This subdividing, coupled with the atrophy of the outward urge, caused the political scientists the most concern. They foresaw increasing estrangement between the planetary enclaves and, subsequently, open hostility. Without the Federation acting as a focus for the drives and ambitions of the race, they were predicting a sort of interstellar feudalism. From there the race would go one of two ways: complete consolidation under the most aggressive enclave and a return to empire much like the Metep Imperium in the pre-Federation days, or complete breakdown of interstellar intercourse, resulting in barbarism and stagnation.
Dalt was not sure whether he accepted the doomsayers’ theories. One thing was certain, however: The Federation was no longer a focus for much of anything anymore.
With the image of the near-deserted General Council assembly hall dancing in his head, he tried to doze. But a voice as familiar by now as the tone of his own thoughts intruded on his mind.
("Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;/mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/… the best lose all conviction.")
Don’t bother me.
("You don’t like poetry, Dalt? That’s from one of my favorites of the ancient poets. Appropriate, don’t you think?")
I really couldn’t care.
("You should. It could apply to your personal situation as well as that of your race.")
Be gone, parasite!
("I’m beginning to wish that were possible. You worry me lately. Your personality is disintegrating.")
Spare me your trite analyses.
("I’m quite serious about this. Look at what you’ve become: a recluse, an eccentric divorced from contact with other beings, living in an automated gothic mansion and surrounding himself with old weapons and death trophies, brooding and miserable. My concern is genuine, though hardly altruistic.")
Dalt didn’t answer. Pard had a knack for cutting directly to the core of a matter and this time the resultant exposure was none too pleasant. He had long been plagued by a gnawing fear that his personality was deteriorating. He didn’t like what he had become but seemed unable to do anything about it. When and where had the change begun? When had occasional boredom become crushing ennui? When had other people become other things? Even sex no longer distracted him, although he was as potent as ever. Emotional attachments that had once been an easy, natural part of his being had become elusive, then impossible. Perhaps the fact that all such relationships in the past had been terminated by death had something to do with it.
Pard, of course, had no such problems. He did not communicate directly with the world and had never existed in a mortal frame of reference. From the instant he had gained sentience in Dalt’s brain, death had been a mere possibility, never an inevitability. Pard had no need of companionship except for occasional chats with Dalt concerning their dwindling mutual concerns, and found abstract cogitations quite enthralling. Dalt envied him for that.
Why, he wondered in a tangent, did he always refer to Pard in the male gender? Why not "it"? Better yet, why not "her"? For he was wedded to this thing in his head till death did them part.
("Don’t blame your extended lifespan for your present condition,") said the ever-present thoughtrider. ("You’re mistaking inertia for ennui. You haven’t exhausted your possibilities; in fact, you’ve hardly dented them. You adapted well for a full millennium. It’s only in the last one hundred fifty years or so that you’ve begun to crack.")
Right again, Dalt thought. Perhaps it had been the end of the horrors that had precipitated the present situation. In retrospect, The Healer episodes, for all the strain they subjected him to, had been high points while they lasted – crests between shallow troughs. Now he felt becalmed at sea, surrounded by featureless horizons.
("You should be vitally interested in what is happening to your race, because you, unlike those around you today, will be there when civilization deteriorates into feudalism. But nothing moves you. The rough beast of barbarism is rattling the cage of civilization and all you can do is stifle a yawn.")
You certainly are in a poetic mood today. But barbarians, like the poor, are always with us.
("Granted. But they aren’t in charge – at least they haven’t been to date. Tell me: Would you like to see a Federation modeled on the Kwashi culture?")
Dalt found that a jolting vision but replied instead, I wish you were back on Kwashi! He instantly regretted the remark. It was childish and unworthy of him and further confirmed the deterioration of his mental state.
("If I’d stayed there, you’d be over a thousand years dead by now.")
"Maybe I’d be happier!" he retorted angrily. There was a tearing sound to his right as the armrest of his recliner ripped loose in his hand.
How’d I do this? he asked.
("What?")
How’d I tear this loose with my bare hand?
("Oh, that. Well, I made some changes a while back in the way the actin and myocin filaments in your striated muscle handle ATP. Human muscle is hardly optimum in that respect. Your maximum muscle tension is far above normal now. Of course, after doing that, I had to strengthen the cross-bridges between the filaments, reinforce the tendinous origins and insertions of the muscles, and then toughen up the joint capsules. It also seemed wise to increase the epidermal keratin to prevent…”)
Pard paused as Dalt carelessly flipped the ruined armrest onto the cabin floor. In the old days Pard would have received a lecture on the possible dangers of meddling with his host’s physiology. Now Dalt didn’t seem to care.
("You seriously worry me, Dalt. Making yourself miserable… it’s unpleasant, but your emotional life is your own affair. I must warn you, however: If you take any action that threatens our physical life, I’ll take steps to preserve it – with or without your consent.")
Go away, parasite, Dalt thought sulkily, and let me nap.
("I resent your inference. I’ve more than earned my keep in this relationship. It becomes a perplexing question as to who is really the parasite at this point.")
Dalt made no reply.
DALT AWOKE WITH CLUTCH looming larger and larger below him as the tourer eased through the atmosphere toward the sea. Amid clouds of steam it plunged into the water and then bobbed to the surface to rest on its belly. A pilot craft surfaced beside it, locked onto the hull, and, as the tourer took on water for ballast, guided it below the surface to its berth on the bottom.
The tube car deposited him on the beach a short time later and he strolled slowly in the general direction of his flitter. The sun had already completed about a third of its arc across the sky and the air lay warm and quiet and mistily opaque over the coast. Bathers and sunsoakers were out in force.
He paused to watch a little sun-browned, towheaded boy digging in the sand. For how many ages had little boys done that? He knew he must have done the same during his boyhood on Friendly. How long ago was that? Twelve hundred years? It seemed like twelve thousand. He felt as if he had never been young.
He wondered idly if he had made a mistake in refusing to have children and knew immediately that he hadn’t. Watching the women he had loved grow old and die had been hard enough; watching his children do the same would have been more than he could have tolerated.
Pard intruded again, this time with a definite tone of urgency. ("Something’s happening!")
What’re you talking about?
("Don’t know for sure, but there’s a mammoth psi force suddenly operating nearby.")
A slight breeze began to stir and Dalt glanced up from the boy as he heard excited voices down by the water. The mist in the air was starting to move, being drawn to a point about a meter from the water’s edge. A gray, vortical disk appeared, coin-sized at first, then persistently larger. As it grew in size, the breeze graduated to a wind. By the time the disk reached a diameter equal to a man’s height, it was sucking in mist and spray at gale force.
Curious, the little boy stood up and
began to walk toward the disk, but Dalt put a hand on his shoulder and gently pulled him back.
"Into your sand hole, little man," he told him. "I don’t like the looks of this."
The boy’s blue eyes looked up at him questioningly but something in Dalt’s tone made him turn and crawl back into his excavation.
Dalt returned his attention to the disk. Something about it raised his hackles and he squatted on his haunches to see what would develop. It had stopped growing now and a number of people, bracing themselves against the draw of the gale, formed a semi-circular cluster around it at a respectful distance.
Then, as if passing through a solid wall, a vacuum-suited figure with a blazing jetpack on its back materialized and hit the sand at a dead run. Carrying what appeared to be an energy rifle, it swerved to the right and dropped to one knee. A second figure appeared then, and as it swerved to the left, the first turned off its jetpack, raised its rifle, and started firing into the crowd. The second soon joined it and the semicircle of observers broke into fleeing, terrified fragments. A steady stream of invaders began to pour onto the beach, fanning out and firing on the run with murderous accuracy.
Dalt had instinctively flattened onto the sand at the sight of the first invader, and he now watched in horror as the people who had only moments before been bathing in the sun and the sea became blasted bodies littering the sand. Panic reigned as scantily clad figures screamed and scrambled to escape. The marauders, bulky, faceless, and deadly in their vacsuits, pursued their prey with remorseless efficiency. Their ranks were forty or fifty strong now and as one ran in his direction, Dalt realized that he was witnessing and would no doubt soon be a victim of one of the mindless slaughters Lenda had been telling him about.
He sensed movement on his right and turned to see the little boy sprinting across the sand, yelling for his mother. Dalt opened his mouth to tell him to get down, but the approaching invader spotted the fleeing figure and raised his weapon.
Dalt found himself on his feet and racing toward the invader. With the high quality of marksmanship exhibited by the marauders so far, he knew he had scant hope of saving the boy. But he had to try. Something, either concern for a young life or for his own, or a combination of both, made him run. His feet churned up furious puffs of sand as they fought for traction, but he could not gain the momentum he needed. The invader’s weapon buzzed quietly and out of the corner of his eye Dalt saw the boy convulse in mid-stride and go down.
The thought of self-preservation was suddenly submerged in a red tide of rage. Dalt wanted to live, yes. But more than that, right now he wanted to kill. If his pumping feet could get him there in time, the memory of the torn armrest on his tourer told him what he could do. The invader gave a visible start – though no facial expression could be seen through the opaque faceplate – as he caught sight of Dalt racing toward him. He began to swing the blaster around but too late. Dalt pushed the weapon aside, grabbed two fistfuls of the vacsuit fabric over the chest, and pulled. A ripping sound, a whiff of fetid air, and then Dalt’s hands were inside the suit. They traveled up to the throat and encircled the neck. A dull snap followed and the invader went limp.
Extricating his hands, Dalt pushed the body to the ground with one and snatched the falling blaster with the other. After a brief inspection: How do you work this thing? There was no trigger.
Beside him, the body of the slain invader suddenly flared with a brief, intolerable, incandescent flash, the oily smoke began to rise from the torn suit.
"What the–” Dalt began out loud, but Pard cut him off.
("A good way to hide your planet of origin. But never mind that. Try that little button on the side of the stock and try it quickly. I believe you’ve drawn some unwanted attention to yourself.")
Dalt glanced around and saw one of the invaders staring at him, momentarily stunned with amazement. Then he began to raise his weapon into the firing position.
Suddenly everything slowed, as if under water.
What’s going on?
("I’ve accelerated your mind’s rate of perception to give you a much-needed edge over the energy bolt that’s about to come our way.")
The blaster had inched up to the invader’s shoulder by now and Dalt dove to his left. He seemed to float gracefully, gently through the air. But there was nothing gentle about his impact with the ground. He grunted, rolled, pointed his blaster in the general direction of the invader, and pressed the button three times in rapid succession.
One of the energy bolts must have found its mark. The invader threw up his arms in a slow, wide arc and drifted toward the sand to rest on his back.
Then, as movements resumed their normal cadence, the body flared and belched smoke like the one before it. Dalt noted that he now occupied a position behind the advancing line of marauders.
Maybe you’d better keep up the speed on the perception, he told Pard.
("I can only do it in bursts. The neurons can’t maintain the necessary metabolic rate for more than a minute or two.")
Dalt settled himself in the prone position, shouldered the weapon, and found that the button fit under his thumb with only a little stretching.
Let’s even up the odds a little while we can.
Without the slightest hesitation or remorse, he sighted on the unsuspecting backs of the invaders as they went on with their slaughter of the remaining bathers. As the invaders fell one by one to the silent bolts of energy from Dalt’s weapon, the skills he had learned as a game hunter on the lesser-settled planets of Occupied Space came back to him: Hit the stragglers and the ones on the periphery, then move inward.
A full dozen of their comrades lay dead and smoking on the sand before the main body of the force realized that all was not going according to plan.
A figure in the center of the rank looked around and, noticing that his detail was unaccountably shrinking in size, signaled to the others. They began to turn their attention from the bathers before them to seek out the unexpected threat from the rear. Pard accelerated perception again and then Dalt’s weapon began to take a merciless toll of the force.
He was constantly moving and sighting the strange blaster, getting the feel of it and becoming more deadly with every bolt he fired. As soon as an invader raised his weapon in his direction, he would shift, sight, and fire, shift-sight-fire, shift-sight-fire. If the muscles of his fingers, arms, and shoulders could have responded at the speed of his perception, he would have killed them all by now. As it was, he had cut their number in half. The assault had been effectively crippled and it wouldn’t take many more casualties before it would fall apart completely.
As Dalt sighted on the figure he took to be the leader, his vision suddenly blurred and vertigo washed over him. The wave receded briefly, then pounded down upon him again with greater force. He felt a presence, totally malignant, totally alien… and yet somehow oddly familiar.
Then came an indescribable wrenching sensation and he felt for an instant as if he were looking at the entire universe from both within and without. Then he saw and felt nothing.
HE AWOKE WITH SAND in his eyes and nostrils and the murmur of the sea and human voices in his ears. Rising to his knees, he brushed the particles from his face with an unsteady hand and opened his eyes.
A small knot of people encircled him, its number growing steadily. The circle widened as he gained his feet. All eyes were fixed upon him, and mixed among the hushed mutterings of the voices, the word "Healer" was repeated time and again. It was suddenly obvious that his psi cover must have cut off while he was unconscious.
Dalt felt something in his right hand: the stolen weapon. He loosened his grip and let it fall to the sand. As he resumed the interrupted trek to his flitter, the crowd parted and left him a wide path obstructed only by the bodies of fallen bathers and the remains of the invaders he had killed.
He surveyed the scene as he walked. The assault had apparently been broken: the attackers were gone, their vertical gateway fro
m who-knows-where had closed. The still-smoldering ashes of the invaders who had not escaped gave him a primitive sense of satisfaction.
That’ll teach ’em.
The crowd followed him to his flitter at a respectful distance and stood gazing upward as he piloted the craft above the mist and toward the mountains. Reaction began to set in and his hands were shaking when he reached the aerie. Gaining the study, Dalt poured himself a generous dose of the thin, murky Lentemian liquor he had acquired a taste for in the last century or so. He usually diluted it, but took it straight now and it burned delightfully all the way down.
Sitting alone in the darkness with his feet on the desk, Dalt became aware of a strange sensation. No, it wasn’t the liquor. It was something else… something unpleasant. He put the glass down and returned his feet to the floor as he recognized the feeling.
He was alone.
Pard? he called mentally, awaiting the familiar reply. None came.
He was on his feet now and using his voice. "Pard!"
The emptiness that followed was more than a lack of response. There was a void within.
Pard was gone. Pard the father, Pard the son, Pard the wife and mother, Pard the mentor, the confidant, the companion, the preserver, the watchdog, Pard the friend, Pard… was gone.
The sudden shattering sensation of being alone for the first time in over a millennium was augmented by the awareness that without Pard he was no longer immortal. The weight of the centuries he had lived became crushing as Dalt realized that once again his days could be numbered.
His voice rose to a scream.
"Pard!"
IV
THREE SULLEN DAYS PASSED, during which Dalt’s aerie was besieged by a legion of news-service reporters vying for an interview. The Healer had returned and everyone wanted an exclusive. Foreseeing this, Dalt had hired a security force to keep them all away. Finally word came that a Federation official and a local politico named Lenda were requesting an audience, claiming they were acquaintances. Should they be allowed in?