The Lights of Skaro (21 page)

“But the story, Jess! It’s the biggest thing I ever touched! What’s behind it? Why did he do it? What kind of a man risks his life to help people escape from his own prison, and deliberately exposes his identity while doing it? And why did he provoke Yoreska into denouncing him?”

I opened my mouth to debate the last point, but she went on.

“He did! He did! Didn’t you see how he taunted Yoreska with the microphone? He bullied him into it! And when he left the room he was triumphant! Why? How had he beaten Yoreska?”

It would be dramatic to say that the answer came pat on the question. It didn’t come for several hours. Until then, tension held the city like a tight spring, neither increasing nor decreasing. The soldiers waited in the park, shots popped now and then, the loudspeakers played music while Cora and I put our bits and pieces of information together to try to understand Bulič.

Once I had accepted the fact that he arranged the escapes, for reasons we did not know, it was evident that nobody else except Yoreska himself could have arranged them, and possibly not even Yoreska. The Gorza escape had required Authority; to deliver the
laissez-passer,
to withdraw the guards, to arrange that the car would not be turned back short of the border post where Bulič waited with his machine-pistol. Why he had not used Authority at that point instead of the gun, was part of the puzzle. Djakovo’s escape had been less complicated, but only someone as important as Bulič could drop off the runaway switch engine and safely appear in the quarantined frontier zone without explanation or challenge. The heavy peasant clothes he wore on both occasions had been to conceal his uniform, as the skull-cap concealed the scars on his head. We couldn’t guess why he had covered his head but not his face, nor why he had chosen to write Radovič’s note in his easily identifiable handwriting instead of on a typewriter, nor why he had done what he had done. But we learned simultaneously of our own danger and the reason for Bulič’s look of triumph at Yoreska’s denunciation when, just before midnight, the loudspeakers announced that President Radovič had an important message for the nation.

Radovič was then three days in his grave. My flesh crawled at the sound of that magnified, compelling voice on the air. It went on crawling at the significance of what the voice was saying. Radovič, dead, spoke of the events that had just happened.

“Comrades, citizens and soldiers! I, your President, speak to you in a moment of national emergency. Our enemies, ruthless in their unceasing attack on the People’s Free Federal Republic, have shown their hand again. Penetrating into the very heart of the Party of the people with gold and treachery, they succeeded in placing in a position of high authority a man who has betrayed us. I name the traitor: Milo Yoreska, one-time—”

Cora gasped. The hair was rising on the back of my neck. The soldiers in the park stood motionless, their faces upturned.

“… general in the Red Army and formerly my Minister of Internal Affairs. Discovered in his treachery by the alert action of the people’s Security Police, frantically attempting to conceal his crimes in a final rat-like spasm of cowardly hate, he had publicly denounced Chief of Security Comrade Colonel Bulič, my loyal
aide
and now, by my order, General Bulič and Minister of Internal Affairs. The traitor and all those who have aided him will pay for their treachery with their lives. The harm they have done cannot be undone, but it will be remedied. Our country is once again in safe and capable hands. I call on you, citizens and comrades, to rally shoulder to shoulder behind me and my ministers, in brotherhood, unity, and strength. Long live the Party of the people! Long live the People’s Free Federal Republic!”

There was a humming and a click, followed by the opening bars of the sign-off music. It was almost midnight, curfew hour. The spark to explode the motes of dust hadn’t come. The crowd of soldiers in the park began to break up and drift away.

When the loudspeakers quit for the night, moments later, we could hear the horns of
roko
cars sounding across the city, as well as the continuing shots. They were all pistol shots, significantly. No rifle fire. Soldiers carried rifles,
rokos
and city police carried pistols. Security was cleaning up.

I closed the window, for no particular reason.

Cora said, in a whisper, “Radovič has been dead three days.”

“I wouldn’t repeat it too loudly or too often.”

She looked at me with a blank, unseeing stare. She was still trying to reconcile her mental picture of Radovič’s dead body with the sound of his living voice. I hadn’t looked at him dead, so the reconciliation wasn’t as hard for me to make. My thought processes were a step ahead of hers.

“You and I are two of a small group of people who know it was a recording, Cora. Bulič had Radovič make it days or weeks or months ago, and kept it ready for the day when he and Yoreska would come to a showdown. The people who know or have reason to suspect that Radovič is dead are being liquidated by those shots you hear. None of them could prove, as we can, that Bulič was the traitor Yoreska charged him with being. We’re in bad trouble.”

She said dully, ‘I’m in bad trouble. There’s no reason why you should be involved.”

“We’re both involved, if it’s any comfort. Bulič never distinguished between one spy and another. And he wouldn’t believe you could keep this to yourself, even if you had.”

We both looked at the note, lying on the table. Cora picked it up, put it in her shoe and slipped the shoe on her foot. A single pistol shot, nearer to us than any that had sounded before, went off. The
rokos
were working in our direction.

I remember how the shots came gradually closer, and that we had another pot of coffee, and how the primus stove hissed when Cora heated water, and that there was a smear of lipstick on the rim of her cup, all the irrelevancies. It’s hard to bring yourself to the realization of imminent danger when you don’t see it staring you physically in the face. A pointed gun, a speeding car, a crumbling avalanche, all make you jump instinctively for your life. Bulič was more dangerous to us than any of them. Yet because he was only an idea in our minds instead of a man in the room with us, we could sit there and drink coffee while we tried to think our way out of trouble, like intelligent people. With
roko
pistol shots sounding the death of Bulič’s enemies all over the city, we could even bicker about what we should do.

Cora said, “We’d better try to reach the legation.”

“We wouldn’t make it, on foot. And I’m not so sure that it would do any good even if we did.”

“He wouldn’t dare violate diplomatic immunity.”

“What makes you think he wouldn’t? Caution? Fear? He doesn’t know what the words mean.”

“We ought to try it, just the same. It’s stupid just to wait.”

“It’s more stupid to charge off and run in circles just to be running. Let’s use our heads.”

We could still discuss rational behavior even when rationality had been done to death all around us. If we hadn’t panicked we might have been sitting there arguing, rationally, when the
rokos
came to take us.

Danitza brought panic with her. We heard it in the blasting horn of the Rolls-Royce coming across the city.

I don’t know how she got away from them. We never thought to ask. I suppose she was such small game, so unimportant, that Bulič didn’t bother about her during the first clean-up, any more than he bothered to have us picked up quickly. People like us could wait. Everything must have been subordinated to a quick strike at Yoreska and the Ministry, control of the loudspeakers, and the murder of Yoreska’s supporters. However it happened, Danitza escaped.

So did Yoreska, in his own fashion. He had poison in his stainless steel teeth. He bit down hard in the right way and at the right angle before they could smash the teeth out of his mouth. He was too old a hand at the game to have any doubts about the wisdom of the bite, or his chances of making a getaway. Danitza was just foolish enough to think it possible.

Why she came for Cora is another question nobody can answer. A need to share her terror, a need for a friend, possibly even out of gratitude for nylons and pink lipstick. One reason is as good as another. She came.

She was hysterical when we ran down to the street to meet her. Her face was tear-stained and distorted. She babbled,“Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” and pulled at Cora’s sleeve, trying to get her into the car. When that didn’t work, she jumped out from behind the wheel and tried to pick Cora up by wrapping her arms around her waist, as a small girl tries to pick up a smaller girl who is reluctant to climb into the baby carriage. She was half again as big as Cora, and could have wrestled her into the Rolls-Royce if I hadn’t interfered. I was still rational.

“You can’t get away in this car,” I told her. “It’s known all over the country.”

“We have to go! We have to
go!'
She was still desperately trying to shove Cora past me where I stood in the way, but she babbled at Cora, not me. “Milo is dead! Bulič is coming for us! Don’t you understand? Bulič will find us unless we hurry! Bulič—”

She went on to say what Bulič would do, still struggling to push Cora into the car.

She had a fertile imagination, Danitza. I could have been wrong in believing that she didn’t have the sense to fearBulič while Yoreska was alive. If I wasn’t wrong, she had dreamed up some bad nightmares very quickly. They were ugly to listen to, nasty things that didn’t belong in any woman’s mind. They made me sick. They must have made Cora sicker. With the pistol shots banging all around in the night, the
roko
horns honking back and forth with their messages of death, and Danitza’s sobbing, terror-shrill voice reciting that awful list of indecencies that were Bulič in her mind, we panicked. Her terror licked us up as suddenly as a flame. Unreasoning, unthinking, as blindly as frightened animals, we jumped into the car and roared away behind a blast of the horn that would point the way we went as surely as a signpost.

I got some sense back after we passed the city limits. Danitza couldn’t drive without using the horn, even when I pointed out how dangerous it was. Her hands wouldn’t leave the button alone. I made her stop long enough for me to rip wires loose under the hood. We went on less noisily then, for several miles, but there was never the smallest chance that we could get as far as a border, or much chance that we would pass safely through the first town. The Rolls-Royce was too conspicuous.

I was still too panicky to try to reason further with Danitza when she wouldn’t abandon the car. I made her stop a second time, by turning off the ignition when she refused to slow down, and hauled Cora bodily into the road. It eases my conscience to remember that I tried hard to haul Danitza out the same way. She was too strong. She clung to the steering wheel, sobbing, begging Cora to come with her. It was a hard thing to leave her, but I wanted to live. When Cora held back I shoved her so hard away from the car that she fell, then slammed the door, caught her arm, pulled her to her feet and began to drag her with me across a ploughed field into darkness.

That was the way we came upon the goats, and Piotr and his girls, and a barn full of hay where I lay sleepless a fewkilometers from Free Territory, still trying to understand why it was that Cora no longer had to be dragged but followed willingly, and still unable to make up my mind where I should lead her.

I heard the speakers start in Skaro at five o’clock. I must have dozed off after that because later there was early morning light in the loft, and Piotr had disappeared. The girls were still at their end of the hay-mow, all huddled together in a tangle of bare arms and legs like a bunch of puppies, with Cora in the middle of the litter.

She woke instantly when I waded through the hay and leaned across Karsta’s big sprawled body to touch her shoulder. I could see that she had slept a lot better than I had. It made me unreasonably angry that she should have been able to sleep. Before she could ask any questions I said, “I haven’t decided yet. I want to talk to Piotr again, first. And I’ll give you a last chance to change your mind about leaving it up to me.”

“I don’t want a last chance.”

“You know it isn’t fair to shove the whole responsibility off on me, don’t you?”

“I suppose not.”

“Will you answer one question?”

“If I can.”

“Why, honesty, are you making me decide?”

“I gave you several reasons.”

“None of them was sensible.”

“I’m sorry. They’re the best I have.”

I went down the ladder, Still angry, still undecided.

Piotr was in the barnyard, praying. It was a fresh, clear morning, after the rain. The sun had just risen. There was running water from a horse trough for the ritual washing, and a patch of damp earth where he could kneel. Now he stood, bareheaded, bare-armed and barefooted, facing south. Drops of water glinted in his beard. He raised his palms towards Mecca, bowed, knelt, and touched his forehead humbly to the ground, then came up to his feet again and repeated the prostration. He did not speak aloud, but his lips moved as he recited his declaration of faith. He didn’t see me, and it was no longer necessary for me to talk to him.

I went back into the barn, leaving him in privacy with Allah.

I can’t explain exactly what that sight did to me, except to say that while it did not help me understand Cora it convinced me that neither she nor I could ever fit into Piotr’s world. It had nothing to do with religion. I had no particular religion of my own, and I didn’t give a damn if he worshipped devils. He was a good man; a kind man and a good friend. We couldn’t ask for a better one, but I knew we could never adapt to the world he lived in any more than fish can learn to breathe air. We were fish. We had to sink or swim in our own element. There was no question left in my mind.

I waited until he came into the bam, drops of water still gleaming on his beard. His eyes were calm. He smiled, seeing me there.

“Good morning, Kasper. Did you sleep well?”

'I didn’t sleep at all.”