Ends, p.21
Ends, page 21
City Spaceport Terminal. Michael lay not with a sword, but with the gaita gallega held to his chest; and beneath him was the leto de muerte—the real leto de muerte, made up of everything that those who had seen him there that day, and who had fought for and against him after it was too late, considered the most valuable thing they could give from what was in their possession at the time.
Each had given the best he could, to build up a bed of state for the dead hero—a bed of triumph, actually, for in winning here Michael had won everything, according to their rules and their ways. After the supreme victory of his courage, as they saw it, there was nothing left for them but the offering of tribute; their possessions or their lives.
We stood, we three, looking at it all in silence. Finally, Kensie spoke.
“Do you still want to take him home?”
“No, * said Amanda. The word was almost a sigh from her, and she stood looking at the dead Michael. “No. This is his home, now.”
We went back to Gebel Nahar, leaving the corpse of Michael with his honor guard of the other dead around him.
The next day Amanda and I left Cebel Nahar to return to the Dorsai. Kensie and Ian had decided to complete their contract; and it looked as if they should be able to do so without difficulty. With dawn, individual soldiers of the regiments had begun pouring back into Gebel Nahar, asking to be accepted once more into their duties. They were eager to please, and for Naharese, remarkably subdued.
Padma was also leaving. He rode into the spaceport with us, as did Kensie and Ian, who had come along to see us off. In the terminal, we stopped to look once more at the leto de muerte painting.
“Now I understand,” said Amanda, after a moment. She turned from the painting and lightly touched both Ian and Kensie who were standing on either side of her.
“We’ll be back, she said, and led the two of them off.
I was left with Padma.
“Understand?” I said to him. ’The leto de muerte concept?”
“No,” said Padma, softly. “I think she meant that now she understands what Michael came to understand, and how it applies to her. How it applies to everyone, including me and you.”
I felt coldness on the back of my neck.
’To me?” I said.
“You have lost part of your protection, the armor of your sorrow and loss,” he answered. “To a certain extent, when you let yourself become concerned with Michael’s problem, you let someone else in to touch you again. ’
I looked at him, a little grimly.
“You think so?” I put the matter aside. “I’ve got to get out and start the checkover on the ship. Why don’t you come along? When Amanda and the others come back and don’t find us here, they’ll know where to look.”
Padma shook his head.
“I’m afraid I’d better say goodbye now,” he replied. “There are other urgencies that have demanded my attention for some time and I’ve put them aside for this. Now, it’s time to pay them some attention. So I’ll say goodby now; and you can give my farewells to the others.”
“Goodby, then,” I said.
As when we had met, he did not offer me his hand; but the warmth of him struck through to me; and for the first time I faced the possibility that perhaps he was right. That Michael, or he, or Amanda—or perhaps the whole affair—had either worn thin a spot, or chipped off a piece, of that shell that had closed around me when I watched them kill Else.
“Perhaps well run into each other again,” I said.
“With people like ourselves,” he said, “it’s very likely.”
He smiled once more, turned and went.
I crossed the terminal to the Security Section, identified myself and went out to the courier ship. It was no more than half an hours work to run the checkover—these special vessels are practically self monitoring. When I finished the others had still not yet appeared. I was about to go in search of them when Amanda pulled herself through the open entrance port and closed it behind her.
“Where’s Kensie and Ian?” I asked.
“They were paged. The Board of Governors showed up at Gebel Nahar, without warning. They both had to hurry back for a full-dress confrontation. I told them I’d say goodby to you for them.”
“All right. Padma sends his farewells by me to the rest of you.”
She laughed and sat down in the copilot’s seat beside me.
“I’ll have to write Ian and Kensie to pass Padma’s on,” she said. “Are we ready to lift?”
“As soon as we’re cleared for it. That port sealed?”
She nodded. I reached out to the instrument bank before, keyed Traffic Control and asked to be put in sequence for liftoff. Then I gave my attention to the matter of warming the bird to life.
Thirty-five minutes later we lifted, and another ten minutes after that saw us safely clear of the atmosphere. I headed out for the legally requisite number of planetary diameters before making the first phase shift. Then, finally, with mind and hands free, I was able to turn my attention again to Amanda.
She was lost in thought, gazing deep into the pinpoint fires of the visible stars in the navigation screen above the instrument bank. I watched her without speaking for a moment, thinking again that Padma had possibly been right. Earlier, even when she had spoken to me in the dark of my room of how she felt about Ian, I had touched nothing of her. But now, I could feel the life in her as she sat beside me.
She must have sensed my eyes on her, because she roused from her private consultation with the stars and looked over.
“Something on your mind?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Or rather, yes. I didn’t really follow your thinking, back in the terminal when we were looking at the painting and you said that now you understood.”
“You didn’t?” She watched me for a fraction of a second. “I meant that now I understood what Michael had.”
“Padma said he thought you’d meant you understood how it applied to you—and to everyone.”
She did not answer for a second.
“You’re wondering about me—and Ian and Kensie,” she said.
“It’s not important what I wonder,” I said.
“Yes, it is. After all, I dumped the whole matter in your lap in the first place, without warning. It’s going to be all right. They’ll finish up their contract here and then Ian will go to Earth for Leah. They’ll be married and she’ll settle in Foralie.”
“And Kensie?”
“Kensie.” She smiled sadly. “Kensie’ll go in…in his own way.”
And you?”
“I’ll go mine.” She looked at me very much as Padma had looked at me, as we stood below the painting. “That’s what I meant when I said I’d understood. In the end the only way is to be what you are and do what you must. If you do that, everything works. Michael found that out.”
“And threw his life away putting it into practice.”
“No,” she said, swiftly. “He threw nothing away. There were only two things he wanted. One was to be the Dorsai he was born to be and the other was never to use a weapon; and it seemed he could have either one but not the other. Only, he was true to both and it worked. In the end, he was Dorsai and unarmed—and by being both he stopped an army.”
Her eyes held me so powerfully that I could not look away.
“He went his way and found his life,” she said, “and my answer is to go mine. Ian, his, Kensie, his; and—
She broke off so abruptly I knew what she had been about to say.
“Give me time,” I said; and the words came a little more thickly than I had expected. “It’s too soon yet. Still too soon since she died. But give me time, and maybe…maybe, even me.”
Last Voyage
“What’s up?” asked Barney Dohouse, the engineer, coming through the hatch and swinging up the three metal steps of the ladder to the control room. Both Jed Alant (the captain), and the young mate Tommy Ris were standing in front of the vision screen.
“We’re being followed, Barney,” said Jed, without turning around. “Come here and take a look.”
The heavy old engineer swung himself forward to stand between the stocky, grizzled captain and the slim young mate. The screen was set on a hundred and eighty degrees rear—which meant it was viewing the segment of space directly behind them. Barney squinted at it. An untrained eye would have seen nothing among the multitude of star points that filled it like an infinite number of gleaming drops from the spatter-brush of an artist; but the engineer, watching closely, made out in the lower left corner of the screen a tiny dark shape that occulted point after glowing point in its progress toward the center of the screen.
The point seemed to crawl with snail-like slowness, but Barney frowned. “Coming up fast, isn’t he? Who do you suppose he is?”
“There’s no scheduled craft on that course,” said Tommy Ris, his blue eyes serious under the carefully combed forelock of his brown hair.
“Uh,” grunted Barney. “Think it’s Pellies?”
“I’m afraid so,” Jed sighed. “And us with passengers.”
The three men fell silent, gazing at the screen. It was a reflection on their years of experience in the void that they thought of the passengers rather than themselves. Your true spaceman is a fatalist out of necessity, and as a natural result of having his nose constantly rubbed in the fact that—cosmically speaking—he is not the least bit important. With passengers, as they all three knew, the case was different. Passengers, by and large, are planet-dwellers, comfortably self-convinced of the necessity for their own survival and liable to kick and fuss when the man with the scythe comes along.
The Tecoatepetl—Teakettle to her friends and crew—had no business carrying passengers in the first place. She had been constructed originally to carry vital drugs and physiological necessities to the pioneer worlds, as soon as they were opened for self-supporting colonists. When the first belt of extrasolar worlds had been supplied, she was already a little outdated. Her atomic power plant and her separate drive section—like one end of a huge dumbell—balanced the control and payload section at the other end of a connecting section like a long tube. Powerful, but not too pretty, she was useful, but not so efficient, by the time sixty years had passed and the hair of her captain and engineer had greyed. As a result she had been downgraded to the carrying of occasional passenger loads—according to the standards of interstellar transportation, where human life is usually slightly less important than cargoes of key materials for worlds who lack them.
Old spaceships never die until something kills them, the demand for anything that will travel between the stars fantastically outweighing the available carrying space. An operating spaceship is worth its weight in—spaceships. To human as well as alien; which was why the non-human ship from the Pleiades was swiftly overhauling them. Neither humans nor cargo could hold any possible interest for the insectivorous humanoids; but the ship itself was a prize.
“We re five hours from Arcturus Base,” said Tommy, “and headed for it at this velocity he can’t turn us. Wonder how he figures on getting us past our warships there without being shot up.”
’Ask him,” said Barney, showing his teeth in a grin.
“You mean—talk to him?” Tommy looked at the captain for permission.
“Why not?” said Jed. “No, wait; I’ll do it. Key me in, Tommy.”
The younger man seated himself at the transmission board and set himself to locating the distantly-approaching ship with a directional beam. Fifteen minutes later, a green light began to glow and wink like a cat’s eye in front of him; and he grunted with satisfaction.
“All yours,” he said to Jed. The captain moved over to stand in front of the screen as Tommy turned a dial and the stars faded to give an oddly off-key picture of a red-lighted control room. A tall, supple-looking member of the race inhabiting the Pleiades stars his short trunk-snout looking like a comic nose stuck in the middle of his elongated free, looked back at him.
“You speak human?” asked Jed.
“I speak it,” answered the other. The voice strongly resembled a human’s except for a curious ringing quality, like a gong being struck in echo to the vowels. “You don’t speak mine?”
“I haven’t got the range,” replied Jed. They stood looking at each other with curiosity, but without emotion, like professional antagonists.
“So,” said Pellie. “It takes a trained voice, you.” He was referring to the tonal changes in the language of his race, which covers several octaves, even for the expression of simple ideas. “Why you have called?”
“We were wondering,” said Jed, “how you thought you could take our ship and carry it through the warfleet we’re due to pass in five hours.”
“You stay in ship, you,” answered the other, “when we pass by fleet we let you leave ship by small boat.”
“I bet,” said Jed.
The Pleiadan did not shrug, but the tone of his voice conveyed the sense of it. “Your choice, you.”
“I’ll make you a deal,” said Jed. “Let us out into the lifeboats now. None of us can turn at this velocity, so we’ll all ride together up as for as the base. Once our small boats are safe under the guns of the fleet, you can chase the ship here and take it over without any trouble.”
“Only one person you leave on ship blows it up,” said the Pleiadan. “No. You stay. Say nothing to fleetships. We stay close in for one pip on screen Arcturus. After we pass, we let you go. You trust us.”
“Well,” said Jed. “You can’t blame a man for trying.” He waved to the Pellie, who repeated the gesture and cut the connection. “That’s that,” Jed went on, turning back to the other two humans, as Tommy thoughtfully returned the star-picture to the screen. The occulting shape that was the ship they had just been talking to was looming quite large now, indicating its closeness.
“D you think there’s any chance of him doing what he says?” Barney asked the Captain.
“No reason to, and plenty of reason not to,” replied Jed. “That way he keeps the two lifeboats with the ship—they’re valuable in their own right.” This was true, as all three men knew. A lifeboat was nothing less than a spaceship in miniature—as long as you kept it away from large planetary bodies, whose gravity were too much for the simple, one-way-thrust engines.
“I suppose the passengers will have to be told,” broke in Tommy. ’They’ll be seeing it on the lounge screen sooner or later. What do you say, Jed?”
“Let’s not borrow trouble until we have to,” frowned the captain. They were all thinking the same thing, imagining the passenger’s reactions to an announcement of the true frets of the situation. Hysteria is a nasty thing for a man to witness just before his own death.
“I wish there was something the fleet could do,” said Tommy a trifle wistfully. He knew the hopelessness of the situation as well as the two older men; but the youngness of him protested at such and early end to his life.
“If we blew ourselves up, they’d get him, eh, Jed?” said Barney.
“No doubt of it,” said the captain. “But I can’t with these passengers. If it was us…
There was the sudden suck of air, and the muted slam of the opening and closing of the bulkhead door between the control section ana the passengers lounge above. Leni Hargen, the chief steward swung down the ladder, agile in spite of his ninety years, his small, wiry figure topped by a free like an ancient monkey’s. He joined the circle.
“Got company have we, Jed?” he asked, his sharp voice echoing off the metal, equipment-jammed walls.
“A Pellie,” Jed nodded, “the payload excited?”
“So-so,” replied Leni. “It hasn’t struck home yet. First thing they think of when they see another ship is that it’s human, of course. ‘Damned clever, these aliens, but you don’t mean to say they can really do what we do’—that sort of attitude. No, they think it’s human. And they want to know who their traveling companions are; sent me up to ask.”
“I’ll go talk to them,” said Jed.
“Why talk?” said Leni. Living closest of them all to the passengers, he had the most contempt for them. “Won’t do no good. Wait till the long-nose gets close, then touch off the fuel, and let everybody die happy.”
Barney swore. “He’s right, Jed. We don’t have a prayer, none of us. And I want to go when the old girl goes.”
He was talking about the Teakettle, and the captain winced. With the exception of Tommy and the assistant steward, the ship had been their life for over half a century. It was unthinkable to imagine an existence without her. The thought of Tommy made him glance at the young mate. “What d’you say, son?”
“I…” Tommy hesitated. Life was desperately important to him and at the same time he was afraid of sounding like a coward. “I’d like to wait,” he said at last, shamefacedly.
“I’m glad to hear it,” replied Jed, decisively. “Because that’s what we’re going to do. I know what you think of your charges, Leni; but so far as I’m concerned, human life rates over any ship—including this one. And as long as there’s one wild chance to take, I’ve got to take it.”
“What chance?” said Leni. “They promise to turn us loose?”
Jed nodded. “They did. And f m going to have to go on the assumption that they will.”
“They will like…”
“Steward!” said Jed; and Leni shut his mouth. ““I’ll go out and talk to the passengers. The rest of you wait here.”
He turned and went up the ladder toward the lounge door in the face of their silence.
The hydraulically-operated door whooshed away from its air seal as he turned the handle, and sucked back into position after he had stepped through. He stood on the upper level of the lounge, looking down its length at the gay swirl of colorfully dressed passengers. For a moment he stood unnoticed, seeing the lounge as it had been in the days when it was the main hold and he was younger. Then “Oh, there’s the captain!” cried someone; and they flocked around him, chattering questions. He held up his hand for silence.
