"Thou art a child!" he repeated. "Young thou art! What dost thou know of the struggle to gain sustenance, generation on generation, on our harsh and stony worlds, as I have known it? What dost thou know of hunger and want, even to the women and babes, I say it, among the Children of the Lord? What dost thou know of the purposes of them who send us to battle, that our people may live and flourish when all men elsewhere would gladly see us dead and our faith dead and buried with us?''
"I know something," retorted the younger soldier, though his voice showed its youth and trembled a little even as he answered. "I know that we have a duty to the right, and that we have sworn to the Mercenaries' Code, and-"
"Shut thy milk-babe mouth!" hissed the Groupman. "What are Codes before the Code of the Almighty? What are oaths other than our oath to the God of Battles? Lo, our Eldest of our Council of Elders, he who is called Bright, hath said that this day bears hard upon the future of our people, and the winning of this day's war is a need that we must meet. Therefore shall we win! And nothing else!"
"But still I tell thee-"
"Thou shall tell me nothing! I am thy superior! I tell thee. Our orders are to regroup for another attack upon the enemy. Thou and these four with thee are to report now, to their message center. It recks not that thou art not of their unit. Thou hast been called and will obey!''
"Then we shall take the prisoners safely with us-"
"Thou shalt obey!" The Groupman was carrying his spring-gun slung under one arm. He swung it around into his grasp so that the barrel pointed at the private. The Groupman's thumb pushed the control of the weapon to automatic fire. I saw Greten's eyes close for a second and his throat worked; but when his voice came out, it was still steady.
"Yet all my life have I walked in the shadow of the Lord which is truth and faith-" I heard him say, and the barrel came up. I shouted at the Groupman.
"You! Hey, you-Groupman!"
He jerked about like a timber wolf at the sound of a snapping twig under a hunter's boot-and I was looking down the pinhole muzzle of his automatic-set spring-rifle myself. Then he came toward me, gun still aimed, and the axe blade of his starved fanatic's face above it looked down at me.
"Thou art sensible, then?" he said. And the words were like a sneer. I read in them a contempt for anyone weak enough to take a pain-killer for the relief of any physical discomfort.
"Sensible enough to tell you a few things," I croaked. My throat was dry and my leg was beginning to stir to an ache again, but he was good medicine for me, reawakening my anger, so that the returning hurt could feed the fury that rose easily in me. "Listen to me. I'm a Newsman. You've been around long enough to know that nobody wears this cape and beret who isn't entitled to them. But just to make sure"-I dug into my jacket and produced them-"here are my papers. Look them over."
He took them and glanced through them.
"All right now," I said, when he had looked at the last of them. "I'm a Newsman and you're a Groupman. And I'm not asking you anything-I'm telling you! I want transportation to a field hospital immediately, and I want my assistant over there"-and I pointed at Dave-"returned to me. Now! Not ten minutes from now, or two minutes from now; but now! These privates who've been on guard here may not think they have the authority to get me and my assistant out of here and me to a hospital, but you know you have. And I want it done!"
He stared from the papers to me and there came over his face a peculiar grimness of cast, the sort of look a man might get as he shakes off the grasp of those escorting him to a gallows and strides forward to the place of his execution contemptuously under his own power.
"Thou art a Newsman," he said, and drew a deep breath. "Aye, thou art one of Anarch's breed, who with lies and false report spreads hatred of our people and our faith throughout the worlds of men. I know thee well, Newsman"-he stared at me with black, hollowed eyes-"and thy papers to me are but trash and nonsense. But I will humor thee, and show thee how little thou weighest in the balance, with all thy foul reports. I will give thee a story to write, and thou shalt write it, and thou shall see how it is less than dry leaves blowing before the marching feet of the Anointed of the Lord.''
"Get me to a field hospital," I said.
"Thou shalt wait for that," he said. "Further" -and he waved the papers at me-"I see here thy pass, but no pass signed by one of authority in our ranks that gives free passage to the one thou callest thy assistant. Therefore he shall not come to thee, but remain with those prisoners of like uniform, to meet what the Lord shall send them."
He threw the papers down into my lap, turned and stalked off, back toward the prisoners. I shouted after him, telling him to come back; but he paid me no attention.
But Greten ran after him, caught him by the arm and murmured something in his ear, meanwhile gesturing sharply toward the group of prisoners. The Groupman shoved him off with a thrust of his arm that sent Greten staggering.
"Are they of the Chosen?" the Groupman shouted. "Are they Chosen of God?"
And he whirled about in fury, with his spring-rifle still set on automatic menacing not merely Greten, but the other guards as well.
"Fall in!" he shouted.
Some slowly, some hastily, they left off guarding the prisoners and fell into line, facing the Groupman.
"You shall all report to the Message Center-now!" the Groupman snapped. "Right face!" And they turned. "Move out!"
And so they left us, moving off out of my sight among the shadows of the trees.
The Groupman watched after them for a second, then turned his attention and his rifle back on the Cassidan prisoners. They shrank a little from him; and I saw the white, indistinct outline of Dave's face turned momentarily in my direction.
"Now, your guards are gone," the Groupman said to them slowly and grimly. "For an assault begins that will wipe your forces from the field. In that assault every soldier of the Lord is needed, for a call has been placed upon us by our Eldest in Council. Even I must go-and I cannot leave enemies like yourselves unguarded behind our lines, to do mischief against our victory. Therefore, I send you now to a place from which you cannot harm the Anointed of the Lord."
In that moment, in that moment only, for the first time, I understood what he meant. And I opened my mouth to shout; but nothing came out. I tried to rise, but my stiff leg would not let me. And I hung there, mouth open, frozen in the act of half-rising.
He opened fire at full automatic upon the unarmed men before him. And they fell-Dave among them- they dropped and fell, and died.
Chapter 13
I am not clear in my mind exactly how things went after that. I remember, when there was no longer any stir or movement among the fallen bodies, how the Groupman turned and came toward me, holding his rifle in one hand.
He seemed, though he strode swiftly, to come slowly, slowly but inexorably. It was as if I watched him on a treadmill growing ever bigger as he loomed closer to me with the black rifle in his hand and the red sky behind his head. Until, at last, he reached me and stopped, standing over me.
I also tried to shrink from him, but could not; for the great stump of the tree was behind me and my damaged leg, itself stiff as a dead stick of wood, anchored me. But he did not lift his rifle against me; and he did not shoot me.
"There," he said, looking at me. His voice was deep and calm, but his eyes were strange. "Thou hast thy story, Newsman. And thou shalt live to report it. Perhaps they will let thee come when I am led before a firing squad-unless the Lord decrees otherwise, so that I fall in the assault now beginning. But though they executed me a million times over, thy writing will avail thee nothing. For I, who am the fingers of the Lord, have writ His will upon these men, and that writing thou cannot erase. So shalt thou know at last how little is thy writing in the face of that which is written by the God of Battles."
He stepped back from me one step without turning his back. It was almost as if I were some dark altar from which he retreated with ironic respect.
"Now, farewel
l, Newsman," he said, and a hard smile twisted his lips. "Fear not, for they will find thee. And save thy life."
He turned and went. I saw him go, black into the blackness of the deeper shadows; and then I was alone.
I was alone-alone with the still dripping leaves ticking occasionally upon the forest floor. Alone with the red-darkening sky, showing in its tiny patches between the growing black masses of the treetops. Alone with the day's end and the dead.
I do not know how I did it, but after a while I began to crawl, dragging my useless leg along with me, over the wet forest floor until I came to the still heap of bodies. In the little light that remained I hunted through them until I found Dave. A line of slivers had stitched themselves across the lower part of his chest, and from there on down his jacket was soaked with blood. But his eyelids fluttered as I got my arm around his shoulders and lifted him up so that I could support his head on my good knee. His face was as white and smooth as the face of a child in sleep.
"Eileen?" he said faintly but clearly as I lifted him. But he did not open his eyes.
I opened my mouth to say something, but at first no sound would come out. Then, when I could make my vocal cords work, they sounded strange.
"She'll be here in a minute," I said.
The answer seemed to soothe him. He lay still, hardly breathing. The calmness of his face made it seem as if he were not in any pain. I heard a steady sound of dripping that at first I took to be the rain dripping still from some leaf overhead; but then I put down my hand and felt the falling of dampness on its palm. The dripping was of his blood, from the lower part of his soaked jacket, onto the forest earth below where the mosslike groundcover had been scuffed away by the scrabbling of dying men, leaving the bare earth.
I hunted around as best I could for wound dressings on the bodies near us, without disturbing Dave upon my knee. I found three of them, and tried to stop his wounds with them, but it was no use. He was bleeding from half a dozen places. By trying to put the bandages on I disturbed him, rousing him a little.
"Eileen?" he asked.
"She'll be here in a minute," I told him, again.
And, later on, after I had given up and was just sitting, holding him, he asked again.
"Eileen?"
"She'll be here in a minute."
But by the time the full dark passed and the moon rose high enough to send its silver light down through the little opening into the trees, so that I could see his face again, he was dead.
Chapter 14
I was found just after sunrise, not by Friendly, but by Cassidan troops. Kensie Graeme had fallen back at the south end of his battle line before Blight's well-laid plan of an attack to crush the Cassidan defenses there and cut them up in the streets of Dhores. But Kensie, foreseeing this, had robbed the southern end of his line and sent the armor and infantry so acquired swinging wide around to reinforce the north end of his line, where Dave and I had been.
The result was that his line pivoted about a central point, which was just about at the motor pool where I had first caught sight of him. The advancing reinforced north end of it, the following morning, swept around and down, cutting the Friendly communications and crashing in upon the rear of those Friendly troops that thought they had most of the Cassidan levies penned and broken up within the city.
Dhores, which was to have been a rock on which the Cassidan levies were broken up, became instead the rock on which the Friendly forces themselves were broken. The black-clad warriors fought with their usual fierceness and reckless bravery on being trapped; but they were between the barrage of Kensie's sonic cannon to the west of the city and his fresh forces piling in upon their rear. Finally, the Friendly Command, rather than lose any more of the valuable battle units in human shape that were their soldiers, surrendered-and the civil war between the North and South Partitions of New Earth was over, won by the Cassidan levies.
But I cared nothing about this. I was taken, half-conscious from medication, back to Molon for hospitalization. The wound in my knee had complicated itself from lack of attention-I do not know the details; but, though they were able to heal it, it remained stiff. The only cure for that, the medicians told me, was surgery and a whole new, completely artificial knee-and they advised against that. The original flesh and blood, they said, was still better than anything man could build to replace it.
For my part, I did not care. They had caught and tried the Groupman who had perpetrated the massacre; and-as he himself had predicted-he had been executed by firing squad under the provisions of the Mercenaries' Code with respect to the treatment of prisoners. But I did not care even about that.
Because-again as he himself had said-his execution did not alter things. What he had written upon Dave and the other prisoners with his spring-rifle was past the power of me, or any other man, to erase; and by this much he had done something to me.
I was like a clock with a broken part in it that does not keep it from running, but which you can hear rattling away, if you pick the clock up and shake it. I had been broken, inside; and not even the commendation that came from the Interstellar News Service and my acceptance into full membership in the Guild could mend me. But the wealth and power of the Guild was caring for me, now that I was a full member; and they did what few private organizations would have been able to do-they sent me to the wizards of mental mending on Kultis, the larger of the two Exotic Worlds, for treatment.
On Kultis, they enticed me into mending myself- but they could not force the manner in which I chose to mend. First, because they did not have the power (though I am not sure if they actually realized how limited they were, in my particular case) and secondly, because their basic philosophy forbade the use of force in their own proper persons, and also forbade them any attempt to control the individual's self-will. They could only beckon me down the road they wished I would go.
And the instrument they chose to beckon me down that road was a powerful one. It was Lisa Kant.
"-But you're not a psychiatrist!" I said in astonishment to Lisa when she first appeared in the place on Kultis to which I had been brought-one of their many-purposed indoor-outdoor structures. I had been lying by a swimming pool, ostensibly soaking up sun and relaxing, when she showed up suddenly beside me and replied, in answer to my question, that Padma had recommended she be the person to work with me in getting my emotional strength back.
"How do you know what I am?" she snapped back, not at all with the calm self-control of a born Exotic. "It's been five years since I first met you in the Encyclopedia, and I'd already been a student then for years!"
I lay blinking at her, as she stood over me. Slowly, something that had been dormant in me began to come back to life and began to tick and move once more. I got to my feet. Here was I, who had been able to choose the proper words to make people dance like puppets, making a blundering assumption like that.
"Then you actually are a psychiatrist?" I asked.
"Yes and no," she answered me quietly. Suddenly she smiled at me. "Anyway, you don't need a psychiatrist."
The moment she said this, I woke to the fact that this was exactly my own thought, that it had been my own thought all along, but encased in my own misery I had let the Guild plow to its own conclusions. Suddenly, all through the machinery of my mental awareness, little relays began to click over and perceptions to light up again.
If she knew that much, how much more did she know? At once, the alarms were ringing throughout the mental citadel I had spent these last five years in building, and defenses were rushing to their post.
"Maybe you're right," I said, suddenly wary; and I grinned at her. "Why don't we sit down and talk it over?"
"Why not?" she said.
And so we did sit down and talk-unimportant make-conversation to begin with, while I sized her up. There was a strange echo about her. I can describe it no other way. Everything she said, every gesture or movement of her, seemed to ring with special meaning for me, a meaning I could not quite interp
ret.
"Why did Padma think you could-I mean, think that you ought to come here and see me?" I asked cautiously after a while.
"Not just see you-work with you," she corrected me. She was wearing not the Exotic robes, but some ordinary, short street dress of white. Above it her eyes were a darker brown than I had ever seen them. Suddenly she darted a glance at me as challenging and sharp as a spear. "Because he believes I'm one of the two portals by which you can still be reached, Tam."
The glance and the words shook me. If it had not been for that strange echo about her, I might have fallen into the error of thinking she was inviting me. But it was something bigger than that.
I could have asked her then and there what she meant; but I was just newly reawakened and cautious. I changed the subject-I think I invited her to join me for a swim or something-and I did not come back to the subject until several days later.
By that time, aroused and wary, I had had a chance to look around me and see where the echo came from, to see what was being done to me by Exotic methods. I was being worked on subtly, by a skillful coordination of total environmental pressure, pressure that did not try to steer me in one direction or another, but which continually urged me to take hold of the tiller of my own being and steer myself. Briefly, the structure that housed me, the weather that bathed it, the very walls and furniture and colors and shapes that inhabited it, were so designed that they subtly combined to urge me to live-not only to live, but to live actively, fully and joyously. It was not merely a happy dwelling-it was an exciting dwelling, a stimulating environment that wrapped me around.