“Believe me, I thought of killing myself. I imagined fifty different ways of doing it. Fifty thousand. But it wasn’t in me to do a thing like that.”
“A great pity, that,” the Colonel said. “You allowed yourself to stay alive and you lived happily ever after.”
“Not happily, no,” said Lanista.
He had fled from Shannakha in a desperate delirious vertigo, he told the Colonel: aware of how badly awry it all had gone, frantic with shame and grief. There had been no attempt at a feigned suicide, he insisted. Whatever evidence the Service had found of such a thing was its own misinterpretation of something that had nothing to do with him. Fearing that the truth about the supposed Tristessan invasion would emerge, that the Shannakhans would discover that he had flagrantly misled them, he had taken advantage of the confusion of the moment to escape to the nearest world that had a Magellanic doorway and in a series of virtually unprogrammed hops had taken himself into some shadowy sector of the Rim where he had hidden himself away until at last he had felt ready to emerge, first under the Heinrich Bauer name, and then, as a result of some kind of clerical error, as Martin Bauer.
In the feverish final hours before the Shannakhan invasion began he had, he maintained, made several attempts to contact the Colonel on Tristessa and urge him to get away. But all communications lines between Shannakha and its colony-world had already been severed, and even the Imperium’s own private communications channels failed him. He asked the Colonel to believe that that was true. He begged the Colonel to believe it. The Colonel had never seen Geryon Lanista begging for anything, before. Something about the haggard, insistent look that came into his eyes made his plea almost believable. He himself had been unable to get any calls through to Lanista on Shannakha; perhaps the systems were blocked in the other direction too. That was not something that needed to be resolved just at this moment. The Colonel put the question aside for later consideration. For fifty years the Colonel had believed that Lanista had deliberately left him to die in the midst of the Tristessa uprising, because he could not face the anger of the Colonel’s rebuke for the clumsiness of what he had done on Shannakha. Perhaps he didn’t need to believe that any longer. He would prefer not to believe it any longer; but it was too soon to tell whether he was capable of that.
“Tell me this,” he said, when Lanista at last had fallen silent. “What possessed you to invent that business about a Tristessan invasion of Shannakha in the first place? How could you ever have imagined it would lead to anything constructive? And above all else, why didn’t you try the idea out on me before you went off to Shannakha?”
Lanista was a long while in replying. At length he said, in a flat, low, dead voice, the voice of a headstrong child who is bringing himself to confess that he has done something shameful, “I wanted to surprise you.”
“What?”
“To surprise you and to impress you. I wanted to out-Colonel the Colonel with a tremendous dramatic move that would solve the whole crisis in one quick shot. I would come back to Tristessa with a treaty that would pacify the rebels and keep the Shannakhans happy too, and everything would be sweetness and light again, and you would ask me how I had done it, and I would tell you and you would tell me what a genius I was.” Lanista was looking directly at the Colonel with an unwavering gaze. “That was all there was to it. An idiotic young subaltern was fishing for praise from his superior officer and came up with a brilliant idea that backfired in the most appalling way. The rest of my life has been spent in an attempt to atone for what I did on Shannakha.”
“Ah,” the Colonel said. “That spoils it, that last little maudlin bit at the end of the confession. ‘An attempt to atone’? Come off it, Geryon. Atoning by starting up a rebellion of your own? Against the Imperium, which you once had sworn to defend with your life?”
Icy fury instantly replaced the look of intense supplication in Lanista’s eyes. “We all have our own notions of atonement, Colonel. I destroyed a world, or maybe two worlds, and since then I’ve been trying to build them. As for the Imperium, and whatever I may have sworn to it—”
“Yes?”
“The Imperium. The Imperium. The universal foe, the great force for galactic stagnation. I don’t owe the Imperium a thing.” He shook his head angrily. “Let it pass. You can’t begin to see what I mean.—The Imperium has sent you here, I gather. For what purpose? To work your old hocus-pocus on our little independence movement and bring me to heel the way you were trying to do with Ilion Gabell on Tristessa?”
“Essentially, yes.”
“And how will you do it, exactly?” Lanista’s face was suddenly bright with expectation. “Come on, Colonel, you can tell me! Consider it the old pro laying out his strategy one more time for the bumptious novice. Tell me. Tell me. The plan for neutralizing the revolution and restoring order.”
The Colonel nodded. It would make no real difference, after all. “I can do two things. The evidence that you are Geryon Lanista and that you were responsible for the catastrophic outcome of the Tristessa rebellion is all fully archived and can quickly be distributed to all your fellow citizens here on Hermano. They might have a different view about your capability as a master schemer once they find out what a botch you made out of the Tristessa operation.”
“They might. I doubt it very much, but they might.—What’s the other thing you can do to us?”
“I can cut Hermano off from the Velde system. I have that power. The ultimate sanction: you may recall the term from your own Service days. I pass through the doorway and lock the door behind me, and Hermano is forever isolated from the rest of the galaxy. Or isolated until it begs to be allowed back in, and provides the Imperium with proof that it deserves to be.”
“Will that please you, to cut us off like that?”
“What would please me is irrelevant. What would have pleased me would have been never to have had to come here in the first place. But here I am.—Of course, now that I’ve said all this, you can always prevent me from carrying any of it out. By killing me, for example.”
Lanista smiled. “Why would I want to kill you? I’ve already got enough sins against you on my conscience, don’t I? And I know as well as you do that the Imperium could cut us off from the Velde system from the outside any time it likes, and would surely do so if its clandestine operative fails to return safely from this mission. I’d wind up in the same position but with additional guilt to burden me. No, Colonel, I wouldn’t kill you. But I do have a better idea.”
The Colonel waited without replying.
“Cut us off from the Imperium, all right,” Lanista said. “Lock the door, throw away the key. But stay here on the inside with us. There’s no reason for you to go back to the Imperium, really. You’ve given the Imperium more than enough of your life as it is. And for what? Has serving the Imperium done anything for you except twisting your life out of shape? Certainly it twisted mine. It’s twisted everybody’s, but especially those of the people of the Service. All that meddling in interstellar politics—all that cynical tinkering with other people’s governments—ah, no, no, Colonel, here at the end it’s time for you to give all that up. Start your life over here on Hermano.”
The Colonel was staring incredulously, wonderingly, bemusedly.
Lanista went on, “Your friends from Gavial can go home, but you stay here. You live out the rest of your days on Hermano. You can have a villa just like mine, twenty kilometers down the coast. The perfect retirement home, eh? Hermano’s not the worst place in the universe to live. You’ll have the servants you need. The finest food and wine. And an absolute guarantee that the Imperium will never bother you again. If you don’t feel like retiring, you can have a post in the government here, a very high post, in fact. You and I could share the top place. I’d gladly make room for you. Who could know better than I do what a shrewd old bird you are? You’d be a vital asset for us, and we’d reward you accordingly.—What do you say, Colonel? Think it over. It’s the best offer you’ll ever get, I
promise you that.”
It was easiest to interpret what Lanista had said as a grotesque joke, but when the Colonel tried to shrug it away Lanista repeated it, more earnestly even than before. He realized that the man was serious. But, as though aware now that this conversation had gone on too long, Lanista suggested that the Colonel return to his own lodgings and rest for a time. They could talk again of these matters later. Until then he was always free to resume the identity of Petrus Haym of the Gavialese trade mission, and to go back to his four companions and continue to hatch out whatever schemes they liked involving commerce between Gavial and the Free Republic of Hermano.
He was unable to sleep for much of that night. So many revelations, so many possibilities. He hadn’t been prepared for that much. None of the usual adjustments would work; but toward dawn sleep came, though only for a little while, and then he awoke suddenly, drenched in sweat, with sunlight pouring through his windows. Lanista’s words still resounded in his mind. The Imperium has twisted your life out of shape, Lanista had said. Was that so? He remembered his grandfather saying, hundreds of years ago—thousands, it felt like—The Imperium is the enemy, boy. It strangles us. It is the chain around our throats. The boy who would become the Colonel had never understood what he meant by that, and when he came to adulthood he followed his father, who had said always that the Imperium was civilization’s one bulwark against chaos, into the Service.
Well, perhaps his father had been right, and his grandfather as well. He had strapped on the armor of the Service of the Imperium and he had gone forth to do battle in its name, and done his duty unquestioningly throughout a long life, a very long life. And perhaps he had done enough, and it was time to let that armor drop away from him now. What had Lanista said of the Imperium? The universal foe, the great force for galactic stagnation. An angry man. Angry words. But there was some truth to them. His grandfather had said almost the same thing. An absentee government, enforcing conformity on an entire galaxy—
On that strange morning the Colonel felt something within him breaking up that had been frozen in place for a long time.
“What do you say?” Lanista asked, when the Colonel had returned to the small office with the desk and the chairs. “Will you stay here with us?”
“I have a home that I love on Galgala. I’ve lived there ever since my retirement.”
“And will they let you live in peace, when you get back there to Galgala?”
“Who?”
“The people who sent you to find me and crush me,” Lanista said. “The ones who came to you and said, Go to a place called Hermano, Colonel. Put aside your retirement and do one more job for us. They told you that a man you hate was making problems for them here and that you were the best one to deal with him, am I not right? And so you went, thinking you could help the good old Imperium out yet again and also come to grips with a little private business of your own. And they can send you out again, wherever else they feel like sending you, whenever they think you’re the best one to deal with whatever needs dealing with.”
“No,” the Colonel said. “I’m an old man. I can’t do anything more for them, and they won’t ask. After all, I’ve failed them here. I was supposed to destroy this rebellion, and that won’t happen now.”
“Won’t it?”
“You know that it won’t,” the Colonel said. He wondered whether he had ever intended to take any sort of action against the Hermano rebels. It was clear to him now that he had come here only for the sake of seeing Lanista once again and hearing his explanation of what had happened on Shannakha. Well, now he had heard it, and had managed to persuade himself that what Lanista had done on Shannakha had been merely to commit an error of judgment, which anyone can do, rather than to have sought to contrive the death of his senior officer for the sake of convering up his own terrible blunder. And now there was that strange sensation he was beginning to feel, that something that had been frozen for fifty years, or maybe for two hundred, was breaking up within him. He said, “Proclaim your damned independence, if you like. Cut yourselves off from the Imperium. It makes no difference to me. They should have sent someone else to do this job.”
“Yes. They should have.—Will you stay?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’re no longer of the Imperium and neither are you.”
Lanista spoke once again of the villa by the sea, the servants, the wines, the place beside him in the high administration of the independent world of Hermano. The Colonel was barely listening. It would be easy enough to go home, he was thinking. Lanista wouldn’t interfere with that. Hop, hop, hop, and Galgala again. His lovely house beside that golden river. His collection of memorabilia. The souvenirs of a life spent in the service of the Imperium, which is a chain about our throats. Home, yes, home to Galgala, to live alone within the security of the Imperium. The Imperium is the enemy of chaos, but chaos is the force that drives evolutionary growth.
“This is all real, what you’re offering me?” he asked. “The villa, the servants, the government post?”
“All real, yes. Whatever you want.”
“What about Magda Cermak and the other three?”
“What do you want done with them?”
“Send them home. Tell them that the talks are broken off and they have to go back to Gavial.”
“Yes. I will.”
“And what will you do about the doorways?”
“I’ll seal them,” Lanista said. “We don’t need to be part of the Imperium. There was a time, you know, when Earth was the only world in the galaxy, when there was no Imperium at all, no Velde doorways either, and somehow Earth managed to get along for a few billion years without needing anything more than itself in the universe. We can do that too. The doorways will be sealed and the Imperium will forget all about Hermano.”
“And all about me, too?” the Colonel asked.
“And all about you, yes.”
The Colonel laughed. Then he walked to the window and saw that night had fallen, the radiant, fiery night of the Core, with a million million stars blazing in every direction he looked. The doorways would be sealed, but the galaxy still would be out there, filling the sky, and whenever he needed to see its multitude of stars he needed only to look upward. That seemed sufficient. He had traveled far and wide and the time was at hand, was more than at hand, for him to bring an end to his journeying. Well, so be it. So be it. No one would ever come looking for him here. No one would look for him anywhere; or, if looking, would never find. At the Service’s behest he had returned to the stars one last time; and now, at no one’s behest but his own, he had at last lost himself among them forever.
THE EATER OF DREAMS
The details of my long relationship with the oldest of all science fiction magazines, Amazing Stories, beginning with the first copy of it that I bought, late in 1948, and ending with its suspension of publication in 2000, are amply outlined in the introduction to “Travelers.” But, as I indicated there, Amazing had not quite reached its end even then.
After a six-year hiatus, Amazing returned yet again, this time under the aegis of a company unknown to me, Paizo Publishing. That is to say, Paizo was listed on the contents page as the publisher, but the magazine was copyrighted in the name of Wizards of the Coast, the gaming company that had been Amazing’s publisher in its previous incarnation. What relationship, if any, existed between Paizo and Wizards of the Coast, I never knew. But the important fact was that Amazing had returned from the dead once again, and once again was being published as a large-size slick magazine.
Having been entangled with Amazing Stories first as avid reader and then as prolific contributor through so many of its various incarnations, I couldn’t resist contacting the Paizo people, up near Seattle, and asking them if there might be some role for me to play in their version of the magazine. Yes, certainly, replied editor Dave Gross. Every issue was featuring a 1000-word story by some well-known s-f writer. Would I care to do a short-short of my own for the
series?
My favorite story form is the novella, the story of 20,000 to 40,000 words. I like to develop background and character in an unhurried way and to set in motion a fairly elaborate plot that gradually reaches an inevitable though unexpected conclusion. The short-short, the quick vignette with a snapper ending, has never been a speciality of mine, though I’ve written some, naturally, in the course of a long career. The thousand-worders the Paizo Amazing had already published included work by such commendable pros as Jack Williamson, David Gerrold, and Joe Haldeman. It seemed like an interesting challenge. (And I would be well compensated for the trouble of compressing a story idea into a thousand-word span.)
So I wrote “The Eater of Dreams” in December of 2004 and sent it in and duly received my satisfactory paycheck...and almost immediately Amazing went out of business again. A sad little letter from the publisher told me that the magazine was going into yet another hiatus, and, at least as of the day I write this, no new rescuer has appeared this time. The rights to my mini-story thus reverted to me, and I offered it to Sheila Williams, the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction, and she published it in her April-May 2007 issue. And thus it was that Amazing Stories and I finally came to a parting of the ways. Or so it seems, anyway.
The Queen-Goddess feels another dream coming to her tonight, and she knows it will be a dark one. So I am summoned to her, masked in the mask of my profession, and I crouch by her pallet, awaiting the night. The Queen-Goddess sleeps, lying asprawl like a child’s discarded doll. At the foot of the bed lurks the Vizier in his horned mask: our chaperone. No man, not even the royal Eater of Dreams, may enter the Queen-Goddess’ bedchamber unescorted.
Her spirit flutters and trembles. Her eyes move quickly beneath their lids. She is reaching the dream-world now.