Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 7: March 2014 (8 page)

He began to close the door. Cordle said, “You do that, sweetheart, and I’ll have you up for slander and defamation of character. Those are serious charges over here, buddy, and I’ve got witnesses.”

Aside from Mavis, Cordle had collected a small, diffident but interested crowd.

“This is becoming entirely too ridiculous,” the butler said, temporizing, the door half closed.

“You’ll find a stretch at Wormwood Scrubs even more ridiculous,” Cordle told him. “I intend to pe
r
secute—I mean prosecute.”

“
Howard!
” cried Mavis.

He shook off her hand and fixed the butler with a piercing glance. He said, “I am Mexican, though perhaps my excellent grasp of the English has deceived you. In my country, a man would cut his own throat before letting such an insult pass unavenged. A woman’s coat, you say?
Hombre
, when I wear a coat, it becomes a
man’s
coat. Or do you imply that I am a
maricón
, a—how do you say it?—homosexual?”

The crowd—becoming less modest—growled approval. Nobody except a lord loves a butler.

“I meant no such implication,” the butler said weakly.

“Then it is a man’s coat?”

“Just as you wish, sir.”

“Unsatisfactory! The innuendo still exists. I go now to find an officer of the law.”

“Wait, let’s not be hasty,” the butler said. His face was bloodless and his hands were shaking. “Your coat is a man’s coat, sir.”

“And what about my necktie?”

The butler made a final attempt at stopping Zapata and his blood-crazed peons.

“Well, sir, a handkerchief is demonstrably—”

“What I wear around my neck,” Cordle said coldly, “becomes what it is intended to be. If I wore a piece of figured silk around my throat, would you call it ladies’ underwear? Linen is a suitable material for a tie,
verdad
? Function defines terminology, don’t you agree? If I ride to work on a cow, no one says that I am mounted on a steak. Or do you detect a flaw in my argument?”

“I’m afraid that I don’t fully understand it. …”

“Then how can you presume to stand in judgment over it?”

The crowd, which had been growing restless, now murmured approval.

“Sir,” cried the wretched butler, “I beg of you. …”

“
Otherwise
,”
Cordle said with satisfaction, “I have a coat, a necktie, and an invitation. Perhaps you would be good enough to show us the Byzantine miniatures?”

The butler opened wide the door to Pancho Villa and his tattered hordes. The last bastion of civilization had been captured in less than an hour. Wolves howled along the banks of the Thames, Morelos’ barefoot army stabled its horses in the British Museum, and Europe’s long night had begun.

Cordle and Mavis viewed the collection in silence. They didn’t exchange a word until they were alone and strolling through Regent’s Park.

“Look, Mavis,” Cordle began.

“No, you look,” she said. “You were horrible! You were unbelievable! You were—I can’t find a word rotten enough for what you were! I never dreamed that you were one of those sadistic bastards who get their kicks out of humiliating people!”

“But, Mavis, you heard what he said to me, you heard the way—”

“He was a stupid, bigoted old man,” Mavis said. “I thought you were not.”

“But he said—”

“It doesn’t matter. The fact is
,
you were enjoying yourself!”

“Well, yes, maybe you’re right,” Cordle said. “Look, I can explain.”

“Not to me, you can’t.
Ever.
Please stay away from me, Howard.
Permanently.
I mean that.”

The future mother of his two children began to walk away, out of his life. Cordle hurried after her.

“Mavis!”

“I’ll call a cop, Howard, so help me, I will! Just leave me alone!”

“Mavis, I love you!”

She must have heard him, but she kept on walking. She was a sweet and beautiful girl and definitely, unchangeably, an onion.

***

Cordle was never able to explain to Mavis about The Stew and about the necessity for experiencing behavior before condemning it. Moments of mystical illumination are seldom explicable. He
was
able to make her believe that he had undergone a brief psychotic episode, unique and unprecedented and—with her—never to be repeated.

They are married now, have one girl and one boy, live in a split-level house in Plainfield, New Jersey, and are quite content. Cordle is visibly pushed around by Fuller Brush men, fund solicitors, headwaiters and other imposing figures of authority. But there is a difference.

Cordle makes a point of taking regularly scheduled, solitary vacations. Last year, he made a small name for himself in Honolulu. This year, he is going to Buenos Aires.

Copyright © 1971 by Robert Sheckley

************************

Martin L. Shoemaker is a two-time
Writers
of the Future finalist. He has sold a pair of stories to
Analog
, as well as to
Digital Science Fiction
2
and
4
,
The Gruff Variations
,
and
The Glass Parachute.
He has also written a book and a comic strip on software design.

.

.

My platoo
n marched through the red jungle, each of us a walking death machine in the best powered armor the Stronghold’s engineers could design. Rifles, missiles, armor, scanners, even a recycling life-support system: a suit had the firepower of a small army by twentieth-century standards, and yet the mobility of a single soldier on foot. But deadlier than all that hardware was the trained warrior inside it, each of us an expert at spreading death and destruction across dozens of planets in our war with the League. With the neural controls in the suits, we only had to think at a target, and a barrage of destruction would rain down upon it.

But the League had plenty of firepower of their own. A whistle came over the
suit’s
audio, loud enough that I could hear it through the helmet, too. The suit sounded the missile alert, but too late: a bright light
flared ahead, much too close, and
the ground heaved. Even with the suit gyros, I lost my footing when the shock wave hit. I was still falling when the heat wall from the explosion arrived. My rad alarms didn’t go off, small blessing there: at least it hadn’t been a nuclear strike. But the heat was still scorching. If I hadn’t been in an armored suit, I would’ve been flashed to ash. Even through the suit, I took nasty burns.

Then the shock wave drove me back into the rock wall. The stabilizers and cushions did everything they could, but my head still snapped back in an instant of agony that shot from my neck and through my to
r
so—before suddenly I felt nothing at all. The last sight I saw was my fellow soldiers similarly tossed and toasted. Then all went black.

***

When I woke, the suit was walking back through the jungle to our pickup point. When I had lost co
n
sciousness, it had switched into Corpsman Mode: analyzing my injuries, applying medicines, immobilizing broken bones, and then walking me back to medical aid. A suit didn’t have the brains to fight and react, but it could follow simple programmed commands and adapt to the environment. In Corpsman Mode, the suit was in charge, and I was just along for the ride.

I couldn’t guess how long the suit had been in Corpsman Mode, but those red-gray trees looked like something we had walked though almost three hours before the League’s missile had shattered our platoon. Suits tended to go slow in CMM so as not to make injuries any worse, so it might have been walking four hours or more.

I peered ahead through the red brush of EJC49-3. (Yeah, my team had bought it for a shitty rock so
remote,
top brass hadn’t even bothered naming it.) It made no sense, but sense wasn’t part of my job. The League was on this rock, the Stronghold wanted them off, and my job was to kick them off or die trying. And “die trying” was looking pretty likely.

I caught movement in the distance. I thought hard about quadrant three, and the suit’s neural scanners picked up my intention. The display zoomed in on three. There, I could see it:
four more suits, Stronghold colors like mine.
Those were making better time than I was. That could mean the soldiers in them were still in control; but from the metronomic way in which they moved, I was sure it was because they had shifted from CMM to PBM: Pallbearer Mode. They no longer had to keep their wearers alive, so they could move to pickup at best speed.

Who else was still out here?
I turned the suit around to check—only I didn’t. I thought I moved legs and arms, and so the suit should match my moves. Neural control is all about tricking your brain, taking the parts that evolved for tasks like lifting things or focusing on one conversation in a crowded room, and training them to do the same work on simulated inputs with neural pickups to translate the outputs. Most soldiers could do basic neural control, enough to run a suit while blasting everything in sight in collabor
a
tion with your team; but a few of us got pretty good at it. I had a bit of a knack for neural control, which had recently earned me a promotion to Armor Officer.

So I was accustomed to a very natural control of the suit; and so I was completely surprised when nothing happened. The suit was overriding my neural control, which was common in CMM: you didn’t want a delirious soldier driving a suit to injure him further after all. I would have to try harder,
really
move my legs, and then maybe the force feedback system would kick in and I would regain control. Force feedback lets you do with muscles what you might not be able to do with your brain.

So I really
stopped
my legs … and they didn’t stop. I struggled. I tried to look down at my legs, and … Nothing. I didn’t feel a twitch, not even a twinge from where my neck had … had … I didn’t feel
anything
below my neck.

This time I didn’t black out from injury; I just … collapsed, my vision going gray as if I slid backward into a long tunnel. Soon all I saw was gray, until that faded to black.

***

When I woke again, the suit was still walking; and I was still inside, just a hundred kilos of meat for the suit to transport. That’s all I might be for the rest of my life. I would be in this suit or a civilian suit until the doctors determined whether I was part of that lucky twenty percent for whom neural regeneration was successful. And I had stopped believing in luck when the missile had exploded.

Despair swept over me like a wave, and I saw myself drowning in it. Again I slid into the gray tunnel, and again the black took me.

***

When my eyes fluttered open again, I muttered, “Stop it, Alex. Take charge.” I needed to vomit, but the suit’s meds suppressed and dismissed that urge almost before I felt it.

Yes, stop it.
Once upon a time, the odds of neural regeneration were zero. Now I had a twenty percent chance at full recovery, almost sixty percent for a meaningful partial recovery. Once a person so paralyzed
was doomed to a bed, unable to even sit in a chair unless strapped in. Now I could wear one of the new civvy suits. Those weren’t powerful war machines like ours, but rather sleek, form-fitting models that would let me walk, run, climb, dance, diaper a baby …

…
everything
but feel. I would never feel Lena’s skin under my fingers again. Never …

I was falling into darkness again. My odds were positive, but I just didn’t believe them. I was doomed to life in a suit, except when Lena would have to take me out of the suit to bathe me and wipe my ass. And she would do that, too, but I couldn’t put her through that.

“Suit.
Stop.”
If the suit wasn’t responding to neural commands, I would revert to voice. I would stop and find something, some way to finish what the League had started.

But the suit had other ideas. Its synthesized voice, calm and neutral, spoke in my audio pickups. “Unit EIA-5372961 is unable to comply. SPC Fitzsimmons, Alexander is classified disabled and unable to pe
r
form his duties or serve in a decision-making role. This unit has switched to Corpsman Mode until reset by the Armor Officer.”

I would’ve shouted, but I couldn’t find the breath. “I
am
the Armor Officer, you fucking moron! I order you to Reset.”

“SPC Fitzsimmons, Alexander is classified disabled and unable to serve as Armor Officer. This unit must report to the new Senior Armor Officer at the recovery vessel.”