The Overlords of War

Chapter 34

He became aware of a presence beside him. He opened his eyes and at once closed them again, blinded by the sun high overhead. He turned over and tried to doze off again, but two insistent noises prevented him, the hiss of the surf and the sound of light breathing. He looked again and saw sand at the level of his cheek, sand on which the wind had raised miniature dunes that it was now leveling again. He awoke completely and sat up. A girl was kneeling at his side, dressed in a short red tunic.

“Antonella!” he exclaimed.

“George Corson,” she said in a disbelieving voice.

He swept the beach with his gaze. Cid, Selma, and the other woman were nowhere in sight. And the girl—Antonella—had risen and taken a few steps back, as though embarrassed at having been caught staring at him.

“You know me?” he demanded.

“I never saw you before. But I’ve heard about you. You’re the man who has to save Uria.”

He looked her over more closely. The fact that she was clad while the others went naked suggested that she must come from a period when the life-style had not attained the ultimate simplicity preferred by the members of the Council. She was younger than he remembered her, almost a teenager. He could not tell how many years had passed for her between their two meetings. For him it had been a matter of only a few months.

He recalled the other Antonella perfectly. How weird to meet someone you had shared all sorts of adventures with, but who did not know you yet! It was like being confronted with someone who had lost his memory.

“Have you been in a war?” she asked in a voice that mingled disapproval with curiosity.

“Yes. It was—unpleasant.”

She pondered. “I want to ask… But I don’t know if I can.”

“Go ahead.”

Flushing, she said, “Have you killed anybody yet, Mr. Corson?” What a nasty kid!

“No. I was a kind of engineer. I never personally stabbed or strangled anyone, if that’s what you wanted to know.”

With seeming satisfaction she said, “I was sure you couldn’t have!”

“But I did press the buttons,” Corson said fiercely.

She didn’t understand that, apparently. At a loss, she felt in her tunic and produced a little case which he recognized. “Would you like some smoke?” she inquired.

“No thanks,” he said, although his mouth watered. “I haven’t smoked for a long time.”

“It’s real tobacco, not a synthetic,” she insisted. “I know they used it in your time… didn’t they?”

“Yes, they did. But I gave it up.”

“Same as everybody around here. I’m the only one who still does smoke.”

But she laid the case aside.

How could I have fallen in love with someone like this? Corson wondered. She seems so shallow, so hollow! Oh, it must be a matter of age and circumstances… When did I begin to fall in love with her?

He searched his memory, and episodes from the adventure they had shared came to the surface like bubbles of gas escaping from the depths of a marsh. Aergistal, the balloon, the recruiting officer, the mausoleum world, the escape, the brief stay at Veran’s camp… No, before all that. Long before. He struggled to work it out. It was when he kissed her. No, just before he did that. He remembered thinking she was the sexiest woman he had ever met in his life. And she had not made that impression on him at first glance.

He had fallen in love with her the moment that bright flash had sparked from her igniter. He had detected the hypnotic trick and believed she wanted to make him talk. But what she wanted was to make him fall for her. She had succeeded. No wonder she had given such a mocking answer when he asked why she had not precogged the failure of her trick. Was this a regular custom at Dyoto? He felt anger surge in him for a moment, then calmed down. Since the dawn of time women had set snares for men. It was one of the facts of human existence, and one couldn’t blame them.

He thought: I should have left her to rot in Veran’s camp and learn that men have tricks of their own! But he would not have done that. It was in the camp that he had genuinely come to love her, when she kept such a cool head, and still more on the mausoleum planet, when she had shown herself both human and terrified.

Besides, he had no choice. He would snatch her—and himself—from Veran’s grasp. He would set down a bag of provisions on a blue road. So far, his part was scripted. He could not avoid that without creating a timequake in his past. But afterward? When he had sent the message, would he still have to furnish the recruits and the equipment demanded by Veran, the fugitive from Aergistal?

It made no sense. Why should the other Corson, after their escape, have led them to the mausoleum world? Was that a compulsory stopover, the site of some kind of temporal interchange?

But Corson was coming to know the paths of time well, and he was fairly certain nothing of the kind existed. When he carried out his rescue operation he could just as well bring the escapees here to this beach where the Council was based and leave for Aergistal by himself if his stay there proved to be indispensable. He knew that it was. He had changed at Aergistal. And he had learned much which was necessary to the success of his plans.

He recalled the metal plate laid so conspicuously on the ration bag before the mausoleum door. At the time its message had seemed unclear to him. Searching the pockets of his suit, he found the plate was there even though he had changed clothes many times. Sheer habit must have made him transfer it from one outfit to another.

Part of the text had been erased, although the letters appeared to be deeply incised in the metal.

He whistled softly between his teeth. Just suppose “empty wrappings” meant the undead women in the mausoleum!

He had wondered whether they might be endowed with artificial personalities and used like robots. He had even thought they might be plastoids until he realized they were too perfectly detailed. They had been alive. Now they were dead, even though the slow activity of their bodies might make one assume the contrary. He had estimated there might be a million of them even in the small part of the mausoleum he had seen. They represented a formidable potential army, numerous enough to match the maddest ambitions of Veran. Bar one thing—they were women. The colonel had judged it necessary to tighten discipline when Antonella entered his camp. He trusted his men only up to a certain point. He did not expect them to betray him for money or by ambition. But there were biological imperatives he dared not infringe.

Corson put his hands to his neck. The collar was there still, so light he often nearly forgot about it. Solid—cold—motionless, yet more dangerous than a cobra. But the snake slumbered. The idea of using the undead as recruits ought not to amount to an overt declaration of hostility.

Shaken by nausea, he bowed down to the sand, aware of Antonella watching him. The idea of making use of the undead appalled him. But it was much in the style of Those of Aergistal to make use of the leftovers, the war criminals or their victims, to avert a far worse calamity. They were casuists who adhered to the principle of the lesser evil—or rather they were total realists. Because those women were dead, dead for good and all. Empty wrappings! No longer capable of reason, or imagination, or even of suffering except on the most basic level. Perhaps they could still breed; that was a point he’d have to bear in mind. But to give them artificial personalities would be a crime far pettier than to annihilate a city full of intelligent beings by pressing a button. On reflection, it was no worse a transgression than an organ transplant, and surgeons on Earth had settled that problem long ago: the dead must serve the living.

He scraped sand over what he had vomited, swallowed painfully, wiped the corners of his mouth.

“I’m better now,” he told Antonella, who was still staring at him in dismay. “It’s nothing. A—a fit.”

She had offered no help, or even sympathy. She had not made a move.

Too young, maybe, he thought. Brought up in the silken safety of a world unaware of disease and pain. Hardly more than a pretty flower. Experience will change her. Then I shall be able to love her. By the gods, l’ll take Aergistal to pieces stone by stone to find her again! They can’t keep her there. She has never soiled her hands with any crime.

And that justified Corson’s presence here. Antonella could not do what he had done, nor what remained for him to do. Neither Selma, nor Cid, nor anyone from their period could do it. They were not hardened as he was. They belonged to another world and fought on a different front. Unluckily for them, it was not free from danger. And it was the role of people like Corson to minimize their peril.

What we are, he said to himself, we’re the road sweepers of history, the sewermen. We paddle in shit so that the way will be clean for the feet of our descendants.

“Are you going for a swim?” the girl asked.

He nodded, not having recovered enough to speak. The sea would make him feel clean again. The entire ocean might not be too much.