Barrington Bayley - The Zen Gun

She needed to reach a town of some kind before she could get proper bearings and find out what to do next. The ape was right: it was probably better to have company, especially now she was unarmed.

“All right,” she sighed, “I’ll stay. But don’t get any ideas, ape.”

She helped gather more firewood for the night, then settled down, taking care to put a piece of ground between herself and the others—especially Pout. The repulsiveness of the creature was coming home to her, as she watched him prowl around the camp, and saw how the others cringed in his presence, all apart from the boy, that was.

Before falling asleep, she spent some while staring at the sky. This planet’s sky was clear, and the stars shone fairly brightly. She thought of the battle that had taken place there, in space’s vastness, and in which she had taken part. It all seemed so remote from here.

She didn’t even know this planet’s name, she reminded herself. What did it matter? There were so many planets. Suddenly she felt very, very tired (she had been awake about forty hours), and her eyes closed.

For Pout, too, sleep was preluded by daydreams. He thought about the girl not far away. He would like to be able to fondle such a girl, to prod with his fingers where the zen stitches prodded. And so he would, he promised himself.

His little band was growing, he told himself warmly. All thanks to the zen gun. It wasn’t just what it could do to maim and kill, he realised. It was its mental ability. While he had the gun it seemed to magnify his presence; people respected him.

His chief hold over his followers, however, was still fear. He had deliberately refrained from instilling that fear in the girl—for tonight. Pout had an instinctive understanding of the skill of dominance: first the girl had to grow used to him, to develop her own feelings for him, for or against. That way the relationship, when it came, would be binding.

That would be when he showed her that the zen gun had a facility for personalised targets. Once a target had been registered, it could be invoked any time. The target could not hide. Anywhere it was—anywhere on this planet, anyway—Pout had only to think of it and press the trigger stud. The stitch beam would go glowing out, wavering in the air, round corners, to anywhere in the world, to where that person was. He would prove it to her with one of the others, would send him half a mile away and fire while aiming in the other direction, so she could see the electric stitches bend around and find their mark.

Then he would register her and use the gun on her in the same way, would take his pleasure for a while, in making her suffer.

Then she would be his.

In the morning Hesper woke by the embers of the fire, rose and stretched. The air was slightly misty, the sun (a yellow sun, like her own at home) about twenty degrees off the horizon.

After weeks of being cooped up in the police cruiser and breathing its stale air, the freshness of the day was invigorating. She began to feel cheerful, a contrast to her mood of the night before. Lacey blew on the embers, adding dried grass and bleached wood. The fire started, and he began to cook a long-eared quadruped he had been saving for breakfast.

Pout squatted on the ground, watching the proceedings and blinking soporifically. He looked so pathetic Hesper felt she could have taken her scangun off him at any moment, but she did not try it. It had already become clear Pout was not as helpless as he looked.

The kosho did not seem to have moved a finger since she had seen him the night before. Still he sat cross-legged, spine erect, clad in all his accoutrements. The effect was weird. Curious, Hesper left the group and walked slowly towards him.

Sinbiane appeared by her side, strolling along with her. “Lady, what were you doing in space?”

She stopped, looking down at him. “Fighting a war,” she said. “Escoria has rebelled against the Empire. Didn’t you know?”

Wonderingly he shook his head. “So is Escoria free from the Empire now, lady?”

“No. We lost. The Simplex knows what will happen now.”

“It won’t make much difference here on Earth, lady.”

Hesper stepped closer to the kosho and stared at him in fascination. His eyes were closed, as she presumed they had been since she arrived. The bony cast of his face was accentuated by the way his shiny black hair was swept back and tied in a bun at the back of his head. It was like looking at a statue.

But what was really striking was his collection of weapons, arranged all over the harness he wore over his simple white gown. At his waist, stretched out now along the ground, was a mortar tube which she recognised as capable of throwing a bomb a good few miles. On his back was a whole rack of rifles whose muzzles projected above the back of his head like railings (this puzzled her a little: she would have expected them to be carried stocks uppermost). She was also amused to see, half-hidden beneath the rifles, the flat shape of a curved sword scabbard.

At chest, belly and thighs he carried an armoury of smaller weapons, grenades, bombs, ammunition pouches and fletched hand-thrown darts. Hesper had never seen, even imagined, such a warrior.

“Why does he stay like that?” she murmured to Sinbiane.

“Is he asleep?”

“No, lady, he is not asleep. He has depersonalised his consciousness.”

“What does that mean?”

“It is a state of perfect repose, lady, even deeper than sleep. But he is not oblivious.”

“He’s still aware of his surroundings, then?”

“Only as you are aware of your little toe, lady.”

It was some sort of trance state, Hesper decided. “Does he stay like that all the time?” she asked.

“Whenever he does not need to act, lady. ‘Between actions, timeless being.’ I can do it too, but uncle says boys should stay active.”

“Uncle?”

“This is my uncle, I may be a kosho one day.”

“If koshos are such wonderful warriors,” Hesper said bitterly, her voice rising, “why don’t they fight with us against the Empire?”

“A kosho is a perfect individual, lady. He does not fight for causes. He fights because every act is a conflict with nature.”

“What?” This mystical talk, especially coming from someone so young, confused and annoyed her. “Then why is he a camp follower of— that? ” She jerked her thumb to indicate Pout. “Does the ape have him screwed down too?”

“He is beholden to the chimera, lady, that is true.”

“Just what is it about that creature?”

The boy did not answer for a moment. He seemed to be hesitating over something. “Lady,” he said suddenly, “was it your battle that interfered with the moon?”

“Moon? What moon?”

“We have a moon here, lady. I have lived on Earth all my life and it has always been the same size—about the size of the sun. Its phases have always been regular too. But lately something had been going wrong. First, a few weeks ago, it shrank to only half its proper diameter. Then it started growing. The night before last it was about ten times as large as the sun; last night it was more like twenty time. It isn’t following its proper cycle, either.”

She did recall a satellite, an unusually large one for the mass of the planet, registering on her egg’s screen in the last few seconds of her approach. It had seemed disproportionately close to its primary, at that.

She hadn’t seen it since landing. Presumably it was on the other side of the planet from the sun at present, only appearing at night when she had been asleep.

She frowned. The boy was talking nonsense, of course. He had either been dreaming or he didn’t understand the satellite’s orbit.