Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (237 page)

I laughed, and heard the harshness of my laughter.

“What’re you going to do about it?” I said.

“Show you how the knife you hold cuts the hand that holds it as well as what you turn it against. I have news for you, Tam. Kensie Graeme is dead.”

* * * *

“D
ead?”
The rain seemed to roar around me suddenly and the parking lot shifted unsubstantially under my feet.

“He was assassinated by three men of the Blue Front in Blauvain five days ago.”

“Assassinated…” I whispered. “Why?”

“Because the war was over,” said Padma. “Because Jamethon’s death and the surrender of the Friendly troops without the preliminary of a war that would tear up the countryside left the civilian population favorably disposed toward our troops. Because the Blue Front found themselves farther from power than ever, as a result of this favorable feeling. They hoped by killing Graeme to provoke his troops into retaliation against the civilian population, so that the St. Marie government would have to order them home to our Exotics, and stand unprotected to face a Blue Front revolt.”

I stared at him.

“All things are interrelated,” said Padma. “Kensie was slated for a final promotion to a desk command back on Mara or Kultis. He and his brother Ian would have been out of the wars for the rest of their professional lives. Because of Jamethon’s death, that allowed the surrender of his troops without fighting, a situation was set up which led the Blue Front to assassinate Kensie. If you and Jamethon had not come together on St. Marie, and Jamethon had won, Kensie would still be alive. So our calculations show.”

“Jamethon and I?” The breath went dry in my throat without warning, and the rain came down harder.

“You were the factor,” said Padma, “that helped Jamethon to his solution.”

“I helped him!” I said.
“I
did?”

“He saw through you,” said Padma. “He saw through the revenge-bitter, twisted surface you thought was yourself, to the idealistic core that was so deep in the bone of you that even your uncle hadn’t been able to eradicate it.”

The rain thundered between us. But Padma’s every word came clearly through it to me.

“I don’t believe you!” I shouted. “I don’t believe he did anything like that!”

“I told you,” said Padma, “you didn’t fully appreciate the evolutionary advances of our Splinter Cultures. Jamethon’s faith was not the kind that can be shaken by outer things. If you had been in fact like your uncle, he would not even have listened to you. He would have dismissed you as a soulless man. As it was, he thought of you instead as a man possessed. A man speaking with what he would have called Satan’s voice.”

“I don’t believe it!” I yelled.

“You do believe it,” said Padma. “You’ve got no choice except to believe it. Because only because of it could Jamethon find his solution.”

“Solution!”

“He was a man ready to die for his faith. But as a commander he found it hard his men should go out to die for no other reasonable cause.” Padma watched me, and the rain thinned for a moment. “But you offered him what he recognized as the devil’s choice—his life in this world, if he would surrender his faith and his men, to avoid the conflict that would end in his death and theirs.”

“What crazy thinking was that?” I said. Inside the church, the praying had stopped, and a single strong, deep voice was beginning the burial service.

“Not crazy,” said Padma. “The moment he realized this, his answer became simple. All he had to do was begin by denying whatever the
Satan offered. He must start with the absolute necessity of his own death.”

“And that was a solution?” I tried to laugh but my throat hurt.

“It was the only solution,” said Padma. “Once he decided that, he saw immediately that the one situation in which his men would permit themselves to surrender was if he was dead and they were in an untenable position for reasons only he had known.”

I felt the words go through me with a soundless shock.

“But he didn’t mean to die!” I said.

“He left it to his God,” said Padma. “He arranged it so only a miracle could save him,”

“What’re you talking about?” I stared at him. “He set up a table with a flag of truce. He took four men—”

“There was no flag. The men were overage, martyrdom-seekers.”

“He took four!” I shouted. “Four and one made five. The five of them against one man. I stood there by that table and saw. Five against—”

“Tam.”

* * * *

The single word stopped me. Suddenly I began to be afraid. I did not want to hear what he was about to say. I was afraid I knew what he was going to tell me. That I had known it for some time. And I did not want to hear it, I did not want to hear him say it. The rain grew even stronger, driving upon us both and mercilessly on the concrete, but I heard every word relentlessly through all its sound and noise.

Padma’s voice began to roar in my ears like the rain, and a feeling came over me like the helpless floating sensation that comes in high fever. “Did you think that Jamethon for a minute fooled himself? He was a product of a
Splinter Culture. He recognized another in Kensie. Did you think that for a minute he thought that barring a miracle he and four overage fanatics could kill an armed, alert and ready man of the Dorsai—a
man like Kensie Graeme?
Before they were gunned down and killed themselves?”

Themselves…themselves…themselves…

I rode off a long way on that word from the dark day and the rain. Like the rain and the wind behind the clouds it lifted me and carried me away at last to that high, hard and stony land I had glimpsed when I had asked Kensie Graeme that question about his ever allowing Friendly prisoners to be killed. It was this land I had always avoided, but to it I was come at last. And I remembered…

From the beginning, I had known inside myself that the fanatic who had killed Dave and the others was not the image of all Friendlies. Jamethon was no casual killer. I had tried to make him into one in order to hide my own shame, my own self-destruction. For three years I had lied to myself. It had not been with me as I claimed, at Dave’s death.

I had sat there under that tree watching Dave and the others die, watching the black-clad Groupman killing them with his machine rifle. And, in that moment, the thought in my mind had not been the one with which I justified three years of hunting for an opportunity to ruin someone like Jamethon and destroy the Friendly peoples.

It had not been me, thinking,
what is he doing there, what is he doing to those helpless, innocent men!
I had thought nothing so noble. Only one thought had filled all my mind and body in that instant. It had been simply—
after he’s done, is he going to turn that gun on me?

* * * *

I came back to the day and to the rain. The rain was slackening and Padma was holding me upright. As with Jamethon, I was amazed at the strength of his hands.

“Let me go,” I mumbled.

“Where would you go, Tam?” said Padma.

“Any place,” I muttered. “I’ll get out of it. I’ll go hole up somewhere and get out of it. I’ll give up.”

“An action,” said Padma, letting me go, “goes on reverberating for ever. Cause never ceases its effects. You can’t let go now, Tam. You can only change sides.”

“Sides!” I said. The rain was dwindling fast. “What sides?” I stared at him drunkenly.

“Your uncle’s side which is one,” said Padma. “And the opposing side, which is yours—which is ours as well.” The rain was falling only lightly now, and the day was lightening. A little pale sunlight worked through thin clouds and illuminated the space between us. “In addition there are two strong influences besides we Exotics concerned with the attempt of man to evolve. We can’t calculate or understand them yet, beyond the fact they act almost as single powerful individual wills. One seems to try to aid, one to frustrate, the evolutionary process; and their influences can be traced back at least as far as man’s first venture into space from Earth.”

I shook my head.

“I don’t understand it,” I muttered. “It’s not my business.”

“It is. It has been all your life.” Padma’s eyes caught light for a moment. “A force intruded on the pattern on St. Marie, in the shape of a unit warped by personal loss and oriented toward violence. That was you, Tam.”

I tried to shake my head again, but I knew he was right.

“You are blocked in your effort,” said Padma. “But the law of conservation of energies could not be denied. When you were frustrated by Jamethon, your force, transmuted, left the pattern in the unit of another individual, warped by personal loss and oriented toward violent effect on the fabric.”

I stared at him and wet my lips. “What other individual?”

“Ian Graeme.”

I stared at him.

“Ian found his brother’s three assassins hiding in a hotel room in Blauvain. He killed them with his hands—and in doing that he calmed the mercenaries and frustrated the Blue Front. But then he resigned and went home to the Dorsai. He’s charged now with the sense of loss and bitterness you were charged with when you came to St. Marie,” Padma paused and added softly, “Now he has great causal potential for some purpose we can’t yet calculate.”

“But—” I looked at Padma. “You mean I’m free!”

Padma shook his head.

“You’re only charged with a different force instead,” he said. “You received the full impact and charge of Jamethon’s self-sacrifice.”

He looked at me almost with sympathy, and in spite of the sunlight I began to shiver.

It was so. I could not deny it. Jamethon, in giving his life up for a belief, when I had thrown away all belief before the face of death, had melted and changed me as lightning melts and changes the uplifted sword-blade that it strikes. I could not deny what had happened to me.

“No,” I said, shivering, “I can’t do anything about it.”

“You can,” said Padma, calmly. “You will.”

He unclasped his hands that he had held together earlier.

“The purpose for which we calculated I should meet you here is accomplished now,” he said. “The idealism which was basic in you remains. Even your uncle couldn’t take it from you. He could only attack it so that the threat of death on New Earth could twist it for a while against itself. Now you’ve been hammered straight in the forge of events on St. Marie.”

I laughed, and the laugh hurt my throat still.

“I don’t feel straight,” I said.

“Give yourself time,” said Padma. “Healing takes time. New growth has to harden, like muscle, before it becomes useful. Now you understand much more about the faith of the Friendlies, the courage of the Dorsai—and something of the philosophical strength for man we work toward on the Exotics.”

He stopped and smiled at me. Almost an impish smile.

“It should have been clear to you a long while ago, Tam,” he said. “Your job’s the job of translator—between the old and the new. Your work will prepare the minds of the people on all the worlds—full-spectrum and Splinter Culture alike—for the day when the talents of the race will combine into the new breed.” The smile softened, his face saddened. “You’ll live to see more of it than I. Good-by, Tam.”

He turned. Through the still misty, but brightening air, I saw him walking alone toward the church, from which came the voice of the speaker within, now announcing the number of the final hymn.

* * * *

Dazedly, I turned away myself, went to my car and got in. Now the rain was almost over and the sky was brightening fast. The faint moisture fell, it seemed, more kindly; and the air was fresh and new.

I put the car windows open as I pulled out of the lot onto the long road back to the spaceport. And through the open window beside me I heard them beginning to sing the final hymn inside the church.

It was the Battle Hymn of the Friendly Soldiers that they sang. As I drove away down the road the voices seemed to follow me strongly Not sounding slowly and mournfully as if in sadness and farewell but strongly and triumphantly, as in a marching song on the lips of those taking up a route at the beginning of a new day.

Soldier, ask not—now, or ever,

Where to war your banners go.

The singing followed me as I drove away. And as I got farther into the distance, the voices seemed to blend until they sounded like one voice alone, powerfully singing. Ahead, the clouds were breaking. With the sun shining through, the patches of blue sky were like bright flags waving—like the banners of an army, marching forever forward into lands unknown.

I watched them, as I drove forward toward where they blended into open sky; and for a long time I heard the singing behind me, as I drove to the spaceport and the ship for Earth that waited in the sunlight.

* * * *

Copyright © 1964 by Galaxy Publishing Corp.