Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  I took ship back to Earth like a man walking in a dream, asking myself why.

  Back on Earth, I told my editors I was not in good shape physically; and they took one look at me and believed me. I took an indefinite leave from my job and sat around the News Network Center Library, at the Hague, searching blindly through piles of writings and reference material on the Fnendlies, the Dorsai and the Exotic worlds. For what? I did not know. I also watched the news dispatches from St. Marie concerning the settlement, and drank too much while I watched.

  I had the numb feeling of a soldier sentenced to death for failure on duty. Then in the news dispatches came the information that Jamethon’s body would be returned to Harmony for burial; and I realized suddenly it was this I had been waiting for: The unnatural honoring by fanatics of the fanatic who with four henchmen had tried to assassinate the lone enemy commander under a truce flag. Things could still be written.

  I shaved, showered, pulled myself together after a fashion and went to see my superiors about being sent to Harmony to cover the burial of Jamethon, as a wrap-up.

  The congratulations of the Director of News Network, that had reached me on St. Marie earlier, stood me in good stead. It was still fresh in the minds of the men just over me. I was sent.

  * * * *

  Five days later I was on Harmony, in a little town called Remembered-of-the-Lord. The buildings in the town were of concrete and bubble plastic, though evidently they had been up for many years. The thin, stony soil about the town had been tilled as the fields on St. Marie had been tilled when I got to that other world—for Harmony now was just entering the spring of its northern hemisphere. And it was raining as I drove from the spaceport of the town, as it had on St. Marie that first day. But the Friendly fields I saw did not show the rich darkness of the fields of St. Marie. Only a thin, hard blackness in the wet that was like the color of Friendly uniforms.

  I got to the church just as people were beginning to arrive. Under the dark, draining skies, the interior of the church was almost too dim to let me see my way about—for the Friendlies permit themselves no windows and no artificial lighting in their houses of worship. Gray light, cold wind and rain entered the doorless portal at the back of the church. Through the single rectangular opening in the roof watery sunlight filtered over Jamethon’s body, on a platform set up on trestles. A transparent cover had been set up to protect the body from the rain, which was channeled off the open space and ran down a drain in the back wall. But the elder conducting the Death Service and anyone coming up to view the body was expected to stand exposed to sky and weather.

  I got in line with the people moving slowly down the central aisle and past the body. To right and left of me the barriers at which the congregation would stand during the service were lost in gloom. The rafters of the steeply pitched roof were hidden in darkness. There was no music, but the low sound of voices individually praying to either side of me in the ranks of barriers and in the line blended into a sort of rhythmic undertone of sadness. Like Jamethon, the people were all very dark here, being of North African extraction. Dark into dark, they blended, and were lost about me in the gloom.

  I came up and passed at last by Jamethon. He looked as I remembered him. Death had had no power to change him. He lay on his back, his hands at his sides, and his lips were as firm and straight as ever. Only his eyes were closed.

  I was limping noticeably because of the dampness, and as I turned away from the body, I felt my elbow touched. I turned back sharply. I was not wearing my correspondent’s uniform. I was in civilian clothes, so as to be inconspicuous.

  I looked down into the face of the young girl in Jamethon’s solidograph. In the gray rainy light her unlined face was like something from the stained glass window of an ancient cathedral back on Old Earth.

  “You’ve been wounded,” she said in a soft voice to me. “You must be one of the mercenaries who knew him on Newton, before he was ordered to Harmony. His parents, who are mine as well, would find solace in the Lord by meeting you.”

  The wind blew rain down through the overhead opening all about me, and its icy feel sent a chill suddenly shooting through me, freezing me to my very bones.

  “No!” I said. “I’m not. I didn’t know him.” And I turned sharply away from her and pushed my way into the crowd, back up the aisle.

  After about fifteen feet, I realized what I was doing and slowed down. The girl was already lost in the darkness of the bodies behind me. I made my way more slowly toward the back of the church, where there was a little place to stand before the first ranks of the barriers began. I stood watching the people come in. They came and came, walking in in their black clothing with their heads down and talking or praying in low voices.

  I stood where I was, a little back from the entrance, half numbed and dull-minded with the chill about me and the exhaustion I had brought with me from Earth. The voice droned about me. I almost dozed, standing there. I could not remember why I had come.

  Then a girl’s voice emerged from the jumble, bringing me back to full consciousness again.

  “—he did deny it, but I am sure he is one of those mercenaries who was with Jamethon on Newton. He limps and can only be a soldier who hath been wounded.”

  * * * *

  It was the voice of Jamethon’s sister, speaking with more of the Friendly cant on her tongue than she had used speaking to me, a stranger. I woke fully and saw her standing by the entrance only a few feet from me, half-facing two elder people who I recognized as the older couple in Jamethon’s solidograph. A bolt of pure, freezing horror shot through me.

  “No!” I nearly shouted at them. “I don’t know him. I never knew him—I don’t understand what you’re talking about!” And I turned and bolted out through the entrance of the church into the concealing rain.

  I all but ran for about thirty or forty feet. Then I heard no footsteps behind me; I stopped.

  I was alone in the open. The day was even darker now and the rain suddenly came down harder. It obscured everything around me with a drumming, shimmering curtain. I could not even see the groundcars in the parking lot toward which I was facing; and for sure they could not see me from the church. I lifted my face up to the downpour and let it beat upon my cheeks and my closed eyelids.

  “So,” said a voice from behind me. “You did not know him?”

  The words seemed to cut me down the middle, and I felt as a cornered wolf must feel. Like a wolf I turned.

  “Yes, I knew him!” I said.

  Facing me was Padma, in a blue robe the rain did not seem to dampen. His empty hands that had never held a weapon in their life were clasped together before him. But the wolf part of me knew that as far as I was concerned, he was armed and a hunter.

  “You?” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “It was calculated you would be here,” said Padma, softly. “So I am here, too. But why are you here, Tam? Among those people in there, there’s sure to be at least a few fanatics who’ve heard the camp rumors of your responsibility in the matter of Jamethon’s death and the Friendlies’ surrender.”

  “Rumors!” I said. “Who started them?”

  “You did,” Padma said. “By your actions on St. Marie.” He gazed at me. “Didn’t you know you were risking your life, coming here today?”

  I opened my mouth to deny it. Then I realized I had known.

  “What if someone should call out to them,” said Padma, “that Tam Olyn, the St. Marie campaign Newsman, is here incognito?”

  I looked at him with my wolf-feeling, grimly.

  “Can you square it with your Exotic principles if you do?”

  “We are misunderstood,” answered Padma calmly. “We hire soldiers to fight for us not because of some moral commandment, but because our emotional perspective is lost if we become involved.”

  There was no fear left in me. Only a hard, empty feeling.

  “Then call them,” I said.

  Padma’s strange, hazel eyes watched
me through the rain.

  “If that was all that was needed,” he said, “I could have sent word to them. I wouldn’t have needed to come myself.”

  “Why did you come?” My voice tore at my throat. “What do you care about me, or the Exotics?”

  “We care for every individual,” said Padma. “But we care more for the race. And you remain dangerous to it. You’re an idealist, Tam, warped to destructive purpose. There is a law of conservation of energy in the pattern of cause-and-effect as in other sciences. Your destructiveness was frustrated on St. Marie. Now it may turn inward to destroy you, or outward against the whole race of man.”

  I laughed, and heard the harshness of my laughter.

  “What’re you going to do about it?” I said.

  “Show you how the knife you hold cuts the hand that holds it as well as what you turn it against. I have news for you, Tam. Kensie Graeme is dead.”

  * * * *

  “Dead?” The rain seemed to roar around me suddenly and the parking lot shifted unsubstantially under my feet.

  “He was assassinated by three men of the Blue Front in Blauvain five days ago.”

  “Assassinated…” I whispered. “Why?”

  “Because the war was over,” said Padma. “Because Jamethon’s death and the surrender of the Friendly troops without the preliminary of a war that would tear up the countryside left the civilian population favorably disposed toward our troops. Because the Blue Front found themselves farther from power than ever, as a result of this favorable feeling. They hoped by killing Graeme to provoke his troops into retaliation against the civilian population, so that the St. Marie government would have to order them home to our Exotics, and stand unprotected to face a Blue Front revolt.”

  I stared at him.

  “All things are interrelated,” said Padma. “Kensie was slated for a final promotion to a desk command back on Mara or Kultis. He and his brother Ian would have been out of the wars for the rest of their professional lives. Because of Jamethon’s death, that allowed the surrender of his troops without fighting, a situation was set up which led the Blue Front to assassinate Kensie. If you and Jamethon had not come together on St. Marie, and Jamethon had won, Kensie would still be alive. So our calculations show.”

  “Jamethon and I?” The breath went dry in my throat without warning, and the rain came down harder.

  “You were the factor,” said Padma, “that helped Jamethon to his solution.”

  “I helped him!” I said. “I did?”

  “He saw through you,” said Padma. “He saw through the revenge-bitter, twisted surface you thought was yourself, to the idealistic core that was so deep in the bone of you that even your uncle hadn’t been able to eradicate it.”

  The rain thundered between us. But Padma’s every word came clearly through it to me.

  “I don’t believe you!” I shouted. “I don’t believe he did anything like that!”

  “I told you,” said Padma, “you didn’t fully appreciate the evolutionary advances of our Splinter Cultures. Jamethon’s faith was not the kind that can be shaken by outer things. If you had been in fact like your uncle, he would not even have listened to you. He would have dismissed you as a soulless man. As it was, he thought of you instead as a man possessed. A man speaking with what he would have called Satan’s voice.”

  “I don’t believe it!” I yelled.

  “You do believe it,” said Padma. “You’ve got no choice except to believe it. Because only because of it could Jamethon find his solution.”

  “Solution!”

  “He was a man ready to die for his faith. But as a commander he found it hard his men should go out to die for no other reasonable cause.” Padma watched me, and the rain thinned for a moment. “But you offered him what he recognized as the devil’s choice—his life in this world, if he would surrender his faith and his men, to avoid the conflict that would end in his death and theirs.”

  “What crazy thinking was that?” I said. Inside the church, the praying had stopped, and a single strong, deep voice was beginning the burial service.

  “Not crazy,” said Padma. “The moment he realized this, his answer became simple. All he had to do was begin by denying whatever the Satan offered. He must start with the absolute necessity of his own death.”

  “And that was a solution?” I tried to laugh but my throat hurt.

  “It was the only solution,” said Padma. “Once he decided that, he saw immediately that the one situation in which his men would permit themselves to surrender was if he was dead and they were in an untenable position for reasons only he had known.”

  I felt the words go through me with a soundless shock.

  “But he didn’t mean to die!” I said.

  “He left it to his God,” said Padma. “He arranged it so only a miracle could save him,”

  “What’re you talking about?” I stared at him. “He set up a table with a flag of truce. He took four men—”

  “There was no flag. The men were overage, martyrdom-seekers.”

  “He took four!” I shouted. “Four and one made five. The five of them against one man. I stood there by that table and saw. Five against—”

  “Tam.”

  * * * *

  The single word stopped me. Suddenly I began to be afraid. I did not want to hear what he was about to say. I was afraid I knew what he was going to tell me. That I had known it for some time. And I did not want to hear it, I did not want to hear him say it. The rain grew even stronger, driving upon us both and mercilessly on the concrete, but I heard every word relentlessly through all its sound and noise.

  Padma’s voice began to roar in my ears like the rain, and a feeling came over me like the helpless floating sensation that comes in high fever. “Did you think that Jamethon for a minute fooled himself? He was a product of a Splinter Culture. He recognized another in Kensie. Did you think that for a minute he thought that barring a miracle he and four overage fanatics could kill an armed, alert and ready man of the Dorsai—a man like Kensie Graeme? Before they were gunned down and killed themselves?”

  Themselves…themselves…themselves…

  I rode off a long way on that word from the dark day and the rain. Like the rain and the wind behind the clouds it lifted me and carried me away at last to that high, hard and stony land I had glimpsed when I had asked Kensie Graeme that question about his ever allowing Friendly prisoners to be killed. It was this land I had always avoided, but to it I was come at last. And I remembered…

  From the beginning, I had known inside myself that the fanatic who had killed Dave and the others was not the image of all Friendlies. Jamethon was no casual killer. I had tried to make him into one in order to hide my own shame, my own self-destruction. For three years I had lied to myself. It had not been with me as I claimed, at Dave’s death.

  I had sat there under that tree watching Dave and the others die, watching the black-clad Groupman killing them with his machine rifle. And, in that moment, the thought in my mind had not been the one with which I justified three years of hunting for an opportunity to ruin someone like Jamethon and destroy the Friendly peoples.

  It had not been me, thinking, what is he doing there, what is he doing to those helpless, innocent men! I had thought nothing so noble. Only one thought had filled all my mind and body in that instant. It had been simply—after he’s done, is he going to turn that gun on me?

  * * * *

  I came back to the day and to the rain. The rain was slackening and Padma was holding me upright. As with Jamethon, I was amazed at the strength of his hands.

  “Let me go,” I mumbled.

  “Where would you go, Tam?” said Padma.

  “Any place,” I muttered. “I’ll get out of it. I’ll go hole up somewhere and get out of it. I’ll give up.”

  “An action,” said Padma, letting me go, “goes on reverberating for ever. Cause never ceases its effects. You can’t let go now, Tam. You can only change sides.”


  “Sides!” I said. The rain was dwindling fast. “What sides?” I stared at him drunkenly.

  “Your uncle’s side which is one,” said Padma. “And the opposing side, which is yours—which is ours as well.” The rain was falling only lightly now, and the day was lightening. A little pale sunlight worked through thin clouds and illuminated the space between us. “In addition there are two strong influences besides we Exotics concerned with the attempt of man to evolve. We can’t calculate or understand them yet, beyond the fact they act almost as single powerful individual wills. One seems to try to aid, one to frustrate, the evolutionary process; and their influences can be traced back at least as far as man’s first venture into space from Earth.”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t understand it,” I muttered. “It’s not my business.”

  “It is. It has been all your life.” Padma’s eyes caught light for a moment. “A force intruded on the pattern on St. Marie, in the shape of a unit warped by personal loss and oriented toward violence. That was you, Tam.”

  I tried to shake my head again, but I knew he was right.

  “You are blocked in your effort,” said Padma. “But the law of conservation of energies could not be denied. When you were frustrated by Jamethon, your force, transmuted, left the pattern in the unit of another individual, warped by personal loss and oriented toward violent effect on the fabric.”

  I stared at him and wet my lips. “What other individual?”

  “Ian Graeme.”

  I stared at him.

  “Ian found his brother’s three assassins hiding in a hotel room in Blauvain. He killed them with his hands—and in doing that he calmed the mercenaries and frustrated the Blue Front. But then he resigned and went home to the Dorsai. He’s charged now with the sense of loss and bitterness you were charged with when you came to St. Marie,” Padma paused and added softly, “Now he has great causal potential for some purpose we can’t yet calculate.”