But the tale is dedicated to Horst-Johann von Drachau. It lasts only another week.
XII
Once free of interrogation, I began preparing the wing to return to action. For years I’d been geared to fighting; administration wasn’t easy. I grew short-tempered, began hunting excuses to evade responsibility. Cursed myself for making the decision that’d brought me inside, even though that’d meant volunteer crews taking zepps north with stores.
An early official action was an interview with Horst. He came to my cubby-office sullen and dispirited, but cheered up when I said, “I’m taking you off attack. You’ll be my wingman.”
“Good.”
“It means that much?”
“What?”
“This stuff about manta intelligence.”
“Yeah. But you wouldn’t understand, Sal. Nobody does.”
I began my “what difference does it make?” speech. He interrupted.
“You know I can’t explain. It’s something like this: we’re not fighting a war. In war you try to demonstrate superiority of arms, to convince the other side it’s cheaper to submit We’re trying for extermination here. Like with the Sangaree.”
The Sangaree. The race his father had destroyed. “No big loss.”
“Wrong. They were nasty, but posed no real threat. They could’ve been handled with a treaty. We had the power.”
“No tears were shed...”
“Wrong again. But the gut reaction isn’t over. You wait. When men like my father and Admiral Beckhart and Commander McClennon and the other militarists who control Luna Command fade away, you’ll start seeing a reaction... a whole race, Sal, a whole culture, independently evolved, with all it might’ve taught us...”
It had to be rationalization, something he’d built for himself to mask a deeper unhappiness.
“McClennon? You don’t approve of him?”
“Well, yeah, he’s all right. I guess. But even when he disagreed, he went along. In fact, my father never could’ve found the Sangaree homeworld without him. If he’d revolted then, instead of later when his actions turned and bit back... well, the Sangaree would be alive and he’d be off starfishing with Amy.”
I couldn’t get through. Neither could he. The speeches on the table were masks for deeper things.
There’s no way to talk about one thing and communicate something else. “Going along,” I said.
“What’ve you been doing? How about the kid who squawks but goes along because he wants to fly?
That’s what we’re all doing here, Horst. Think I’d be here if I could buy off any other way? Life is compromise. No exceptions. And you’re old enough to know it.”*
Shouldn’t’ve said that. But I was irritable, unconcerned about what he’d think. He stared a moment, then stalked out, considering his own compromises.
Two days later my ships were ordered up for the first time since our arrival. Command had had trouble deciding what to do with us. I think we weren’t employed because the brass were afraid we were as good as we claimed, which meant (by the same illogical process that built legends around Horst and the wing) that our survival wasn’t just a miracle, that we’d really been written off but had refused to die. Such accusations were going around and Command was sensitive to them.
We went up as air cover for the rescue convoy bringing our survivors in from up the cable. We wouldn’t’ve been used if another unit had been available. But the mantas had a big push on, their last major and only night offensive.
*Del Gado may indeed have said something of the sort at the time, and have felt it, but again, once the pressure was off, he forgot. He has been bought off for years, yet remains with Ubichi’s Armed Action Command. He must enjoy his work.
-Dogfight
Winds at Derry are sluggish, the ups are weak, and that night there was an overcast masking the moons. The aurora is insignificant that far south. Seeing was by lightning, a rough way to go.
We launched shortly after nightfall, spent almost an hour creeping to altitude, then clawed north above the cable. Flares were out to mark it, but those failed us when we passed the last outpost.
After that it was twenty-five ships navigating by guesswork, maintaining contact by staying headache-making alert during lightning flashes.
But it was also relaxing. I was doing something I understood. The whisper of air over my canopy lulled me, washed the week’s aggravations away.
Occasionally I checked my mirrors. Horst maintained perfect position on my right quarter. The others spread around in ragged formation, yielding compactness and precision to safety. The night threatened collisions.
We found the convoy one hundred twenty kilometers up the line, past midnight, running slowly into the breeze and flashing signals so we’d locate them. I dropped down, signalled back with a bioluminescent lantern, then clawed some altitude, put the men into wide patrol patterns.
Everything went well through the night. The mantas weren’t up in that sector.
Dawn brought them, about fifty in a flying circus they’d adopted from us. We condensed formation and began slugging it out.
They’d learned. They still operated in pairs, but no longer got in one another’s way. And they strove to break our pairs to take advantage of numbers. But when a pair latched onto a sailplane it became their entire universe. We, however, shot at anything, whether or not it was a manta against which we were directly engaged.
They’d overadopted our tactics. I learned that within minutes. When someone got half a pair, the other would slide out of action and stay out till it found a single manta of opposite sex.
Curious. (Shortly I’ll comment on the findings of the government investigators, who dug far deeper than Ubichi’s exobiologists. But one notion then current, just rumor as the sentience hypothesis became accepted, was that manta intelligence changed cyclically, as a function of the mating cycle.)
We held our own. All of us were alive because we were good. Dodging bolts was instinctual, getting shells into manta guts second nature. We lost only two craft, total. One pilot. Two thirds of the mantas went down.
Horst and I flew as if attached to ends of a metal bar. Book perfect. But the mantas forced us away from the main fray, as many as twenty concentrating on us. (I think they recognized our devices and decided to destroy us. If it were possible for humans to be known to mantas, they’d’ve been Horst and I.) I went into a robotlike mood like Horst’s on his high-kill days. Manta after manta tumbled away. My shooting was flawless. Brief bursts, maybe a dozen shells, were all I used.
I seldom missed.
As sometimes happened in such a brawl, Horst and I found our stations reversed. A savage maneuver that left my glider creaking put me in the wingman slot. During it Horst scored his hundred fiftyeighth kill, clearing a manta off my back. Far as I know that was the only time he fired.
The arrangement was fine with me. He was the better shot; let him clear the mess while I protected his back. We’d resume proper positions when a break in the fighting came.
A moment later Horst was in firing position beneath a female who’d expended her bolt (it then took several minutes to build a charge). He bored in, passed so close their wings nearly brushed. But he didn’t fire. I took her out as I came up behind.
The eyes. Again I saw them closely. Puzzlement and pain (?) as she folded and fell...
Three times that scene repeated itself. Horst wouldn’t shoot. Behind him I cursed, threatened, promised, feared. Tried to get shells into his targets, but missed. He maneuvered so I was in poor position on each pass.
Then the mantas broke. They’d lost. The rest of the squadron pursued, losing ground because the monsters were better equipped to grab altitude.
Horst went high. At first I didn’t understand, just continued cursing. Then I saw a manta, an old male circling alone, and thought he’d gotten back in track, was going after a kill.
He wasn’t. He circled in close and for a seeming eternity they flew wingtip to wingt
ip, eyeballing one another. Two creatures alone, unable to communicate. But something passed between them. Nobody believes me (since it doesn’t fit the von Drachau legend), but I think they made a suicide pact.
Flash. Bolt. Horst’s ship staggered, began smoking. The death’s-head had disappeared from his fuselage. He started down.
I put everything in my magazines into that old male. The explosions tore him to shreds.
I caught Horst a thousand meters down, pulled up wingtip to wingtip. He still had control, but poorly. Smoke filled his cockpit. Little flames peeped out where his emblem had been. The canvas was ripping from his airframe. By hand signals I tried to get him to bail out.
He signalled he couldn’t, that his canopy was stuck. Maybe it was, but when McClennon and I returned a month later, after the migration had passed south, I had no trouble lifting it away.
Maybe he wanted to die.
Or maybe it was because of his legs. When we collected his remains we found that the manta bolt had jagged through his cockpit and cooked his legs below the knees. There’d’ve been no saving him.
Yet he kept control most of the way down, losing it only in the last five hundred meters. He stalled, spun, dove. Then he recovered and managed a low angle crash. He rolled nose over tail, then burned. Finis. No more Horst-Johann.
I still don’t understand.*
*“Hawkins, you keep harping on the meaning of Horsfs death. Christ, man, that’s my point: it had no meaning. In my terms. By those he utterly wasted his life; his voluntary termination didn’t alter the military situation one iota. Even in terms your readers understand it had little meaning. They’re vicarious fighters; their outlooks aren’t much different than mine-except they want my skin for taking a bite from their sacred cow. Horst was a self-appointed Christ-figure.
Only in martyr’s terms does his death have meaning, and then only to those who believe any intelligence is holy, to be cherished, defended, and allowed to follow its own course utterly free of external influence. What he and his ilk fail to understand is that it’s right down deep
streambed fundamental to the nature of OUT intelligence to interfere, overpower, exploit and obliterate. We did it to one another before First Expansion; we’ve done it to Toke, Ulantonid and Sangaree; we’ll continue doing it.
“In terms of accomplishment, yes, he bought something with his life, An injunction against Vbichi operations on Camelot. There’s your meaning, but one that makes sense only in an ethical framework most people won’t comprehend. Believe me, I’ve tried. But I’m incapable of seeing the universe and its contents in other than tool-cattle terms. Now have the balls to tell me I’m in the minority.”
From a private letter by Salvador del Gado.
-Dogfight
XIII
According to the latest, the relationship between Manta and whale is far more complex than anyone at Ubichi ever guessed. (Guessed-Ubichi never cared. Irked even me that at the height of Corporate operations, Ubichi had only one exobiologist on planet-a virologist-bacteriologist charged with finding some disease with which to infect the whales. Even I could appreciate the possible advantages in accumulation of knowledge.) At best, we thought, when the intelligence theory had gained common currency, the whales served as cattle for the mantas...
Not so, say Confederation’s researchers. The mantas only appear to herd and control the whales.
The whales are the true masters. The mantas are their equivalent of dogs, fleet-winged servants for the ponderous and poorly maneuverable. Their very slow growth of ability to cope with our aerial tactics wasn’t a function of a cyclic increase in intelligence, it was a reflection of the difficulty the whales had projecting their defensive needs into our much faster and more maneuverable frame of reference. By means of severely limited control.
At the time it seemed a perfectly logical assumption that the mantas were upset with us because we were destroying their food sources. (They live on a mouse-sized parasite common amongst the forest of organs on a whale’s back.) It seemed much more unlikely, even unreasonable, that the whales themselves were the ones upset and were sending mantas against us, because those were better able to cope, if a little too dull to do it well. The whales always carried out the attacks on our ground facilities, but we missed the hint there.
It seems the manta was originally domesticated to defend whales from a pterodactyl-like flying predator, one which mantas and whales had hunted almost to extinction by the time Ubichi arrived on Camelot. As humans and dogs once did with wolves. Until the government report we were only vaguely aware of the creatures. They never bothered us, so we didn’t bother them.
The relationship between whales and mantas is an ancient one, one which domestication doesn’t adequately describe. Nor does symbiosis, effectively. Evolution has forced upon both an incredibly complex and clumsy reproductive process that leaves them inextricably bound together.
In order to go into esterus the female manta must be exposed to prolonged equatorial temperatures.
She mates in the air, in a dance as complex and strange as that of earthly bees, but only with her chosen mate. Somewhat like Terran marsupials, she soon gives birth to unformed young. But now it gets weird. The marsupial pouch (if such I may call it for argument’s sake) is a specially developed semi-womb atop the back of a male whale. While instinct compels her to deposit her young there, the male whale envelopes the she-manta in a clutch of frondlike organs, which caress her body and leave a whitish dust-his “sperm”. Once her young have been transferred, the female manta goes into a kind of travel-frenzy, like a bee flitting from flower to flower visiting all nearby whales. Any receptive female she visits will, with organs not unlike those of the male, stroke the “sperm” from her body.
Incredibly complicated and clumsy. And unromantic. But it works.
We never would’ve learned of it but for Horst-who, I think, had nothing of the sort in mind when he let that old manta bolt him down.
And that’s about all there is to say. It’s a puzzle story. Why did von Drachau do it? I don’t knowor don’t want to know-but I work under severe handicaps. I’m an Old Earther. I never had a father to play push-me pull-you with my life. I never learned to care much about anything outside myself.
A meager loyalty to companions in action is the best I’ve ever mustered. But enough of excuses.
The fighting with mantas continued four years after Horst’s death, through several lesser migrations that never reached the mating grounds. Then a government inquiry board finally stepped in-after Commander McClennon and Fleet Admiral von Drachau had spent three years knocking on doors at Luna Command (Ubichi’s wealth has its power to blind). Their investigations still aren’t complete, but it seems they’ll rule Camelot permanently off limits. So Horst did buy something with his life. Had he not died, I doubt the Commander would’ve gotten angry enough to act.
That he did so doesn’t entirely please me, of course. I inherited his position. Though I pulled down a handsome income as JG Kill’s wing leader and on-going top killer, I loathed the administrative donkey work. Still, I admire the courage he showed.
I also admire Horst, despite his shortcomings, despite myself. But he wasn’t a hero, no matter what people want to hear me say. He was a snot-nosed kid used to getting his own way who threw a suicidal tantrum when he saw there was no other way to achieve his ends...
And that’s it, the rolling down of the socks to expose the feet of clay. Believe the stories or believe his wingman. It’s all the same to me. I’ve got mine in and don’t need your approval.*
*Not true, in your editor’s opinion. Especially in his private communications, del Gado seems very much interested in finding approval of things he has done. Perhaps he has a conscience after all.
He certainly seems desperate to find justification for his life.
-Dogfight
The Recruiter
Illustrated by Richard Olsen (missing)
Moral choices are never easy ones — es
pecially when they involve personal survival …
Some people will do anything not to die, I thought as I stalked through calf-deep trash in one of the light canyons of St. Louis. Year: 3035. Mission: recruiting for Colonial service. Those are the polite words they use on paper or in the holonetnews. In reality, I was a one-unit press gang, a human brain riding a Navy-uniformed metal monstrosity responsible for collecting the scum of the slum of the universe for export to population-starved outworlds. Old Earth rectified her balance of payments deficit by selling warm bodies.
Walk drunkenly in your tin man suit, act like an offworld Spike fool enough to wander the valley of the shadow alone … Let them vent their envy and hatred of starmen on your tank of a body, then subdue a few and drag them to the Station where a lictor, with only your word to guarantee their criminality, will try, convict, and condemn them, and send them to the Colonial Draft. If they’re good ones, not diseased or too far gone in psychotic rage against a universe that didn’t see them born to the silver spoon, you’ll earn a few retirement points. Enough of them, if you survive their attacks-long enough, and you’ll get yourself a real body, a good one, virgin-new, force-grown up from a clone-cell salvaged from your corpse. Welcome to the company store.
Why didn’t they just feed the outworlds clones and let Old Earth go to hell? That’s all these ground hogs want, to be left alone to die in their self-imposed misery and filth. Never mind population reduction and control of criminals and failing production capacities. Never mind the mules, just load the wagon.
Some people will do anything not to die. I knew. That’s why I rode the iron man through cement and waste paper jungles. Nothing’s free. The masters in Luna Command want return on their investment. If an Old Earther got killed fighting McGraws or Sangaree on some nether frontier they usually let him die the death-without-resurrection and left him to lie where he had fallen. Neither the services nor the Old Earth planetary government cared to support the cost of shipment-for-funeral. But if you were lucky, your psych profile was right, and they caught you before your brain rotted, they sometimes kindled you and offered a bargain.