Voyage Across the Stars (22 page)

Slade was not sure how he had gotten there this time, though there was nothing unfamiliar about his surroundings. It was night, and thirty degrees of the horizon bubbled and writhed with the inverted orange funnel of a fire-storm. Somebody had been caught without nuclear dampers. A fusion bomb had gone off and had found fuel enough in the target area to multiply blast effect a thousandfold with winds of living flame.

But where was his tank? Where in
hell
was his tank, Hell was his tank . . .?

There was nothing nearby but mud and shattered trees. Powerguns slashed the distance with blue-green bolts. Occasionally they were answered or amplified by flares of high explosives that preceded their shock waves by many seconds. The mid-level overcast reflected the spire of the fire-storm into a soft, ghastly ambiance. It lighted the figure picking its way toward Slade across the mud and shell-holes.

Reflex moved the tanker’s hand toward the pistol which should have been in his belt. The pistol was not there, however; and his hand was either missing or not responding to control. Slade could not be sure. Vision was no longer quite the accustomed process either.

“Sing out!” called Don Slade in warning. It was what he would have done if he were armed, if he could have slipped to cover behind a stump. What was
wrong
with his—

“What’s the matter, Don?” called the oncoming figure. The voice was a pleasant tenor that cut through the hissing wind. “There’s nothing more to fear, is there?”

“Via,” said the tanker.
“Via!
Major Steuben!”

“Oh, call me Joachim, Don,” said the other figure. “You did when we were alive, after all. And anyway, we’re all equal here.”

“Joachim,” the big man begged. “Where are we?”

There could be no doubt that it really was Joachim Steuben. The uniform that rustled like a whore’s undergarments; the boyishly-smooth face and the curly black hair, signs of wealth spent lavishly when they could no longer truly be signs of youth. The pistol in a cutaway holster high on Joachim’s right hip, an ornamented bangle for a mincing queen—until he chose to kill. Joachim Steuben, slim and dainty as a white mouse . . . and the unit he commanded on the jobs for which no one else quite had the stomach, the White Mice. The Greeks, after all, had called their Furies the Kindly-Minded Ones.

Major Steuben commanded the White Mice until he died.

“Why Don,” the trim figure said. “We’re where people like you and I go when we die. We’re in Hell.” Steuben giggled, a sound that Slade remembered too well to mistake it for humor. “We’re where everybody goes.”

Something passed overhead with a freight-train rush, an artillery salvo aimed twenty kilometers down-range. The ground trembled to its passage.

“Joachim,” Slade said. “I think we ought to get out of here.” His legs would not move, he could not
see
his legs. “I think I’m going to need your help. I don’t—”

“I thought loyalty was the answer,” said Joachim. He spoke conversationally. The dead major was ignoring Slade’s words as one may ignore another’s words at a party, where there will be plenty of time for the other to make his point later . . . and none of it makes any difference anyway. “Be perfectly loyal to a man, answer his needs even when his words don’t admit those needs.” Joachim gestured with a dainty hand. “Do you know what loyalty brings you, Donnie?”

“Joachim, I didn’t—” Slade began. He respected Major Steuben, but he feared Steuben as well. Joachim was like a tank under the control of someone else; not necessarily hostile, but unstoppably lethal if it was chosen to be.

“Loyalty,” Steuben continued in his smooth lilt and harsh smile, “brings you a shot in the back.”

“I didn’t shoot you, Joachim!” the tanker said.

“I know who killed me, Don,” said the smiling figure. “And I know that nothing matters.” Joachim reached out with his right hand, his gun hand, and made as if to stroke Slade’s cheek. The smooth palm did not or did not quite touch the tanker. “Do you fancy me now, Donnie?” the slim man said.

Slade tried to lick his lips. “I don’t think so, Joachim,” he said.

Joachim giggled. “It’s as good as any offer you’ll get here, my friend,” he said. “And as bad, of course. I’m not real, you know.”

The slim figure turned. The back of the silk uniform rustled. The cloth was tattered and charred around the crater which a cyan bolt had left in killing the Major. “Nothing is real for you any more, Donnie,” Joachim called as he walked back through the wasteland. The sky warmed the bright-work of his pistol’s frame. “Nothing ever will be real,” said the lilting voice as the wind swallowed it at last.

“I’m going home, Joachim,” Slade called. “Home is real. Joachim Steuben!
I’m
real!”

Across the horizon from the fire-storm, a calliope began to rave at the sky.

“What’s the matter, brother?” asked a voice behind Slade. “Don’t feel like such a big man now, is that it?”

Don turned his attention with the care of a man who needs a further moment to think. Via, do
I
look that old? Aloud he said, “Hello, Tom. I didn’t expect to find you here.”

“But it’s just the place for Mad Dog Slade, isn’t it, brother?” said Tom. He gestured at the shattered forest, at the shot-split night. “So it’s the place for me, too, now that we’re the same. Now that we’re dead.”

They were fraternal twins, not identical; but they shared some features, and they had the same deep, powerful chests. Tom Slade was stocky where his brother was simply big; and the years since they separated had not been kind to the man who had stayed on Tethys. The orange haze hid the change in hair color, from fair to white; but the individual strands were coarser, now, and they were strewn at wider intervals across Tom’s scalp than they had been twenty years before. Tom’s face was wrinkled. At the moment, the wrinkling was exaggerated by the bitter grimace into which Tom had screwed his mouth.

“No,” Don said slowly. “I don’t think it’s the place for me, Tom. Or either of us. Let’s see if we can’t find a way out, shall we?”

“Why?” snarled Tom. He moved closer with his hands spread at his sides, as if to grapple with his bigger brother. A blade had entered beneath Tom’s ribs on the left side. The edge had been sharp enough to be drawn up diagonally through bone and the organs of the thorax. Tom’s shirt flopped away from the gash. The bloody stain on the fabric seemed glisteningly fresh. “So you could kill me yourself, Don? I know you’ve always wanted to, dear brother. Well, you’re too late. I’m
dead.”
Tom’s left hand deliberately spread the lips of his wound. “And you’re dead too.”

The tanker tried to reach out for his brother’s dripping hand, but he still had no control over his own limbs. “Tom,” he said softly. “I maybe wasn’t what you wanted in a brother, but I never hated you. And . . . Via, Tom, if I’d wanted you dead, you wouldn’t have had to wait around for it. Come on, help me and we’ll get the hell out of here.”

“We can’t get out!” the shorter man shouted. “We can’t! Don’t you understand that?”

“No, I don’t understand,” Don said simply. “Look, I
have
been these places—” he would have gestured to the waste around them— “that’s no more than the truth. And I’m not interested in standing around in another one, buck naked or whatever the
hell
I am. Now
help
me, curse it!”

The other figure slumped back from the tanker. “I can’t even help myself,” Tom said. “Any more than I could help my jealousy of you when we were alive. And I’d tell you I was sorry, Don, but it doesn’t really matter now. Nothing—” and the figure turned, walking away from Don Slade as distant sirens howled—“ever mattered. I see that now. . . .”

“Tom!” the tanker called.
“Tom!”

“Shouldn’t bother you that he doesn’t listen to you,” said another voice. “After all, you never listened to anybody else, did vou?”

The speakers always approached from behind; but Don Slade noticed that however he turned, the glare of the fire-storm was on his left side. “Hello, Father,” he said. “I guess I could have figured that you’d be here.”

Councilor Slade looked much the same as he had when Don last saw him on Tethys. That was not surprising. Though the Councilor had lived eighteen years after Don left home as a recruit for Hammer’s Slammers, he had always seemed aged.

As with the son who had succeeded him, time and duties had taken a harsh toll from Councilor Slade. His hair was gone, save for a fringe, and his eyebrows were starkly white as they pinched together in the angry expression Don remembered so well.

“Then I’m sure I’ve given you some pleasure,” the Councilor snapped in reply. “Cherish it, brat. You’ll find no other pleasure ever again.”

“I guess I am glad to see you,” the tanker said. “I’ve regretted the way we parted often enough. I don’t mean I’d have ever come back to Tethys if you were—” the swallow would not come—“still alive. But I wanted a chance to apologize for my part in the way things worked out. It wasn’t all my fault, but I’m sorry for the part that was.”

“You’re a liar!” the Councilor screamed. He clenched his fist and shook it. His frailty would have made the gesture ridiculous were it not for the fury that glinted from the close-set eyes.

Three shells burst squarely overhead. They were so high that the pops of the charges were several seconds behind the red sparkle. Don cringed, equating the mild warning for the rain of fire and fragment the pops presaged. Aloud he said, “Do people tell lies here, Father? I don’t feel like it myself.” Then, “Why did Tom say he was jealous of me? He’s the one who had it all.”

“Did he?” Councilor Slade said with a gibing laugh. “You’re the one who had Marilee, though, aren’t you?”

“I knew the lady,” Don admitted. He was surprised to learn that an anger hotter than mere frustration was still possible for him in his present guise. “And she brought me down about as hard as I care to remember. I don’t say I didn’t deserve it, but . . . she
married
Tom, he
knew
he’d won that one!”

“He knew much better than that, boy,” said Councilor Slade. “But you’ve lost her forever, now.”

There was a deadly hush across the wasteland. “Go on, brat!” Councilor Slade cackled. “Call me a liar! Call me a liar!”

And the bomblets from the firecracker rounds overhead began to burst across the landscape like the white heart of a furnace.

The scintillant blur was too bright and total for there to be any other sound or shape in Slade’s universe. He should have felt the shrapnel gouging him apart, but the circumstances that prevented him from taking cover also seemed to shield him from the agony of dissolution. Slade rode on the white tide, buoyed up by the blasts whose crackling merged into a roar which in turn became cotton-flock silent.

And toward him through the fluffy silence walked Marilee in high boots and a flame-colored body suit.

“Oh, Via, girl,” Slade whispered. “Oh my Lord. Are you dead too, Marilee?”

The wasteland was gone. The light that bathed the cloud-top ambiance was a soft white instead of the hellish orange of the previous scene. Marilee smiled. She looked older; but dear Lord, they all were older, it had been twenty years. “No, Don,” the tall woman said. “I’m not dead, any more than you are.”

She stretched out a long-fingered hand. Slade reached instinctively to meet her, and he
did
have an arm that moved, a body he could see—

But their hands did not quite touch. As the big man took a step forward to fold Marilee into his arms, she raised a finger in warning and shook her head.

Slade froze. “You’re not real,” he said in a flat voice.

“I’m very real,” Marilee said, “but what you see now isn’t my physical body, Don.” Her grin flashed in a way that tore him with the recollection. “For that matter, you’re not really
seeing
anything . . . but I suppose you’d figured that out.”

“More or less,” Slade said. “What I’d mainly figured was I wanted to get out of this bloody place.” He shrugged the shoulders he could now see and feel again. “That place, I mean. But I’d rather be on Tethys than here, too, so long as . . . well, you’re still on Tethys, Marilee?”

“The part of me that isn’t in your mind, yes,” the woman said. “We could use you there. But there’s a problem.”

“Shoot,” said the tanker. He could not solve all problems, but he knew that he could solve most of them if he had the time to mumble the details over in his brain.

Marilee lounged back onto haze that seemed to have no more solid reality than any other part of the surroundings. “You see, Don,” she said, “your mind is driving an Alayan ship to a planet called Terzia. And at the same time, your mind is creating a false reality for itself. You’ll be incurably insane when the ship reaches Terzia. You won’t be able to recognize reality.”

Slade’s tongue touched one corner of his mouth, then the other. “I won’t be able to recognize you?” he asked.

“Your reality will be within your mind,” the woman said. She was smiling again. “As this is.” Her spread fingers gestured. “As I am.”

“Then I’ll make a reality in which I’m sane,” said Slade. He stepped forward. His voice rose as he added, “By the Lord, I
will!”

Marilee’s image receded from Slade without losing its infinite clarity. Her smile was broader. “That’s right, Don,” she called as she disappeared. “Remember that we need you on Tethys. . . .”

Slade grunted and swung to his feet. The men sleeping near him did not notice. The three Alayans who had entered the globe sprang to alertness like semaphore arms working. All the Alayans carried the frothy apparatus with which Stoudemeyer and Slade had earlier been subdued. The flickers of radiant cross-talk were strikingly obvious since the globe had been darkened for the passengers to sleep.

“Hey, stay calm,” the tanker said. He raised his hands close to his shoulders, palms forward. It was a gesture of submission, but it was a pretty fair posture to strike from also. Slade knew he was not crazy, but he did not intend to be frozen into permanent silence before he could explain that to the Alayans.

“We apologize for disturbing you, Mister Slade,” said the middle of the three aliens, “but we are now in orbit around Terzia. Would you please come with us so that we can make arrangements with the planetary authorities?”