"Did it never strike you as just a trifle odd that the Cantons
destroyed the Laurian ore planet, instead of just taking the colonies
by force? They had the machinery."
"I don't know. I suppose I always thought that tactic psychological.
The whole affair with the gravity beam was quite impressive."
"Yes, and that was the lure of it. But think. Who stood to gain by
such an expensive side show? Who paid the bill, and why?"
"The German States? I don't understand. I thought they sided with the
Cantons out of principle." Dubcek looked at him like all the fools
that had ever been born.
"Horse-shit. They did it because they had the equipment to move in and
salvage ninety percent of the planet's high-grade ore---the Cantons
didn't---and because they could use the station again for other
purposes. The move was purely economic: they got their original
investment back three times over, and flexed their muscles a little in
the process. And (so you know you weren't completely wrong) there is
this. So long as people believe the West Germans are still Nazis at
heart, it gives them a tremendous psychological weapon: the aura of
ruthlessness."
The young man stood bewildered, turned his head from side to side as if
trying to see something through a fog. He paused, frozen it seemed,
and then spoke.
"But the Canton fleets. Who supplied them? Not the German States.
That would make them direct accomplices, and---"
"Now you are beginning to think like a socialist. The ships were, in
fact, of GS build, but they didn't just give them away. First they
were sold to the Belgian-Swiss---along with the arsenal that's headed
here---then passed on. The Alliance needed someone to test the waters,
and the Cantons were used for that purpose. The German States could
not care less. Any instability only allows them greater opportunity
for profit and expansion. Play both sides against the middle, then
pick up the pieces; that is their game. Whether the fascists win or
lose, they will get their cut." The young man looked incredulous,
opened his mouth as if to speak.
"I know, I know---the ideologies. Ideology always seems the great
motive to the young, the reason that nations rise and fall. It is time
you learned that no one, except perhaps a few misguided knights, or
here and there a religious fanatic, ever made war for anything other
than personal gain. Though they may have told themselves otherwise."
He relit his pipe, looking thoughtful. BUT DUBCEK DIDN'T SMOKE.
"I remember when I was young, the great heroes and villains of history
seemed to play out their parts as emissaries---the Churchills and
Hitlers---instruments of good and evil upon the Earth. This was
central to all my illusions. It gave my life as a soldier meaning, and
drummed me full of patriotism, and a lot of other high-sounding
excrement. But the hard truth is, Brunner, men make war because they
think they can get something out of it, whether money or glory, it
hardly matters. They hope to take something by force, that is
otherwise denied to them.
"Because when you reach my age you come to realize, as they have, that
there are no rules. . .except survival of the fittest. The great
aggressors of history, from the Greeks to the Roman to whoever, took
what they took because no one could stop them. It is very difficult to
explain unless you have lived through it.....
"MEN rule the galaxy, Brunner. Men. There are no unseen forces at
work, shaping our destinies to some more perfect end. You must learn
to be cynical: it is the key to all truth. Forget your fairy-tale
notions. We live or die by our own devices."
A lull.
"Then what..... What keeps you going?" The aging colonel rose and
went to a dark window.
"Life is a game of chess. And I don't like to lose."
Brunner struggle beneath the coverings, feeling smothered. Suddenly he
burst forward, eyes open.
"But you lost! You LOST. You lost....." His temples throbbed and he
could not remember where he was. For he was not yet awake. His dream
had played on him the cruelest trick of all. Thinking to escape from
the nightmare world, he had jolted himself insufficiently, and only
dreamed of waking. It was all right now. But no. There was something
wrong with the room. Though incredibly lifelike, it was not quite
square---the walls leaned and corners were uneven.
And then they were coming. Outside the dark window there was a sudden,
blinding flash. THEY'RE COMING. His wife ran through the wall and
disappeared. "Ara!"
COMING. The Americans. Nowhere to hide.....
His head shook violently. And finally, he was awake.
He lay on his back, his underclothes drenched with sweat. As if to
reassure himself, he rolled over to embrace his wife and drive away the
darkness. But she was not there: that much of the nightmare was real.
And then he remembered. He was not home on Athena II. Nor was he in
his quarters aboard the Mongoose, waiting sleeplessly for the approach
of the Alliance fleet. He was alone and on a Czech destroyer, one of
several, escorted by a Soviet cruiser. Heading into Belgian space. To
search for the prisoners, taken from the colonies. Dubcek was dead.
He cried softly, hugging his knees, hating himself for his weakness.
"God damn the Americans for ever helping them. I wish I was dead." He
pushed his forehead hard against his knees.
It will be all right, he told himself. The Alliance has gone too far
and now the Soviets will help us. The colonies will be retaken.
Schiller is gone, but Athena remains. My wife is alive. I will find
her and we can go home again. She is alive. She must be alive!
He got up and checked the passage of time. It was still an hour yet
before what men called dawn---little brackets put around life to give
it meaning and a mean understanding.
This was not what he wanted: four hours of sleep was not enough for
him now, and his mind was dark again. Battle could come any day
now---he was spoiling, and being eaten by the spoiling, for a fight.
And yet his energies continued to desert him. His strength grew less
each day: no sleep. Not enough sleep. No appetite. Anxiety. HE
MUST PRESERVE HIS MENTAL ENDURANCE! He was the second officer of the
first destroyer, and the man taken into the confidence of Soviet
Colonel Joyce, Commander of the Leningrad. Leningrad. He was the
go-between, the link between unlike and alien worlds, that now must
work together.
He lifted the picture of his wife from the bedstead, kissed the cold
glass that kept him from her. His mind was calm again, his emotions
flat and worn out. And he shivered, realizing unexpectedly that it was
cold in the room. He felt his brow: burning, always burning. The wet
underclothes he peeled off and flung away, went into the bathroom,
released a stream of clear, watery urine, turned the heat on high and
took a steaming shower.
Dried and warm but already sweating and a little chilled he returned to
the room and sat down at a desk, and touched a button, and began
studying charts of that quadrant. TRANSPORTS HAD BEEN REPORTED
MOVING..... A WEEK AFTER THE TRANSPORTS BEARING THE PRISONERS.....
His wife was not on Athena. LATEST INTELLIGENCE. SOMETHING CALLED
DRACUS.....
It all ran together in his mind, into a crater-pool of formless gray
mud, edged with hard dark flecks. They were making for the Morannon
system. They would be there in seventy. . .eight hours. Others must
do the thinking now, he was tired. Too tired. He lay down again and
forced himself to remain there until he fell asleep.
He woke two hours later, feeling better but for a slight headache. He
recalled briefly as he rose the half-dream from which his consciousness
had climbed. He was lying on the floor of a public bar, asleep, when a
large rough man had seized him by the shoulders of his jacket and
lifted him rudely, shook him, and told him to be gone. At first it
seemed just another foolish night episode, until he remembered that the
initial feeling of the strong, angry hands upon him had been
pleasurable.
He wondered lamely if this were some sign of latent homosexuality---he
often feared what might be revealed to him of his subconscious through
dream---but the thought could not seriously upset him. A new day was
at hand and he felt a little better. He dressed himself, performed the
morning rituals of the bathroom and made his way to the bridge, feeling
as he walked only a slight hollowness and queasiness of the stomach.
Captain Mandlik greeted him flatly, the small black eyes in their
fleshy face neither kind nor cruel.
"You are up late this morning."
"Yes, forgive me. I didn't sleep well last night."
"You don't look well. Have you been to see the doctor?"
"No, there is nothing wrong with me. There is nothing he could do."
"Very well, but look after yourself. We cannot have you fading out on
us." The captain looked more deeply into his face. "Colonel Joyce has
been asking for you. He seems to take a special interest in
you---believes you have some potential or understanding the rest of us
lack."
"Yes. It seems my curse to have lonely old men confide in me."
"Listen to me Brunner," said the captain sternly. "Don't be that way.
We need him. We need his firepower. Whether you like it or not, we
need you to listen to his every word, and learn what you can from him.
Account yourself as befits the situation! We are in enemy Space now,
and the Soviet detection screens won't hide us forever."
"Captain. They are not going to turn and leave us now."
"You must not count on that! And I am still your commanding officer,
however vague the current status. Remember that."
"Yes, sir."
He performed officiously the duties of a long day, with growing
impatience, but simultaneously fearing for the time to pass. For at
least now he still had hope. He could still imagine the happy reunion
with Ara, still picture the moment of finding her: the tearful embrace
and releasing of pent-up, brutalized emotions---the lonely hours of
anguish, always fearing the worst, listening to the battle rage inside
him.
And yet in the end came the thought, the realization, that he NEEDED TO
KNOW. Sixty odd hours, then the battle. Then the landing on Dracus.
When his shift was over he went to the officer's mess and partook, what
little he ate of it, of the evening meal. He sat alone at an empty
table and spoke to no one, but the others were used to this. With
different words they all realized that he had sunk very deep into
himself, and did not wish to be disturbed in his reverie. And they
were right. Almost he feared to take comfort in the company of other
men, as if this might somehow lessen the prayerful necessity of finding
his wife.
He returned again to his room. Taking out a pen and pad of paper he
made some notes for the following day, then picked up his copy of A
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, and began to read. Dragged down
after a time by its minute detail and understated hopelessness, he
placed a marker in the book and set it down, scrawling idly some verses
that came to him then. Weary and lethargic he lay back on the bed,
though he did not yet wish to sleep.
Nevertheless he felt his eyelids drooping heavily. To block it out. .
.to shut off the day..... Even for a little while. But he could not
sleep now, or he would be unable later.
He tried thinking of his mother and brother, grateful that she had
escaped from the destruction of Schiller, and that he, still in
training, would not see combat for some time. But he was forced to
admit that these meant little to him. His brother's life (until very
recently, when he had joined the space navy after the fall of Athena),
had taken a different path. Tomas was an artist, he a soldier. They
were no longer close, as in childhood. And his mother, too, was like a
distant figure, his affection for her a dying ember that the fearful
walls of her religion kept any living breeze from ever fanning. He
cared for nothing and no one, but Ara.
The thought came to him again of his own existence without her. His
stomach crawled. He got up and paced back and forth in nervous
agitation. This restlessness was maddening! His mind raced, but could
seize hold of nothing concrete to calm it. At length, the mock energy
expended, he lay down again and covered his eyes, not caring.....
He woke two hours later, feeling stifled in his clothes. And checking
the clock he saw that deep night was only just beginning. And knew
that he would not be able to sleep for many hours. He sat on the edge
of the bed and took off his shirt. His arm started for the light
switch, but something drew back the hand. Moved by what he could not
say, he reached instead into the drawer of his dressing cabinet and
pulled out from it the thick tallow candle, brass capped, that had been
given him by his wife. Taking out also the metal igniter, he touched a
flame to the wick and set it before him.
For a long time he did not look at his reflected image in the closet
mirror, holding his head in his hands, incapable of purity of thought
or emotion. He felt little outside his own fatigue, but also a slow
strange stirring of the soul.
He looked up, studied his features in the soft, forgiving light of his
lover. The face that he had never associated with himself..... His
eyes were drawn downward to the wiry muscles that reached from his
chest to his arm. Always slender and taut, they now looked almost
famished, layered rope wrapped stranding and twine after strand into
nothingness. What were they for? And the rage inside him. Could he
tear down the walls? Could he dive through the mirror and come to the
place where his wife lay needing him, distraught, possibly frightened
and in torment?
And suddenly the image changed, becoming sinister and spectral. The
remembrance was almost audible.
"And how would you judge me while a Belgian officer was raping your
wife?"
Caught in a trap of near despair, simultaneously hit by a rush of dizzy
sickness---a lethal virus had, in fact, attacked his stomach---his mind
and courage reeled in a half physical, half emotional torment.
Snatches of conversations with Dubcek came back to him, echoed and
enforced, made indisputable by the darkness that hung thick and
menacing around him. They dove and swirled like insane, angry birds.
His spirit palled before them.
"You must learn to be cynical"
"Some day you will be hurt very badly"
"It is the key to all truth"
"Forget your fairy-tale notions"
"While a Belgian officer was raping your wife"
"You will be hurt"
"Very badly"
"Raping your wife"
"Raping your wife"
"Raping your wife---"
"Stop it!" he cried in answer. "Get away from me!"
A foul nausea engulfed him as he staggered toward the bathroom, falling
to his knees and retching violently into the toilet. Hardly able to
breathe, feeling the very soul torn out his throat, he fell back
against the wall and tile as wave after wave of hot sweat dizziness
broke over. Finally, as if the agony that raped him had expended
itself he was left, a forlorn and shivering ball on the floor, hopeless
and friendless and lost.
But now the cold truth of it was clear, needing no help from the
physical assault. She was gone from him forever. She had been too
beautiful, too spirited. At best she was the unwilling mistress of a
bastard animal. At worst she was dead. Dubcek was right. There was
no unseen God to protect her, no Comforter to see him now and ease his
pain. He had been a fool, and now he would pay for it. He should have
told her to evacuate. They should never have come here. Fool! Fool!
Fool!
He wept no tears and shivered and struck the wall weakly with the side
of his fist.
"Dear God don't let it be. Don't leave her! Don't leave me here....."
He sobbed. "Don't leave me."
Not much like a prayer that his mother might have taught him, but still
he spoke it with all his soul. A young ensign, hearing his cries, came
in from the hallway and found him there. Putting his head through
Brunner's crooked arm, he lifted him and took him to the Infirmary.
The doctor had to be wakened, and did not come at once, so that he was
left in a half-lying sit in a bed behind a wrap-around screen, given
time, as it were, to gather himself. He felt nothing but weakness and
a blank mental stupor. That things had gone too far he knew, but to
whom should he address this complaint? He felt as low, though less
bitter and sharp-edged, as he had ever been in his life.
He had prayed, and not in the moment of fear and anguish, but in their
afterglow. This in itself was enough to show him that Dubcek had not
won a convert, though he was still probably right. But this sense of
wrongness and self-deprecation began to bring back bitterness. He shut
it off.
I'm sorry, Ivan, he said to himself. You're a good man and I know you
tried to keep me from being hurt. But I can't see the world through
your eyes, or I despair..... And I cannot do that yet. Not while
there is any hope.
With this a ghost inside him seemed to rest more easily. Or something.
The doctor drew back the screen and with a sleepy, objective and
infinitely forgettable manner began to examine him and ask him
questions, mildly rebuking him for not coming sooner.
"It is obvious that you are suffering from acute anxiety as well as the
virus, and that the two feeding off one another have brought you to
this state. I have been told you are here searching for your wife and
that is all fine and good, but you must take better care of yourself or
you will be of no use to anyone. I am going to give you an injection
for the virus and prescribe lozenges to help you sleep. Yes, yes I
know you do not like to take drugs into your body and if you sleep on
your own you will not need them. I want you to have them anyway. You
are to spend this night in hospital and the next two days off duty then
you may do as you like but if you have any sense you will put from your
mind what is beyond your control and guard your health more closely.
You are not the only one with problems and concerns in this time of
unrest, and though you are young....."
When she left Brunner turned his head to one side against the hard
pillow, still half upright, and let his thoughts and feeling sink down
like stirred silt in a stream. NILEMUD AND CROCODILES. He remembered
the phrase from "Portrait." What the hell did Nilemud have to do with
anything? And why was Joyce always writing about himself? Did he
imagine he was the only one who suffered? And why call Ireland a sow
that eats its fodder? Like murdering a sick patient.
Joyce. That was the Colonel's name as well. He wondered if they were
related, or how a Joyce had come to settle in Leningrad. THE
Leningrad. He compared his perceptions of the two.
Thus his mind vomited what his body could not, passing time in words,
until he started to feel dizzy again and another rush of anguish folded
over him. He endured it, and with almost unselfish reserve except for
the thought, again, that it was too much. Any one of the things he had
felt in the past months, heightened now by nearness, might have been
bearable singly, or even in bunches of two and three. But all at once
and one after another was like an endless trap, with no escape from the
steady flow of consciousness. But for sleep, which of late had become
a fickle and untrustworthy ally.
Unbroken flow of consciousness. Perhaps that was what Joyce had been
after (he suspected the thought was not original). Certainly his
self-endowed character Stephen had been trapped, feeling rare moments
of freedom and longing for the sky, but always coming back to himself
in a dirty world. More trapped in the human shell than in Dublin. Did
he ever truly fly? Certainly the rambling phrases were incoherent.....
And so at long length his thoughts become more natural and sleep came
back to him, and shutting his eyesmind and heart, he passed through a
thick black night without dream.
*
The next morning after some time alone and a second examination, he
returned to his rooms. Someone had extinguished the candle for him but
it was still there, the igniter beside it. He resisted the urge to
contact Mandlik and ask him how many hours, or had they yet been
discovered. There was no reason, he knew, to go looking for a fight.
It would come to him. He had had time to work things through, and
believed he now possessed a clearer understanding.
The first few moments in that place were difficult, for all his renewed
spirit of resolve. To be left here in this state, weakened and
sick..... He still feared for the future, which he knew stalked him
inexorably. At stake, no more and no less than his spiritual life and
death. It was no use trying to prepare himself against all
contingencies. If his wife was not there, or was dead or
unaccounted-for, a part of himself would die forever, and the tiny
flame of faith to which he clung would be lost beyond recall. Even now
it flickered feebly in that dark place, shivered by the cold winds of
doubt.
He mastered his trepid nature as best he could, and stayed there. He
lay down and read for many hours, somewhat heartened by his mind's
endurance, and by the sudden turn from hopelessness he perceived in
Joyce's work. 'Exiles.' It filled all his mind with true thought and
carried him for a time from himself, and he loved in those moments both
the medium and the man, so beyond his understanding.
Moved as it were to make some account of himself he rose, wrapped the
robe about him, went to the desk-table and, without looking at the
verses he had scrawled the day before, wrote a simple, passionate poem
to his wife.
But the feelings went too deep and he could not yet read back what he
had written.
He called and a nurse brought him a soft and frugal meal, and before
she left he looked into her face and said sincerely, "Thank you," for
she had reminded him that other lives existed outside his own.
After he ate for a time he was unwell, and lay down in the bed and
waited for the aching nausea to pass. Weariness and exhaustion came
over him when the other left, and having little choice, yet also
wanting to trust, he surrendered. And after a further time he slept.
He did not wake until late in the evening. Without looking or even
thinking about the clock he went to his writing desk and flipped over
the written pages of the pad. A thought had come to him, whether in
dream or rising from it he could not recall, nor did it matter. He had
his answer. He wrote on a blank sheet of paper with a quiet warm peace
inside him:
If you believe in too much, or nothing at all, either way you will be
hurt.
With this he became calm and thoughtful. What was the use of despair,
or endless worry? Running around wildly, trying by one's own efforts
to turn back an imagined tide of evil and malicious fate, or believing,
at the most, that life was nothing but a primal struggle without order
or lasting hope. If there truly was nothing beyond man and the grave,
then what was the use of trying at all? when the bravest and most
determined lives must eventually end in ruin and death? In this sense
even the existentialists were wiser than the proponents of human will
and self-made destiny.
And on the other side of the coin, were those who put their faith and
trust in Gods and religions they did not understand, accepting without
trial or common sense the narrow dogmas of fearful (or even wise) old
men. MEN. What made their observations and conclusions more
enlightened than his own, or those of anyone who sought with both heart
and mind, using Nature and experience as a guide?
It was all so obvious and clear; how could anyone not see it? Yet now
he, Olaf Augustine Brunner, must take this lesson and apply it to that
Universe, often cold and unreasoning, OUT THERE. He did not know if he
was equal to the task. He only knew that he must try.
His mind and confidence thus piqued, he turned back to the poems
written earlier, hoping, perhaps, to find some further sign of his own
understanding---something to set against the huge, dark uncertainty
beyond his window. There were the two from the previous night, as well
as the poem to his wife.