Soldier, ask not

Chapter 7

''Tam!'' she said. ''Wait! Don't go!''

I could not, without crowding past her. She blocked the narrow stairway. I stopped, irresolute, glancing over at the far entrance through which Bright and his aide had already disappeared. At once it became plain to me that I was already too late. The two of them had been moving fast. By the time I could get downstairs and across the crowded room, they would have already reached their transportation outside the establishment and been gone.

Possibly, if I had moved the second I saw Bright turn to leave - But probably, catching him, even then, would have been a lost cause. Not Lisa's arrival, but my own moment of wandered attention, on seeing the unusual eyes of Donal Graeme, had cost me my chance to obtain Bright's signature on Dave's pass.

I looked back at Lisa. Oddly, now that she had actually caught up with me and we were face to face once more, I was glad of it, though I still had that fear which I mentioned earlier, that she would somehow render me ineffective.

"How'd you know I was here?" I demanded.

"Padma said you'd be trying to avoid me," she said. "You couldn't very well avoid me down on the main floor there. You had to be out of the way someplace, and there weren't any out-of-the-way places but these balconies. I saw you standing at the railing of this one just now, looking down."

She was a little out of breath from hurrying up the stairs, and her words came out in a rush.

"All right," I said. "You've found me. What do you want?"

She was getting her breath back now, but the flush of effort from her run up the stairs still colored her cheeks. Seen like this, she was beautiful, and I could not ignore the fact. But I was still afraid of her.

"Tam!" she said. "Mark Torre has to talk to you!"

My fear of her whined sharply upward in me, like the mounting siren of an alarm signal. I saw the source of her darngerousness to me in that moment. Either instinct or knowledge had armed her. Anyone else would have worked up to that demand slowly. But an instinctive wisdom in her knew the danger of giving me time to assess a situation, so that I could twist it to my own ends.

But I could be direct, too. I started to go around her, without answering. She stepped in my way, and I had to stop.

"What about?" I said harshly.

"He didn't tell me."

I saw a way of handling her attack then. I started laughing at her. She stared at me for a second, then flushed again and began to look very angry indeed.

"I'm sorry." I throttled down on the laughter; and at the same time, secretly, I was in fact truly sorry. For all I was forced to fight her off, I liked Lisa Kant too well to laugh so at her. "But what else could we talk about except the old business of my taking over on the Final Encyclopedia again? Don't you remember? Padma said you couldn't use me. I was all oriented toward" - I tasted the word, as it went out of my mouth - "destruction."

"We'll just have to take our chance on that." She looked stubborn. "Besides, it isn't Padma who decides for the Encyclopedia. It's Mark Torre, and he's getting old. He knows better than anyone else how dangerous it would be if he dropped the reins and there was no one there quickly to pick them up. In a year, in six months, the Project could founder. Or be wrecked by people outside it. Do you think your uncle was the only person on Earth who felt about Earth and the younger worlds' people the way he did?"

I stiffened, and a cold feeling came into my mind. She had made a mistake, mentioning Mathias. My face must have changed, too; because I saw her own face change, looking at me.

"What've you been doing?" Fury burst out in me all of a sudden. "Studying up on me? Putting tracers on my comings and goings?" I took a step forward and she backed instinctively. I caught her by the arm and held her from moving further. "Why chase me down now, after five years? How'd you know I was going to be here anyway?"

She stopped trying to pull away and stood still, with dignity.

"Let go of me," she said quietly. I did and she stepped back. "Padma told me you'd be here. He said that it was my last chance at you - he calculated it. You remember, he told you about ontogenetics."

I stared at her for a second, then snorted with harsh laughter.

"Come on, now!" I said. "I'm willing to swallow a lot about your Exotics. But don't tell me they can calculate exactly where anyone in the sixteen worlds is going to be ahead of time!"

"Not anyone!" she answered angrily. "You. You and a few like you - because you're a maker, not a made part of the pattern. The influences operating on someone who's moved about by the pattern are too far reaching, and too complicated to calculate. But you aren't at the mercy of outside influences. You have choice, overriding the pressures people and events bring to bear on you. Padma told you that five years ago!"

"And that makes me easier to predict instead of harder? Let's hear another joke."

"Oh, Tam!" she said, exasperated. "Of course it makes you easier. It doesn't take ontogenetics, hardly. You can almost do it yourself. You've been working for five years now to get Membership in the Newsman's Guild, haven't you? Do you suppose that hasn't been obvious?"

Of course, she was right. I had made no secret of my ambitions. There had been no reason to keep them secret. She read the admission in my expression.

"All right," she went on. "So now you've worked your way up to Apprentice. Next, what's the quickest and surest way for an Apprentice to win his way into full Guild membership? To make a habit of being where the most interesting news is breaking, isn't that right? And what's the most interesting - if not important - news on the sixteen worlds right now? The war between the North and South Partitions on New Earth. News of a war is always dramatic. So you were bound to arrange to get yourself assigned to cover this one, if you could. And you seem to be able to get most things you want."

I looked at her closely. All that she said was true and reasonable. But, if so, why hadn't it occurred to me before this that I could be so predictable? It was like finding myself suddenly under observation by someone with high-powered binoculars, someone whose spying I had not even slightly suspected. Then I realized something.

"But you've only explained why I'd be on New Earth," I said slowly. "Why would I be here, though, at this particular party on Freiland?"

For the first time she faltered. She no longer seemed sure in her knowledge.

"Padma . . ." she said, and hesitated. "Padma says this place and moment is a locus. And, being what you are you can perceive, and are drawn to, loci - by your own desire to use them for your own purposes."

I stared at her, slowly absorbing this. And then, as suddenly as a sheet of flame across my mind leaped the connection between what she had just said and what I had heard earlier.

"Locus - yes!" I said tightly, taking a step toward her again in my excitement. "Padma said it was a locus here. For Graeme - but for me, too! Why? What does it mean for me?"

"I . . ." she hesitated. "I don't know exactly, Tam. I don't think even Padma knows."

"But something about it, and me, brought you here! Isn't that right?" I almost shouted at her. My mind was closing on the truth like a fox on a winded rabbit. "Why did you come hunting me now then? At this particular place and moment, as you call it! Tell me!"

"Padma ..." she faltered. I saw then with the almost blinding light of my sudden understanding that she would have liked to lie about this, but something in her would not let her.." Padma... only found out everything he knows now because of the way the Encyclopedia's grown able to help him. It has given him extra data to use in his calculations. And recently, when he used that data, the results showed everything up as more complex - and important. The Encyclopedia's more important, to the whole human race, than he thought five years ago. And the danger of the Encyclopedia's never being finished is greater. And your own power of destruction . . ."

She ran down and looked at me, almost pleadingly as if asking me to excuse her from finishing what she had started to say. But my mind was racing, and my heart pounded with excitement.

"Go on!" I told her harshly.

"The power in you for destruction was greater than he had dreamed. But, Tam" - she broke in on herself quickly, almost frantically- "there was something else. You remember five years ago how Padma thought you had no choice but to go through that dark valley of yours to its very end? Well, that's not quite true. There is a chance - at this point in the pattern, here at this locus. If you'll think, and choose, and turn aside, there's a narrow way for you up out of the darkness. But you've got to turn sharply right now! You've got to give up this assignment you're on, no matter what it costs, and come back to Earth to talk to Mark Torre, right now!"

"Right now," I muttered, but I was merely echoing her words without thought, while listening to my racing mind. "No," I said, "nevermind that. What is it I'm supposed to be turning my back on? What special destruction? I'm not planning anything like that - right now."

"Tam!" I felt her hand distantly on my arm, I saw her pale face staring tensely up at me, as if trying to get my attention. But it was as if these things registered on my senses from a long distance away. For if I was right - if I was right - then even Padma's calculations were testifying to the dark strength in me, that ability I had worked these five years to harness and drive. And if such power were actually mine, what couldn't I do next?

"But it isn't what you plan!" Lisa was saying desperately. "Don't you see, a gun doesn't plan to shoot anyone. But it's in you, Tam, like a gun ready to go off. Only, you don't have to let it go off. You can change yourself while there's still time. You can save yourself, and the Encyclopedia-"

The last word rang suddenly through me, with a million echoes. It rang like the uncounted voices I had heard five years ago at the Transit Point of the Index Room in the Encyclopedia itself. Suddenly, through all the excitement holding me, it reached and touched me as sharply as the point of a spear. Like a brilliant shaft of light it pierced through the dark walls that had been building triumphantly in my mind on either side of me, as they had built in my mind that day in Mark Torre's office. Like an unbearable illumination it opened the darkness for a second, and showed me a picture - myself, in the rain; and Padma, facing me; and a dead man who lay between us.

But I flung myself away from that moment of imagination, flung myself clear back into the comforting darkness, and the sense of my power and strength came back on me.

"I don't need the Encyclopedia!" I said loudly.

"But you do!" she cried. "Everybody who's Earth-born - and if Padma's right, all the people in the future on the sixteen worlds - are going to need it. And only you can make sure they get it. Tam, you have to-"

"Have to!"

I took a step back from her, myself, this time. I had gone fiercely cold all over with the same sort of fury Mathias had been able to raise in me once, but it was mixed now with my feeling of triumph and of power. "I don't 'have to' anything! Don't lump me in with the rest of you Earth worms. Maybe they need your Encyclopedia. But not me!"

I went around her with that, using my strength finally to shove her physically aside. I heard her still calling after me as I went down the stairs. But I shut my mind to the sense of her voice and refused to hear it. To this day I do not know what the last words she called after me were. I left the balcony and her calling behind me, and threaded my way through the people of the floor below toward the same exit through which Bright had disappeared. With the Friendly leader gone, there was no point in my hanging around. And with the newly rearoused sense of my power in me, abruptly I could not bear them close around me. Most of them, nearly all of them, were people from the younger worlds; and Lisa's voice rang on and on, it seemed, in my ear, telling me I needed the Encyclopedia, reechoing all Mathias' bitter lesson - giving about the relative helplessness and ineffectuality of Earthmen.

As I had suspected, once I gained the open air of the cool and moonless Freiland night outside, Eldest Bright, and whoever had called him from the party, had disappeared. The parking-lot attendant told me that they had left.

There was no point in my trying to find them, now. They might be headed anywhere on the planet, if not to a spacefield off-world entirely, back to Harmony or Association. Let them go, I thought, still bitter from the implication of my Earth-born ineffectiveness that I thought I had read in Lisa's words. Let them go. I alone could handle any trouble Dave might get in with the Friendlies, as a result of having a pass unsigned by one of their authorities.

I headed back to the spacefield and took the first shuttle to orbit and shift back to New Earth. But on the way, I had a chance to cool down. I faced the fact that it was still worthwhile getting Dave's pass signed. I might have to send him off for some reason of his own. An accident might even separate us on the battlefield. Any one of a number of things could occur to put him in trouble where I would not be around to save him.

With Eldest Bright a lost cause, I was left with the only option of heading to military headquarters of the Friendly troops in North Partition, to seek the signature for Dave's pass there. Accordingly, as soon as I hit orbit New Earth, I changed my ticket for Contrevale, the North Partition city right behind the lines of the Friendly mercenaries.

All this took some little time. It was after midnight by the time I had gotten from Contrevale to Battle Headquarters of the North Partition Forces. My Newsman's pass got me admission to the Headquarters' area, which seemed strangely deserted even for this time of night. But, when I pulled in at last before the Command building, I was surprised at the number of floaters parked there in the Officers' area.

Once again, my pass got me past a silent-faced, black-clothed guard with spring-rifle at the ready. I stepped into the reception room, with its long counter clipping it in half before me and the tall wall transparencies showing the full parking area under its night lights behind me. Only one man was behind the counter at one of the desks there, a Groupman hardly older than myself, but with his face already hardened into the lines of grim and merciless self-discipline to be observed on some of these people.

He got up from his desk and came to the other side of the counter as I approached the near side.

"I'm a Newsman of the Interstellar News Service," I began. "I'm looking for-"

"Thy papers!"

The interruption was harsh and nasal. The black eyes in the bony face stared into mine; and the archaic choice of the pronoun was all but flung in my face. Grim contempt, amounting nearly to a hatred on sight, leaped like a spark from him to me, as he held out his hand for the papers he had requested - and like a lion roused from slumber by the roar of an enemy, my own hatred leaped back at him, instinctively, before I could leash it with cooler reflection and wisdom.

I had heard of his breed of Friendly, but never until this moment had I come face to face with one. This was one of those from Harmony or Association who used the canting version of their private speech not just privately among themselves, but indifferently toward all men and women. He was one of those who avoided all personal joy in life, as he avoided any softness of bed or fullness of belly. His life was a trial-at-arms, antechamber only for the life to come, that life to come that was possible only to those who had kept the true faith - and to only those who, in keeping the true faith, had in addition been Chosen of the Lord.

It did not matter to this man that he was no more than a noncommissioned officer, a lesser functionary among thousands such, from a poor and stony planet, and I was one of only a few hundred on sixteen inhabited worlds intensively educated, trained and privileged to wear the Newsman's cloak. It made no difference to him that I was a member or Apprentice of the Guild, that I could talk with the rulers of planets. It did not even matter that I knew him to be half a madman and he knew me to be a product of education and training many times his own. None of this mattered, for he was one of God's Elect, and I was without the shadow of his church; and so he looked on me as an emperor might look at a dog to be kicked from his path.

And I looked back at him. There is a counter for every human emotional blow, deliberately given. Who knew this better than I? And I knew well the counter to anyone who tries to look down his nose at you. That counter is laughter. There never was a throne yet built so high that it could not be rocked by laughter from below. But I looked at this Groupman now, and I could not laugh.

I could not laugh for a very simple reason. For half-mad as he was, narrow-minded, limited as he was, yet he would have calmly let himself be burned at the stake rather than give up the lightest tenet of his beliefs. While I could not have held one finger in a match flame one minute to uphold the greatest of my own.

And he knew I knew that was true of him. And he knew I knew he knew what was true of me. Our mutual knowledge was plain as the counter between us. And so I could not laugh at him, and win my self-respect back. And I hated him for it.

I gave him my papers. He looked them over. Then he handed them back to me.

"Thy papers are in order," he said, high in his nose. "What brings thee here?"

"A pass," I said, putting my own papers away and digging out Dave's. "For my assistant. You see, we move back and forth on both sides of the battle line and-"

"Behind our lines and across them, no pass is necessary. Thy Newsman's papers are sufficient." He turned as if to go back to his desk.

"But this assistant of mine" - I kept my voice level-" doesn't have Newsman's papers. I just took him on earlier today and I haven't had time to make arrangements for him. What I'd like would be a temporary pass, signed by one of your Headquarters' officers here-"

He had turned back to the counter.

"Thy assistant is no Newsman?"

"Not officially. No. But-"

"Then he hath no leave or freedom to move across our battle lines. No pass can be issued."

"Oh, I don't know," I said carefully. "I was going to get one from your Eldest Bright, at a party on Freiland, just a few hours back, but he left before I had a chance to get it from him." I stopped, for the Groupman was grimly shaking his head.

"Brother Bright," he said, and in his choice of title I saw at last that he would be immovable. Only the purest of the fanatics among the Friendlies scorned the necessities of rank amongst themselves. Eldest Bright might order my Groupman to charge an enemy gun emplacement bare-handed and my Groupman would not hesitate to obey. But that did not mean that my Groupman considered Bright, or Brother Blight's opinion of the rightness of things, to be better than his own.

The reason was a very simple one. Bright's rank and title were of this present life, and therefore, in my Groupman's eyes, no more than toys and dross and tinkling cymbals. They did not weigh with the fact that as Brothers of the Elect, he and the Groupman were equal in the sight of the Lord.

"Brother Bright," he said, "could not have issued a pass to one not qualified to go and come among our numbers and perhaps be a spy upon us to the favor of our enemies."

There was one last card to play, and it was, I knew, a losing card; but I might as well play it anyway.

"If you don't mind," I said. "I'd like to get an answer on this from one of your superior officers. Please call one - the Officer of the Day, if no one else's available."

But he turned and went back to sit down at his desk.

"The Officer of the Day," he said, with finality, returning to some papers he had been working on, "can give thee no other answer. Neither will I summon him from his duties to repeat what I have already told thee."

It was like the crashing down of an iron portcullis upon my plans to get that pass signed. But there was nothing to be gained by arguing further with this man. I turned about and left the building.