The Worshippers and the Way coaaod-9 Read online

  While Hatch was sipping at his second cup of steaming coffee, Scorpio Fax entered. Fax was the Startrooper whom Hatch had recently seen feeding young Lucius Elikin. A sad and sorry history linked Hatch to Fax, for the Silver Emperor had once commanded Hatch to persuade Fax to murder his father, the infamous Impala Fax, the Butcher of Shintoto – and Hatch, recognizing the political necessities, had been obedient to the emperor's command.

  Fax tried to make eyecontact with Hatch, but Hatch pretended not to see him. Hatch almost scalded his throat by gulping down his over-hot coffee, then hurried off to his room, where he made a half-hearted effort to study MegaCommand tactics until it was time to report to Forum Three.

  When Hatch did take himself off to Forum Three, he found most of the Startroopers already settled on the steeply-banked benchseats which faced the silent lecture-size display screen. The benchseats were fronted by matching benchdesks, and some people had chess sets and similar arranged on those benchdesks. Lupus Lon Oliver was playing star chess with Shona, which surprised Hatch, who had not known that the Pang female had any knowledge of or taste for the game.

  Lupus was playing with the intense concentration of a small man who does not like to lose. Or that at least was how Hatch perceived the conflict. Asodo Hatch was possessed of the indelible conceit that large men (like himself) were good losers, whereas small men (like Lupus) were vicious in defeat. The validity of this belief is questionable, since Hatch never played chess at all, simply because he found losing to be intolerable.

  The Startroopers were gathering in Forum Three to receive their assignments for the next stage of the examinations which would determine who would become the Combat College instructor.

  Though only Hatch and Lupus were seriously in contention, all Startroopers were supposed to participate – but such universal participation was impossible because of the limited number of combat bays.

  When all were gathered, Forum Three's lecture-sized display screen came alive with the olive-skinned features of Paraban Senk, who addressed them with an unseemly cheerfulness.

  "Greetings, Startroopers," said Paraban Senk. "I hope we are all ready for this today's exercises. Today we have evasion exercises, which start soon and run through the day then through the night, finishing at dawn tomorrow."

  A big groan went up. Evasion drills were extremely unpopular, since they generally meant scrambling over spiky bits of rainstruck landscape without any weapons to stave off the howling pursuit of dogs, dorgis, and airmobile warriors.

  "Of course," said Senk, "we cannot put everyone through this exercise, since we have 29 Startoopers, and we only have seven functional combat bays."

  There were cheers.

  "Teams will be four-legged," said Senk, using the Stormforce idiom often employed to designate work in pairs. "We have the capacity to exercise six two-person teams, and accordingly this is what we will do. You will not be scored as individuals but as a team. Here are your pairings."

  Notebooks were produced.

  "Startrooper Shona."

  "Yo," said Shona, acknowledging her name.

  "Startrooper Shona. You will be paired with Startrooper Fax."

  At that, Fax bent to his notebook and wrote down the name of his partner, as if he might forget. Since his nervous breakdown, from which he had only recently recovered, Fax had been overcautious, reluctant to trust his own mental resources. There was no way that he could win the Combat College instructorship. And Shona – well, she was too relaxed about the whole thing.

  "Startrooper Echo," said Senk.

  Jeltisketh Echo, the inscrutable gray-skinned Janjuladoola Startrooper, indicated that he was listening.

  "You are paired with Startrooper Icon."

  The redskinned Hobart Icon, the good-natured athletic combatmaster who had the distinction of being the sole Ebrell Islander in the Combat College who did not belong to the Free Corps, signed his acknowledgement of the order.

  "Startrooper Hatch."

  Asodo Hatch stood a little straighter. For all that he claimed to hold the Combat College in contempt, it meant a lot to him to be referred to as a Startrooper. Nobody could live through so many years as a Combat Cadet without being pleased with promotion when it finally came.

  "Startrooper Hatch. You will be paired with Startrooper Oliver."

  Asodo Hatch and Lupus Lon Oliver exchanged glances, and each wished the glances were knives.

  With these assignments having been given out, the Startroopers made their way to the Combat Bays, there to enter the world of the illusion tanks. On the way, Scorpio Fax passed a not to Asodo Hatch. But Hatch, who had enough on his plate without worrying himself about whatever was worrying Fax, dropped the note unread amongst the steadily accumulating corridor trash, and strode on to meet his destiny.

  Chapter Eleven

  Illusion tanks: interactive brain stimulators used to train Combat Cadets in everything from riot control to transcosmic warfare. Unfortunately the tank curriculum has one lamentable deficiency: there is no instruction in hand-to-hand combat.

  However the tanks do teach Environmental Survival (everything from bushwacking through tropical jungle to living on open ice); Civic Emergency (everything from fire fighting to a Destabalization Emergency); vacuum combat (with special emphasis on the use of radiation weapons); Urban Conflict (starting with riot control, then building by way of Elementary Streetfighting to full-scale city wars involving nerve gas and nuclear munitions); and Aerospace (which involves everything from dueling with a singlefighter to commanding a Galactic Class MegaCommand Cruiser, the ultimate weapon in the realms of transcosmic warfare).

  As the computer-generated interactive illusions of the tanks have no actual physical existence, they must be recreated from moment to moment in the human brain. As soon as brain stimulation ceases, the illusion collapses.

  A designer's conceit holds the world of the illusion tanks to be subjectively no different from everyday reality, but in fact the constant stimulation of the brain gives rise to the phenomenon known as lyricism – that heightened awareness of surrounding physical phenomena which is consequent upon the constant renewal of the illusion.

  The life of the tanks is therefore more vivid, more real than reality, for in reality the eye grows weary and the skin forgets the very clothing it wears, and one so much forgets the truths of one's body that one can become so engrossed by the entertainments of the Eye of Delusions as to quite lose self-awareness.

  In the illusion tanks, one is always self-aware, always conscious of the truths of the body, of the reality of the flesh – even though the body one inhabits in the tanks is unreal, its truths mere conceits of advanced mind-manipulation.

  The hand implies the knife, and so -

  The rose creates the thorn, the thorn – The eye blinks wet, And wet with rainbow, wings the butterfly – And waits.

  So it was morning, and a morning unlike any other Hatch had ever known. First rose the ferocious white spark of an intolerably bright sun, a sun so fierce that Asodo Hatch and Lupus Lon Oliver had to shield their eyes against the blistering light. Then up from the sea there slowly lumbered a huge and swollen sun of torrid red, at which the brightwhite star snapped out of existence – a phenomenon Hatch found to be inexplicable unless that superlit luminary be presumed to be artificial.

  "Brothers in blood," observed Lupus, as the two men lay bathed in the senile bloodlight of the big red sun. Then yet another sun began to rise, this one duller yet, its color purple.

  "Your tutelary star," said Lupus.

  Hatch found in his weariness that he knew not the meaning of tutelary, and so was unsure whether he was being insulted, so pretended not to have heard.

  "Your sister could use such a star," said Lupus.

  "Doubtless," said Hatch, too tired to know whether Lupus was making sense or was babbling like a beggar.

  "But in her absence," said Lupus, "I'll serve."

  "You'll serve her well, I doubt that not," said Hatch, wishing indeed t
hat Penelope was happily consigned to Lupus, and no longer a problem for Hatch.

  "With your help," said Lupus. "My father as yet needs persuading."

  As Hatch made no answer to that, Lupus started digging into his over-stuffed pockets, searching for breakfast. What he came up with was survival rations of the type known to the Nexus as combast. The choice was between cheese and fish, the fish being a tube of salmon-colored paste. Hatch was not hungry and, in any case, would not eat such food except under the pressure of dire necessity.

  Lupus of course was an Ebrell Islander, and as far as Hatch was aware the Ebrell Islanders ate anything and everything, including each other on occasion. But amongst the religious injuctions which ruled the lives of the Frangoni there was one which said: Thou shalt not deform the Given.

  This had severe dietary consequences, for it meant that frog must be cooked as frog, fish as fish, flesh as flesh. It might be sliced, and sliced finely, but it could not be squashed, pulped or slurried. Such was the Frangoni way. And whatever doubts Hatch entertained about the might of the Great God Mokaragash, he had shed none of the inhibitions which his stomach had learnt in childhood. He found all combast rations repulsive, particularly the fish: the very thought of reducing a living animal to a pulped ooze then consuming the result made him shudder.

  In the distance, there was a dull explosion.

  "A little late," said Lupus, checking the survival-issue time-counter strapped to his wrist.

  "A little," agreed Hatch.

  In the course of their illusion-tank evasion exercise, the two men had managed to seize a reconnaissance vehicle. Resisting the temptation to escape in the thing – it was a target easy to track, find and destroy – they had rigged it to self-destruct at dawn.

  The echoes of that explosion were still dying away when there came a much larger rock-bang roar – a convulsive blast which made the ground rock. The sun blinked off, then on.

  Asodo Hatch and Lon Oliver looked at each other.

  "What was that?" said Lupus.

  "A glitch, maybe," said Hatch, dry-mouthed.

  He hoped it wasn't. When things went wrong with the programming of the illusion tanks, outright terror was often the result. But for the moment, everything looked normal, if a red sun in combination with a purple sun could be thought of as representing some kind of normality.

  Under the red sun and the purple sun, the red-skinned Ebrell Islander and the purple-skinned Frangoni warrior lay in the lizard-tongue heat. Lupus began sucking a small stone to appease his thirst. That made Hatch conscious of his own thirst. The sky was a vast heating plate, its color purple – the same as that of the big sun. Was there some scientific reason for the sky to be purple, or was its coloration a defect of the illusion? Or an unseemly joke perpetrated by Paraban Senk?

  Hatch wanted to sleep, but sleep was always difficult in the world of the illusion tanks, since the brain was constantly being artificially stimulated to maintain the illusion. As ever, the lyricism consequent upon that stimulation meant that Hatch saw everything with hallucinatory clarity, from the wrinkled skin over the knuckles of his right hand to a liquid seam of shining black ants coursing past that same organ – which the Frangoni ever call the killing hand.

  "So," said Lupus, "what did you do last night?"

  Hatch gathered that Lupus meant not the night of the illusion tanks through which they had just lived but the previous night in Dalar ken Halvar.

  "I was with my wife," said Hatch.

  "I've heard that she's dying," said Lupus.

  "It is so," acknowledged Hatch.

  "Then doubtless you'd like to spend more time with her," said Lupus.

  "I don't need persuading, if persuasion's your motive," said Hatch. "With revenue secured, I'd leave the Combat College tomorrow."

  "So what were you doing with your wife?" said Lupus. "Why weren't you working on my father?"

  "You over-estimate my talents," said Hatch. "Old man Gan, he's not the kind of man one works on. What am I supposed to do?

  Bluff him? Bribe him? Scare him with threats? Lupus, your father's a hard man. If he doesn't want you to have Penelope, why, there's nothing I can do about it."

  "So," said Lupus. "We're doomed to fight each other. You and I. Fight it out to the finish."

  "Not necessarily," said Hatch. "We…"

  "We what?"

  Hatch hesitated, not sure how Lupus would take this suggestion. Then he got it out:

  "We could kill him."

  "What!?" said Lupus.

  "Kill him," said Hatch. "Kill Gan Oliver. Your father's a hard man, but he's by no means immortal."

  "Hatch," said Lupus, "I'm warning you this. If my father dies, whatever the cause, I'll hold you responsible."

  "All right, all right," said Hatch, startled by the wrathfulness of the Ebrell Islander's response. "It was only a, an exploratory suggestion."

  "Exploratory! We're talking murder here!"

  "Speech is not action," said Hatch. "Why, many times I've – "

  "Don't joke with me, Hatch!"

  So saying, Lupus locked eyes with Hatch. Hatch, mature enough to concede a point of ego to the needs of diplomacy, broke eye contact. As he did so, he saw a blister of blue light rising over a knoll. He recognized it instantly as one of the hunterkillers of the Musorian Empire.

  "Split!" yelled Hatch, rolling away.

  Lupus rolled likewise, then joined Hatch in a downhill sprint. The two men fled, dodging and jinking in an effort to make themselves hard to hit. Hatch glanced at the survival-issue timecounter strapped to his wrist. It was almost time! Almost time!

  But the hunter-killer was almost upon them. There was no escaping it.

  Ahead was a sink-hole, a deep cleft in the ground. Hatch leapt across it. He landed hard, feet together, and ran on. Ahead was a slight rise, and beyond that – what? Lupus Lon Oliver outpaced Asodo Hatch and sprinted for the top of the rise.

  "Shit!" screamed Lupus, teetering on the rocks at the top of the rise. "It's a cliff!"

  A moment later, Hatch was level with Lupus, who was standing at the edge of a colossal drop. Rock fell sheer for a league or more to the blistering sunslash of the sea.

  The hunter-killer was behind them, and approaching fast.

  Hatch did not hesitate.

  Do or die!

  Hatch shoulder-slammed Lupus, slammed him over the edge of the cliff, then jumped after him. Lupus fell, screaming and flailing. Hatch dived as if in a parachute exercise. He spreadeagled his body, presenting maximum resistance to the air, thus slowing his fall. Below him, Lupus was tumbling helplessly, locked into a tumultous death-down spinfall.

  Hatch thought at him furiously:

  – Come on, Lupus! Break out of it!

  But this irrational attempt at telepathy was futile. Lupus fell in the tumult of his fear. Hatch squinted his eyes against the buffeting doorslam of the windrush sky. The sea was rushing toward him, hurtling upward with the dropspeed of his plunge, and Lupus was flailing still, would be dead in a moment, would be – A slapshock of cold dashed Hatch backwards. He had been thrown into a sitting position. He tried to straighten, to spreadeagle his body. He wrenched himself with such viciousness that he almost dislocated a dozen joints before he realized he was sitting in the initiation chair.

  He was out of the world of the illusion tanks.

  He was back in the Combat College.

  He was cold in the chair, his heart at idling speed, his body at rest. But a moment later, the fearshock battlecharge hit, and his heart slammed to a panic-sprint, his flesh flared with heat, his limbs shook, and nausea doubled him over.

  The combat bay's display screen filled with the olive-skinned features of Paraban Senk.

  "Congratulations," said Paraban Senk.

  Hatch straightened, slowly. Breathed out. Shuddered. Mastered himself, and said:

  "Thank you."

  "Mind you," said Paraban Senk, "your escape stratagem would have been futile had you been living through t
hat episode in the flesh of the fact."

  "Futile?" said Hatch. "Since when is escape futile?"

  "You would have died when you hit the sea," said Senk.

  "Ah," said Hatch, "but you have the concede the fact. I did extend my life by jumping over the cliff, even if only for moments."

  "Yes," said Senk. "But what's the use of those moments?"

  "It is written in the Book of Survival," said Hatch, "that a breath of life is still life, and that much can be done with a dying breath. You should know as much."

  "I do know," said Senk, evidencing amusement. "But of course my function is to make sure that you know."

  "So it is," said Hatch. "So it is."

  Then, being in no mood to endure Senk's bantering lecturing any longer, Hatch freed himself from the initiation chair and escaped to the corridor, where he found Lupus Lon Oliver. Despite the redskinned tint of his race, the Ebrell Islander was pale and sweaty.

  "Hatch, you bastard!" said Lupus, leaning against the creamcolored wall for support. "Only a Frangoni would be mad enough to pull a stunt like that."

  "My breeding I cannot help," said Hatch gravely. "I was born to the Wild Tribes, hence must live with wildness. Come on, let's get something to eat."

  "To eat?" said Lupus.

  "Yes, to eat," said Hatch. Then, maliciously: "Something nice and greasy. Oilfish in butterslime."

  "Hatch," said Lupus, irefully. "I'm warning you!"

  At which Hatch had mercy. Abandoning his attempts to talk Lupus's stomach into vomiting, Hatch left the shocked and shaken Ebrell Islander and set off for the cafeteria.

  Chapter Twelve

  Polk the Cash: a moneylender of Dalar ken Halvar who dwells in the commercial center of Actus Dorum, south of Cap Gargle and north of Cap Foz Para Lash. Onica, the youngest daughter born to Talanta and Asodo Hatch, has lately mortgaged herself to this dignitary in order to amplify the supply of opium available to her mother.

  So swords so screams so