Or perhaps a flotilla of Navy aerocraft might be dispatched on another “good will tour” to drive the point home unmistakably.
We would not care. We would be far away.
Or dead.
-2-
“I just do not know, Corporal O’Thraight, three years is a long time...”
I watched Eleva Dethri through the smeared transparency, hating the quarantine procedures at the base, wishing I were on the other side of the plastic where her voice would not come to me through an electronic filter, yet, deep inside, a little grateful for the regulations which saved me from potential humiliation.
I never touched her; I never knew if she would want me to.
Behind her on the corrugated metal wall of the shed, garish posters proclaimed the glory of our coming leap to the stars, informed visitors of the many rules governing their brief, highly-supervised stays, exhorted them to tell their friends, their co-workers, their families, how their voluntary tax contributions were building a magnificent future for unborn generations of Vespuccians.
“Yes, I know, Eleva, darling, if you could only...besides, when I come back, I will be an officer.”
Dim red sunlight trickled through the windows on her side of the barrier. The shed stretched forty or fifty meters. At the door, a heavily-armed Army guardsman stood at parade-rest, watching each conversing couple closely. There were a dozen stations like this one where we Starmen could have a short, unsatisfactory glimpse of those we loved, of the lives we were leaving behind.
She was right, of course. Women generally are about these things. Three years is a long time, a lifetime, almost the same amount of time I had loved her, since an Officer’s Club dance where she arrived come on the arm of some slavering lieutenant. Since I had last played the mandolar in public. Even then it came as a temporary assignment, an unlooked-for break in my regular duties.
Changing my life.
“An officer?” Her pale blue eyes brightened a little, she licked her lips uncertainly. “Why, Corporal, how wonderful! An astronaut, one of the first eighteen...but three years?”
Eleva the beautiful: fair, lightly-freckled skin, tightly-curled copper- colored hair, taller than I by a centimeter or so, unless I stood up very straight. I stood up very straight. Combat boots helped, except when she wore high heels. I suppose, as the only offspring of a warrant officer—worse yet, descended from an upper-class family whose demotion, after a lost battle, had been the scandal of the previous century—she never fitted, either among the enlisted class of my beginnings, or the officer class she desperately aspired to rejoin.
I shifted uncomfortably on the tractor-seat bolted in place before the counter they had divided down the middle with a plastic partition. We eighteen would spend two weeks here, with our alternates, until we proved to carry no diseases which might compromise the mission. Air pressure measured slightly higher inside the buildings to insure our isolation. We communicated with the outside world by wire.
Eleva looked unhappy. “Corporal...” She glanced around to see whether anyone listened, a futile gesture, as, in addition to the guardsmen, our conversation would be line-monitored by the psychiatric staff. “...Whitey, I—I do not know what to say. I, well, I had my plans, my life sort of laid out in front of me. Now you...”
Now I... I had thrown her an unpinned grenade by promising to become the officer she wanted. What else could I do? Did I want a commission for its own sake, for my own sake? I knew I wanted Eleva. Like most individuals of my class, I had learned not to want much of anything else.
“Say you will wait for me, Eleva,” I answered, trying hard to cover the anger, the frustration I felt, “Or say you will not. Either way. You will not say you love me. We have never... But let me know, now.”
“Please do not force the issue, I do not know what to say! Whitey, I do not know what I feel. Three years? Why, by then, I will be...”
“Three years older. Eleva, go marry a captain. I will learn not to care. Anyhow, it is too late, I am stuck here with this mission, all on account of—”
“Do not dare blame me!” she pouted. The door-guardsman looked our way, raised eyebrows under his titanium helmet. “I never asked you to volunteer for the
Asperance,
did I? I did not ask you to do anything at all—except let me alone!”
This was turning out all wrong, not at all as planned, as dreamed about. Saying goodbye to the only girl—woman—I ever loved, I had expected something different from her, something warm to take with me to the cruel stars. Now I watched myself ruining it, heard myself say all the wrong things, helpless to stop myself saying them.
“Then what the Ham are you doing here, Eleva Dethri? Why did you come?”
“I do not know!” she cried, flinging herself off the stool. She ran out of the room while I could think of nothing to say but “Eleva! I love you! Please do not go like this!”
But of course she could not hear me. The press-to-talk switch popped up the moment she released it.
-3-
Three years earlier, I stood before the battered desk of my CO/conductor, Colonel Gencom, trying hard to understand what they were doing to me. The office walls were lined with photographs of the band over two generations, half a thousand men in uniforms of varying obsolescence, half a dozen wars of varying unbearability. On the window sill behind his desk lay a tarnished trumpoon with a bullet-hole through its bell; the unit color-cords hanging from it were stained with something which matted the braids together. Something dark, nearly black.
“Whitey,” the Colonel shuffled through the sheaf of paperwork as if he, too, could not comprehend the reasoning behind this order, “You are the best damned mandolar player in the band. I hate to see this happen; you know how it is: ‘Ours not to reason why...’”
Never mind that, in an orchestra, nobody hears the mandolar except the other musicians who rely upon it for harmony, chord-progression, rhythm even the percussionist depends on.
Never mind that the papers on the Colonel’s desk were reassigning me to training as a field-armorer, a sort of meatball gunsmith—something I knew nothing about, possessed no background for. There was a war on; there was always a war on; war imposes its own reasons, its own demented logic. There existed a greater need, in the eyes of the State, for field-armorers than for mandolar players no one except the other musicians could hear.
Never mind that I had been trained to play the mandolar, by edict of the same government, since the age of seven.
I doubled as company supply-clerk, meaning in the first place that I was in charge of spare reeds, mouthpiece-covers, mutes, assorted junk like triangles, ceram-blocks, train whistles, sand whistles, slide whistles. In the second, it meant I billeted with what I was in charge of, spending my days—except for rehearsals, performances—among endless shelves of odd-shaped semi-musical detritus, inventory forms, the storeroom dust of a hundred military years.
In the third place, I was de-facto repair officer: if a thumb-key broke off a picconet, if the bass saxonel got dented, if the xylotron threw burnt insulation all over the xylotronist, they brought it to me, for soldering, hammering, emergency rewiring—even a little first aid. I got to be pretty good—undoubtedly the reason I had been chosen for retraining.
“It is not all so bad,” the Colonel shattered me of my reverie, although I thought he spoke more to himself than to me. “While you are in training, you will be available should we need you. I suspect there will be no replacement, not in a hurry, anyway.”
I nodded. Nothing he said required—or justified—a reply.
“There may be other opportunities, even after you are rotated out into the field. I shall try to see there are, if it would please you, Whitey.”
“I would like it very much, sir.”
“Good. Also, you will always have your musical talent to fall back on, as a comfort to yourself, your comrades. It could be worse, could it not, Corporal?”
I saluted, snapped my heels. “Yes, sir, Colonel, sir, it could be worse, sir.”
He gave me a very unmilitary grin, shook his head ruefully. If one thing the Navy—or the Army, for that matter—could arrange, it was for things to be worse. He knew it. I knew it.
I turned smartly, started out of his office.
“Whitey?”
I turned again, curious. He removed his spectacles, rubbed his eyes, looked back up at me. “Since we will not be getting a replacement, take your mandolar with you. You will need to stay in practice, anyway.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“Do not thank me, son, I am not authorized to give away Navy property. I do not know what happened to Corporal O’Thraight’s mandolar, just before he got reassigned. Thank the Navy, boy. I do it every day. You could never print the words I use to do it.”
-4-
The voice in the corridor outside said, “Here it is: YD-038.”
Nobody knocked. The door opened. Miss Sixte, ninth-floor mother for the local Navy Reserve creche stepped inside.
I snapped to attention.
It was a gray room, three meters by three, with a gray door, six little gray bunks, YD-036 through YD-041 inclusive, smoothly tucked to regulation tautness. Miss Sixte kept pretty much to herself. Sometimes you could hear her sobbing in her own room after lights-out. None of the kids ever managed to discover why.
Everybody else had gone to calisthenics that morning; I had been told to wait. It made me nervous. I had never spent much time here in the daylight. Behind Miss Sixte, a tall, thin man carried an odd-shaped plastic box by the handle. “Whitey, this is Sergeant Tenner of the Twenty-third Aerofleet Band. He is going to be your teacher.”
I had teachers, plenty. Tenner looked okay, though, if kind of weird: cadaverouslike, with slicked-down hair, olive skin, a good smile. Good hands, with long, thin fingers. “Whitey?” He offered me one of the hands.
“Sergeant,” I answered, gravely adult as I could be, “What is that you are carrying, sir?”
“Not ‘sir’, ‘Sarge’. Take a look.” He handed me the case. I fumbled with the spring latches. Inside, in a tight-fitting bed of bright yellow plush, lay the most beautiful object I had ever seen.
About the length of my forearm, it had a long tapered neck on the flat face of which six inlaid columns of square brightly-colored buttons touched each other at the edges, like mosaic tiles, each about the size of a thumbnail. They marched down the neck in twenty-four rows, until it blended with the body: not much larger than the neck, very slightly ovoid. At its bottom was a cluster of tiny knobs. Six long plastic vanes stuck out from the face, centimeter-high, six centimeters long.
Tenner took the beautiful thing from my reluctant hands, arranged the fingers of his left on the neck-buttons, just-so, fluttered his right thumb down across the hinge-springed vanes.
A chord more wonderful than anything I had ever heard. E-minor-seventh.
“What do you think, Whitey?” Nobody had ever asked me that.
“What is it, Sarge?”
“A mandolar. From now on, it will be your life.”
The Sky Demons
Slop, I remember thinking, is a bit early today.
I had heard the barred doors slamming open along the length of the hallway. Now a shadow eclipsed the only light in my severely atrophied universe. To my immense astonishment, a heavy mallet rose, fell, rose again, fell—exactly as it had done when we were sealed into this purgatory, this time miraculously splitting the soft rivets in the hasp.
The rust-blistered door grated open noisily. Out in the hallway, forms moved erratically from side to side, throwing bizarre shadows into my world. I cringed backward, only partly in terror of renewed torture, mostly because my fear-filled eyes were painfully blinded by the raw, unfiltered glory of a smoky torch in the sconce across the passage.
“Ye’re of a certes as these be the ones ye’re wantin’?”
His harsh voice seared forever into my memory, the Bailiff stood before the door, visible from the waist down. I recognized his boots, the hem of his mailed shirt over its padded vest. A hammer with chisel dangled from one of his sword-callused hands. A hatchet hung from his belt.
Other figures, completely anonymous in their floor-length hooded robes, bent down nearly double to examine us, each in turn averting its hidden face as it did so, from the ghastly sight, from the vile stench of two once-human beings being slowly converted into piles of putrescence.
The rats skittered back into their niches.
The last of these hooded apparitions, in a dialect of Scavian that was almost unintelligible to me, spoke to both of us in a low sibilant crackle betraying not a hint of personality, or of gender, or even of humanity.
“You are the sky demons?”
Backlighted by the flickering torch outside, the vapor of its breath hung menacingly before my face within the frigid cell. I tried to look it straight in the face. Firelit shadows gave the impression of a brown-robed man, arms folded into opposing sleeves, faceless, terrifying.
“What is it you want from me now, torturer?” I managed to croak a question of my own in response. They were the first words I had spoken—besides Eleva’s name—in what seemed like centuries, “Yet another confession?”