Other

  He looked at Bleys, Dahno and Henry.

  “Will they do for you, too?”

  “Certainly,” Bleys said. “Your people have worked a miracle here in what must have been no time at all.”

  “Actually,” said Anjo, “we started some time ago. This was to be a sort of headquarters for our own use.”

  “I see,” said Bleys. “Well, I don’t need to look at my residence now. But I’d like something to eat, and then a chance to sleep.”

  They all had something to eat—roast rabbit, of course—in the communal combined kitchen and dining room; the largest structure so far erected—and turned in to the cots prepared for them.

  Waking, about twilight, Bleys went to inspect the nearly-finished building in which he would record his speeches, and which also acted as a communication center for the security setup of the camp.

  He found eye-and-ear spy units had already been set up in a wide band encircling the camp. The units were placed unobtrusively in rocks and trees so that any attempt to creep up on the camp unobserved could be detected. He put on the monitor, using the controls for a while to acquaint himself with the terrain immediately surrounding them; and in moving from one camera viewpoint to another, found himself suddenly an invisible companion of Toni and Henry, walking together under the soft day’s-end light that was now filtering through the high branches of the pines. Curious, he stayed with them.

  “…You know,” Toni was saying to Henry, “what was Bleys like when he was young? When he first came to you?”

  “Different,” said Henry. “Different—and lonely.”

  “Yes,” Toni said, looking at the ground as they walked along, “in some ways he’s the loneliest man I’ve ever met. I can feel it so strongly sometimes when I’m around him that it’s like a deep hurt in me.”

  She looked at Henry. “But he has you.”

  “That’s so,” said Henry. “I love him like one of my own. But he’s still alone—I believe he’s been alone always—since the day he was born.”

  There was silence for a few moments. They continued walking along—Henry looking ahead of them, Toni looking thoughtfully downward at the pine needles. Alone in the security center, Bleys switched to another eye-and-ear unit, to stay with them.

  “—Something else,” Toni said then, as they moved now through the greater sunshine between the sparser tall pines near the border of their island, “if Bleys hadn’t told me your name before I saw it written, I wouldn’t have known it was pronounced ‘MacLain.’ How does it happen you say it that way?”

  “Ah, well,” said Henry, “the name’s Scottish, you know. You know where Scotland is on Old Earth?”

  “Let me see,” said Toni. There was a slight pause as they paced along together. “It’s part of the British Isles, isn’t it?”

  “In a manner of speaking. Put it that the English part is to the south of Scotland in the main island. But the Scots also lived in the Hebrides, the so-called Western Isles, off the west coast of Scotland; and it was from the Hebrides my ancestors came.”

  “I remember now,” Toni said. “The Scots spoke Gaelic to begin with—do they still do so in parts of Scotland?”

  “That I don’t know,” said Henry. “I don’t myself, but the way we say ‘MacLean’ comes because the MacLeans are descended from a man called Gilleathain na Tuaidh. I don’t say that as a Gael-speaker would—” he gave her one of his quick, quirky smiles—-“but it means ‘Gillian of the Battleaxe,’ and he lived in the Isles, back in the thirteenth century of the Christian calendar. Two brothers of his—Lachlan and Lubanach—were ancestors of two separate clans of MacLeans: the MacLeans of Duart, and the MacLeans of Lochbuie.”

  He paused.

  “—Those are other parts of Scotland, you see,” he said. Toni nodded.

  “In the Hebrides—or on the main island?” she asked.

  “Both,” said Henry. “The MacLeans lived mainly in the Western Isles at the time of Gillian of the Battleaxe; but they gained more lands on the mainland of Scotland and ended as four separate clans. When I was young, I was told that my father’s line went back to the MacLean chief, Red Hector of the Battles, who was killed at the battle of Harlow, fourteen hundred and eleven, if I remember right.”

  “Such names!” Toni shook her head and smiled a little. “Both Red Hector and that other you mentioned, whose name is hard to say—Battleaxe—Battles. They both sound as if they ate people for breakfast.”

  “The MacLeans were always a fighting race,” said Henry. He looked somber, his gaze going away from Toni into the distance.

  Toni’s smile disappeared and she glanced at him with a touch of concern.

  “I’ll tell you why it stuck in my mind to ask you about your name,” she said. “You see, my name isn’t the way it’s said—or written—either.”

  “Is it not?” Henry’s eyes came back to focus on her face.

  “Yes,” she said. “My family is Nipponese—you’d probably call us ‘Japanese’—but Lu isn’t a Nipponese name. You’ll find it in people of Chinese ancestry, but not from Nippon—Japan.”

  “Your name isn’t Lu?” Henry studied her.

  “It is—and it isn’t,” said Toni.

  They stopped. They had come to the very edge of the island of variform pine and they stood now on top of a small cliff of bare, gray rock, that overhung the long metallic brown-green slope of the grass downward until it lost itself against the flatland below, stretching off purple in the shadow, grayish-red in the sunlight, far and far to the perfect horizon in every direction without a rise along it anywhere.

  “No,” she said, after a moment’s pause. “Correctly, my family name is Ryuzoji, not Lu. My immediate ancestors were some of the first Nipponese to emigrate from Old Earth to Association. They didn’t really plan to stay. You remember how it was—how we’re all taught in the history classes in school? The coalition of many religions that bought the settlement rights to both Friendly Worlds from the large terraforming companies that were formed to make the Younger Worlds livable, had put out nearly all their credit in the hope of getting only religious emigrants to them. To begin with, there seemed to be a great many people who wanted to emigrate.”

  “I know,” said Henry. “We’ve letters from my family of those early times on Association.”

  Toni looked at him sympathetically.

  “Yes,” she said, “but a lot of the people from the religious groups didn’t go after all—wouldn’t, or couldn’t afford it—and with so few settlers on the two worlds, the coalition feared the colonies wouldn’t be viable. So they began to offer bonuses to attract more immigrants.”

  She looked at Henry, who nodded knowingly.

  “Well, my family were bonus immigrants,” Toni went on. “And, as you know, along with the bonus, there was a promise by the terraforming companies to ship them back to Old Earth after five years if they didn’t like the bargain they’d made. The companies didn’t want to spend the money to do that, of course, but it was the only way to get enough people to go. My family planned to take the bonus and go out, build up a property that could be sold to other people who intended to stay there—and then come back before their five years were up.”

  She looked at Henry. “I don’t suppose your family did that.”

  “No.” Henry looked out at the land below. “My family came for religious reasons.”

  “Oh,” said Toni. “Well, at any rate, we were one of the few Nipponese families coming out to Association, and we were widely separated from other such families. But we found ourselves in an area that had a number of Chinese families, and these grew into quite a community over the generations. Meanwhile, my family hadn’t gone back, because like just about everyone else who’d come out, they had underestimated the problems of building anything worthwhile in as short a time as five years on a newly terraformed world. They’d have gone home poorer than when they came out. So they ended up staying.”

  Henry nodded again, his mouth now a straight li
ne. “Even today, it’s not very easy to work the land for a living, on most worlds.”

  “Yes,” said Toni, “we know that now. But—as I said, where my family settled, they were surrounded by Chinese; and the proper pronunciation of Ryuzoji is one that sounds to the Chinese ear as if the Nipponese speaker is saying ‘Lyuzoji.’ So the result was that we eventually became known as ‘Lyuzoji’—and finally this became shortened to just ‘Lu,’ and it’s been that way for probably the last hundred years or close to it.”

  “I see,” said Henry.

  “But as for notable ancestors,” said Toni. “Our family traces itself back, too. As I say, Ryuzoji’s the family name. Ryu stands for ‘dragon,’ to for ‘to create’ or ‘to construct’ and ji for ‘temple.’ The u and o in Ryuzoji are long vowels. My illustrious ancestor was a sixteenth-century daimyo in a warring period that lasted over a century. His domain was roughly a third of the island of Kyushu, and he probably commanded an army of samurai warriors of a few tens of thousands. In those years, a daimyo had the absolute power of life and death over his subjects. When he died in 1584 of your Christian calendar, Takanobu was fifty-six years old. After his death, his domain was dismembered by other warlords. Unless you read Japanese history, you probably never ran across mention of him.”

  “I did not,” said Henry. “So, Takanobu was your direct ancestor?”

  “Specifically,” Toni said, “the direct ancestor of my family was Ryuzoji Masanobu, a great grandson of Takanobu. His grandfather, Takanobu’s son, had sought solace in religion—Christianity in his case—after witnessing the ephemeral nature of earthly glory after the death of Takanobu and the subsequent fall of their clan. Then there was a Christian uprising in the Amakusa-Shimbara region on the island of Kyushu in 1637, twenty-four years after the prohibition of Christianity in Japan and two years after the Tokugawa Shogunate’s total ban on overseas travel by Japanese nationals. Perhaps you read of that?”

  “I did not,” said Henry again, but this time watching her with sharper interest.

  “Masanobu was, of course, a Christian; and one of those whose persecution was carried out relentlessly by the local daimyo, whose fief had the largest concentration of Christians. The local peasants were overtaxed inhumanely, and they rose in rebellion and joined the Christians. Together, Christians and peasants entrenched themselves in the Hara Castle on the Shimbara Peninsula, under the leadership of Amakusa Shiro Tokisada, who was barely sixteen years old at the time. He led the rebels with great courage, and they held off the assaults by much superior forces of trained samurai warriors for four months.”

  “They were strong in the Faith,” said Henry.

  “Yes,” said Toni, “but eventually the castle was overrun, and only a few escaped with their lives—because the attackers tried deliberately to slaughter them all. One of the few who did escape was Masanobu, and so my family descends directly from him.”

  She stopped and smiled again at Henry. “So, you see, we Ryuzoji are a fighting race, too.”

  Henry nodded soberly and thoughtfully. Their eyes met and held for a moment. Watching and listening at the security console, Bleys felt a sudden twinge of something like shame for witnessing this moment secretly. It was clear that with Toni’s words something like a bond had been sealed between her and Henry.

  “I wonder,” Toni said, after a second’s silence, “what it would be like for either one of us, with what we think of our forebears—to be back on Old Earth right now, and how would those of that time look at us?”

  “Whatever they felt and whatever we felt,” said Henry, “it would make no difference in us nor any difference in them. We are as God made us—whether we believe in Him or not.”

  “He can hardly blame us, then, if we’re like our ancestors,” Toni said.

  Henry looked at her abruptly.

  “God looks at not only what’s done, but at the reason for doing it,” he said. “It may be my ancestors knew no better than to do what they did. I do.”

  Toni merely continued to look at him, as she had been since she last finished speaking.

  “You have been told of my sin,” Henry said. “The one I would not tell you of in the limousine.”

  “No.” Toni shook her head. “Who could tell me? Bleys or Dahno? Neither of them have.”

  “Dahno does not know,” Henry said. “Bleys does—my sons told him, which was wrong of them; but at that time they knew no better. If Bleys did not tell you, how do you know?”

  “I know only that that pistol of yours is always there under your shoulder,” said Toni. “The only times I’ve seen you without it were when we went through customs here on New Earth and when we went to the CEOs Club. But I’ve watched you with it. Do you know you walk differently when you’re wearing it? And I can feel that you carry some sort of unhappiness with it. I couldn’t help thinking it might be connected with the sin you mentioned.”

  Henry looked at her for a long moment. She met his gaze candidly.

  “I’ll tell you, then,” said Henry. “When I was young and first went as a Soldier of God, it was for God I went—or I thought it was for God I went. But I went again and again—and I found that it was not just God I went for, but for something in me that liked the warfare and the fighting. Only… there is never any justification for fighting and killing. Justification may be found here, in this life, among other sinful human beings; but in the life to come—”

  He broke off suddenly. Then started again.

  “So I realized that my soul was at stake. I buried my pistol, nearly twenty years ago. And it remained buried until the day when I came to Bleys.”

  “Burying the pistol saved you?”

  “It was not all, but it was necessary,” Henry said. “I had thought I was doing good with it, but with each time I fought, I fell deeper into Satan’s hands.”

  “But you dug it up again and brought it to Bleys,” she said. “You’ve gone back to risking your soul again, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said. He did not say anything more for a short moment. “But I can save Bleys.”

  “With a pistol, a single pistol?”

  “Yes,” said Henry. He gazed out over the level ground far below them.

  Toni’s face paled slowly. “You don’t mean you’d use it on him, if you thought he was going the same way?” she demanded.

  Henry turned his head and looked into her eyes. “Yes.”

  “But you love him,” she said. “You love him like a son, you said. How could you bring yourself to kill him, just because you believed he was taking the wrong path?”

  Henry had looked away from her as she spoke. Now he looked back, and she saw his eyes—tortured, but as unyielding as stones in the earth.

  ‘The soul is more than the body,” he said. “If it comes to the choice, I must save his soul—if God gives me the courage.”

  They stood looking at each other for a long moment.

  “You can tell him this,” Henry said—and the words came out painfully. “But I don’t think you’re one to do that.”

  “No,” she said. “But I have my own duty. And from this moment, Henry, I’ll always be watching you.”

  “I know.”

  Neither said anything for a breath or two. Then, gently, Toni put out her hand to him; and, after a moment, he took it, as he might have taken the hand of another Soldier of God who, an old friend, was now fighting on the opposite side.

  Bleys wrenched off his glasses and earphones, suddenly flooded with disgust at himself for watching and listening to them at a moment like this.

  He turned and started out of the building. There was no one else in it, and he encountered no one as he crossed the small distance to his private shelter. He pushed his way through the triangular entrance and threw himself down on the long bed made for him there.

  For a little while he lay, looking up at the converging tips of the needle-heavy branches forming a tight, dark point at last above him. Then he got up and sat down in a solid wooden chai
r before the simple four-legged table provided as a desk for him.

  There was a neat stack of paper, a stylus and a folder containing maps of the camp and the area.

  Bleys picked up the stylus, took a piece of untouched paper from the stack and began to write upon it.

  “NOTE—” he wrote automatically and, after that, the date and the current hour and minute. He moved the point of the stylus a little farther down the paper, hesitated, then began to write.

  “I watched today over the spy system set up in the trees that surround our camp here on New Earth, and found myself with Toni and Henry. They were talking.

  “I should have thought—I should have known—the full reason behind Henry’s sudden appearance that day on Association. Of course, to Henry, the soul must always be more important than the body.

  “But how could I have been so blind as not to realize he was taking the need for such a heartbreaking decision on himself, knowing how he thinks and how he feels about me—”

  He dropped the stylus and crumpled the paper into a ball hidden by the clenched grasp of his long fingers.

  After a moment, automatically, Bleys smoothed out the crumpled piece of paper and looked about for the slot of a phase-shift document destructor.

  There was none, of course. Getting to his feet, he stepped to the floor-mounted heating unit that stabilized the temperature inside the building. He turned up its thermostat, and it came on, projecting a small, hot wind abruptly through its vent, an aperture not unlike the wider, deeper slot in a document destructor.

  Bleys waited a moment, until the air from the slot in the heating unit burned the skin of his hand. Then he fed the paper into the vent. The white sheet disappeared as it went, as if an invisible tongue licked it up. At the last, a corner of curled ash clung to the lip of the slot as if in defiance of the outrushing air. Then it, too, was gone.

  Chapter 13

  The sound of feet on the two steps up to the entrance of Bleys’s office structure the next day, and the sound of a knock on the slab of wood provided for that purpose, made Bleys look up from the sheet on which he was drawing what looked like the skeleton of a spiderweb; but which actually was a coded version of his latest thinking of his future plans, described in terms of their combined effectiveness in working to his eventual goals. It was only a thinking aid, and unreadable by anyone else; but the habit of caution made him fold it and conceal it in a pocket of his jacket before responding.