Hari didn't so much as blink. My first instinct was to bluster, but I followed Hari's lead and held my expression as neutral as I could.
Chandra looked from me to Hari, then back again, and the hardness in his face melted back into weary despair. "But I don't know why. I don't know how this—we--ended up here, in the infirmary. I don't know why we'll have to find a donor eye for Pat Connor, why Jan Colon is undergoing reconstructive knee surgery even now. Ballinger is in a coma in Athens; the best neurosurgeon in Europe has just finished pulling splinters of his skull out of the right lobe of his brain. They say he'll probably survive, but the extent of the permanent damage won't be known for days, or weeks."
A slow, sick weight gathered within my chest.
Chandra's eyes were raw with pain.
"You have what you want. Both of you. I—I cannot stand ..." His breath hitched, then steadied. "I will have no further bloodshed. One student maimed, another crippled. A third with a fractured skull and permanent brain damage. You did this, Hansen. And you, Michaelson. And for what? To get a transfer into the College of Combat?"
He opened his hands helplessly. "Why did it have to be this way? Was there no other choice?"
I wanted to answer him, but no words came to my lips. The respirator seemed to suck air from my lungs, just as it had sucked all the moisture from my mouth. I glanced at Hari, but his face was as unreadable as a fetish mask.
Chandra shook his head, and his eyes glistened with unshed tears. "Couldn't you have asked?"
17
Hours became days, and weeks. Hari was released from the infirmary long before I was; by the time I saw him again, he was already established in the Combat school. Though he would never have the size and strength necessary to be competitive in the tank warfare of the lumbering, heavily armored Combat Trials, he liked to point out that no one wears armor all the time, not even on Overworld. He never bothered to train in armor, himself, and there was no man or woman on campus who would care to face him over a pair of bokken without it.
He spent much of his time working with Hammet and Tallman on techniques that would allow him to defeat an armored opponent, taking advantage of his superior speed and mobility to knock a man down or to close with him into the infighting range where a sword is useless and a stiletto can enter a visor, or slip beneath a gorget. He got good at it, too, as I knew he would. Never good enough to consistently beat a really gifted Combat student like Ballinger once was—but good enough that no one, not even the best, was entirely comfortable coming into the ring with him, or facing him in a VA sim.
He was a celebrity on campus, a curiosity, a traveling one-man freak show. There was no one on the island that didn't know who he was, no one that didn't want to be able to say they'd spent time with him; he began to hold court in the cafeteria, just as I once had.
He was the idol of a growing circle of awed magick students, and he became the unofficial mascot of the College of Combat. Connor and Colon took to following him around like bachelor wolves behind their pack leader; far from holding a grudge for their injuries, they would proudly point them out and tell the story of how Hari had gouged out Connor's eye, and why Colon still walked with a slight limp. All his course work improved, especially his academics. By the time the Combat Trials rolled around, the week of my Graduation Boards, it was clear that Hari would graduate near the top of his class.
I didn't grudge him any of this. He deserved it. Setup or not, Hari was a real hero. Fighting four Combat students, single-handed, had never been part of our plan—but Hari hadn't even hesitated. I never forgot that he could have just stayed in that supply closet and let them kill me.
Ballinger, though—the bone splinters had sliced into his brain. He has recovered limited use of the left side of his body, they tell me, enough to walk with a crutch strapped to his shoulder, but his eyes will not focus, and half his mouth is forever frozen in rictus, and he will never be an Actor, never go to Overworld; he'll live out his days in a Temp house in Philadelphia, on subsistence.
I almost screened him, once. I don't know what I would have told him, what I could possibly have said. There was no way to make him understand that I flashed on him in unguarded moments, every day; that every day I became him, in his hospital bed, incontinent, a nurse emptying his diaper into a bedpan. I became him struggling through rehab with a steel strut buckled to my shoulder to take the place of a working leg, dragging the dead half of a body that once had been my greatest pride. Feeling the twisting rivulet of drool that constantly trails from my half open lips.
Maybe I wanted to tell him that I would never forget how expensive my dream had become.
I made up my midterms, took top honors in each, as usual. I went through the rest of my surgeries, took my classes, did my course work, went on with my life.
Stayed away from people.
I took my meals in my rooms, didn't speak on campus. I drifted from class to class like a ghost. Soon enough, no one bothered to speak to me, ei ther. My circle of creeps had a new hero to suck up to, and Hari was welcome to them.
It wasn't Ballinger's face I saw in my nightmares. It was Chandra's. It was Chandra's voice I heard, asking if there had been no other way.
Hari, though, he stuck by me. I don't think he liked me much, either; I think he felt like he owed me something, and that kept him coming around, talking to me, trying to keep me going.
It was Hari who kept telling me not to surrender to Chandra's guilt-laying game, who kept reminding me that it was Chandra who put this whole thing in motion. Chandra's speech in the infirmary, he said, had been nothing more than a weak man's attempt to avoid responsibility for the consequences of his actions. Which may have been true, but it changed the facts not at all.
I hadn't tried another way. I hadn't even thought about it.
Maybe, if I had tried, I could have saved my dream without killing Ballinger's. I had slid right into Hari's world. I had turned to violence and slaughter because it was easier simpler, more efficient.
More fun.
I could not pay this price for my dream. I stayed in my classes on pure inertia. Though I had told no one, not even Hari, my mind was made up. I would give up Acting. Give up Overworld. Let my dream of magick die. It wouldn't help Ballinger, of course; but it would let me sleep.
All I had to do was shitcan my Boards, and then I would never have to face this choice again. There is no second chance; if you fail before the Graduation Board, they just go ahead and send you home.
The night before I was to go in front of the Graduation Board, Hari Michaelson saved, my life again.
18
We sat in my room, sharing a liter of retsina, talking about our careers. It's traditional, at the Conservatory, for a student's friends to sit up with him the night before his Boards. The night before, you're too nervous to sleep anyway, and you need friends to keep you company.
Hari was the only friend I had left.
When his Boards came, next term, he'd have a crowd of well-wishers in his room, a party so thick you couldn't squeeze from one end to the other; that night, the two of us sat at the edges of a pool of pale yellow light from my desk lamp, drank the bitter pine-flavored wine, and talked in low voices. We talked about him, because the words that would come if we talked about me, I could not bear to hear, or speak.
"C'mon, Kris," he said, a little unsteadily, as he drained the last glass. "You really think I'll make it?"
"Hari," I said seriously, "you're a star already. Look at the way people watch you around here. Everyone knows you're going to be huge. You're like something out of a twentieth-century samurai film—or a pirate movie. This industry lives on novelty ... and it's more than that, too, You've got it, whatever it is. Star quality. I can see it. You can, too-I mean, think about how you, like, came alive when everybody started paying attention to you. It's like you're a whole different person, now. Shit, if I didn't know you so well, I'd say you were happy."
He smiled into his empty glass, his eye
s fixed on some far-distant future. "Where do you think we'll be, twenty years from now? Big stars, all over the nets? Whole magazines devoted to our sex lives, that kind of shit?"
I shrugged. "You, maybe—if you live. Me? I guess I'll be VP of something in Malmo, in the family industry." I managed to say it like it didn't even hurt.
He blinked owlishly, staring at me in half-potted confusion.
I shook my head at his silent question, and took a deep breath that slid painfully around the knot at the bottom of my throat.
In the end, I guess, I had to tell him. It was vanity, really. I thought I could handle the snickers, and the I knew he never had it in him stories, and the false commiseration I would get from the other students when word got out that I'd failed. But I couldn't take it from Hari; I had to let him know I was tanking the Boards on purpose. Of all the people I have ever known, he was the one that I most wanted to understand that I could pass, if 1 wanted to.
I needed him to understand that this was a failure of nerve, not of ability.
"I can't do it, Hari," I said slowly. "I think about it this way, that way, every way, and I just can't do it. Remember what you told me all those months ago, right when Nye first met? I don't have it. You were right, man. I don't have it"
"Bullshit."
"It's true."
"It fucking isn't true," Hari said fiercely. "This is still about Ballinger, right?"
"Yeah."
"He got what was coming to him, that's all. He was begging for it." "It's not that."
"Then what is it? What?" His face flushed red, and he looked like he wanted to hit me, as though he could slap the weakness out of my head.
I only he could. "I'm a coward," I said helplessly.
"What, because you folded when he hit you? Jesus Christ Kris! Ballinger was three times your size, a fucking stone killer. You had no chance against him--but you walked into that shifter anyway. There are different kinds of courage, Kris. The hot kind, that's mine. Once the action starts, I'm all into it but there are lots of people like that. Yours is the cold kind. Cold courage, man. You have to be just about the bravest son of a bitch I ever met."
My eyes went hot, and my tongue went thick, and all I could do was shake my head. How could I explain? But if I didn't start talking, I was going to start crying, and I would have rather died.
So I said, "All I ever wanted was to go to Overworld. My whole life, all I ever wanted was to be an Actor. But you know what being an Actor is, Hari? It's stepping back into that bathroom, every day."
"You can handle it," he insisted. "On Overworld, you're gonna be the toughest kid on the block—like when you tore me up in the Meadow—"
"It's not that," I said. "It's not the danger. I don't care about the danger. It's stepping back into that bathroom because I'd have to hurt somebody, to kill him just to get another point of market share, a few bloody thousand marks. And what does that mean, to me? I'm rich already. What do I need so badly that it's worth somebody's life?"
"Fucking upcaste liberal," Hari muttered. "There's nothing cheaper than somebody's life. If you were Labor, you'd know it—Laborers are born knowing it. Shit, in the Mission District, you can buy a murder for less than the price of a steak dinner."
"But that's you," I said. "That's not me, and I can't pretend it is."
"Then I guess we got a problem." "We?"
He settled back into his chair and set his wineglass on the floor. "Yeah. We. This isn't just your problem. You're my best friend, Kris."
"Huh? Hari, you don't even like me!"
"You saved my life. I don't forget that."
I started to protest, and he cut me off. "No," he said sharply. "You did. You wash out, you go back to the life of a Businessman on the Nordic Peninsula. Hey, that's one thing; it's not so bad. I wash out, I go to the Temp slums of San Francisco. That's something else. You saved my career, and that's more important than my life. I'm not going to let you suffer for it."
"Too late," I said bitterly.
"Listen, let's say you graduate after all. What then?"
"The usual. Two years of Overworld freemod for acclimatization and whatever final training I can manage; say, if I can find an adept who'll take me on as an apprentice. Then I come back for the implant—"
The possibility bloomed within my head, and Hari tracked its growth by the birth of my first smile in months. He grinned in reply.
"See, Hansen? You're still too locked into the rules, man. You're obsessed with what you're supposed to do. What's the real issue here, being an Actor or going to Overworld? Who says it's both or nothing?"
"I ... I ..." I couldn't think of anything to say; inside my head, my brain rang with Hari's echoes.
Who says it's both or nothing?
19
The next morning, I passed my Graduation Boards with the highest score this decade.
20
I spent the next week or so hanging around the Conservatory, packing, making preparations. It had been my home for three years, and it was hard to believe I'd never see it again.
That week, my surgical mask finally came off for the last time. Now, when I look in the mirror, I see the alien features of a primal mage. My true face.
It still gives me the shivers, a little.
I'm an elf, I say to myself, over and over again.
I'm an elf.
I also spent some time watching the Combat Trials. I led the wild cheers from the Shitschool students as Hari battled his unconventional way up the ranks. He lost in the finals, but the feral joy that showed through the blood on his face when he congratulated the winner made him look like he was the champion, instead.
Then I went home for a week, to see my father and my mother, my older brothers and my little sister, and to walk the fields of our estate, to fish, to wander through the neighborhoods of Malmo, where I grew up. To say good-bye.
Then I came back to the Conservatory, to write this all down and tuck it away, so that someday it will be found, and someone—maybe my father, maybe Hari, maybe even I myself—will read it, and understand.
Tomorrow, I make the Winston Transfer to Overworld, on freemod. I'm crossing over into the Promised Land. At the end of two years, I might present myself at one of the Studio's fixed transfer points, to return to Earth and an Acting career.
And, I might not.
A lot can happen in those two years of freemod. Many students die. Overworld is a dangerous place—more so for us, who know of it only secondhand. Some students vanish, and are never seen or heard from again.
I have a feeling that this is what will happen to me.
It's all about Hari, you see. He's smarter than I ever gave him credit for. He was right: I never wanted to be an Actor in the first place.
I want to be a primal mage.
Maybe I'm just pretending. Maybe I'm fooling myself Maybe I'll die trying.
So what? I've faced that choice already, and I see no reason to change my mind now.
I can't stop thinking about the look in Chandra's eyes, the morning he started all this. I can't stop thinking about seeing that same blank hunger behind Ballinger's ursine glare. The link, the common thread between them—I spent days turning it over slowly in my mind, again and again, looking at it from every angle, trying to understand, and I couldn't quite put it together ... until I saw the same look in my father's eyes, as the Social Police transport van arrived with a new load of Workers for the factory.
I mean, precisely the same: as though the same creature had worn all three faces like a mask. My nightmares whisper of some vast, unknowable power, buried in bedrock slumber, whose dreams reach out and don us like hand puppets. Like masks. Like one of those mirror masks of the Social Police.
I've been thinking about that creature a lot. At first I thought it was just a metaphor: a myth I'd invented to solidify the way it made me feel. Now, I'm not so sure. I think that creature wore my face, for a while: I have a feeling that Hari saw that same abstract, impersonal hunger in my eyes
there in the weight room, the day we first met. I have a feeling that's why he hated me on sight.
He beat it out of me, literally—but that didn't stop me from using Ballinger as ruthlessly, as coldly and impersonally as Chandra was using me. I used him until he was all used up.
I guess it's a habit. I guess it's the way the world works. That's what keeps the gears of civilization grinding along.
But Hari ... Well, nothing impersonal there: he hated Ballinger's guts. Maybe that's what it's really all about, in the end. Hari and that blankly hungry creature, maybe they're natural enemies.
With Hari, it's always personal.
Me, I'm going to run and hide. Hari won't; I can see it every time I look at him. He's going to wade on in and slug it out:
It feels strange, to write that: to admit, even to myself, that a savage, antisocial Labor thug is a better man than I am. And there I am again: He is not a savage, antisocial Labor thug.
Well, he is, but that's not all he is.
I don't think I even have the vocabulary for this. He's Hari, that's all. That's a lot.
I tried to be his teacher, but I learned more than I taught.
I told Hari that Acting was stepping back into that bathroom, every day; what I didn't tell him is that for me, a Businessman born and bred, I'm stepping into that bathroom every time I get up in the morning. That's the inescapable structure of life on Earth.
Use and be used, until you're used up. It's the way the world works. This world, anyway.
I can hear, with my enhanced elvish ears, Hari's footfalls on the walk outside, far down in the dormitory's courtyard. I'm saying good-bye to him, too, tonight.
We save the most important good-byes till the last.
Good-bye to my best friend that I never liked.
Strange world.