The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde Page 13

  Big deal. Birds. Trees. Grass. Rocks. So what?

  Well, at least I’m free out here, he told himself. Yeah, that’s it, freedom!

  I’m free! I’m free to… to… to do what? Just free, I guess.

  Some of those writers made a big deal about being free, too. But what in hell were they talking about, really?

  I guess freedom means not having to do anything you don’t want to do, he mused.

  But hell, he thought, who does? Who has to do anything he doesn’t want to do? Not on B.C.S. You never have to do anything you don’t want to do…

  Well then, maybe it’s more than that. Maybe freedom is being able to do what you do want to do.

  So what do I want to do? That’s easy! Willy thought bitterly. I want a job. I want to work. And that’s the one thing in the world I can’t do. I can’t do it in the city, and I can’t do it here either…

  As he walked on, Willy was becoming less and less concerned with abstract musings, and more and more aware of something much more prosaic—it was time for lunch. He was beginning to get hungry. Damn, he thought, now why didn’t I think to bring some food along?

  He eyed the red button on the Safetybracelet. I can always call for the Retrieval Robot, he thought. It’d probably even have some food along with it, just in case…

  “No!” he shouted. “That’s not what I came out here for!”

  Okay Willy, he told himself, so you’re hungry. Isn’t that what you wanted in the first place? To feel something for a change?

  So now you do feel something. You feel hungry. Do you good!

  Now Willy had something to do, something meaningful—get some food.

  So how do you get food in the woods? he wondered. Kill a rabbit or something, I suppose.

  But he hadn’t seen a rabbit or anything else. And how do you kill a rabbit? Hit it with a rock, maybe?

  Willy realized that he had never killed anything in his life, and that he did not have the slightest idea of how to go about doing it, not without a gun. And maybe not with a gun, either.

  And what would he do with a dead rabbit, even if he had one? Eat it raw?

  He didn’t think he could ever get that hungry. So I’d have to cook it, he thought. Now how do you cook a rabbit?

  I guess you just spit it on a piece of wood and roast it over a fire. But how do you build a fire? With self-lighting cigarettes, no one carried matches or a lighter anymore, and how else could you start a fire?

  Well, hunting sure is out! he thought.

  And now he was really getting hungry. Willy hadn’t missed a meal as long as he could remember, and he had never been really hungry before.

  It wasn’t the way he had imagined it at all. It was like a big hollow in his guts, and it sort of hurt. It almost really did hurt.

  And now that he was suffering at last, he found that it didn’t make him feel any more alive at all. It was just plain unpleasant.

  He stopped walking and once again he considered the red button on the Safetybracelet. It would be the easiest thing in the world to push it. Then he wouldn’t have to be hungry anymore. And he didn’t want to be hungry.

  No! No! At least I’ll get back to the city on my own!

  Yeah, that’s it. I’ll go back to the entrance. I’ll go home and have a good meal.

  Now let’s see, the wall is… where?

  Willy looked around. He was surrounded by trees and rocks and bushes, bushes, rocks and trees. He couldn’t see the wall. He couldn’t see the horizon. He couldn’t see anything but trees and rocks and bushes.

  Where the hell am I? he thought.

  He began to walk, faster and faster. He had no idea in which direction the wall was, but he had to get to it! He had to do something! He would not press the button! He would make it on his own.

  For hours, Willy blundered about in the woods, as his hunger became an ache, then a dull throb, and finally a pain, a real, burning hunger-pang in his stomach.

  Willy was hungry. He was hungry and lost and cold and he didn’t like it one bit.

  “I won’t! I won’t! I won’t!” he muttered continually as he staggered through the woods.

  I won’t press the button! I’ll make it back on my own!

  Then it started to rain.

  At first it was just the patter of raindrops on the leafy roof of the woods. Then it started to come down harder and harder and harder.

  The trees became soaked, and the raindrops began to penetrate the treetops. They began to hit Willy, big, fat, cold raindrops. And the trees began to drop their overload of moisture on him. Willy, who had lived his life in the protected, Climatecontrolled cities, had never been caught in the rain before. He did not at all enjoy the new experience.

  It rained and rained and rained. Willy’s clothes became saturated. His hair became wet and matted, and water dripped down his forehead and into his eyebrows. Cold water.

  Willy was soaked. It was getting colder.

  He sat down on a big, flat rock. The rock was wet. He felt it through the seat of his sodden pants. He was wet, he was cold, he was tired, and he was very hungry.

  He was thoroughly miserable.

  He was as miserable as he had been back in his apartment, maybe more miserable. There was no meaning in being cold or wet or hungry.

  Willy Carson had found suffering. It didn’t make him feel any happier at all. It didn’t fill any of the empty places in his life. It just made a few new ones.

  With a little sighing sob of resignation, he pressed the red button on his Safetybracelet. Soon, very soon, the Retrieval Robot would arrive and take him back to the city.

  It would take him back to his apartment, back to his Autostove, his hobbies, his long pointless days and empty nights. Back to the endless, meaningless years that would stretch on and on and on…

  But now Willy wanted to go back, back to the same old empty dead end that was his existence. It would be no less empty, no less futile.

  But Willy had learned one inevitable, brutal lesson: suffering too, was meaningless, suffering too, was a pointless dead end.

  And as he heard the whir of helicopter blades approaching, one forlorn, bitter realization filled his being with final despair:

  Pain too, hurt.

  A Night in Elf Hill

  Dear Fred:

  Yeah, it’s your brother Spence after all these years, and of course I’m yelling for help. Just spare me the I-told-you-sos and the psychiatrist’s pounce. So I’m a black sheep and a miscreant and a neurotic personality. We never could quite stand eachother even when we were kids, and when you became a shrink and I Shipped Out, that really tore it. The reality of inner space versus the escapism of outer space, maturity versus perpetual adolescence, isn’t that what you said? Sometimes I think you were born speaking that jargon, and if you’ll pardon my saying so, I still think it’s horse-hockey.

  But the bitch is that now I find myself urgently in need of your brand of horse-hockey. I’ve got something I’ve got to tell to somebody, something that’s been eating me up for a year, something way over my head. Something you only tell a brother or a shrink—and for all your squareness, Fred, at least you’re both.

  I suppose I’ve got you good and confused by now, just like in the bad old days, but I hope I’ve got you as intrigued as bugged.

  Don’t go putting things in my mouth, though; I’ve got no regrets. Seventeen years in space, and I don’t regret a minute of it. But you never could understand that. Remember? I’d tell you about the kick of five new planets every year, of a new woman on every one of ’em, of the greener grass just beyond the planet beyond the next one, and what I’d get from you is long lectures on “flight from reality” and “compulsive satyrism.” The only reason I’m raking up these tired old coals, Herr Doktor, is that it all bears on the problem that I’m going to do my damndest to try and dump in your lap.

  Yeah, space is my oyster, always has been, always will be—and that’s my only regret. The knowledge that eighteen years of it i
s all I can ever have.

  You know how the time limit on Merchant Service Papers works, or at least you should, since shrinks like you stuck us with the system. When you apply for Papers, they give you a solid week of physical and mental examinations, everything in the book and some things that aren’t, and they tell you just how long they figure you can stand the Jumping in and out of sub-space, the accelerations, the pressures, the tensions. They tell you how long, and they put it down on your Papers. This man is certified for eighteen years in space and not a millisecond longer. The moving finger writes, and all that… Actually, I’ve got no fair reason to complain: eighteen years is Good Time. The average is closer to fifteen.

  It’s a nice safe system. No one suddenly goes ape and wrecks a ship, like in the bad old days. No spacer, shipping far beyond his endurance, comes home a shattered hulk from Farside Syndrome anymore.

  Yeah, a good, safe, secure system. The only thing wrong with it is that you know you have that date hanging over your head, and you know that under the rules the day will come when you start collecting that Mustering Out Pension (a nice piece of change every year as long as you live—even to a high-priced shrink like you, Fred), and get that last free ride to the planet of your choice.

  Sure, you think it’s a sweet set-up. You would. Eighteen years of your life in return for financial security in perpetuity. Why don’t you go to Port Kennedy and take a good hard look at all those old men sitting in the sun, living off their nice fat pensions and watching the ships taking off for the stars like one-eyed cats peeping in a seafood store? Old men of thirty-five or forty. Ask them if it’s such a sweet set-up! How would you like to be put out to pasture when you’re forty? After eighteen years, what do you have to live for but the next planet? That last free ride back to Earth is the sickest joke there is. It’s not for me. In the bad old days, they let you ship out till it killed you, and ask any of the hulks that haunt Port Kennedy if that wasn’t the more merciful way.

  Man, I’m sure glad this is a letter, because I can all but hear you bellowing “I told you so.” What was it you used to call Shipping Out, “A night in Elf Hill”? Where a man goes into the hall of the elves for one night of partying, and the next day, when he comes out, a hundred years have passed, and he’s an old, old man and his life is over… I can hear you telling me that I can’t find myself by searching the Galaxy, that I’ve got to look within, and now look at you, Spence, you’re a hollow shell, a thirty-eight-year-old adolescent. I can see you shaking your head with infinite sadness and infinite wisdom, and you should be glad this isn’t face-to-face too, ’cause I’d kick your sanctimonious teeth down your throat, and you know that I always could lick you.

  Suffice it to say that unless you can come up with some pearl of wisdom from out of your bottomless pit of middle-aged maturity, and don’t get me wrong, Fred, I hope to God you can, when I’m Mustered Out next year, that last trip won’t be back to Earth. It’ll be to Mindalla.

  I know, I know, you never heard of Mindalla. Who has? It’s a nothing little planet orbiting a G-4 sun. Colonized about a century ago. Maybe fifteen million yokums living off a piddling mining industry on one continent. That’s Mindalla. Ten thousand mudballs just like it scattered all over the Galaxy. But I’m afraid, really afraid, that unless you can stop me, I’m going back. Going back to stay.

  I made my first planetfall on Mindalla a little over a year ago, on a freighter from Sidewinder, carrying the kind of cargo we just don’t talk about. Fortunately, it’s a big, big Galaxy, and there are so many planets in it that you never have to go back to a single one, even if your Papers go all the way to the twenty-year maximum.

  And so, I believed at the time, this would be my first and last visit to Mindalla. I mean, when you’ve been in space as long as I have, seen hundreds of cities on hundreds of planets—G’dana, Hespa, the Ruby Beach of Modow, the whole wild lot—Mindalla is strictly nowheresville.

  The population is small, there’s only one town with nerve enough to call itself a city, the outback has been pretty thoroughly explored by air, no interesting local beasties, no natives. And the colony is just not old enough to have really marinated, if you dig, become decadent enough to appeal to my peculiar tastes… But let’s not get into that.

  Still, like it or not, I had three days on this mudball, and I knew from long experience that a planet’s just too big a place to be a total nonentity. That’s why I went into space in the first place; that’s where it’s really at. Not all that crap about “the vast spaces between the stars.” Space itself is creation’s most total bore. What makes a man Ship Out is just being a kid on Earth, and looking up at all those stars, and knowing that they all own whole worlds, and that each of ’em is a world, as full of surprises as Earth was when Adam and his chick got themselves booted out of Eden. I guess that’s it—you’re got to dig surprises. Man like me hates security as much as you love it.

  So I knew there had to be something for me on Mindalla, a new taste, a new sound, a new woman. A nice surprise…

  Well, I wandered from bar to bar, my usual S.O.P., and to make a long, tedious story short, I came up with only two little goodies, and one of ’em seemed to be just a fairy story at first.

  But the second concerned the Race With No Name. The Race had left one of its weird ruins on Mindalla.

  Even you must know about the Race With No Name. Billions of years ago, before Man was even a far-distant gleam in some dinosaur’s eye, before the ’Bodas or the Dreers, or any of the other races that are around today ever existed, the Race With No Name owned this Galaxy, from the Center clear to the Magellanic Clouds. A billion years ago, they disappeared, died out, or migrated elsewhere, or God-knows-what, leaving nothing but ruins on thousands of planets. If you can call lumps of some metal that assays out stainless steel but hasn’t rusted at all in a billion years “ruins.” A lump of the stuff here, a whole mountain of it there, weathered to dust by a billion years of time and wind, twenty or so Artifacts that no one understands, scattered throughout the known Galaxy—the Race With No Name.

  But you know that. What you don’t know is what the Race means to spacers. It’s our own private little nightmare that somewhere, somehow, some of ’em are still around, and that one day we’re going to run into them, in sub-space, or some forgotten planet on the Rim… A race a billion years gone, a race that was young when the Galaxy was coalescing, a race that had as much in common with us as we do with worms… A race that we can’t be sure doesn’t still exist, somewhere…

  And the Race With No Name left a few lumps of metal on Mindalla, as they did on thousands of other planets. Nothing unusual… But then there was that local fairy story…

  It seems that a few decades ago, a Mindallan who had been a spacer settled down on his pension near something called the Great Swamp. Apparently, he wigged out—was known to rave about someplace in the Swamp that was the “most beautiful city in the Galaxy.” Of course, there was no such thing in the Swamp. And one day, he just disappeared and they never found his body. The locals claimed that other men had disappeared into the Great Swamp, but nobody I talked to could name names.

  Just the usual crock, eh? But the Race With No Name had left a ruin on Mindalla, and when you added that to the fairy story, you came up with something that smelled of Artifact.

  I guess they’ve found maybe two dozen intact Artifacts of the Race With No Name. I lose count. There’s the Solid Hole on Beauchamp, the Time Trap on Flor Del Cielo, the Sub-Space Block on Misty, that horrible thing they haven’t even named on Channing, the thing that turns living creatures inside out… No one knows what any of the damned things really are, and I suppose we never will. Maybe I hope we never will.

  But 1 got the smell of Artifact on Mindalla. Somewhere in that swamp was… something. No matter how many men have died, or worse, because of them, I still never heard of a spacer who could resist the lure of discovering an Artifact. Don’t ask me why. Why do people pick at scabs, Herr Doktor?

  S
o I rented a flitter, bought some tinned food, leased an energy-rifle which everyone assured me was about as necessary as a Conversion Bomb, and set out for the Great Swamp.

  The Swamp was where it was supposed to be—about four hundred miles east of the city. “Great Swamp” turned out to be local hyperbole, of course—you could lose it in the Everglades.

  I set the flitter down in a clearing near the center of the Swamp. The clearing was ringed with trees—something between palms and mangroves: gnarled, ringed trunks, big, bright-green, feathery leaves. The ground was coal-black, the way it sometimes is around a volcano on Earth, only here it was soggy, half-mud, interlaced with hundreds of sluggish little streams. In short, a swamp.

  I put a small radio direction finder in my pocket, turned on the Sitter’s beacon, hoisted my small pack, slung the energy-rifle over my shoulder and set off rather noisily to get the lay of the land.

  One weird thing—the trees were lousy with a kind of feathery stuff like Spanish moss, long globs of it hanging everywhere. It was a deep, deep red, and it gave you the feeling that you were walking through perpetual sunset. Kind of eerie, maybe, but also sort of soothing.

  Quite a few critters around—ugly little lumpy fish like mud-puppies in the streams, small six-legged blue lizards all over the place, octopoid things swinging in the trees by their tentacles like monkeys—but nothing big enough to worry about, even without the rifle.

  Actually, I suppose you’d go for the place—you always were a nature nut, and this swamp had what you’d call atmosphere, what with that red moss all over everything and the black soil, and those octopoids in the trees, covered with a golden fuzz and gabbling like turkeys. Now you know me, Fred, I’m strictly a city boy, my idea of beauty is Greater New York, or Bay City, or Riallo. But I must admit that I sort of dug the place. It put me at ease, it even smelled kind of sweet and musky as I went deeper into it.

  And of course, that’s when I should’ve started to sweat. I don’t care how tame a planet is, it just shouldn’t seem harmless if it isn’t Earth. Every planet is different from every other in thousands of ways, and at least one of those differences should be the kind that makes a man look behind him. Besides, every other extraterrestrial swamp I’ve ever seen stank like an open cesspool.