Гордон Диксон - Soldier, Ask Not

“But now you can’t wait to stop up the other one, can you, Tam?” she said a little bitterly. “All right—tell me something.” She picked up a petal fallen from one of the flowers behind her and tossed it onto the still waters of the pool, where it floated like some fragile yellow boat. “Have you gotten in touch with your sister?”

Her words crashed in upon me like a bar of iron. All the matter of Eileen and Dave, and Dave’s death after I had promised Eileen to keep him safe, came swarming back on me. I found myself on my feet without knowing how I had gotten there, and a cold sweat had sprung out all over me.

“I haven’t been able—” I started to answer; but my voice failed me. It strangled itself in the tightness of my throat and I stood face to face in my own soul with the knowledge of my own cowardice.

” They’ve notified her!” I shouted, turning furiously on Lisa where she still sat watching up at me. “The Cassidan authorities will have told her all about it! What’s the matter—don’t you think she knows what happened to Dave?”

But Lisa said nothing. She only sat, looking up at me. Then I realized that she would go on saying nothing. No more than the Exotics who had trained her almost from the cradle would she tell me what to do.

But she did not have to. The Devil had been raised again in my soul; and he stood, laughing on the far side of a river of glowing coals, daring me to come over and tangle with him. And neither man nor Devil has ever challenged me in vain.

I turned from Lisa, and I went.

As a full member of the Guild, I no longer had to produce an assignment as a reason for drawing travel money. The currency between worlds was knowledge and skills wrapped up in the human packages that conveyed these things. In the same way, a credit easily convertible into this currency was the information collected and transferred by the skilled Communications people of the Interstellar News Guild—which was no less necessary to the individual worlds between the stars. So the Guild was not poor; and the two hundred or so full members had funds to draw upon on each one of the sixteen worlds that might have made a government leader envious.

The curious result of which in my case, I discovered, was that money as such ceased to have any meaning for me. In that corner of my mind which before this had concerned itself with spendables, there was now a void—and rushing in to fill that void, it seemed, through the long flight from Kultis to Cassida, were memories. Memories of Eileen.

I had not thought that she had been so important a part of my young life, both before our parents’ death, and especially after. But now, as our space ship shifted, and paused, and shifted again between the stars, moments and scenes came thronging to my mind as I sat alone in my first-class compartment. Or for that matter, still alone in the lounge, for I was in no mood for company.

They were not dramatic memories. They were recollections of gifts she had given me on this birthday or that. They were moments in which she had helped me to bear up under the unendurable empty pressure of Mathias upon my soul. There were unhappy moments of her own that I recalled now as well, that I now realized had been unhappy and lonely, but that I had not understood at the time, because of being so bound up in my own unhappiness. Suddenly it came to me that I could remember any number of times when she had ignored her own troubles to do something about mine; and never—there was no single instance I could recall—had I ever forgotten mine even to consider hers.

As all this came back to me, my very guts shrank up into a cold, hard knot of guilt and unhappiness. I tried between one set of shifts to see if I could not drink the memories away. But I found I had no taste either for the liquor or for that as a way out.

And so I came to Cassida.

A poorer, smaller planetary counterpart of Newton, with whom it shared a double-sun system, Cassida lacked the other world’s academic link with and consequently the rarefied supply of scientific and mathematical minds that had made the earlier-settled world of Newton a rich one. From Cassida’s capital-city spaceport of Moro, I took a shuttle flight to Alban, the Newton-sponsored University City where Dave had been studying shift mechanics, and where both he and Eileen had held supportive jobs while he did so.

It was an efficient ant-hill of a city on various levels. Not that there had been any lack of land on which to build it, but because most of it had been built by Newtonian credit; and the building method most economical of that credit had been one that clustered all necessary quarters together in the smallest practical space.

I picked up a direction rod at the shuttleport and set it for the address Eileen had given me in that one letter received the morning of Dave’s death. It pointed me the way through a series of vertical and horizontal tubes and passageways to a housing-complex unit that was above ground level—but that was about the best you could say for it.

As I turned into the final hallway that led to the door of the address I hunted, for the first time the true emotion that had kept me from even consciously thinking of Eileen, until Lisa recalled her directly to my attention, began to boil up in me. The scene in the forest clearing on New Earth rose again around me as vividly as a nightmare; and fear and rage began to burn in me like a fever.

For a moment I faltered—I almost stopped. But then the momentum I had built up by the long voyage this far carried me on to the doorway and I sounded the doorcall.

There was a second’s eternity of waiting. Then the door opened and a middle-aged woman’s face looked out. I stared down into it in shock, for it was not the face of my sister.

“Eileen …” I stammered. “I mean—Mrs. David Hall? Isn’t she here?” Then I remembered that this woman could not know me. “I’m her brother—from Earth. Newsman Tam Olyn.”

I was wearing cape and beret, of course, and in a way this was passport enough. But for the moment I had forgotten all about it. I remembered then as the woman fluttered a bit. She had probably never before seen a member of the Guild in the actual flesh.

“Why, she’s moved,” the woman said. “This place was too big for her alone. She’s down a few levels and north of here. Just a minute, I’ll get you her number.”

She darted away. I heard her talking to a male voice for a moment, and then she came back with a slip of paper.

“Here,” she said a little breathlessly. “I wrote it down for you. You go right along this corridor—oh, I see you’ve got a direction rod. Just set it then. It’s not far.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Not at all. We’re glad to—well, I mustn’t keep you, I suppose,” she said, for I was already beginning to turn away. “Glad to be of service. Goodbye. ”

“Good-bye,” I muttered. I was moving off down the corridor resetting the direction rod. It led me away and down and the door I finally pressed the call button on was well below ground level.

There was a longer wait this time. Then, at last, the door slid back—and my sister stood there.

“Tam,” she said.

She did not seem to have changed at all. There was no sign of change or grief upon her, and my mind leaped suddenly with hope. But when she simply continued to stand there, looking at me, the hope sank once more. I could do nothing but wait. I stood there also.

“Come in,” she said finally, but without much change in tone. She stood aside and I walked in. The door slid closed behind me.

I looked around, shocked out of my emotion for the moment by what I saw. The gray-draped room was no bigger than the first-class compartment I had occupied on the spaceship coming there.