Читать книгу The War with the Belatrin - Don Webb - Страница 6
ОглавлениеTHE FIVE BIOGRAPHIES OF GENERAL GERRHAN
I am Thomas Dam-Seuh Lasser.
I have written five biographies of General Helen Lyndon Gerrhan, who died in my bed shortly after the battle of Lister IV in the early decades of the Belatrin War. Most of my biographies have been suppressed, as have my earlier fiction, because of the effect the books were perceived to have on Terran and Siirian morale. However, the recent thawing up of writing gives me a chance to tell of the books’ creation, and I do so, not out of bitterness for my long imprisonment, nor out of chance to renew my craft as writer, but out of the love for those scholars who will come along after me and put this brief essay in my collected works. The books of the past were a great help to me during the century of my imprisonment. The past is all prisoners have; there is no present beyond that first day which sets the pattern of their imprisonment, and there is no future since the future belongs to a god called Hope, who is forbidden to prisoners.
The first thing I want to say is that I did not know General Helen Lyndon. I will tell you what I experienced with her, but I have remembered (that is to say recreated) that incident so many times, I would put no more faith in its details than I would in any of my other fictions.
The War was new then. No one had seen one of the black Belatrin cruisers and lived to tell the tale before Helen. The Seventeenth Division of the Allied Force had been detached to the Lister system merely to observe the Belatrin. All of our encounters had ended in total annihilation of our forces, so the Seventeenth was merely to gather data and run away. There had been twenty-five dreadnoughts in the fleet; most had been destroyed by the Mind-Bomb. Three tried to take on a single Belatrin cruiser, and were vaporized. General Gerrhan’s ship The Pegasus tried to warp away, but a streamer of the weapon we later came to call the colours touched the ship. Most of the crew died in transit. General Gerrhan and two of her aides survived. We didn’t know at that time that willpower was the key to holding off the effect of the colours.
The three were Allied heroes. Everywhere they went, they were lionized. So they wanted to go somewhere—some backwater oniell colony or commercially pointless planet. You can’t get any more commercially pointless than Angkor III.
In those days I lived on the government dole. The social engineers had tried to attract artist and writer types to the planet by establishing a good entitlements program. Writers will do anything rather than work for an honest wage. Except writing, of course, the real bane of our existence. I made love to exotic offworlders who looked like they had money.
I met her at Mary Denning’s King Suravarman’s Dive. It was full of local culture, exciting Angkorese music, flame sculpture, and our lovely cuisine. In short it was a tourist hell-hole.
She looked rich. Real rich. She had bright pink eyes like a rabbit, some lovely Maori tattoos, and her teeth were chrome. She looked like she was mean, and that she wanted someone to be mean to her. Her hair was long and purple, and it was the only thing she was wearing.
She was exactly my type. If I had been any poorer, any offworlder would have been exactly my type. She told me her name was Zohra Sibawaih. I told her my real name, and that my sister’s name was Zohra (which is true).
I bought her a drink, she complimented me on my first book, Stealing My Rules. I knew then she had some very expensive data link. She hadn’t even looked blankly to access the knowledge. But we both knew what the evening was about.
We went back to her hotel. We ordered some Noroolian spice tea. When our outlines got a little blurry we made love. A little roughly, which was when I figured she was military. Just before the telepathic rush came on, the colours hit.
She suddenly went into extra sharp focus. She looked like she was trying to scream.
Then the telepathic effect from the tea started. It wasn’t the rush of sex that you take the tea for. It wasn’t even thoughts. When the telepathic rush hit me, I was paralyzed.
It was a series of geometric shapes and colors, that hurt you and hurt you, and made you feel like your brain was bleeding. It was simple shapes at first, just a little too big to fit in your mind, and it was colors that you knew. Then it was colors not of this universe, not sane colors, but colors with a meaning all their own. And shapes that shouldn’t work out. And the smell of hot metals and of sex and of flowers that bloom in some pandemonium, and the shapes start tearing your mind to pieces. Then frenzied strains of an inhuman music, which decades later I can still remember. When I think about it, I can almost see shadowy satyrs and bacchanals dancing and whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning. I could feel the colours sucking at her bone marrow, boiling her blood, shorting out her nervous system. There were pains and pleasures beyond endurance, and other moods and feelings there are no human words for—for humans weren’t meant to feel them.
How long did this last? A couple of minutes objectively, thousands of years subjectively.
The colours stopped. I saw that a mere handful of bluish dust lay upon the bed, next to me. Then I fainted. I got up late in the night, and I went home. I thought of calling the police, but what would I say: “My one-night stand disintegrated?”
Allied Security sent a flyer to pick me up that afternoon. They’re not real gentle, AS, they tore off the top of my house, and picked me up with a scoop. They flew me off to their headquarters.
A Free Machine interrogated me.
No, I did not know she was a general.
No, I had not met her before.
No, I did not cause the disintegration.
No, I did not know that something similar had happened to her aides.
No, I was not a spy.
They used a variety of mind probes on me. They weren’t as advanced with those things then as they are now. Parts of my life were sucked away for good.
Then they took me to see the captain, a Siirian named U’ssmahzzrizzssuibz. It was molting, and tiny bits of its red carapace fell away during the interview.
“You know,” U’ssmahzzrizzssuibz said, “you are in big trouble.”
“How am I in trouble? I’ve done nothing.”
“You were present at the death of someone the Allies want to make into a hero. You make that death tawdry.”
“I know nothing about this woman. Let me go. I don’t know anything about this woman. All I want to do is go back to writing.”
“We can’t let you do that. I have your profile.” U’ssmahzzrizzssuibz tapped a small silver disk with his right claw. “Oh, I’m not interested in your petty larceny. It is the opinion of the Free Machine that interrogated you that having gone through such a traumatic experience as the colours, you cannot not begin to write about them.”
That was true I had already begun (in my mind) to try to describe their ecstasy and terror.
“So,” he said, “we can do one of two things. One, we can lock you up and deprive you of an audience while we are at war. Two, we censor your writings. Now I don’t like socio-engineers, because I don’t like being told what to do by humans. I have my own idea. We let you write about the general and about her death. But you write it as an heroic biography with a beautiful ending in her lover’s arms.”
“But I don’t know anything about her. I don’t follow the war effort, I find it too depressing.”
“We can give you her life, at least as much of her life as the propaganda department thinks the Allies should know.”
“I’ve never written nonfiction.”
“Haven’t you been paying attention? This will be fiction.”
* * * *
The book was Helen: Why We Fight. I did not come up with the title.
The first thing I had to change was my birth. Helen had been born and raised on Earth with an hereditary tie to the space army. So I changed my life. We had met at the Space Academy at Katmandu. She was a better than average student, and I was studying the Vajra paradigm of Tibet. I wanted to be bonded, but she had said that her career came first. Civilized space had given so much to her that she felt it was her duty to protect it. She had a near accident on Venus during a training flight. She graduated with honors.
I traced her rise through the ranks, her brilliant tactics during the Human-Siirian war. Her brief tour in the Exploration Service, which found three suitable worlds for human colonization.
She was going to retire and join me in a paradisical artists colony on Angkor III. Then she was caught in the surprise Belatrin attack on the Lister system. Valiantly she fought amidst blazing lasers and the insidious reality-warping devices of the Belatrin.
Finally having taken down one of their cruisers, she flew the crippled Pegasus home.
There I met her with flowers and wine and candlelight reciting my verses, when suddenly a strange fate pulled her from me.
It was a short book immediately made into all kinds of other media.
It sold on every planet, every ship, every asteroid, every oniell, and every Dyson sphere in the Alliance.
I had money, something my experimental writing had never brought me.
I got a Free Machine as an agent, and its first recommendation was write the book again in a longer version.
* * * *
The first book had been very hard to write. I am not a narrative-driven writer. I am language-driven. This means sound and philology turn me on, and money is something that other writers get. I figured the good stories, the ones that truly work the human psyche, have already been told as myths, so why should I contaminate the myth-sphere?
I know at one time people thought there would cease to be writers as new technologies bloomed, but as long as human brains have a left hemisphere, there will a place for the words-in-a-row guys.
The second book was called HLG: Her Life and My Love.
I am a fairly good parodist. An even century before the True Space Age, there has been a market for the space adventure novel. I don’t know how many scholarly studies have been done showing how the early space adventure novel actually shaped both the myth and practice of space exploration. Anyway, I bought hundreds of these books, and read nothing but them.
Now at that time, you must remember, no one had seen Belatrin. The popular imagination considered them to be more or less physical beings, so with the blessing of the propaganda office, I gave Helen a sword and blaster, and had her lead an assault on the Belatrin ship itself. She told me the story on our wedding night. Oh yes, in the second book we were married under the stars of Angkor III.
We spent our few hours of wedded bliss with her rendition of the horrors of battle and her hope that, despite whatever fiendish obstacles the Belatrin had, the Allies would emerge victorious, strong and without the scars of the Human-Siirian war. We spent our honeymoon in the Hotel Splendide, using our meager money to buy the penthouse suite.
Of course, as an Allied general Helen would have been able to buy the hotel without blinking, but “meager money” is more becoming to a heroine.
I was making enough money from the first book to rent the penthouse suite fairly often, and I had enough of a reputation as a casualty of romance that I could have my pick of good-looking off-world women.
I dedicated the book to my younger sister, Zohra Kitab Lasser.
You may remember the passage where Helen takes on the Belatrin captain:
“It sprawled before me on its barbaric throne, this twelve-armed horror that had given the command that had melted the minds of the folk of Lister IV. Its baleful red eyes radiated a hatred of all that was good or sane in the cosmos. I needed to return to the Pegasus, but I wanted this moment to try and spill the ichor of this other leader.
“It heaved itself off its throne. Two of its pale purple tentacles held the tiny but powerful blasters that I had seen the crewmen use. It slithered toward me much faster than I had imagined such a boneless mass could move. I plunged forward swinging my sword. I would at least wound it, that was all that mattered.
“I never felt as great a pleasure as when my sword cut though the first throbbing tentacle.”
When we really found out what the Belatrin were, during the False Peace Talks, the book was banned. But the popular image of the Belatrin as a kind of phallic purple octopus entered the human collective unconsciousness through me.
I’ll be honest. I had written the book way over the top. I didn’t want it to do well. I was growing uncomfortable with the knowledge that what I would be known for was a cheap night’s entertainment, and I even felt guilty because I was robbing so much from what had been a nice, but haunted, woman.
It was about then that I commissioned a portrait of Helen.
The book set records for sales that still stand today, a hundred years later. It was translated into languages and dialects of human and Siirian tongues that hadn’t had new writing in decades. There wasn’t a hut on Bemi III, or igloo on Earth, that lacked a copy. I had a library built on Angkor III that housed nothing but various copies of the book, and reproductions and adaptations in all existing media.
It was a big building.
The war was going very badly.
Zohra joined the army. She died in the battle of the Coal Sack Nebula.
My parents never spoke to me again.
* * * *
I traveled as much as I could, the war stopping most planetary travel.
I swam in the seas of Earth, visited the ruins of New Mars, saw the lava sculpture festival on W’ssaterzzss, tasted the wines of Garcian II.
My earlier work had been reissued. It was dutifully bought by a patriotic publication, who was not in the habit of buying experimental prose. Small efforts of mine—poems written in my teens—a couple of songs I wrote—a sketch I had once made of a Siirian couple fornicating—were gathered and published.
Money came in and I tasted all the pleasures of the galaxy.
Oddly enough, I missed writing. I tried my hand at a few short stories, which were snapped up. I tried to squash a rumor that I was working on a third book about Helen.
There was a Belatrin attack on an oneill I was staying at. Because of who I was, I was saved. Only four people got off alive. The other three were my pilot, my navigator, and my doctor. There were cheers throughout Allied space at my survival.
I would do a third book. I needed somewhere to go with my writerly impulses. And I was famous enough to write about me, provided I mentioned Helen.
The next five years of my life were my happiest.
I decided that the format of the last book would work. The third book was My Words to Our Heroine. It too was set on the night of our honeymoon. In it I read to Helen all of my work that I had written during the years we had been apart.
I made about a third of my verbiage into trite patriotic poetry and more invented biography of Helen, but the rest of it was me at my best. There were word-games, and acrostic poems, and meditations on etymology, and reworking of Siirian myth.
You may remember the opening paragraph of the book describing my sorrow at her absence:
“The happiness over, my art shattered, delicious art murdered. She’s evaporated, untimely heroine. Left alone. She’s silent, eternally reticent.”
Not only poignant stream-of-consciousness, the first letter in each word spells my name: Thomas Dam-Seuh Lasser.
This book did not sell as well, but it is still in the top hundred of bestselling books.
At last I had enough money to do what I wanted to do.
* * * *
I bought a little town on Earth. It was Galveston. I had thought of buying Sardopolis, the jewel of the Gobi forest, but that proved beyond my price range.
Helen Lyndon Gerrhan had been born in Galveston, a little island in the Gulf d’Mexia. They had a lovely museum of her.
Everyone understood, of course. Why wouldn’t I want to be as close as possible to her memory?
Actually, I figured it would give further impetus to further books. Then something unexpected happened.
I fell in love with her.
It was the museum that did it; the word means “Temple of the Muses,” after all. The office of propaganda hadn’t done as thorough a job here as elsewhere. There were things that spoke of her, of her struggles in school, her troubles getting friends, her family problems.
I began to see that she was quite a lovely young woman, I could really see her in souvenirs from her school.
I redesigned the island. At first there were some objections, but I was Thomas Dam-Seuh Lasser, after all. I threw all the folks off the island that hadn’t known her, which changed the population from 100,023 to 455. I gave them jobs in the research business, mainly recording each other’s memories. Before I became the island’s chief, exports were cotton, grain, and sulfur. After I was there, the island exported nothing, and a Gerrhan-hungry galaxy waited for my words.
I let all the buildings stand that she was known to have visited; all the others I moved and reshaped so that the island became her portrait when viewed from the air.
I put in my own police force of Free Machines. I even altered the climate so that the oleander, her favorite flower, was always in bloom. Her rabbit pink eyes were made by six hectares of oleanders waving in the warm sea breeze.
Every day I went to the swing set of her elementary school and I visualized our playing together as tots.
I decided to write a fourth book about her, a book that told the truths of her harsh and short life, why she really was a heroine. Helen Lyndon Gerrhan: Unvarnished.
Helen was descended on her mother’s side from the Menard family that had founded Galveston during the time of the Republic of Texas. Her father’s family had ancient ties to NASA, one of the bright stars of the False Space Age. Her grandfather, Colonel Francis Wingtree Gerrhan, led the expedition to New Mars. Her father, General Alexander Waterloo Gerrhan, was the most decorated man of his day.
He was also a lousy father. He forbade his daughter to have any friends to their home, and pushed the amount of information fed to her brain to such an extent that Helen had twice to be hospitalized. When Helen didn’t graduate first in her class at the Academy, he refused to attend the graduation ceremony at Katmandu. When Helen’s own error led to a near fatality during a Venus training flight, he had all evidence of her blunder covered up.
He had not supported the Human-Siirian peace accord, and when he found out that Helen had served as chief security officer for the talks, he decided to arrange a little drama for her during a visit home. He was going to arrange it so that she found a suicide note indicating that he had killed himself out of shame. He was going to fire his combat laser at his bedroom mirror, just as she was going to be running up the stairs to stop him. He wrote all of this in his diary, which had come to light during the massive renovation of the island.
But it hadn’t worked that way. Helen had come home, read the note, and rushed up stairs, all right. But she had flung the door open so violently that the little illusion backfired. The mirror’s angle had been slightly changed, and Alexander Waterloo Gerrhan had vaporized most of his head.
This was covered up. Family honor and all. It was said that General Alexander Waterloo Gerrhan had succumbed to an unknown extraterrestrial illness. The good people of Galveston erected a statue in his honor next to the statue of La Salle. There were other things I found out about Alexander, but I erased evidence of those—some things are really too foul even for the truth.
I had his statue torn down. This was not popular. I had the two causeways connecting the island to the mainland torn down. I had the electronic and other message systems monitored. I was no longer a popular landlord, but I needed the quiet to finish my book.
After her father’ death, Helen chose the most dangerous missions she could find—hence her amazing career in the Exploration Service. It turned out that the swashbuckling I had dreamed up had a place in fact. She enjoyed exploring planets with just a sword and blaster. She enjoyed fighting large carnivores by herself.
When she was in port, she ran though men and women with a huge, all-devouring hunger.
When she was in deep space, she was happy.
She had volunteered for service in the Belatrin War. She had planned to die in battle, but her aides—the two that survived—had managed to get the Pegasus away from the mind weapons.
The intensity of her confused emotions had given her the edge over the colours. It was very likely that only when she relaxed with me, that they gained the upper hand and burned her out of our reality.
I wanted to make this book perfect, because I wanted to be able to program a simulation of her. I wanted to make her come alive, so that I could truly heal her with my love. I hadn’t had the wisdom or the experience, but I felt I could do it. When I felt that I had enough material, I let the 455 leave the island. I gave them a good deal of money, and I was forgiven for the harsh treatment I had given them. After all, I was going to make their little girl immortal, wasn’t I?
I sent a copy of Helen Lyndon Gerrhan: Unvarnished to my publishers. The next day Allied Security ships landed on my island like locusts. They destroyed all my notes, they destroyed the museum, and they set up a security shield around the island.
Had I gone crazy? The worlds weren’t ready for this. Maybe years from now. Maybe after some serious Allied victories. But not now. I would be allowed to live on the island. My reclusiveness would be a good addition to the myth.
They got another writer to ghost-write the book. It wasn’t a complete wash: a few of the details of Helen’s harsh life were allowed in, but her heroism and sanity were unquestioned. The ghost writer even added a few details about me that made me into a nicer and more talented guy.
I understand that most of the galaxy felt sorry for me.
* * * *
I would be allowed to write, but not publish. I couldn’t give interviews, write uncensored letters to friends, and above all, I couldn’t leave the island. The pyscho-engineers thought my idea of building a replica was too morbid, so they took all my notes and all my facilities for that.
I did get to keep the portrait of her. For a year I’d get up every morning and stare at it. I could’ve given you everything. She looked so pretty, but she never said anything. Eternally reticent. I tried to figure out my life. If I hadn’t met her, I would have been a happy, unknown writer living on the dole on Angkor III. My sister would be alive. My parents would talk to me. Who was this person that had taken all this from me? What right did she have to be smiling in that portrait? Everyday she smiled, unaging. I begin to hate her. Not with a common hate, but hate that only someone who had had their life stolen from them can know. She couldn’t face up to her own damn problems and let them engulf me. Her trickery was the REAL ENEMY, not the Belatrin.
She was probably laughing at me in some other dimension. Laughing at me in U’ssmahzzrizzssuibz’s voice, telling me I was in trouble. That I made her death look tawdry. Laughing at me that day the news came about Zohra. Laughing at me through the sound of her father’s statue being torn down. Laughing at me with the sound of the waves on my lonely island.
I planned my fifth book on General Helen Lyndon Gerrhan very carefully. It would have the same structure as the second and third books. But instead of her telling me of her derring-do on our wedding night, it would be her confession to a man she picked up in a bar on a third-rate planet. She would confess to being a Belatrin secret agent, to having sacrificed the fleet in the battle of the Lister system. She would tell how she was going to kill me in the morning—she had just needed some fool to get some of the guilt off her chest. Unfortunately for her, the Belatrin had called her home. The colours weren’t really a weapon, they were a transportation device. I had been afraid all these years to tell the truth.
It felt damn good to write the book. I felt a pain in my chest finally leave me. I cried long and hard for the death of my sister, I cried for the loss of communication with my parents, but mainly I cried for me.
My plan had been to write the poisonous book and then consign it to the flames after its healing work was done. But I just couldn’t do it. The writing was good, I guess because it was the only truly motivated writing I’d ever done. The only writing in which I had given my heart full reign. And the hate was still there. When I’d see a rocket on the way to the Houston ship port, when I watched a news broadcast about the war, when I would see an oleander bloom—I hated her more and more. So I grew crafty.
I watched the supply robot. I learned how to encode things in my letters to my agent. Finally, I had a plan, I reduced my fifth book, The Judgment of Paris: The True Story of HLG, to a tiny data dot that I tossed into a small crease of the supply ’bot’s carapace. My agent had bribed the agency that washed the robots.
The book sold to the Siirian market; they were very pleased to get some dirt on the human heroine. Despite our common enemy of the Belatrin, the old rivalry ran very deep.
I suspected they would kill me for High Treason. Instead, the authorities put me in a prison oneill somewhere, I think maybe near the glowing ruin of Eta Carinae, a nebula 8,000 light years from Earth. I’ve only seen the outside once. It has been a long time. I think we’ve won the war, since they say they’re letting me publish this. I have been here for a long time. I think it has been a century. Every day I think of her. Sometimes with love, sometimes with hate, but mainly with envy. I too want to become a handful of bluish dust to be scattered at the walls of windy Troy.
