Soldier, ask not

Chapter 15

As a full member of the Guild, I no longer had to produce an assignment as a reason for drawing travel money. The currency between worlds was knowledge and skills wrapped up in the human packages that conveyed these things. In the same way, a credit easily convertible into this currency was the information collected and transferred by the skilled Communications people of the Interstellar News Guild - which was no less necessary to the individual worlds between the stars. So the Guild was not poor; and the two hundred or so full members had funds to draw upon on each one of the sixteen worlds that might have made a government leader envious.

The curious result of which in my case, I discovered, was that money as such ceased to have any meaning for me. In that corner of my mind which before this had concerned itself with spendables, there was now a void - and rushing in to fill that void, it seemed, through the long flight from Kultis to Cassida, were memories. Memories of Eileen.

I had not thought that she had been so important a part of my young life, both before our parents' death, and especially after. But now, as our space ship shifted, and paused, and shifted again between the stars, moments and scenes came thronging to my mind as I sat alone in my first-class compartment. Or for that matter, still alone in the lounge, for I was in no mood for company.

They were not dramatic memories. They were recollections of gifts she had given me on this birthday or that. They were moments in which she had helped me to bear up under the unendurable empty pressure of Mathias upon my soul. There were unhappy moments of her own that I recalled now as well, that I now realized had been unhappy and lonely, but that I had not understood at the time, because of being so bound up in my own unhappiness. Suddenly it came to me that I could remember any number of times when she had ignored her own troubles to do something about mine; and never - there was no single instance I could recall - had I ever forgotten mine even to consider hers.

As all this came back to me, my very guts shrank up into a cold, hard knot of guilt and unhappiness. I tried between one set of shifts to see if I could not drink the memories away. But I found I had no taste either for the liquor or for that as a way out.

And so I came to Cassida.

A poorer, smaller planetary counterpart of Newton, with whom it shared a double-sun system, Cassida lacked the other world's academic link with and consequently the rarefied supply of scientific and mathematical minds that had made the earlier-settled world of Newton a rich one. From Cassida's capital-city spaceport of Moro, I took a shuttle flight to Alban, the Newton-sponsored University City where Dave had been studying shift mechanics, and where both he and Eileen had held supportive jobs while he did so.

It was an efficient ant-hill of a city on various levels. Not that there had been any lack of land on which to build it, but because most of it had been built by Newtonian credit; and the building method most economical of that credit had been one that clustered all necessary quarters together in the smallest practical space.

I picked up a direction rod at the shuttleport and set it for the address Eileen had given me in that one letter received the morning of Dave's death. It pointed me the way through a series of vertical and horizontal tubes and passageways to a housing-complex unit that was above ground level - but that was about the best you could say for it.

As I turned into the final hallway that led to the door of the address I hunted, for the first time the true emotion that had kept me from even consciously thinking of Eileen, until Lisa recalled her directly to my attention, began to boil up in me. The scene in the forest clearing on New Earth rose again around me as vividly as a nightmare; and fear and rage began to burn in me like a fever.

For a moment I faltered - I almost stopped. But then the momentum I had built up by the long voyage this far carried me on to the doorway and I sounded the doorcall.

There was a second's eternity of waiting. Then the door opened and a middle-aged woman's face looked out. I stared down into it in shock, for it was not the face of my sister.

"Eileen ..." I stammered. "I mean - Mrs. David Hall? Isn't she here?" Then I remembered that this woman could not know me. "I'm her brother - from Earth. Newsman Tam Olyn."

I was wearing cape and beret, of course, and in a way this was passport enough. But for the moment I had forgotten all about it. I remembered then as the woman fluttered a bit. She had probably never before seen a member of the Guild in the actual flesh.

"Why, she's moved," the woman said. "This place was too big for her alone. She's down a few levels and north of here. Just a minute, I'll get you her number."

She darted away. I heard her talking to a male voice for a moment, and then she came back with a slip of paper.

"Here," she said a little breathlessly. "I wrote it down for you. You go right along this corridor - oh, I see you've got a direction rod. Just set it then. It's not far."

"Thank you," I said.

"Not at all. We're glad to... well, I mustn't keep you, I suppose," she said, for I was already beginning to turn away. "Glad to be of service. Goodbye. ''

"Good-bye," I muttered. I was moving off down the corridor resetting the direction rod. It led me away and down and the door I finally pressed the call button on was well below ground level.

There was a longer wait this time. Then, at last, the door slid back - and my sister stood there.

"Tam," she said.

She did not seem to have changed at all. There was no sign of change or grief upon her, and my mind leaped suddenly with hope. But when she simply continued to stand there, looking at me, the hope sank once more. I could do nothing but wait. I stood there also.

"Come in," she said finally, but without much change in tone. She stood aside and I walked in. The door slid closed behind me.

I looked around, shocked out of my emotion for the moment by what I saw. The gray-draped room was no bigger than the first-class compartment I had occupied on the spaceship coming there.

"What're you doing living here?" I burst out.

She looked at me without any response to my shock.

"It's cheaper," she said indifferently.

"But you don't need to save money!" I said. "I got that arrangement made for your inheritance from Mathias - it was all set with an Earth-working Cassidan to transfer funds from his family back here to you. You mean"- for the thought had never occurred to me before - "there's been some hitch at this end? Hasn't his family been paying you?"

"Yes," she said calmly enough. "But there's Dave's family now to take care of, too."

"Family?" I stared stupidly at her.

"Dave's younger brother's still in school - never mind." She stood still. Nor had she asked me to sit down. "It's too long a story, Tam. What've you come here for?"

I stared at her.

"Eileen," I said pleadingly. She only waited. "Look," I said, snatching at the straw of our earlier subject, "even if you're helping out Dave's family, there's no problem anymore. I'm a full Guild member now. I can supply you with anything in the way of funds you need.''

"No." She shook her head.

"In heaven's name, why not? I tell you I've got unlimited-"

"I don't want anything from you, Tam," she said. "Thank you anyway. But we're doing fine, Dave's family and myself. I've got a good job."

"Eileen!"

"I asked you once, Tam," she said, still unmoved. "Why've you come here?"

If she had been changed to stone, there could not have been a greater difference in her from the sister I had known. She was no one I knew. She was like a perfect stranger to me.

"To see you," I said. "I thought - you might like to know-"

"I know all about it," she said, with no emotion at all. "I was told all about it. They said you were wounded, too; but you're well now, aren't you, Tam?"

"Yes," I said, helplessly. "I'm well now. My knee's a little stiff. They say it'll stay that way."

"That's too bad," she said.

"Damn it, Eileen!" I burst out. "Don't just stand there talking to me as if you don't know me! I'm your brother!"

"No." She shook her head. "The only relatives I have now - the only relatives I want now - are Dave's family. They need me. You don't and never did, Tam. You were always sufficient for yourself, by yourself."

"Eileen!" I said, pleadingly. "Look, I know you must blame me - partly at least - for Dave's death."

"No," she answered. "You can't help being what you are. It was my fault, all these years, for trying to convince myself that you were something different from what you are. I thought there was something about you that Mathias never got to, something that just needed a chance to come out. It was that I was counting on when I asked you to help me decide about Jamie. And when you wrote you were going to help Dave, I was sure that what I'd always thought was in you was finally coming to the front. But I was wrong both times."

"Eileen!" I cried. "It wasn't my fault we ran into a madman, Dave and I. Maybe I should have done something different - but I did try to make him leave me after I got shot, only he wouldn't. Don't you understand, it wasn't all my fault!"

"Of course it wasn't, Tam," she said. I stared at her. "That's why I don't blame you. You're no more responsible for what you do than a police dog that's been trained to attack anyone who moves. You're what Uncle Mathias made you, Tam - a destroyer. It's not your fault, but that doesn't change anything. In spite of all the fighting you did with him, Mathias' teaching about Destruct filled you up, Tam, and didn't leave anything."

"You can't say that!" I shouted at her. "It's not true. Give me just one more chance, Eileen, and I'll show you! I tell you, it's not true!"

"Yes, it is," she said. "I know you, Tam, better than anyone alive. And I've known this about you for a long time. I just wouldn't let myself believe it. But I have to, now - for the sake of Dave's family, who need me. I couldn't help Dave, but I can help them - as long as I never see you again. If I let you come close to them, through me, you'll destroy them, too."

She stopped talking then and stood looking at me. I opened my mouth to answer her, but I could think of nothing to say. We stood looking at each other across a couple of feet of distance that was a wider, deeper space and gulf than I had ever encountered in my life.

"You'd better go, then, Tam," she said at last.

Her words stirred me numbly to life again.

"Yes," I said dully. "I guess I'd better."

I turned away from her. As I stepped toward the door I think I still hoped she might stop me and call me back. But there was no movement or sound behind me; and as I went out the door I glanced back for a final time over my shoulder.

She had not moved. She was still standing where she had been, like a stranger, waiting for me to go.

So I went. And I returned to the spaceport alone. Alone, alone, alone. . . .