Hero! (9 page)

Nothing else moved and the strenuous breathing rattled on at the same pace. The dog howled.

Vaun stepped close and knelt painfully to clutch the thin, cold bones of the comcom’s fingers. “Tham, I’m sorry!” The invalid had a sour smell.

Sunken flesh around Tham’s mouth began to move, and what happened was apparently intended to be a smile—not a very happy one, though. “Who did your face?”

“I bailed out a little early.”

“You always did think that fences were for climbing, didn’t you, Vaun?” Even if Tham was as angry as Zozo, his gibes would be more subtle than her shrewish reproaches. Tham was never discourteous, even when his meaning was deadly.

“I should not have come if I…Damn!” Vaun wasn’t about to start telling lies to an old friend, and there was no use apologizing now. “Listen, Tham, I came because of a misunderstanding. I just need to ask you a couple of questions, then I’ll go and leave you in peace. This wasn’t Roker’s idea. Just me. A favor for an old friend?”

“How may I be of assistance, Admiral?” The voice was a scratch of fingernail on old, dry bone.

“You know there’s a Q ship coming…”

“Three, the last I heard.”

“The one from Scyth, I mean. It was due in about this time next year. Out of sheer curiosity, I checked on it—and I discovered that it isn’t braking. I thought we’d lots of time to…time before it arrived. But it should have started braking by now.” No need to tell Tham that Scyth was seven elwies away, or that such a journey needed a rock, which could not decelerate like a metal-skin boat. “It’s on impact course, and in about a hundred days we’ll need an
Eject
button on the planet. Suddenly it feels urgent…Tham.”

What wasn’t urgent to someone who looked like Tham looked? Or what was? Did anything matter at all? Tham’s
Eject
button had already been pushed.

“And what can I do?” His mind seemed to be unaffected. The boy Vaun had known so long was still in there, in that suddenly ancient body. It was going to take him with it.

Vaun had never considered himself as being afraid of death, no more than any other living being, but he knew that some deaths were better than others. “I want to know if it’s the Brotherhood, Tham. That’s all that concerns me. If it’s beasties or a runaway derelict or anything else at all, then Roker and his boys can do the worrying. But if it’s the Brotherhood again, then…”

Vaun let the sentence fade out, wondering what the ending really was…
Then I feel responsible?

Tham grimaced and squirmed, as if at a sudden cramp. “How the hell should I know? You think I can pick up signals from a Q ship?”

“Of course not. But when Scyth went silent, you told me you thought it was the Brotherhood’s doing.”

“Maybe I did. Thought so once. Still do, I suppose.” Tham rubbed his eyes wearily. “Didn’t you tell us that Abbot told you that the Brotherhood came from Scyth originally?”

What was going on here? Was Tham deliberately playing dumb, or was this just part of his illness?

“No,” Vaun said. “Abbot claimed that the Brotherhood did not originate on Avalon. And you know damn well that Abbot could have been lying. Scyth went silent—what? Thirty years ago?”

“Thirty-three, our time.”

“And twenty years
after
that—”

“Nineteen.”

“Nineteen years after that, a Q ship leaves the planet, heading for Ult.” Why hadn’t everyone panicked then? But Vaun had had no need to storm the fortress of Forhil and consult Commodore Tham to find the answer to that question. Because the ship wouldn’t arrive for years, so who cared? There had been lots of time, and everything else had been more urgent. Now the time was up.

Tham coughed painfully. “Vaun, you’re as bad as Roker. In fact you’re worse. You both think I have some enormous store of secrets about the Brotherhood, and The Meaning of Life, and How to Feed a Family of Four on One Gushima Egg. He seems to think I’ve been confiding in you, for Krantz’s sake! Remember the Ootharsis of Isquat?”

“Vaguely,” Vaun said, wondering if Tham was hallucinating. “Gibberish.”

“Yes, gibb—” Tham coughed, and twisted in his chair, and coughed again. Zozo came over to him, and perched on the arm beside him. She laid a hand on his shoulder.

When he spoke again, his voice was an insectile rustle in the big, still room. “That is the secret, Vaun. The whole secret. That it’s all like that. Scraps and fragments. Languages we don’t understand. News that means nothing, and is hundreds of years old anyway. Static from the Q ships blanks most of it, and the rest is gibberish. Every world is an island, Vaun. We’re on our own.”

Vaun remembered the loudmouth lieutenant at Maeve’s party the previous night. The boy had been right, in a way—why did everyone not worry more about this? Scyth was one of the closest worlds, yet it had gone silent and no one had done anything. They had all gone on with their own little lives and trusted the Patrol to do any worrying required. And beyond Scyth, all the way back to the origin, thousands upon thousands of worlds had inexplicably gone silent in the last thirty millennia.

“But Avalonian Command say they’ve won, don’t they? The war there is over, the Brotherhood defeated?”

Tham grunted, and rubbed his eyes.

“Don’t they, Tham? Isn’t that right? They finally answered, and said they’d won?”

“That’s what the com said.” Tham coughed. “It was garbled, though, and friggin’ short. Maybe the Brotherhood won, and faked the message, mm?”

There was the problem—four elwies was too far to go to find witnesses. “Tham—tell me about the Silence? What took out the old worlds? Beasties? Destruction? Is it suicide, or murder?”

Tham shook his head as though unwilling to waste his fading time on trivia. “You know all the theories as well as I do.”

“Do I? I’m asking for the Patrol’s real thinking here, Tham, not what the civilians hear, or the stuff that gets taught at Doggoth. What do Roker and his cronies believe?”

“Don’t know that they ever worry about it.” Tham closed his eyes wearily. “Same as everyone else, I suppose. Worlds just wear out, maybe. Like me. Or they invent something better than radio. And just talk to each other, not us. Or they stop caring. Like me. Why is everyone so anxious for my famous last words?”

“What happened to Scyth?” Vaun demanded.

“Plague?” the invalid mumbled. “They had a plague on Scyth.”

“That was a hundred years ago!”

“Close-run thing, though. Maybe it came back and next time took everybody?”

“No plague ever takes everybody!”

Tham wheezed for a moment. “Families?”

“Families? I never heard that one. What families?”

“Designer genotypes like the Brotherhood. It can’t be the only one. There must be others, many others, in a million worlds. They wouldn’t be any friendlier to each other than they are to…to us. I don’t know, Vaun. I never have. What is this strange superstition about wisdom on deathbeds?” The familiar eyes glared resentfully in their unfamiliar, macabre surroundings.

“A chance to look back and review a life’s work, I suppose.”

“And Roker told me I had to file a report before I could go off duty.” Tham bared his teeth, and again seemed to spasm with cramp. “Well, I told you, didn’t I?”

“Er…” Vaun thought quickly over what had been said. He sat back on his heels to ease the pressure on his sore knee. “You did?”

Again the dying boy was racked by a spasm of coughing, and this time it was worse. “Yes, I did,” he said at last, hoarsely. “So now it’s my turn. Why don’t you like singing?”

“Huh? I do like singing. I join in any—”

Tham was shaking his skull-like head. “I mean listening to singing.”

“Opera? Folk songs? I—”

“Don’t play dumb, Vaun. I haven’t time for games. As long as there’s a band, or any instrument…that’s fine. But unaccompanied voices…They drive you nuts. You get almost hysterical. Why, Vaun? Tell me now.”

Vaun shivered as some unwelcome memory tried to surface and he pushed it back down in its psychic swamp. “I’ve no idea. Is that true? Ask DataCen, it has all my synapses cataloged. No idea, Tham.” He shivered again.

“I noticed that,” Zozo remarked vaguely, not looking at either of them.

Tham sighed. “Then try this one. Vaun,
what did happen when you boarded the Q ship?
”

Vaun flinched. “Oh, Krantz, Tham! Not after all this time? Not you, too!”

The dying boy said nothing, just gazed painfully at his visitor. The dog howled, far away.

Even Tham? Had no one ever trusted Vaun?

“Go read the history books!”

Still Tham just waited, staring accusingly with his dying eyes. Zozo smiled mindlessly at a lithoprint on the far wall. Security would be monitoring the conversation. Roker himself could access those records—if not now, then very soon, when Tham’s heart stopped. Oh, Tham!

“I pretended to be Prior!” Vaun snapped. “I fooled them. They gave me the run of the ship. I managed to trigger the self-destruct and I got the hell out, in the shuttle! That’s the official story, it’s my story, and it’s the true story!” He looked for reaction, and saw none. “For Krantz’s sake, Tham!
Unity
blew herself all over the sky. The whole of Shilam saw the flash. All over Ult, rocks were falling for weeks. You
know
that! What else
could
have happened?”

Tham sighed again, a long sad exhalation as if something vital were seeping away. He closed his eyes for an agonizing moment.

“You still owe me one, then,” he whispered. “
Hercule!
”

The standard Security sim at Forhil was a testimony to Tham’s former sense of humor. It imaged in now beside his chair, a hairy, beetle-browed boy, bulging with tattooed muscles and festooned with weapons. It glowered suspiciously at Vaun, then at Zozo on the arm of the chair, and finally down at its owner, all with the same belligerent expression. Vaun rose to his feet and backed away a couple of steps. He wasn’t afraid of a mirage, although this one was admittedly oppressive and intended to be so. It was Tham he was wary of now.

“Transmit the Memorabilia file to Admiral Vaun at Valhal,” Tham said hoarsely.

“Deciphered, Commodore?”

“No. Ciphered.”

“Done, sir.”

“Power down all circuits still active.”

The sim’s scowl grew even more menacing. “I need confirmation of that, Commodore. Code seven-four-three?”

“Eight-three-two.”

The sim vanished instantly and the illusory flames dancing in the grate faded out into cold emptiness. Vaun had a strange sense of the building itself growing still, although he had not been aware of any other background noise. A house was a machine, and tended to have its own imperceptible hum of life. This one had just died.

The dog’s howl sounded louder, and nearer.

“Good-bye, Admiral!” The dying boy glared up from his chair with a beady scowl only marginally less menacing than the sim’s. “And thank you.”

Vaun’s mouth felt unusually dry. “Now wait a minute, Tham…”

As if it were a painful effort, Tham raised an arm to embrace Zozo, and she slid down in the chair beside him; there was plenty room for two such withered relics. But his eyes stayed fixed on Vaun. Obviously speaking was becoming an effort for him. “I was thinking of something Prior once said. Did you know that Roker threatened to have you tortured to death?”

“It doesn’t surprise me,” Vaun said sourly. “When was that?”

“Early in Prior’s interrogation. You were still scrubbing floors in Doggoth. You know all the experimenting we did on Raj…Or perhaps you don’t? We discovered that truth drugs didn’t work at all. Truncheons and electric shocks weren’t much better. We had three of the cuckoos by then, and Roker threatened to string you all up by your thumbs and skin you in front of Prior’s eyes.”

Vaun wondered if that had been entirely a bluff. “What did Prior say?”

“He said, ‘The brethren cannot be distracted from their duty by foolish sentimentality, as you randoms can.’”

“The brethren are also very slow to anger,” Vaun said, but he was thinking,
Truncheons and electric shock
?

“Then do it in cold blood. You owe me one. Maybe more than one?” Tham’s eyes shone with bitterness, or challenge.

Startled, Vaun looked to Zozo—surely she would never have repeated her suspicions to Tham? But Zozo was spaced up on neverminds, cuddling Tham vaguely with her head on his shoulder, and not listening.

“Good-bye, Admiral,” Tham repeated firmly.

Well, Vaun had come seeking trouble, and the request was reasonable under the circumstances. He eyed the distance to the window, and concluded that Security could block that before he could reach it; if Security was operational. He held Tham’s steady glare for a moment, and could think of absolutely no reason why the commodore should have faked those instructions to the sim. Tham had never been petty.

“All right,” he said. “Good-bye, Zozo. Good-bye, Tham.”

Zozo grinned childishly, not comprehending.

Tham pursed his lips, and she turned her head to kiss him. Vaun blew out their brains while they were distracted, two shots so close that a single roar echoed through the empty house. No shutters crashed down over doors and windows, so Security truly had been powered down. It wouldn’t really have mattered, he thought as he laid the gun on the nearest table. He would just have had to spend an unpleasant hour locked in with two smelly corpses. No court of law would ever convict the famous Admiral Vaun of wrongdoing when he had merely been helping out an old comrade; but he probably should report the matter right away.

The dog had fallen silent. Perhaps there was no dog.

At the door, Vaun turned to glance briefly back at the bodies, a single bloody tangle in the big chair. He would miss Tham. On the other hand, he had never understood Zozo, and her miserly reluctance to share that superb body with her friends.

But he would miss Tham.

Yet…
truncheons and electric shocks?

“I did it for Raj!” Vaun proclaimed wryly, and went off in search of a com unit.

I
N DISABLING SECURITY, Tham had also disabled every useful device in the house, down to and including the antique brass barometer in the vestibule. Eventually, in a tiny office he had never seen before, Vaun found an emergency com with its own power supply. As he put through a call to Valhal, he realized that he was sitting at a magnificent antique goldwood desk, almost certainly a genuine Fairinjian. For years he had wanted one of those to add to his collection, and here Tham had had one all the time, tucked away and probably forgotten in this neglected nook.