A heros life, p.1
A Hero's Life, page 1
This it James Blish’s first appearance with an orginal story in a British science fiction magazine, it was specially written for this issue on the theme of sacrifice.
From : Impulse, March 1966 – Short Story
A HERO’S HERO’S
by James Blish
I
Listening automatically for the first sound of possible interruption, Simon de Kuyl emptied his little poisons into the catch basin in his room and ironically watched the wisps of wine-coloured smoke rise from the corroded maw of the drain. He was sorry to see them go; they were old though venemous friends.
He knew without vanity - it was too late for that - that High Earth had no more distinguished a traitor than he. But after only four clockless days on Boadicea, he had already found it advisable to change his name, his methods and his residence. It was a humiliating beginning.
The almost worn-away legend on the basin read: Julius Boadicea. Things made on this planet were usually labelled that generally, as though any place in the world were like every other, but this both was and was not true. The present city, Druidsfall, was the usual low jumble of decayed masonry, slightly less ancient slums and blank-faced offices, but the fact that it was also the centre of the treason industry - hence wholly convenient for Simon - gave it character. The traitors had an architectural style of their own, characterized by structures put together mostly of fragmented statues and petrified bodies fitted like puzzle-pieces or maps. Traitors on Boadicea had belonged to an honoured social class for four hundred years, and their edifices made it known.
Luckily custom allowed Simon to stay clear of these buildings after the first formalities and seek out his own bed and breakfast. In the old friendly inns of Druidsfall, the anonymous thumps of the transients - in death, love or trade - are said to make the lodgers start in their beds with their resident guilts. Of course all inns are like that; but nevertheless, that is why the traitors like to quarter there, rather than in the Traitors’ Halls: it guarantees them privacy, and at the same time helps them to feel alive. There is undoubtedly something inhibiting about trying to deal within walls pieced together of broken stone corpses.
Here in The Skopolamander, Simon awaited his first contact. This - now that he had dumped his poisons - would fall at the end of his immunity period. Quarantine was perhaps a more appropriate term…
No, the immunity was real, however limited, for as a traitor to High Earth he had special status. High Earth, the Boadiceans thought, was not necessarily Old Earth - but not necessarily not, either. For twelve days Simon would not be killed out of sheer conservatism, at least, though nobody would attempt to deal with him, either.
He had three of those days still to run - a dull prospect, since he had already completed every possible preliminary, and spiced only by the fact that he had yet to figure out how long a day might be. Boadicea’s sun was a ninety-minute microvariable, twinned at a distance of a light-year with a bluewhite, Rigel-like star which stood - or had stood throughout historical times - in high Southern latitudes. This gave Druidsfall only four consecutive hours of quasi-darkness at a time, and even during this period the sky was indigo rather than black at its deepest, and more often than not flaring with aurorae. There was one lighting the window now, looking like a curtain of orange and hazy blue fire licking upward along a bone trellis.
Everything in the city, as everywhere upon Boadicea, bespoke the crucial importance of fugitive light, and the fade-out - fade-in weather that went with it, all very strange after the desert glare of High Earth. The day of Simon’s arrival had dawned in mist, which cold gales had torn away into slowly pulsating sunlight; then had come clouds and rain which had turned to snow and then to sleet - more weather in a day than the minarets of Novoe Jiddah, Simon’s registered home town, saw in a six-month. The fluctuating light and wetness was reflected in Druidsfall most startlingly by its gardens, which sprang up when one’s back was turned and did not need to be so much weeded as actually fought. They were constantly in motion to the ninety-minute solar cycle, battering their elaborate heads against back walls which were everywhere crumbling after centuries of such soft, implacable impacts. Half the buildings in Druidsfall glistened with their leaves, which were scaled with so much soft gold that they stuck to anything they were blown against - the wealth of Boadicea was based anciently in the vast amounts of uranium and other power-metals in its soil, from which the plants extracted the inevitable associated gold as radiation shielding for their spuriously tender genes. Everyone one saw in the streets of Druidsfall, or any other such city, was a mutation of some sort - if he was not an out-worlder - but after a day in the winds they were all half yellow, for the gold scales smeared off the flying leaves like butter; everyone was painted with meaningless riches, the very bed-sheets glittered ineradicably with flakes of it, and brunettes -especially among the elaborate hair-styles of the men - were at a premium.
Simon poured water from an amphora into the basin, which promptly hissed like a dragon just out of the egg and blurted a mushroom of cold blue steam which made him cough. Careful! he thought; acid after water, never water after acid - I am forgetting the most elementary lessons. I should have used wine. Time for a drink, in Gro’s name!
He caught up his cloak and went out, not bothering to lock the door. He had nothing worth stealing but his honour which was in his right hip pocket. Oh, and of course, High Earth - that was in his left. Besides, Boadicea was rich: one could hardly turn around without knocking over some heap of treasures, artifacts of a millennium which nobody had sorted for a century or even wanted to be bothered to sort. Nobody would think to steal from a poor traitor any object smaller than a king, or preferably a planet.
In the tavern below, Simon was joined at once by a play-woman. ‘Are you buying tonight excellence?’
‘Why not?’ And in fact he was glad to see her. She was blonde and ample, a relief from the sketchy women of the Respectables whom fashion made look as though they suffered from some nervous disease that robbed them of appetite. Besides she would exempt him from the normal sort of Boadicean polite conversation which consisted chiefly of elaborately involuted jokes at which it was considered gauche to laugh. The whole style of Boadicean conversation for that matter was intended to be ignored; gambits were a high art but end-games were a lost one. Simon sighed and signalled for beakers.
‘You wear the traitors’ clasp,’ she said, sitting across from him, ‘but not much tree-gold. Have you come to sell us High Earth?’
Simon did not even blink; he knew the query to be a standard opening with any outworlder of his profession.
‘Perhaps. But I’m not on business at the moment.’
‘Of course not,’ the girl said gravely, her ringers playing continuously with a sort of rosary tasselled with two silver phalluses. ‘Yet I hope you prosper. My half-brother is a traitor, but he can find only small secrets to sell - how to make bombs, and the like. It’s a thin life; I prefer mine.’
‘Perhaps he should swear by another country.’
‘Oh, his country is well worth selling, but his custom is poor. Neither buyer nor seller trusts him very far - a matter of style, I suppose. He’ll probably wind up betraying some colony for a thousand beans and a fish-ball.’
‘You dislike the man - or is it the trade?’ Simon said. ‘It seems not unlike your own, after all: one sells something one never really owned, and yet one still has it when the transaction is over, as long as both parties keep silent.’
‘You dislike women,’ the girl said, tranquilly, as a simple observation, not a challenge. ‘But all things are loans - not just chastity and trust. Why be miserly. To “possess” wealth is as illusory as to “possess” honour or a woman, and much less gratifying. Spending is better than saving.’
‘But there are rank orders in all things, too.’ Simon said, lighting a kief stick. He was intrigued in spite of himself. Hedonism was the commonest of philosophies in the civilized galaxy, but it was piquant to hear a playwoman trotting out its mouldy cliches with such fierce solemnity. ‘Otherwise we should never know the good from the bad, or care.’
‘Do you like boys?’
‘No, that’s not one of my tastes. Ah: you will say that I don’t condemn boy-lovers, and that values are in the end only preferences? I think not. In morals, empathy enters in, eventually.’
‘So: you wouldn’t corrupt children, and torture revolts you. But Gro made you that way. Some men are not so handicapped. I meet them now and then.’ The hand holding the looped beads made a small, unconcious gesture of revulsion.
‘I think they are the handicapped, not I - most planets hang their moral imbeciles, sooner or later. But what about treason? You didn’t answer that question.’
‘My throat was dry… thank you. Treason, well - it’s an art, hence again a domain of taste or preference. Style is everything; that’s why my half-brother is so inept. If tastes changed he might prosper, as I might had 1 been born with blue hair.’
‘You could dye it.’
‘What, like the Respectables?’ She laughed, briefly but unaffectedly. ‘I am what I am; disguises don’t become me. Skills, yes - those are another matter. I’ll show you, when you like. But no masks.’
Skills can betray you too, Simon thought, remembering that moment at the Traitors’ Guild when his proud sash of poison shells had lost him in an instant every inch of altitude over the local professionals that he had hoped to trade on. But he only said again, ‘Why not?’ It would be as good a way as any to while away the time; and once his immunity had expire
She proved, indeed, very skilful, and the time passed… but the irregular days - the clock in the tavern was on a different time from the one in his room, and neither even faintly agreed with his High Earth based chronometer and metabolism - betrayed him. He awoke one morning/noon/night to fond the girl turning slowly black beside him, in the last embrace of a fungal toxin he would have reserved for the Emperor of Canes Venatici or the worst criminal in human history.
War had been declared. He had been notified that if he still wanted to sell High Earth, he would first have to show his skill at staying alive against the whole cold malice of all the Traitors of Boadicea.
II
He holed up quickly and drastically, beginning with a shot of transduction serum - an almost insanely dangerous expedient, for the stuff not only altered his appearance but his very heredity, leaving his head humming with false memories and traces of character, derived from the unknown donors of the serum, which conflicted not only with his purposes but even with his tastes and motives. Under interrogation he would break down into a babbling crowd of random voices, as bafflingly scrambled as his blood types and his retina - and finger prints, and to the eyes his gross physical appearance would be a vague characterless blur of many roles - some of them derived from the D.N.A. of persons who had died a hundred years ago and at least that many parsecs away in space - but unless he got the anti-serum within fifteen days, he would first forget his mission, then his skills, and at last his very identity. Nevertheless, he judged that the risk had to be taken; for effete though the local traitors seemed to be, they were obviously quite capable of penetrating any lesser cover.
The next problem was how to complete the mission itself - it would not be enough just to stay alive. After all, he was still no ordinary traitor, nor even the usual kind of double agent; his task was to buy Boadicea while seeming to sell High Earth, but beyond that, there was a grander treason in the making for which the combined guilds of both planets might only barely be sufficient - the toppling of the Green Exarch, under whose subtle non-human yoke half of humanity’s worlds had not even the latter-day good sense to groan. For such a project, the wealth of Boadicea was a pre-requisite, for the Green Exarch drew tithes from six fallen empires older than man - the wealth of Boadicea, and its reputation as the first colony to break with Old Earth, back in the first days of the Imaginary Drive.
And therein lay the difficulty, for Boadicea, beyond all other colony worlds, had fallen into a kind of autumn cannibalism. In defiance of that saying of Ezra-Tse, the edge was attempting to eat the centre. It was this worship of independence or rather, autonomy, which had not only made treason respectable, but had come nigh on to ennobling it… and was now imperceptibly emasculating it, like the statues one saw everywhere in Druidsfall which had been defaced and sexually mutilated by the grey disease of time and the weather.
Today, though all the Boadiceans proper were colonials in ancestry, they were snobs about their planet’s pre-human history as though they had themselves not nearly exterminated the aborigines but were their inheritors. The few shambling Charioteers who still lived stumbled through the streets of Druidsfall loaded with ritual honours, carefully shorn of real power but ostentatiously deferred to on the slightest occasion which might be noticed by anyone from High Earth. In the meantime, the Boadiceans sold each other out with delicate enthusiasm, but against High Earth - which was not necessarily Old Earth, but not necessarily was not, either - all gates were formally locked. .
Formally only, Simon and High Earth were sure; for the habit of treason, like lechery, tends to grow with what it feeds on, and to lose discrimination in the process. Boadicea, like all forbidden fruits, should be ripe for the plucking, for the man with the proper key to its neglected garden.
The key that Simon had brought with him was now lost; he would have to forge another, with whatever crude tools could be made to fall to hand. The only one accessible to Simon at the moment was the dead playwoman’s despised half-brother.
His name, Simon bad found easily enough, was currently Da-Ud tam Altair, and he was Court Traitor to a small religious principate on the Gulf of the Rood, on the edge of The Incontinent, half the world away from Druidsfall. Since one of his duties was that of singing the Rood-Prince to sleep to the accompaniment of a sareh, a sort of gleemans harp (actually a Charioteer instrument ill-adapted to human fingers, and which Da-Ud played worse than most of those who affected it), Simon reached him readily in the guise of a ballad-merchant, selling him twelve-and-a-tilly of ancient High Earth songs Simon had made up while in transit to the principate; it was as easy as giving Turkish Delight to a baby.
After the last mangled chord died, Simon told Da-Ud quietly:
‘By the way… well sung, excellence… did you know that the
Guild has murdered your half-sister?’
Da-Ud dropped the fake harp with a noise like a spring-toy coming unwound.
‘Jillith? But she was only a playwoman! Why, in Gro’s name-‘
Then Da-Ud caught himself and stared at Simon with sudden, belated suspicion. Simon looked back, waiting.
‘Who told you that? Damn you - are you a Torturer? I haven’t - I’ve done nothing to merit -‘
‘I’m not a Torturer, and nobody told me,’ Simon said. ‘She died in my bed, as a warning to me.’
He removed his Clasp from the shoulder of his cloak and clicked it. The little machine flowered briefly into a dazzling actinic glare, and then closed again. While Da-Ud was still covering his streaming eyes, Simon said softly:
‘I am the Traitor-in-Chief of High Earth.’
It was not the flash of the badge that was dazzling Da-Ud now. He lowered his hands. His whole plump body was trembling with hate and eagerness.
‘What - what do you want of me, excellence? I have nothing to sell but the Rood-Prince… and a poor stick he is. Surely you would not sell me High Earth; I am a poor stick myself.’
‘I would sell you High Earth for twenty rivals.’
‘You mock me!’
‘No, Da-Ud. I came here to deal with the Guild, but they killed Jillith - and that as far as I’m concerned disqualified them from being treated with as civilised professionals, or as human beings at all. She was pleasant and intelligent and I was fond of her - and besides, while I’m perfectly willing to kill under some conditions, I don’t hold with throwing away an innocent life for some footling dramatic gesture.’
‘I wholly agree,’ Da-Ud said. His indignation seemed to be at least half real. ‘But what will you do? What can you do?’
‘I have to fulfil my mission, any way short of my own death - if I die, nobody will be left to get it done. But I’d most dearly love to cheat, dismay, disgrace the Guild in the process, if it could possibly be managed. I’ll need your help. If we live through it, I’ll see to it that you’ll turn a profit, too; money isn’t my first goal here, or even my second now.’
‘I’ll tackle it,’ Da-Ud said at once, though he was obviously apprehensive, as was only sensible. ‘What precisely do you propose?’
‘First of all, I’ll supply you with papers indicating that I’ve sold you a part - not all - of the major thing I have to sell, which gives the man who holds it a lever in the State Ministry of High Earth. It shows that High Earth has been conspiring against several major powers, all human, for purposes of gaining altitude with the Green Exarch. They won’t tell you precisely which worlds, but there will be sufficient information there so that the Exarchy would pay a heavy purse for them - and high Earth an even heavier one to get them back.
‘It will be your understanding that the missing information is also for sale, but you haven’t got the price.’
‘Suppose the Guild doesn’t believe that?’
“They’ll never believe - excuse me, I must be blunt - that you could have afforded the whole thing; they’ll know I sold you this much of it only because I have a grudge, and you can tell them so - though I wouldn’t expose the nature of the grudge if I were you. Were you unknown to them they might assume that you were me in disguise, but luckily they know you, and, ah, probably tend rather to underestimate you.’
