Gordon R. Dickson (46 page)

Since he and I had been away from
home, he had become more dependent, not only on me, who had been the only
human, originally, he would get close to, but on Doc during Doc's brief visits.

"Make yourself a drink," I
said to Doc now, "while I go through these letters."

"Thanks," he said
enthusiastically. He pried his hand loose from the Old Man's and went over to
the table that did duty as my liquor cabinet. Doc was, in fact, a nondrinker as
well as a non-smoker. But he always carried cigarettes with him, and he was
expert at making a show of both smoking and drinking, these being only two of a
large number of casual acts he had perfected, apparently on the off-chance that
the misdirection in them might prove useful-someday. I ripped open my letters
and read them.

They were perfectly ordinary,
personal mail from home; and in spite of the fact that they were intended
primarily as camouflage, I found myself going through them as eagerly as anyone
else would, away from home and family against his will. Marie was still worried
about Wendy, who herself had written me a few lines of pure prattle—under
duress probably. Ellen had written almost as brief a note, saying that things
were fine, just the way I'd left them, and there was no need to worry about
anything. I read the last line as a hint to take Marie's motherly concern with
a certain amount of advisement. Ellen's language could not have been any more
spare and stiff if she herself had been a soldier in the field; so that the
word "love" at the end looked incongruous. But I knew her.

Bill wrote he was pleased with the
way things were going. From him, this would be a reference to Porniarsk's work.
Also, he mentioned that he had finally refined the "emergency harvest
plans," which would be a reference to my orders that they all split up and
scatter if Paula suddenly decided to take some of them hostage as insurance
against my noncooperation. Porniarsk sent no message.

"Good," I said to Doc,
when the last letter had been read. "Things seem all right at home."

"They are," he answered.
"Have you got letters for me to take back?"

"Over on the writing table,
there," I said. He went to get them. "Were you planning on heading
back right away?"

"Unless there's something to
keep me here."

He tucked the letters I had written
into his wallet, came back and sat down. The Old Man took his hand again.

"I was just thinking—why don't
you stick around a day or so until we've taken this local area? They're putting
up quite a fight, and if you stay you'll be able to go back and tell the women
personally that I didn't get hurt in the process."

"Glad to," said Doc.
"You've got a good life here. Far as I'm concerned, it's a vacation with
all expenses paid."

He had a nice, light tone to his
voice as he said it; but his eyes were sharp on mine, ready to read why I was
asking him to stick around. I shook my head very slightly, to tell him
not
now,
and started to talk about the situation, saying nothing that wasn't highly
complimentary to Paula and confident about her eventual achievements here, but
filling him bit by bit with data on the actual state of affairs militarily.
When I was done, he knew what the facts were, but not what the connection was
between these and the reason I wanted him to stick around.

That was the third day of the battle
for control of the area. It was not until Sunday that Paula's soldiers overran
most of the strong points of the opposition and not until Monday afternoon that
they finished mopping up.

"As long as you've stayed this
long, you might as well stay for the victory celebration, too," I told
Doc.

"Suits me," he said. His
voice sounded a little thickly from one of the couches in my tent where he
sprawled with a glass in his hand; but his eyes were as clean and steady as the
eyes of a sniper looking along the sights of his rifle.

I was more glad to have him there
than I had thought. I had seen the pattern of the battle's consequences
building all week. Paula and Aruba, in particular, must be seeing the same
thing themselves, now that the fight was over and the returns were in. So,
while the rank and file survivors whooped it up in celebration, Paula herself
and her immediate staff would now be biting into the bitter fruit of a win that
had cost so highly. The way they would react, I had told myself, could tell me
a lot more about their patterns; and part of what I might learn might be useful
information to send home with Doc.

Paula had already had to face one
particular ugly truth; that there was a point beyond which her well-trained
soldiers would not obey her. From dressed-up recruits they had turned into
veterans in the bloodbath of the last seven days; and commanders back to the
dawn of history could have told her what would happen when such soldiers were
finally allowed to overrun an enemy who had bled them heavily in preceding
days. Her kids had turned into killers. They slaughtered right and left on that
Monday afternoon as they subjugated the conquered people.

It was Paula's first setback. There
were aircraft mechanics and boat mechanics, as well as other experts, among her
former enemies that were worth regiments to her; but there was no way she could
hold her blood-high soldiery back long enough to weed out such valuable
individuals from the otherwise killable chaff of the local population. Monday
cost her dearly.

Nonetheless, she had to put a good
face on it and appear to encourage the wild celebration that ensued that night.
It began at late afternoon and went on until dawn, by which time all but a few
rarely tough individuals had collapsed. It was at dawn that Aruba came for me.

That he came himself for me, rather
than sent for me, was an index of his upset. He stepped into my tent, peered
for a second at the still form of Doc, who appeared to be asleep on one of the
couches, and then looked back at me. In the early daylight coming through the
plastic windows of the tent, his face was sallow, the shade of new liverwurst.

"She wants to see you," he
said.

"Paula?" I asked.

He nodded. I got to my feet. I was
still dressed. Anything could have happened in that night just past and I had
not felt like trying to sleep.

"What about?" I asked, as
I went with him out into the cool morning. A breeze was blowing from the ocean.

"She'll want to tell you
herself," he said and licked his lips. He had been badly shaken and I
could see him reaching for a bottle the minute he was alone in his own
quarters.

I nodded indifferently enough, but
inwardly I braced myself. On this morning, her purpose in wanting to see me
would not be good. I walked alongside Aruba to the entrance of the pavilion
tent, where two of her officers—colonels—now stood with machine rifles, doing
sentry duty. He stopped at the tent flap.

"Go in," he said,
"she's waiting for you."

I went in alone. Paula was alone
also, wearing a filmy yellow dressing gown as if she had just risen from bed;
but her face was hard and weary with the look that comes from being up and
tensely awake for hours.

"Marc," she said, and her
voice was pure industrial diamond in tone, "there's a paper over there on
the desk. Sign it."

"Sign...?" I went across
to the desk and looked down. It was a neatly typed letter, several pages long,
beneath the letterhead she had given me as one of her staff.

"Just sign it," she said.

"Not until I read it," I
answered.

Our eyes clashed. Then she shrugged
and turned away; but I could almost see the note her memory made of this, my
balking at her command. It would be recalled when the hour was right.

"Of course," she said.

I bent my head to the letter again
and read. It was like being unexpectedly hit in the stomach. Or, more
accurately, it was like a sickening collision in the dark, running full tilt
into a concrete wall you had known was there all the time, but whose existence
you had put out of mind—an impact so unexpected and brutal it left you
nauseated; because suddenly I understood Paula, saw her complete and naked in
the glaring, fluorescent light of what she was planning to set me up for.

I read that I had been shocked by the
irresponsible behavior of some of her soldiers in taking over the enemy area.
But, over and above my shock, I had been aghast to see the criminal murder of
certain innocent individuals among the defenders; artisans and mechanics, as
well as other trained personnel, who had only been in the enemy camp under
duress. The slaughter of these innocents was not only a heinous crime against
them as individuals, but amounted to treason against the Empire, since the
Empress was now deprived of the willing services of these people and many of
her subjects would suffer because of that lack. Consequently, I called upon her
formally to take action against the criminals responsible and see that they
were brought to justice, since I, with the skills that had allowed me to halt
the ravages of the time storm, could see more deeply and clearly than anyone
into the terrible cost we must all bear because of the deaths of these
innocents.

Suddenly, reading this, the pattern
I had been building on Paula was complete. I saw the hell she had in mind not
only for the soldiers responsible for delaying her here over the coming winter,
but for anyone who had been around to witness this happening to her; and that
told me more about her than she might have betrayed to me in two more years of
my observing her.

I signed.

"I'm proud to do this," I
said, taking the letter over to her. "It doesn't say anything I didn't
feel myself. No wonder you're the Empress, Paula. You can even read
minds."

She smiled and took the letter. I
was by no means forgiven for wanting to read before signing, but for the
present small moment, the smile was genuine. I would never have risked
flattering her so grossly before I had stepped through the flap of this tent;
but now I knew when and where she was vulnerable.

"Dear Marc," she said.
"You understand."

She looked at me; and I understood,
all right. Ironically, suddenly the moment I had patiently waited for, in which
I could gain control over her by securing her physically, was with me. In this
devastated moment she was available, if I had still wanted her. But the fact
was, after reading that letter, I now would not have touched her with a
shark-stick.

"More than ever before," I
said. "Do you want me to let other people know I've written you this
letter?"

She hesitated, but it was only the
habit of caution operating in her. Again, if she had been herself, I myself
would have hesitated to show her such rapid agreement. But she was not herself.
That was the crucial truth that had broken out into the open, with the completing
of her pattern in my mind just now. She had a flaw I had never really
appreciated until now, a deep flaw that would cost her the rulership of the
world that had seemed so possible up until now. Already, she was adapting to my
own hint that I was eager to accept the authorship of the letter she held.
Already she was beginning to make herself believe the attractive idea that I
had indeed written it on my own initiative.

"If I just drop the letter with
you and go out to spread the word, I know your officers'll be eager to back me
up. I know they will," I said. "Then we can arrest the guilty ones
and bring them to justice before they have time to fill the minds of their
fellow soldiers with lies."

"Yes." She laid the letter
softly down on the end-table beside her. "Of course. You've got my
permission to tell what you've written me. Justice should be speedy."

"I'll go right now, then,"
I said. "Wait a second, though. Maybe if you give me a written order to do
what's necessary, I can make sure none of them escape. Or, for that matter,
with that kind of authority I could do anything necessary in connection with
the matter...."

She smiled dazzlingly, seeing me
setting the noose of responsibility for this so firmly around my own neck.

"Of course," she said.

She crossed to the desk, wrote on
the top sheet of an order pad sandwich, tore off the top sheet and pushed the
carbon copy to the back of the desk.

"There you are."

"Thank you." I took it
without looking at it and moved toward the door. "Probably I shouldn't waste
time...."

"No. No, you shouldn't. I have
to rest now; but—see me after lunch, Marc. Dear Marc.... What would I do
without you?"

"Come on, now. You're the
Empress. You can do anything."

She smiled dazzlingly.

I went out. Aruba was gone, as I had
expected him to be; and I went directly back to my own tent. Doc was off the
couch and on his feet the second the tent flap fell behind me.

"We're leaving for home right
away," I said. "I'll explain as we go. You armed?"

"My rifle's with the
jeep," he said. He patted his shirt at belt level before and behind.
"Belly gun and knife."

"Right. I want your help in
bringing some blood-soaked criminals to justice," I said. "The
Empress has given me special authority to corral the soldiers who committed
atrocities on certain innocent people among the civilian population opposing us
until tonight."