Eleven

“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.

NIGHT

Sipping sadness, from the young girl

So afraid to go unnoticed

Young man, stalking forests in his dreams

Heightens all his senses

to you.

Madman, racing knives across a windstorm

Searching

For the blood that he will spill.

...

EVIL

Rising slowly

hideous figure

cast aside

Black with bitter

twisted passions

seeking only

The murder of a child.

...

And the last, to his wife:

PLIGHTED TROTH

Ara

What is my life without you?

To be your knight

to fight for you

Is all that holds my will together

Unraveled, and dispossessed

by Distance, time and empty suffering

Now you are taken from me,

One comfort only can I find:

That I loved you then, not less than now

And thanked dear Heaven

you were mine.

...

A year, a month, a day ago he might have cried; but this was not the time. Emotion and sentiment would not bring her back to him, nor would dashing his heart upon the rocks. The mind was the stronger instrument now, a bit cold, but maybe that was best. He gave it free rein to pursue its ends.

The poems showed him that indeed, both elements, love and hatred, yielding and aggression, lived inside him. And both were needed. Hadn’t he felt them? Hadn’t their constant battle for use and mastery tormented him? Yes! That was what had made him so miserable. Fool! It was simply (or merely) a question of knowing which to listen to at a given moment---exerting supreme effort when called for, and having enough faith in God, or life, to accept the consequences of what was beyond human will to affect. Faith and disillusion, professed as different creeds, were one and the same, either half without the other like a man trying to stand on one leg.

With that he became calm again, knowing he must save his strength. Later that night he lit the candle and set it beside the picture of his wife, and prayed a short, fervent prayer to Whom he did not know. His own image was no longer important. He vowed to find his wife, however long it took, and to do what he could in the war, though he detested violence and a part of his prayer was that it would soon end.

The next day, the second of his confinement, passed without serious (personal) incident. That night he took one of the lozenges, knowing he would be unable to sleep without it. For the Morannon system, code-named Dracus by the Belgians, would be reached the following day, and they no longer moved in secret. The Alliance, apparently piercing their detection shields, had detached a fighter-destroyer group to intercept them. As near as anyone could tell, battle would be joined somewhere within the system itself.

In the morning he rose, and reported to the bridge, and with a hard bitter determination that grew out of and suppressed his anxiety, prepared himself for the fight. Because for all his introspection and self-doubt, there was another side of him, as yet only half realized.

Not for nothing had Dubcek made him his pupil; and not for nothing was he second officer to Mandlik. His military and psychological testing had revealed that whatever other characteristics he might possess, when cornered and left no option, he responded with a resourcefulness and tenacity that were almost off the scale. This fact was so striking in one of his (outwardly) skittish nature, that more than one of the military leaders who reviewed it (including Dubcek) went back to the examining psychologist to ask for an explanation.

The psychologist had told them simply, “It’s no mistake. In ordinary circumstances he is much like Hamlet---wavering, indecisive, introspective to a fault. But when pushed to the final need, somehow he raises himself to another level, and reacts with a courage and cunning that are ... remarkable.”

And that was well, because the fight came, hard and long, and in it the upper bridge was wracked by internal explosion, killing Mandlik and half his officers. Without the Soviet cruiser, which the Belgian-Swiss had not detected, the battle would almost certainly have gone against them.

Brunner’s first order, upon assuming command, was to stay near, and protect the planet’s prison complex, which in their late desperation he feared the Alliance commanders might try to destroy.

And he was right.

The browning, grapple wrist, raised stiffly before him like a manikin, or a marionette, preceded the old man from the chamber. The entire body moved with it in stiff, convulsive strides, out onto the porch of the Parthenon, between the pillars and onto the marble steps.

One not of that place might have been shocked by his appearance, distorted as it was by bony growths, the jaw torn to one side by a madman’s rock. Some half-buried sense had drawn him---sight it might be called---to stand there and watch the night sky.

Distant lightnings played before his eyes, soft bursts of light and almost, a pool fancied, distant sounds. Perhaps Mars had come at last, to liberate and destroy them. Through the dull horror of his marrowmind, twisted like the frame, he recalled verses from a book long ago, that set his knife-tattered soul on edge.