The Trouble With Heroes.... (8 page)

Jenny slumped back in the chair. That hadn't
even been Angliacom. It could have been anywhere around the
world.

On sudden impulse she clicked on the
directory and found the numbers for Hellbane U, scrolling down to
Information. She clicked on that. After two rings a message
flashed:
We regret that due to the current
emergency the Gaian Center for Investigation and Control of the
Unfriendly Amorphic Native Entities is unable to respond to
enquiries. Please call back when normal conditions
resume.

Jenny clicked back to the multi-cell screen
and lay there watching maps and charts, sometimes raising the
volume on an interview. She heard displaced people, community
administrators, doctors, and even artists sharing their thoughts
about victory and the future.

No one mentioned Dan.

If he was dead, wouldn't she know it?

She staggered up to go to the loo, grabbed
some food and collapsed back down again to watch, trying
desperately to glean something that would tell her Dan’s fate.

Then more interviews with fixers popped up.
They were all different in age, clothes, and race, but she could
spot them by their debilitated look. It was more that physical. It
was as if something vital had been sucked out of them. Something to
do with the wild magic Dan had shown her that night?

What a terrible struggle it must be, and it
wasn’t over yet.

But they were winning. They were winning.

Then slowly Jenny began to hear something in
their voices -- an echo of the speeches in the war films. One of
them even said, "We will never surrender," in a flat tone almost
identical to Winston Churchill.

Then one of the fixers cried. He was a
dark-skinned man, perhaps, by his accent, from one of the African
settlements first affected, and part way through his technical
description tears began to well in his large, dark eyes. He blinked
and kept going, but then suddenly choked. He covered his face and
turned away from the camera.

The reporter -- another young black man, but
speaking meticulous Earth Standard English -- took over, talking
about the exhaustion of the noble heroes who were fighting such
terrible battles.

Jenny watched, not hearing what he was saying
but the sobs of the man off screen, shaken by that deep and
desolate grief. Nothing in that spoke of victory, only of loss.

Was talk of victory a lie?

Or did he weep for the price of victory?

In the past weeks she'd become an expert on
war. All kinds of war. Now she remembered the words of the Duke of
Wellington after the bloody victory at Waterloo: "Nothing except a
battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won."

If Dan was alive, was he as melancholy, as
soul-shocked as the weeping fixer? Oh, to take him in her arms and
comfort him. She'd have walked out of Anglia to find him if she'd
had any idea where to start.

All she could do was do her bit to keep the
home fires burning. She had a shower, went to work, and even
suctioned dust out of the idle presses. She kept part of the office
screen on to Angliacom as she worked, set to alert her to a mention
of Dan Fixer.

The parade of fixers stopped, replaced by a
middle-aged woman called Helga, with gray hair and a stony,
unreadable face. Helga made no attempt at technical explanations,
but flatly reported daily successes, giving details on areas that
were cleared. She did not take questions.

News readers returned. Jenny phoned Angliacom
asking for news about Dan. A short time later she heard back.
They’d put in a request for a report on him and received no
response.

Anglia itself was perking up like a spring
flower after a frost. People were pouring back in, and Jenny
finally had work to distract her, enough that she grew impatient
for her co-workers to return.

Reporters ventured out with cameras, but
apparently the fixers had ordered everyone to stay away from the
front, so they could only send back pictures of peaceful
countryside and occasional close-ups of heaps of clothing and ash.
Even they were rare. War hadn’t changed the weather, so most
remains had been scattered by wind and rain.

Daily, Helga reported progress, and the red
tide on the map ebbed. Then she began to announce places that were
now safe, inviting people to return. There was never a trace of joy
or triumph.

Jenny had learned to distrust the news, but
she'd come to believe in Helga. The woman reminded her of jowly
Churchill, someone who tamped down emotion and simply got the job
done.

Anyway, Jenny knew in other ways that what
Helga said was true. The pressure of sick fear in her mind was
easing, the bitter taste was less. She actually had some appetite,
and began to gain back the weight she'd lost. Sometimes she had to
probe for the unreal parts of her mind instead of fight them
off.

With victory clear, it was like Christmas.
She could have gone to ten parties a night, but instead she spent
every night in Dan's place. She didn't watch the war films anymore.
Instead she wandered through his sys – music, poetry, games,
comedies. She saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail listed, but
skipped over it. She didn’t think she’d find it funny now.

Then she came across his family album and
some film from when they were kids.

A group of them running around screaming in
the park under water jets.

A birthday party with Dan wearing a Sirius V
helmet, a milkshake moustache, and missing his front teeth.

Dan and her building something out of
Robot-Robot, then cheering as their construct poured juice into a
glass without spilling any. She thought about Earth, where
apparently war was mostly waged by robots.

Lucky Earth.

Helga stopped reporting and Jenny missed her
stony solidity, but the good news kept coming. The red swath around
the equator shrunk thinner and thinner, and Jenny linked it to
Dan’s return. He was working hard, to his limit, destroying
hellbanes. When that shrinking stain disappeared, Dan would come
home.

Then one day she realized that her magic had
gone. No, no, that wasn't quite it. That strange bit of her brain
that shouldn't be there was still there, but it felt.... alone. As
if the rest of the magic had gone.

As if the fixers had gone?

She clicked on the screen, heart pounding.
More jubilation. More stupid speeches. Say something about the
fixers, you berks!

After an hour or so of nothing, she phoned
the station. She managed to talk her way through to the newsroom
and asked why there were no interviews with fixers.

"I thought you were offering to set up an
interview with a fixer," a woman snapped.

"It's hard?"

The woman cut the connection.

With the screen on mute, Jenny closed her
eyes and tried to sense Dan. She probed for him, hunted him,
blanked her mind so something could come on its own. Eventually she
opened her eyes, defeated. It was as if the magic didn't exist any
more.

As if the Dan didn't exist any more.

Surely if the fixers were gone someone would
say so.

Stomach churning she scanned multi-cells.
She stilled on one that showed people returning to their homes. The
camera was like a predator itself, seeking the moments of horror,
the faces of loss. Even while thinking that, Jenny couldn’t move
on. The continuing scenes of return were made weirder because all
the buildings and machinery were intact simply waiting for the
inhabitants to return, but sometimes with blotches of ash.

A camera swooped in on a woman scrubbing,
weeping, saying over and over, "Who am I cleaning up here? Who am I
cleaning up?"

^^^^^^^^^^

Soon it was almost as if the Hellbane Wars
had never been, and yet, and yet, it seemed to Jenny that people
held their breath as she did, not really able to believe that the
terrible things were gone for good. And no one mentioned the other
terrible thing -- that they might have to carry on without
fixers.

Eventually Jenny had to pick up her old
life. She cleaned Dan's place one last time and moved home. Her
family was coming back anyway, so she had to stock the house with
basics and restart the energy sys. She kept regular work hours
again, and her family returned for a tearful reunion.

And then she heard that Dan's family was
back, too.

Jenny hurried over there and her last hope
died. They’d heard nothing and they assumed he was dead. A hero,
but dead.

Someone designed a poster of Dan Fixer,
Hero, and it hung everywhere. Heaven knows where'd they'd found the
shot to start with, but it didn't look much like Dan in the end.
Square-jawed and rugged, he looked resolutely into the distance
against a flaming red sky.

Jenny bought one and kept it, knowing he'd
be amused.

Hoping he’d be amused.

Her last hope wasn’t really dead.

Then Angliacom announced that in view of the
lack of response from the fixers, a team of Mayan reporters was on
its way to the Gaian Center for Investigation and Control of the
Hostile Amorphic Native Entities. They would carry the thanks of
the world and report back on the situation.

Needing privacy, Jenny watched on Dan’s
screen, watched through the camera's eye as the reporters
approached the pale rock walls that looked like part of the Mayan
mountain. The gates stood open, but no one waited to welcome
them.

With the benefit of top-reality technology,
she wandered empty streets and peered into deserted buildings. The
mikes picked up only silence broken by breeze-blown dust and
rubbish. At least the dust seemed ordinary dust, sandy and dry.

Were any of the houses places where Dan had
been? Had he shopped at that bakery, drunk at that tavern? A
reporter was droning on about Hellbane U in former days. Jenny made
herself listen.

New students had been housed in dormitories
in the central buildings ahead. Later, they could board with
families in the town. Most of the citizens of Hellbane U were
fixers -- teachers or researchers -- but some had been family and
descendants of fixers, without special powers.

Then Jenny realized that the reporter was
such a person, that he was a refugee from Hellbane U returning to
his former home, and shocked by the desolation. He was a
professional and his voice stayed steady as the team progressed
through the ghostly town, but she could hear the thickness of tears
in it.

Tears were falling down her own cheeks.

Where have all the flowers gone...?

Eventually the camera reached the central
buildings. It panned lecture halls, libraries, and rooms that
defied general descriptions. The tour continued, and Jenny watched
it all, but Hellbane U was a dead place, the inhabitants gone. She
remembered a term for it.

A ghost town.

Where have all the flowers gone?

She found the song in the system and set it
to play.

Another war song.

Damn war.

She listened, and watched, and wept for all
the heroes who weren't coming back from the war.

Chapter 6

They held a parade, renamed Bond Street Dan
Fixer Way, and life went on.

Doctors had to learn how to mend broken
bones with splints and plaster, but the latest technology was on
the way. Apparently they had bugs and bots now to do just about
anything the fixers could do. The Minister for Post-Fixer
Adjustment moved into the Dan’s flat. Dan’s things were sent to his
parents, who turned most of it over to a committee planning the Dan
Fixer museum. Jenny managed to sneak the red jacket out and take it
home.

No one knew what the fixers had done, but
they were heroes for sure. Yet it seemed to Jenny that other than
Dan’s family and friends people didn’t seem deeply affected by the
loss.

Her pain was beyond words or expression, so
she hid it, glad that no one knew about that last night.

Then as she wandered out of work at the end
of another meaningless day, a woman in the street bumped into
her.

"Did you hear? Dan Fixer's back!"

Jenny stared at her. "They found his body?"
But then she answered herself. "No. Blighters leave nothing but
ash."

"Alive as you and me! Outside the southern
gate, he is."

Alive? Outside? The words didn’t make
sense.

“
They’re keeping him out, till they
figure out what to do.”

The gates would be shut, yes. They were
still shut and guarded, though now she thought about it, she didn't
know why.

“
Then it can’t be Dan,” Jenny said.
“He’s a citizen.”

"
And
a fixer. Citizen of all, citizen of none."

A sort of glee in the woman's voice
shattered the blankness in Jenny's mind. "You don't want him back?
How can you not want him back? He's a hero. He saved the world. We
had a parade and named a bloody street after him!” When the woman
backed away, Jenny asked, “Don't you at least want the fixing
back?"

The woman turned and hurried off.

Jenny stood frozen.
Dan was back
?

Alive?

She was already running toward the nearest
tram stop. She needed to get to the gate, get to Dan. Then she
realized it would be on screen. If it was true. She stopped, made
herself look calm, and walked into the nearest pub.

One of the big screens faced the door split
between a cricket game, a comedy, and a dim, sunset landscape. She
saw a fire and a figure by it. She moved into that line of sound,
having to squeeze up against two men in business clothes.

"...claiming to be Dan Fixer," an announcer
was saying. "The Witan is meeting to discuss this development and
assures everyone...."