Memories of the Future (10 page)
Read Memories of the Future Online
Authors: Robert F. Young
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Anthologies, #short stories, #Anthologies & Short Stories
“Why, of course,
Pan
Reston. You are more than welcome to my house. . . . All spring I waited for you to come, but when you did not I knew that it was because you were not yet prepared, that you were not quite certain of the call.”
He looked at her puzzledly. He had never asked a Polish girl for a date before, but he was reasonably sure that they didn’t usually respond in quite so formal a manner, or in quite so respectful a tone of voice. “I mean,” he explained, “that I would like to see you again because—” he floundered for words “—because I like you, because you are beautiful, because . . .” His voice trailed away when he saw the expression that had come over her face.
Then he stared uncomprehendingly as she turned away and ran into the house. The door slammed and he stood there for a long time, looking dumbly at the mute panels and the little curtained windows.
The enormity of the social crime he had apparently committed bewildered him. Surely no society—not even a society as pious and as God-fearing as the one he was involved in—would expect its widows to remain widows forever. But even granting that such were the case, the expression that had come over Helena’s face was still inexplicable. Reston could have understood surprise, or even shock—
But not horror.
He was something besides just an odd number in the peasants’ eyes. He was a grotesque misfit, a monster. But why?
He walked home slowly, trying to think, trying, for the first time, to see himself as the immigrants saw him. He passed the church, heard the sporadic hammering of the carpenters as they applied the finishing touches to the interior. He wondered suddenly why they had built it next door to the only heathen in the village.
He brewed coffee in his kitchen and sat down by the window. He could see the foothills, green and lazily rising, with the mountains chaste and white beyond them.
He dropped his eyes from the mountains and stared down at his hands. They were long, slender hands, sensitive from long association with the control consoles of half a hundred complex ships—the hands of a pilot, different, certainly, from the hands of a peasant, just as he was different, but, basically, intrinsically the same.
How
did
they see him?
The answer was easy: They saw him as a pilot. But why should their seeing him as a pilot so affect their attitude toward him that they could never relax in his presence, could never evince toward him the warmth and camaraderie, or even the resentment, which they evinced toward each other? A pilot, after all, was nothing but a human being. It was no credit to Reston that he had delivered them from persecution, no credit to him that
Nowa Polska
had become a reality.
Suddenly he remembered the
Book of Exodus
. He got up, disbelievingly, and located the copy of the Bible he had borrowed during the winter. With mounting horror, he began to read.
* * *
He had crouched wearily on the little ledge. Above him the insurmountable cornice had obfuscated the sky.
He had looked down into the valley and he had seen the remote winking of tiny lights that symbolized his destiny. But they symbolized something more than just his destiny: They symbolized warmth and a security of sorts; they symbolized all there was of humanity on
Nowa Polska
. Crouching there on the ledge, in the mountain cold, he had come to the inevitable realization that no man can live alone, and that his own need for the immigrants was as great as their need for him.
He had begun the descent then, slowly, because of his weariness and because his hands were bloodied and bruised from the frenzy of the climb. It was morning when he reached the meadows, and the sun was shining brightly on the cross above the church.
* * *
Abruptly Reston left the window and returned to his chair. There was pain even in remembered conflict.
But the room was warm and pleasant, and his chair deep and comfortable, and gradually the pain left him. Very soon now, he knew, one of the children would come running across the snow bearing viands from the feast, and a knock would sound at his door, and there would come another one of the moments for which he lived, which, added together through the years, had made his surrender to his destiny more bearable.
His surrender had not immediately followed his return to the village. It had come about subtly with the passage of the years. It had been the natural result of certain incidents and crises, of unanticipated moments. He tried to remember the moment when he had first stepped briefly into the niche which circumstance and society preordained for him. Surely it must have been during the fourth winter when the little Andruliewicz girl had died.
It had been a dull wintry day, the sky somber, the frozen earth unsoftened as yet with snow. Reston had followed the little procession up the hill that had been set aside for the cemetery and he had stood with the gray-faced immigrants at the edge of the little grave. The casket was a crude wooden one, and the father stood over it awkwardly with the Bible in his hands, stumbling through the service, trying to say the words clearly and instead uttering them brokenly in his clumsy peasant’s voice. Finally Reston could stand it no longer and he walked over the frozen ground to where the stricken man was standing and took the Bible into his own hands. Then he stood up straight against the bleak cold sky, tall and strong, and his voice was as clear as a cold wind, yet as strangely soft as a midsummer’s day, and filled with the promise of springs yet to come, and the sure calm knowledge that all winters must pass.
“I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die . . .”
* * *
The knock finally sounded, and Reston got up from his chair and walked over to the door. Funny the way a simple, God-fearing people would regard a spaceman, he thought. Especially the particular spaceman who had delivered them from persecution and brought them to the Promised Land; who had nonchalantly manipulated a ship three acres long by one acre wide with nothing but his fingers; who had, in the course of Exodus, performed exploits that made Moses’ cleaving of the waters of the Red Sea seem like a picayune miracle by comparison; and who had, after the Promised Land had been attained, made many wanderings into the Wilderness to commune with God, sometimes carrying the sacred Book itself.
But that attitude by itself would not have been enough to engender the social pressure that had shaped his way of life without the catalyst that the single casualty of planetfall had provided. Reston could still appreciate the irony in the fact that that single casualty should have involved the most essential pillar in the structure of the new society—the Polish priest himself.
He opened the door and peered out into the snow. Little Piotr Pyzykiewicz was standing on the doorstep, a huge dish in his arms. “Good evening, Father. I’ve brought you some
kielbasa
and some
golabki
and some
pierogi
and some
kiszki
and—”
Father Reston opened the door wide. Being a priest had its drawbacks, of course—maintaining peace in a monogamous society that refused to stay evenly balanced in the ways of sex, for one, and making certain that his sometimes too greedy flock did not overexploit the simple indigenes, for another. But it had its compensations, too. For, while Reston could never have children of his own, he had many, many children in a different sense of the word, and what harm could there be in an old man’s pretending to a virility which circumstance and society had denied him?
“Come in, my
son
,” he said.
Divine Wind
T
HE EIGHT APPROACHING KAMIKAZES
became visible in the T’ran flagship’s telescreens. Interceptors had already been dispatched. Seven of them found their mark. The eighth missed, and the surviving Kamikaze came through the distortion field and by sheer chance caught the T’ran hospital ship. Missile and ship bloomed into a great red rose, then the remnants of each raced one another down to the ice-mantled surface of the planet Ozar, round which the T’ran space fleet was orbiting.
The T’ran commander convened her highest-ranking officers on the flagship’s bridge. The decision they arrived at had been in embryo stage since the T’ran-Pwalm battle had begun. After dismissing the officers, the commander summoned Gunther Kenyon, missile man first class, to the bridge.
The commander’s name was O’Malley, and she was as tall as Kenyon was. Her resplendent white uniform lent width to her shoulders and accentuated the trimness of her hips. Kenyon had heard it said that hair grew on her chest.
Her gelid eyes impaled his soft brown ones. She said, “Perhaps you’ve guessed why I sent for you.”
He shook his head. “No, Commander.”
“I will enlighten you.
Kamikaze
originally referred to the pilot of a sacrificial war craft. We now use the word to designate unmanned missiles. Had the Pwalm Kamikaze that just struck the hospital ship been manned, the pilot could easily have made a last-minute course correction and destructed its true target.”
“The flagship?”
“Yes. By this time their spy-beams must have relayed back to them that we’ve committed the age-old blunder of massing the brains of our war machine in a single ship. They know that once that ship is knocked out they can risk a frontal attack on the remainder of our fleet. Just as we know, from our own spy-beams, that they also have committed the age-old blunder, and that once their flagship is knocked out,
we
can risk a frontal attack.”
“But even without a flagship, either fleet would fight, Commander.”
“Yes, but deprived of intelligent leadership, neither could survive. . . . This has been an exasperating battle. The Pwalmians orbit the fourth planet from the sun, we orbit the fifth, and the planet we’re fighting for is the next one out, a blue jewel in the sky to be awarded to the winner. Hiding behind distortion fields that misrepresent the true positions of their ships and disorient target sensors, the two sides hurl explosive stones at each other and on occasion, through chance alone, obtain a hit. A most ridiculous battle. Perhaps, in a hundred years, one side or the other might find its true target and be able to move in for the kill. But we do not have a hundred years, and neither do the Pwalmians. What we are about to do tomorrow, they would undoubtedly do the day after.”
Kenyon said nothing. He waited, as he had always waited throughout his life.
“Tomorrow,” the commander said, “we will launch a true Kamikaze.”
Her ice-blue eyes were locked on Kenyon’s. He knew what her next words would be before she spoke them. “And you, Gunther Kenyon, because of your years of dedication to the service and because of the courage and level-headedness you have exhibited so many times under fire, have been chosen for the role.”
“A Divine Wind,” Kenyon said.
“Yes. A Divine Wind. You have been nominated to enter the ranks of the Honored Dead.”
She picked up a pointer and stepped over to an illuminated holo-map that covered part of the port bulkhead. The map reduced the actual scale of distance so that the entire theater of operations could be shown. Even on such a reduced scale, this would not have been possible had not the three planets involved been on the same side of the sun.
With the end of the pointer she touched a glittering little world near the base of the map. “This is Ozar, Karowin’s fifth planet, round which we are in orbit. This”—she moved the pointer’s end a considerable distance up and to the left and touched a blue world—“is Blazon, Karowin’s sixth planet, which this battle and the entire war are all about. And this”—she moved the pointer’s end far to the right and much higher on the map and touched a brown world that had two moons—“is Mitar, Karowin’s fourth planet, round whose face and moons the Pwalm fleet is in orbit.”
“No-man’s-space,” Kenyon murmured.
The hairy tildes of the commander’s eyebrows lifted. “You’re a student of history, Gunther Kenyon?”
“Only in the sense that I’ve read about the ancient wars. It’s necessary to go only one World War back from the one that gave the common language
Kamikaze
to find no-man’s-land.”
“A commendable intellectual feat, nonetheless, for an enlisted person.” The commander laid the pointer down. “My reference to the map was to point out that Blazon is so remote from the trajectory you’ll be following tomorrow that only the wildest deviation from your course would put it in jeopardy. I felt you should be reassured in this respect, since the warhead you’ll be carrying will be vacuum-shielded anti-matter.”
Kenyon was stunned. “I thought there was a mutual agreement between both sides to refrain from using H-bombs, laser rays, and anti-matter.”
“There was. But such agreements are adhered to only by losers. A war has only two objectives: One, to win it in any way possible; and two, to keep intact that which you are fighting for. Tomorrow a wave of unmanned Kamikazes will precede you. They will be knocked out by Pwalm interceptors, but by then you’ll be almost to the distortion field. After you slip through it, you will go on manual, search out the flagship and ram it. Your trajectory will take you to that part of the field our sensors indicate the flagship to be. It won’t be there, of course, but it won’t be far away. Your warhead will not only destruct the flagship but all the other ships in the area, thereby assuring our ultimate victory.”
Kenyon thought of a number of things to say, but he dared say none of them, so he said nothing.
“Launch time will be 0600.”
Kenyon saluted and left.
* * *
On his way down the free-fall tube he was seized by two female officers, drawn into a storeroom, and raped. It was not a new experience, but it sickened him because of the subjugation it implied. When he reached his tiny cabin, he lay upon his bunk and stared at the gray ceiling. Formerly, enlisted men had been provided with armed guards when they were summoned topside, but since the last T’ran-Pwalm engagement there had been a shortage of enlisted personnel, and armed guards could no longer be spared. For this same reason the fraternization parties formerly held at monthly intervals in the main rec hall had been discontinued, augmenting the likelihood of rape.
In addition to his bunk, his cabin contained a footlocker and a bench. Although small and Spartan, it was a sizable cut above the fetid common quarters shared by the enlisted men beneath his rank. He was in charge eight hours a day of one of the flagship’s Kamikaze launching stations. He had just completed a tour of duty when the commander had summoned him to the bridge.
His final tour of duty.
There was no one he cared to say goodbye to. There was an enlisted girl he slept with on occasion, but she was no more than that. He had no true friends; he wasn’t a gregarious man. And he wouldn’t have dared to say goodbye to anyone in any case, for although the commander hadn’t said so, he knew his forthcoming mission shouldn’t be bruited through the ship.
Although he didn’t question the rightness or the wrongness of the task to which he’d been arbitrarily assigned, it dawned on him as he lay there on his bunk that he didn’t want to die. That he didn’t want to join the long gray ranks of the Honored Dead.
While reading of the ancient T’ran wars he had read of the fifteen- and sixteen-year-old Japanese boys who had waited eagerly to board the
kaikens
and make their way underwater to glorious immolation against the hulls of enemy ships. He didn’t feel the way they must have felt, although he’d been similarly inculcated.
I’m too old
, he thought,
I’ve seen too many springs, too many blue-skied summers. I’ve seen trees exchange their paling autumnal dresses for brand-new gowns of white far, far too many times. I’ve got up too many times at dawn and seen the day put the stars to bed. Living is comprised of a million little things, and those little things, when added together, spell love, and beside that love, the dirt that also comprises life shrinks into an indiscernible mote.
* * *
He was launched into no-man’s-space at 0601.
The cockpit the machinists had installed in the Kamikaze was just behind the warhead. Directly before him lay the control board. Above it, the forward viewscreen showed the night and the stars. To the right of the screen, a smaller one showed a section of the T’ran flagship bridge. Beneath the forward screen, the rear viewscreen showed the receding flagship. There were small windows on either side of the cockpit that looked out into the waste of space. In the right one he could see Karowin, the sun.
The manual override control was inset in the left arm of his seat. Beneath the right arm was a tiny button with which he could activate the warhead should he miss his target. In building the cabin, the machinists—perhaps out of irony, more likely because the commander hadn’t wanted them to know that she and the other officers were contemplating a true Kamikaze mission—had installed an ejection hatch. Thus Kenyon, before the moment of contact, could jettison himself from the cabin. Even without an anti-matter warhead to contend with, such an ejection would have had dubious value; with one, he would merely obtain the privilege of dying outside rather than inside the missile.
In the forward viewscreen he could see the bright yellow wakes of the eight unmanned Kamikazes that had been launched seconds before his manned one. He could see the distant crescent of Mitar, but he couldn’t see its two moons. And he wasn’t seeing Mitar where it truly was, for the Pwalm distortion field refracted its position.
I am a bomb
, he thought.
For
this
, I have lived my life.
He had lived the early part of it on the Old World, and he went there often when on leave. The Old World was the matrix of the T’ran Empire. The empire was constituted of an archipelago of planets along the galactic lens. The Pwalm Empire constituted another such archipelago deeper in the galaxy. Both races were the matured “plants” of “seeds” spread eons ago on the Old World and on Pwalm by a far superior, possibly an extragalactic, race. Neither the T’ranians nor the Pwalmians had detected each other’s existence till each reached a scientific stage that embodied interstellar travel and permitted extrasystem colonization. The war in which Kenyon now fought had been in progress for three years. It was being fought over Blazon. The galaxy was rich with dead planets, but inhabitable ones like Blazon were few and far between. And Blazon had never been “seeded” with intelligent life. It was an open invitation to both sides to spread themselves farther upon the face of space. The two fleets now confronting each other in the Karowin system had depleted the T’ran and Pwalm economies to a degree where a loss for either side would terminate the war.
* * *
Kenyon tried to see Blazon in the forward viewscreen. It did not appear because the hull camera was focused on Mitar, or rather, on where Mitar seemed to be, and Blazon was too far to the left. He leaned sideways and looked through the left lateral window. He made out a minute sapphire at two o’clock. The planet’s blueness made him think of the Old World, and he turned his eyes away and leaned wearily back in his seat.
Halfway across no-man’s-space, the control board’s missile sensor-lights turned red. Interceptors were on their way. Commander O’Malley’s face appeared in the bridge screen. She had a small wart on her chin. In ancient, more romantic, days, it would have been called a “beauty mark.” “They launched only eight,” she said. “As yet, they’re unaware of you. Impacts will occur shortly before you reach the field.”
Kenyon said nothing.
He was no longer in the cockpit.
He was walking down a springtime street.
New leaves adorned the trees. He felt gay and sad. It was a street he had walked down before. He looked at the houses and the lawns, at the blue Old World sky. He smelled lilacs and saw their mauve, bouquetlike trees.
The little things
, he thought.
Yes, the little things. The parameters we pay so little attention to; that spell love.
He came back to the cockpit when the advance Kamikazes began meeting their interceptors. Space seemed to wink. It winked again and again and again. Presently Kenyon found himself alone in the star-barbed night.
He watched the forward viewscreen. Mitar was a huge crescent now, and he could see the roundness of its dark side. He could see the gross shapes of the Pwalm ships. The flagship was the grossest of all. Beyond the ships he could see the little moons. They twinkled diamondlike in the sky.
The missile sensor-lights had gone out. The commander’s face was still in the bridge screen. “We can detect no more interceptors, Kenyon. But they know you’re there by now; they’ll be trying something else.”
Suddenly a girl appeared beside him.
She seemed to be sitting next to him on a nonexistent seat.
She was unlike any girl he had ever seen before. She had full cheeks and a gentle gaze, and her hair was dark brown and shoulder-long, and her eyes made him think of the Old World sky he had just walked beneath during his springtime stroll. She was wearing a white tunic that reached but little lower than her hips and seemed to be suspended from the nipples of her breasts.
The commander’s face still filled the bridge screen. Compared to the girl’s, it was a gargoyle face. Fury and fear had painted it gray. “Eject her!—she’s a bomb!”
Yes. A bomb. What other kind of girl would come to see him here in no-man’s-space?
The Pwalm sensor operators had detected not only his Kamikaze but his presence on board, and they had projected a gynecomorphous bomb.
“Eject her!” the commander screamed again.
He found that he could faintly see the bulkhead through the girl’s flesh. He raised the faceplate of his helmet. “I can’t. The projection’s not fully complete.”