Family was drafted into a group task and Tuagi had to obey his orders with precision. One never knew what the task was going to be. But the grueling pressure of any of the group operations provided Tuagi with a level of excitement he never felt while he was on his own. Would the Bezeks heap honors upon themselves? The smiles of his older brothers, the friendly clout, the singing when they had all come through together was something he relished.
Disobedience was unthinkable. Once, long ago, on a desert operation in the battle simulator with a squad of mature brothers, he had been unable to keep up—the heat of the two suns, the wind, the struggle had been too much. He was still only a small child, the smallest body in his squad. Rebellion flashed to his mind and out of him rose a monumental temper tantrum.
“Ah, we have the makings of a temperamental gigolo!” exclaimed his comrades lewdly. “A delight for the girls!”
With bawdy chuckles they suggested that if he didn’t shape up immediately and bring honor to the family, he would be culled as a soldier and sent off to service the Female Army, there to earn his life with his penis. They detailed the horrors to come. He would have to kiss women on their mouths or on their bottoms or on their toes all day long. He’d have to wear perfume and curl his hair and read poetry while he stared into their eyes with adoration. He’d have to whisper that he loved them while he nibbled their ears. He’d have to let women soldiers dress and undress him and fondle his body, and let his body be bought and sold among them as they chose. And if he failed in those arduous duties … well, there was always the stewpot.
They discussed the size of the bonus paid by each of the Female Families for a fresh young boy who was too genteel to make it as a soldier and how much they thought the Bezeks could get for Tuagi. How they argued and scrapped! Four of them inflicted upon him the indignity of measuring the length of his penis. The bigger it was, the better the bonus, they said. They bemoaned the fact that it was the smallest in the unit.
He chose the fury of the suns and reshouldered his duty with silent resentment. He decided that he did not like girl soldiers, even though he had never met one. He’d die under the melting humidity of the double suns before he’d let a girl touch his penis! Stoically he tried to keep up and when he did not complain, he found that the older boys understood and helped him through his exhaustion. Later, when the Bezeks were commended for a brilliant performance, he became proud that he had been able to stay with the men in the simulator. He was tough enough to be a soldier.
He equated women with his fear of failure and put them out of his mind. But try as he might he was never really able to get away from thoughts of the mysterious sex. He had never met one of them, yet they constantly appeared in the military simulations in the most awkward of places like in the middle of burning buildings where he had to respond to their ghost images. If he did not meet some computer standard, he was recycled through the ordeal again and again. They were everywhere.
Tuagi’s perception studies usually consisted of things like how to see through camouflage but could just as easily turn into lessons requiring discrimination between the moods of different Encladian women as shown by shifts of muscle tension on their faces.
Worse, part of his training consisted of learning the typical strategies used by Encladian women to attract and hold their men. If you were stupid enough to do something that annoyed the simulated woman, you had to talk to her all over again. Absorbing such belief structures was torture.
He grew. His voice deepened and the down on his body became hair but when his older brothers discussed women or a particularly delightful whore he left for elsewhere. He was more content at the stables or at some new game to sharpen his body or perceptions or mind. Mostly the topic of women bored him. He endured their appearance in the simulations. So he was taken by surprise when the Bezeks went on maneuver with a unit of the Female Army and he ended up in a foxhole with a real armed girl who looked exactly like the Encladian girls whose psychology he’d had to memorize in the simulation units. The resemblance was striking, even under the helmet and the light combat armor.
She didn’t act like an Encladian girl though; she had the swiftness and grace and toughness of a Bezek—until an unplanned lull in the battle when they were pinned down and had to hold their position lying in the mud with nothing to do but wait. Mischievously her voice transformed into an Encladian accent and her mannerisms softened into the mold he had met so often in the simulations. She was flirting with him! He had a traitorous desire to seduce her.
She just laughed. “You oaf! You’re wasting your time. They’re all virgins!”
Before he could respond, the battle resumed. His foxhole companion retransmogrified into a lean attack weapon, they moved out, covering each other, and he never saw her again.
And girls kept coming up in his study of history. It seemed that every great warrior had been suckled by a mother.
Not Tuagi. Tuagi was born of the ectogenetic tanks on level 115 from a witch’s brew of chromosomes smuggled out of Enclad and distilled by the Getan engineers. He had neither seen nor been touched by any woman. His earliest memory was being held against the hairy chest of one of his bearded Bezek brothers and pissing all over him. His brother had jerked Tuagi up and away, laughing. That was all there was to that memory. Emotionally his brothers had been everything to him.
Avoiding thoughts about women became more and more difficult. The more he suppressed them, the more he dreamed. In the dreams he would always meet one of his Encladian mothers. They were always his age or younger. That was part f
antasy, part take-it-for-granted physics. He knew he was growing up inside a time-accelerated cauldron. He was growing from newborn to man in only eighty Encladian days. It was possible that his chromosomes might have been smuggled out of human space dozens of kilodays ago, packaged in nitrogen-frozen ova, their donor long dead. But it was also possible that they had been taken from Enclad only after the first Getan beachheads.
Sometimes the dream of that contact with a mother was a nightmare. She would reject him like all of Enclad had rejected the soldiers who had already landed. Sometimes it was a peaceful meeting. Then he would be eating grapes with her on a mountainside or grooming her horse.
Once in his dream his mother came to him with a face from a standard training sequence on Encladian emotions. “Come!” He had been helpless to resist her beckon. She took him into a situation maze that forced on him her love and rage, her fear and grief, warmth and hatred, petulance and despair, exultation and serenity, mercy and pettiness. In that maze he had killed her friend, saved a son, bought her a dress, reclaimed her eyesight, cynically betrayed her, comforted her, refused to talk to her when she pleaded with him, tended her while she was sick and cursing him, each thing right on top of the next. He had been hard put upon to find the right responses.
Then at the end of the maze she had told him with no emotion at all: “You will never conquer me! See, I am unafraid of any emotion you can create in my soul.” Then she had handed him a sword. And he was so afraid of the sword he woke up.
It was because of his love for horses that he met the whore Elieta. He was often at the cavalry stables. Brother Kartiel came into the stall to watch him groom his favorite mare. Tuagi was surprised to see him. Kartiel was into infantry tactics and communication and had never been known to give an animal a second glance. True to form he was watching Tuagi and not the mare.
“Ah, as soon as I spied you here, I knew you were my man. Where else could I find a handsomer, more deserving virgin who loves horses? I told myself: Tuagi Bezek, my faithful brother, will do this one last favor for me before I am shipped off to Enclad.”