by Neil Clarke
Well done, Mr. deBrun, you think.
Something moves from in the shadows. A large man with shaggy hair, seven and a half feet tall, muscle and fat and pistoned machine all stitched together like an art show gone wrong. A glimpse of what you could have been, if you’d been designed for strength and strength alone.
In the palm of his oversized hand, a brick that leaked superconducting fluid. ShinnCo logo on the outside and all. The last time you saw it . . . the last time you saw it, you’d woken up in a room and a man in a suit had sat with it in his lap. He’d explained to you that you were in that box. Everything that had once been you, at least. And now they owned it. And by extension, you.
“A copy of your memories,” the Satrap says. “You’ll hand deBrun over. I know you. I have tasted your memories. Partaken of you.”
“You know who I was, know who I am,” you say. “That was the me before, I’m the me after they took all that, sliced me apart, rebuilt me, and deployed me.”
You grab John’s head, and before anyone in the cavern can twitch, you slice his head off and hold it up into the air. John’s body slumps forward, blood fountaining out over the rock at your feet.
“How long before the dying neurons are inaccessible in here?” you shout.
Everything in the room is flailing, responding to the movements of the Satrap’s tendrils as they shake in anger.
You ignore all that. “Give me. My memories.”
The Satrap calms. “You are too impertinent,” the mouths around you chorus. “I am near immortal. I know the region the man was in. I will continue hunting for that world, and I will eventually have it. But you . . . ”
The large man crushes the memory box. Hyperdense storage crumples easily under the carbon fiber fingers and steaming coolant bursts from between his knuckles.
Fragments drop to the ground.
You stare at them, lips tight.
“Ah,” the Satrap sighs all around you. “Now those memories only live inside me. They are, once again, unique within flesh. So . . . if you kneel and behave from now on, I’ll tell you all about your life. Every time you complete a task, you will return and bow before me right here, and I will tell you about your life. I will give you your past back. Just hand me the head, and kneel.”
“You actually believe that I will hand you this head, and take a knee?” you ask.
“I do. From here, those are your only two choices. So the question is . . . ”
You throw the head aside and hold the machete in both hands firmly.
As expected, half the men and women in thrall scrabble for the head. There’s a twinge of regret. Maybe John would have been able to hide in his ship if you hadn’t shown up. Maybe he would have been able to sneak enough fuel to his ragged fleet to make for that hidden world.
But you doubt it.
And here you are.
Killing the puppets who are in thrall to the Satrap is a thankless task. They are human. Many of them would not have asked for this life. They are people from the home world who fell on hard times, and were given a promise of future wealth in exchange for service. If they live long enough. Others were prepaid: a line of credit, a burst of wealth for a year, and then thrall. Others are criminals, or harvested from debtor’s prison. Prisoners of war left over from various conflicts.
The Satrapy is “civilized.” So it says. It doesn’t raid for subjects. They have to, nominally, be beings that have lost their rights. Or agreed to lose them.
Doesn’t mean most can’t see what thralldom is.
But you kill anyway. Their blood, sliding down the hydrophobic blade to drench your sleeves. The three nearest, beheaded quickly and cleanly. There’s no reason to make them suffer.
You walk through a mist of their jugular blood settling ever so slowly to the ground in the lower gravity. The Satrap, realizing what’s happening, pulls humans around itself. One of them holds deBrun’s head in their arms covetously.
The big guy is the artillery.
He advances, legs thudding, even here. Dust stirs. You walk calmly at him. He swings, a mass-driver, extinction-level powered punch that grazes you. Because what you have is speed. Mechanical tendons that trigger and snap you deep into his reach.
Just the whiff of his punch catches you in the ribs, though. They all crack, and alloys underneath are bent out of shape.
Warning glyphs cascade down your field of sight.
You ignore it all to bury your blade deep into the giant’s right eye socket, then yank up.
Even as the body falls to the ground, you’re facing the Satrap once more.
“I’ve already called my brothers and sisters down on the ground to come for you,” it says through the remaining puppets. “You are dead.” “People keep telling me that,” you say. And maybe they’re right.
The puppets come at you in a wedge. All seven. It’s trying to overwhelm you.
You use the machete to cut through the jungle of flesh, leaving arms and limbs on the ground. And when you stand in front of the Satrap, it wriggles back away from you in fear.
“Let me tell you a memory,” it begs through speakers, using the machines now that it has been shorn of biological toy things.
“It’s too late,” you tell it. “I’m dead.”
You drive the machete deep. And then you keep pushing until you have to use your fingers to rip it apart.
There’s a sense throughout the habitat that something major has shifted. Free humans are bunched together in corners, and others are dazed and wandering around. The rumor is that the Satrap has suddenly disappeared, or died. But what if it comes back? What happens when other Satraps arrive?
You find the docks and a row of deBrun’s crew with guns guarding the lock. They stare at you, and you realize you are still covered in blood and carrying a machete. Everyone on the station has given you a wide, wide berth.
“If you wanted to steal fuel, now’s the time,” you tell them. “The Satrap’s not going to be able to stop you. Everyone out there doesn’t know what to do.”
There are some other alien races sprinkled in throughout the station. But they seem to have locked themselves away, sensing something has gone wrong.
Smart.
“Who did the captain leave in charge, if he died?” you ask. They don’t answer, but take you back into the ship, and the first mate comes up.
“You’re in charge?” you ask.
“Yes,” he nods. “I’m John.”
You frown. “He called you Jay on the bridge, when I came out.”
The first mate smiles sadly. “John deBrun. The junior John deBrun. Jay because we don’t need two Johns on the bridge. Though . . . I guess that won’t happen anymore.”
“He gave you the coordinates, in case he was taken.”
John’s son nods. “You were taken with him, by the Satrap? You were there?”
You pause for a moment, trying to find words that suddenly flee you. You change direction. “You have three hours to steal as much fuel as you can before forces from the planet below arrive. We should both be long gone by then. Understand?”
“Three hours isn’t long enough.”
You shrug. “Take what time you have been given.”
“You don’t understand, we’re taking on extra people. People we didn’t plan to take on. That adds to the mass we need to spin up. We have the other ships docking hard, and we’re taking refugees from Hope’s End. People, who if they stay, will be back in thrall at the end of those few hours. We won’t have enough fuel to get where we need to go. Maybe, three quarters of the way?”
And out there in space, you were either there or not. There was no part way. No one was getting out on foot to push a ship. Those are cold calculations. They come with the job of captain. Air. Food. Water. Carbon filters. Fuel.
“Sounds like you need to shut your locks soon,” you say. “Or you risk throwing away your father’s sacrifice.”
“I will not leave them,” John says calmly. “He may have been abl
e to. You may. But I will not. We are human beings. We should not leave other human beings behind.”
“Then you’d better hope your men hurry on the fuel siphoning.”
You have no use for goodbyes. You leave him in his cockpit. But you stand in the corridor by yourself in the quiet. Your legs buckle slightly. A wound? Overtired muscles sizzling from the performance earlier? You lean against the wall and take a deep breath.
When you let go, you stare at the bloody handprint.
You lost it all. So close, and you lost it all.
And now what? What are you?
You’ll never have those memories. They aren’t you anymore. You are you. What you have right now, is you. What you do next, will be you. What will that be?
A cold heart and a bloody hand. That’s what you’ve been. What you are.
You turn and go back into the cockpit.
“Is the planet real?” you ask. And look at John’s son for any hint, any sign of a lie. You can see pulse, heat, and micro-expressions. Things that help you fight, spot the move. And now, spot intent.
“It’s real.”
“There is another way,” you say.
“And what is that?”
“Take me with you. Get as much fuel as you can, but leave early. Even if it means we only get halfway to where you are going. I killed the Satrap, and everything protecting him. And it wasn’t the first. When we run out of fuel, we’ll dock and I’ll rip more fuel out of their alien hands for you. For you. Understand? I can train more like me. When your fleet passes through, those that stand against us will rue it. I will do this because there is a debt here, understand?”
John looks warily at you. “You were with my father. He didn’t kill the Satrap?”
“There is a debt,” you repeat.
“He helped you?”
“Give me weapons. The non-humans on the station, they enjoy a position of power. They have avoided mostly being in thrall, as we are the new species for that. So even though we have time, they will figure out what we are doing and act against us. You’ll want me out there, buying you time.”
John nods, and reaches out a hand to shake.
You don’t take it. You can’t take it. Not with his father’s blood still on it.
“Weapons,” you repeat. “Before your men start dying unnecessarily.”
Cycled through the locks, deBrun’s men behind you, you walk past the stream of frightened people heading for the ship.
You stand in the large docking bays and survey the battlefield.
This is who you are. This is who you will be. This is who you choose.
A cold heart and bloody hands.
When this is over, when you help deliver them to their new world and repay your debt, you can go home to Earth. Stalk for clues to your past. See if you wander until you find that palm tree on the island you remember.
But for now, you are right here.
Right now.
Waiting for the fight to come to you.
Robert Silverberg has been a professional writer since 1955, and has published more than a hundred books and close to a thousand short stories. Among his best-known novels are Lord Valentine’s Castle, Dying Inside, Night-wings, The World Inside, and Downward to the Earth. He is a many-time winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, was Guest of Honor at the World Science Fiction Convention in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1970, and in 2004 was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, of which he is a past president.
Silverberg was born in New York City, but he and his wife Karen have lived for many years in the San Francisco Bay Area. They and an assortment of cats share a sprawling house of unusual architectural style, surrounded by exotic plants.
THE COLONEL RETURNS
TO THE STARS
Robert Silverberg
On the day that the Colonel found himself seized by circumstances and thrust back against his will into active service he had risen early, as usual, he had bathed in the river of sparkling liquid gold that ran behind his isolated villa in a remote corner of the Aureus Highlands, he had plucked a quick handful of dagger-shaped golden leaves from the quezquez tree for the little explosive burst of energy that chewing them always provided, and he had gone for his morning stroll along the glimmering crescent dunes of fine golden powder that ran off down toward the carasar forest, where the slender trunks of the long-limbed trees swayed in the mild breeze like the elongated necks of graceful lam-mis-gazelles. And when the Colonel got back to the villa an hour later for his breakfast the stranger was there, and everything began to change for him in the life that he had designed to be changeless forever more.
The stranger was young—seemed young, anyway; one never could really tell—and compactly built, with a tightly focused look about him. His eyes had the cold intensity of a fast-flowing river of clear water; his lips were thin, with deep vertical lines at their sides; his thick, glossy black hair was swept backward against his head like the wings of a raven. The little silver badge of the Imperium was visible on the breast of his tunic.
He was standing on the open patio, arms folded, smiling a smile that was not really much of a smile. Plainly he had already been inside. There was nothing to prevent that. One did not lock one’s doors here. The Colonel, looking past him, imagined that he could see the fiery track of the man’s intrusive footsteps blazing up from the green flagstone floor. He had entered; he had seen; he had taken note. The Colonel kept about himself in his retirement the abundant memorabilia of a long life spent meddling in the destinies of worlds. In his sprawling house on golden Galgala he had set out on display, for his eyes alone, a vast array of things, none of them very large or very showy—bits of pottery, fossils, mineral specimens, gnarled pieces of wood, coins, quaint rusted weapons, all manner of ethnographic artifacts, and a great number of other tangible reminders of his precise and devastating interventions on those many worlds.
Most of these objects—a scrap of bone, a painted stone, a bit of tapestry, a blunted knife, a tattered banner that bore no emblem, a box of sullen-looking gray sand—had no obvious significance. They would have been baffling to any visitor to the Colonel’s Galgala retreat, if ever a visitor were to come, although there had not been any in many years, until this morning. But to the Colonel each of these things had special meaning. They were talismans, touchstones that opened a century and a half of memories. From Eden, from Entrada, from Megalo Kastro, from Narajo of the Seven Pyramids, from snowy Mulano, from unhappy Tristessa, even, and Fenix and Phosphor and some two dozen others out of mankind’s uncountable string of planets had they come, most of them collected by the Colonel himself but some by his pinch-faced limping father, the Old Captain, and even a few that had been brought back by his swaggering buccaneer of a grandfather, who had carved a path through the universe as though with a machete five hundred years before him.
The Colonel now was old, older than his father had lived to be and beginning to approach the remarkable longevity of his grandfather, and his days of adventure were over. Having outlived the last of his wives, he lived alone, quietly, seeking no contact with others. He did not even travel anymore. For the first two decades after his retirement he had, more from habit than any other motive, gone off, strictly as a tourist, on journeys to this world and that, planets like Jacynth and Macondo and Entropy and Duud Shabeel that he had never found occasion to visit during the course of his long professional career. But then he had stopped doing even that.
In his time he had seen enough, and more than enough. He had been everywhere, more or less, and he had done everything, more or less. He had overthrown governments. He had headed governments. He had survived a dozen assassination attempts. He had carried out assassinations himself. He had ordered executions. He had refused a kingship. He had lived through two poisonings and three marriages. And then, growing old, old beyond the hope of many further rejuvenations, he had put in for retirement and walked away from it all.
When he was young, restless and full of insat
iable hungers, he had dreamed of striding from world to world until he had spanned the entire universe, and he had leaped with savage eagerness into the shining maw of each new Velde doorway, impatient to step forth onto the unknown world that awaited him. And no sooner had he arrived but he was dreaming of the next. Now, though, obsessive questing of that sort seemed pointless to him. He had decided, belatedly, that travel between the stars as facilitated by the Velde doorways or by the other and greater system of interstellar transport, the Magellanic one, was too easy, that the ease of it rendered all places identical, however different from one another they might actually be. Travel should involve travail, the Colonel had come to think. But modern travel, simple, instantaneous, unbounded by distance, was too much like magic. Matters had been different for the ancient explorers of ancient Earth, setting out on their arduous voyages of discovery across the dark unfriendly seas of their little planet with almost incomprehensible courage in the face of impossible odds. Those men of so many thousands of years ago, staking their lives to cross uncharted waters in tiny wooden ships for the sake of reaching alien and probably hostile shores on the very same world, had been true heroes. But now— now, when one could go almost anywhere in the galaxy in the twinkling of an eye, without effort or risk, did going anywhere at all matter? After the first fifty worlds, why not simply stay home?
The visitor said, “Your home is fascinating, Colonel.” He offered no apology for trespassing. The Colonel did not expect one. With the smallest of gestures he invited the man inside. Asked him, in a perfunctory way, if he had had a good journey. Served him tea on the terrace overlooking the river. Awaited with formal politeness the explanation for the visit, for surely there had to be some explanation, though he did not yet know that it was ultimately going to break the atoms of his body apart once again, and scatter them once more across the cosmos, or he would have shut the man out of his house without hearing another word.