Hugh Cook: The Worshippers and the Way

"Carcinogens?" said Lupus. "Is that all?"

"Environmental exposure threatens long-term health degradation," said the door.

Lupus did not laugh. Did not even smile. In the days of his adolescence, he had sometimes had difficulty in taking illusion- tank scenarios seriously. The earnestness of machines such as the singlefighter's door had struck him as being risible. But these days he took his training very seriously, for what happened in these tanks would have consequences in the real world.

The murder of Hiji Hanojo, the killing which had taken place just over two years previously, had opened up the possibility that Lupus Lon Oliver might be able to win the instructorship of the Combat College. In just under a year, he would face the terminal examinations which would decide whether he succeeded in that ambition – or was expelled from the Combat College forever. There was only the one instructor's position. And to win it, Lupus would have to defeat Asodo Hatch in combat in the illusion tanks. Lupus addressed himself to the door.

"Priority over-ride," said Lupus, again in the tone of Command. "Door. Open."

"You wish me to open?" said the door.

"Confirmed," said Lupus.

"I refuse," said the door. "In my judgment there is no combat justification for the contemplated adverse environmental exposure."

Lupus was taken aback. He had often had arguments with the door of a singlefighter, but never before had he had one refuse point blank to do his bidding.

"You will open," said Lupus, "or I will eject from this singlefighter."

"Then you will probably die," said the door smugly. "Ejection from a grounded singlefighter carries a high risk of death."

In exasperation, Lupus grabbed the shipkill lever and wrenched hard, thus destroying the ship's mainbrain, wrecking its power supply and killing the door and every other utility. With that, the manual controls became operative. Lupus grappled with the controls, then threw open the singlefighter's single gullwing door.

Hot air washed into the singlefigher.

Lupus sat in his seat, absorbing the heat, listening, watching, waiting. Waiting for something to happen. The air was curiously scented with the unmistakable smell of hashish. Now where could that possibly be coming from? There was no plant life anywhere in evidence – only a lowslung landscape of uninspiring red dust warped into a series of unimpressive undulations. With difficulty, Lupus clambered out of the cramped confines of the singlefighter and jumped down to the desert. He landed hard. He staggered, almost fell, then recovered his balance.

"Wah!" he said.

He had landed so clumsily that he had just about wrecked one of his ankles. The spaceway heroes did it so much more neatly on the entertainments screened by the Eye of Delusion. But this was no entertainment. This was combat training, in which one could get very severely hurt.

How bad was it?

Lupus took an experimental step.

Not so bad, but even so, he was minded to abort the training sequence right then and there.

But he had his pride. He was of the Free Corps, and thus he believed in the supremacy of the mind over the body. So, though he grimaced with the pain, he forced himself to walk across the alien desert to the charred wreckage of the enemy he had shot down. Besides, he really did want to see. He always inspected the wreckage if it was at all possible. He wanted proof positive of his glory, and liked it best if there were bodies in the wreck: charred corpses with the skin sloughed off and the lips stretched back in a death-rictus.

Today there was indeed a corpse in the wreckage, but it was too badly burnt to be distinguishable as human. Lupus sniffed. The transient smell of hashish was gone. Instead, he smelt desert dust, melted synthetics, charred hair. He indulged himself in a flight of imagination, pretending that the corpse which lay there at his mercy was the dead flesh of the Frangoni warrior Asodo Hatch.

For the last two years, Lupus had lived with a certain fear of the Frangoni warrior, since it had for that long been clear that ultimately Lupus would have to fight Hatch for the instructorship of the Combat College. While Lupus had youth on his side, Hatch had the battleground training in the fact-of-the- flesh. Asodo Hatch had killed men face to face, eye to eye, blade to blade, and that made him an object of jealous awe to Lupus Lon Oliver.

The Frangoni warrior Asodo Hatch had gone to war in the fact- of-the-flesh because he was a slave of Plandruk Qinplaqus, the Silver Emperor who ruled Dalar ken Halvar. Accordingly, under the terms of a long-standing treaty between the Silver Emperor and the Combat College, Hatch had left the Combat College at the age of 18, and had then soldiered for the Empire for seven years before returning to the College to resume his studies.

Since Lupus Lon Oliver was a freeborn Ebrell Islander, he had never had to undertake such military service, so now, as the two men entered upon their last year in the Combat College, Asodo Hatch was seven years older than Lupus – Hatch being aged 33 to Lupus's 26.

Hatch was training with ferocity, and Lupus knew that the Frangoni warrior would fight fiercely for the instructorship in a year's time. But there was every possibility that trouble would arise between them before then. What, for example, would Hatch do when he at last discovered the secret of Lupus's lust? Or did he know of that lust already? The Frangoni were so intrinsically inscrutable that it was impossible to say.

"But at least," said Lupus to himself, "at least I'm winning for the moment."

He wiped the sweat from his forehead. The wreckage, the corpse, the buckled reddust desert – he had exhausted his interest in it. It was time to undertake the painful business of walking back to his singlefighter. There was no reason for him to do any such thing, since he could abort the training sequence from where he was, but he always walked back. It was his ritual. His private concession to the age-old human need to work protective magic.

As Lupus began the walk back to the singlefighter, he heard a mechanical drone, sounding quite loud in the desert where there was scarcely any sound but for his own breathing and the click of cooling metal. He stopped. He looked around warily. A hover vehicle was approaching. It was coming on too fast for him to run away. Still, he was armed.

The vehicle halted a stone's throw distant. Its brightsign surface was garbled with logos, amongst which Lupus saw a fleshpink vulva, a grinning orange sun, a dolphin spouting orangejuice, and a sign in Nexus script which identified the vehicle as the property of an organization known as Happy Hunting Tours.

As Lupus watched, the vehicle decanted a dozen tourists. They were dressed in kinetiscope, a fun-fashion material for which there had been a Nexus fad some twenty millennia previously. They began to take photographs.

"Hey!" said Lupus.

Nobody answered him. It was almost as if he didn't exist. He unholstered his sidearm, and automatically checked the charge in its corrosion cells, just as he had done ten thousand times on the shooting range. He leveled the weapon… hesitated… then gunned down one of the tourists. The tourist thrashed to fireball and kicked down, jerked, smoked, then lay still.

The others did not turn a hair, but continued to take photographs.

Annoyed by this lack of reaction, Lupus shot the rest. One by one he gunned them down. Once all had been killed, they each and every one of them turned – simultaneously and without warning – into winged creatures which ascended into the sky, where each transformed itself into an egg. The eggs hung in the sky, pulsing with blue light.

They grew swiftly bigger.

Each of the skyhanging eggs abruptly sprouted a long orange tail. The tails stretched taut and began to vibrate, giving off a keening music.