Hal Colebatch - The Man-Kzin Wars 07

India, Northwest Frontier, 1878

“Lie still. Rest,” the doctor told him. “You're not recovered yet.”

“Lie still? And listen to that ?”

The wind brought to the field hospital the sounds of an intermittent drumfire from the barren, snow-topped hills to the north, the flat thud-thud of screw-guns and the thorns-in-fire crackle of distant musketry.

“Rest, I say. You're out of this one, Captain Vaughn.”

“I've had enough. Dreams. Sickness. Delirium.”

The sick man swung his legs to the floor and rose to his feet. He took a half dozen steps, and the doctor caught him as he fell.

A punkah coolie took part of the emaciated soldier's weight and they helped him back to the bed.

“I'll make a bargain with you: When you can get as far as the latrine without help you can try leading your squadrons in the mountains. Not before.”

“I just feel so… useless lying here. Those are my men.”

“If it's any consolation to you, the cavalry have been resting for the last week: It's work for mules and infantry up there. And if it's any further consolation, I had you marked off for dead a week ago. You and your friends.”

The sick man smiled weakly. “I don't suppose my kit would have fetched much. There must have been a few auctions in the mess lately.”

“It hasn't been too bad. Old Bindon's cautious with men's lives on punitive expeditions. Your tigerskin would have fetched something though… here, steady on!”

The doctor held the sick man's head as a violent retching shook him. Then, as he recovered, Vaughn raised his hand to the part of his scalp the doctor had held and gasped, “My head! What's happened?”

“I suppose I can show you.” The doctor held up a mirror.

“Oh, my God!”

“Curlewis and Maclean are the same. And that Afridi devil of yours. But you're all alive. It was blood you were spewing a week ago, though you were in no condition to notice.” The doctor held a glass of water to the captain's lips, steadying his trembling as he drank. “I must go. Rest, I say.”

“Where is the skin?”

“Salted. The gomashta 's got it. I advanced him a couple of rupees.” He rose at the sounds he had been waiting for: hooves and the approaching wheels of ambulance carts from the direction of Dirragha.

Captain Vaughn sank back exhausted. He closed his eyes and saw again, hanging in blackness, the great cat's head with its blazing gold and violet eyes and batwing ears, the interlocking fangs protruding beyond the lips, the great cat they called his tiger-man. The dark cave, the rockets…

The wounded were being brought from the carts. The unmistakable sounds recalled him from his own visions to reality, and the work that had been done that day. At the tail end of the Afghan Campaign, a force of no less than five thousand men was fighting to pacify these barren hills, with all that that implied in terms of death and wounds. Besides that, his own recent moment was nothing at all. But he was not fully clearheaded yet. The doctor could say what he liked, but at that moment the feeling of his weakness and uselessness oppressed him. He felt ashamed.

“They will forget you and me,” he whispered to the image of his enemy. “But they will not forget the Dirragha Expeditionary Force.”

Adding these statements together he was, at best, only partly correct.

Sir Bors had been taken away, so had Sir Kay, and Sir Launcelot and Lady May and Lady Helen and the rest. It was a routine matter, and the 'doc would soon be logging its report.

When they emerged from memory-wipe, the members of the Order of Military Historians, restored to their proper names, plus numbers, would find themselves new people.

They would be privileged in a sense, with an all-expenses-paid trip into space, and actual paid jobs at the end of it. Not very far into space, and not the very best jobs, of course — tending elderly machinery at the bottom of Martian canyons in a long-term, low-priority terraforming project, kept up mainly for its use in criminal rehabilitation. But work that some would envy, for all that.

Crime could pay in our civilized world: A coven of fantasists, who had given each other special names and titles of rank at bizarre ceremonies and who had cherished collections of ancient weapons and war-gaming programs, were going to get something to do to fill their lives after all.

They would have adequate medi, geri and other care in the red canyons. Lady May and Lady Helen would still be beautiful when they returned to Earth. The 'knights' when rehabilitated would be able to take part in approved sports. They were lucky, but even without the memory-wipe I doubted they would ever have known just how lucky they were. Some of their predecessors had gone into organ-banks.

I closed the files down and sent Alfred O'Brien my own report. Finding and closing the Order of Military Historians, as quietly and indeed as gently as possible, had been a piece of variety in increasingly routine literary work. I reprogrammed my desk, wishing the 'doc could do something with my brain chemistry to make me immune from what a forbidden book I had once come across called The Great Mystery of Human Boredom .

At least I told myself it was boredom. There seemed to be less and less need now for the 'gifts' which had made me valuable to ARM. There was still plenty of desk work, but desk work anyone reasonably intelligent could do. The Games were of no interest to me when I knew how we had programmed them. What puppet master wants to join the puppets' sports? Two days later I was toying with a not-very-realistic idea of rearranging certain things to allow me a trip into space myself (Wunderland had been a dream abandoned long ago, but would the Belt have use for anyone like me? I doubted it.) when Alfred O'Brien called. He wanted to see me personally.

He began with a rundown of my report.

“Not so many of these people now,” he remarked.

He had the statistics and the global picture. I didn't know, or want to know, much more than I needed to: A long time ago, before my time, the militarist fantasy had been widespread. It had produced a great deal of pathological fiction and pseudohistory. We had had a lot of people working on it once. But our whole society had progressed in recent years.

Also, the study of real history was being progressively restricted. That, too, seemed to have helped put military fants out of business. A few years ago one in ten might have had clearance to study history. It would be one in thousands now.

Personally, I was not among that chosen few. My job was quite distinct. Literary, not historical.

The controller seemed talkative. Almost oddly so. He usually kept conversation either strictly business or strictly social. It was not like him to ruminate on what we were doing, at least to people like me. Even someone with less training than I possessed would have recognized him as being slightly ill at ease, and not bothering to disguise the fact overmuch. Something was, if not worrying him, I thought, puzzling him at least.