Healer, page 13
part #3 of LaNague Federation Series
(“Neither have I, and I believe I can recreate enough of them to fill this house with a concentrated dose of the horrors … concentrated enough to insure that those two never bother us or anyone else again.”)
Okay, but let’s get rid of Giff.
XIV
Without warning, the body in front of Giff suddenly rolled over and achieved a sitting position. “Stop that blubbering and get out of here,” it told him.
Giff’s mouth hung open as he looked at the obviously alive and alert man before him with the gory front and the hole in his chest where his heart should be. He looked torn between the urge to laugh with joy and scream with horror. He resolved the conflict by vomiting.
When his stomach had finally emptied itself, he was told to go to the roof, take the emergency chute down to the ground, and keep on going.
“Do not,” the body emphasized, “repeat: do not dally around the grounds if you value your sanity.”
“But how …” he began.
“No questions. If you don’t leave now I won’t be responsible for what happens to you.”
Without another word but with many a backward glance, Giff headed for the roof. At last look, he saw the body climb unsteadily to its feet and walk toward one of the chairs.
Dalt sank into a chair and shook his head. “Dizzy!” he muttered.
(“Yeah. It’s a long way from the pelvis to the brain. Also, there’s some spasm in the aortic arch that I’m having trouble controlling. But we’ll be all right.”)
I’ll have to trust you on that. When do we start with the horrors?
(“Now. I’ll block you out because I’m not sure that even you can take this dose.”)
I was hoping you’d say that, Dalt thought with relief, and watched everything fade into formless grayness.
And from the bloody, punctured body slumped in the chair there began to radiate evil, terror, horror. A malignant trickle at first, then a steady stream, then a gushing torrent.
The men below stopped their search and began to scream.
XV
Dalt finished inspecting the lower rooms and was fully satisfied that the two gurgling, drooling, blank-eyed creatures that had once been Kanlos and Hinter were no longer a threat to his life and his secret. He walked outside into the cool night air in a vain attempt to soothe his laboring right lung and noticed a form slumped in the bushes.
It was Giff. From the contorted position of his body it was evident that he had fallen from the roof and broken his neck.
“Looks like this Son of The Healer couldn’t follow directions,” Dalt said. “Must’ve waited up on the roof and then went crazy when the horrors began and ran over the edge.”
(“Lot’s son.”)
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
(“Nothing. Just a distorted reference to an episode in an ancient religious book,”) Pard said, then switched the subject. (“You know, it’s amazing that there’s actually a cult of Healer-followers awaiting his return.”)
“Not really so amazing. We made quite an impression … and left a lot undone.”
(“Not because we wanted to. There was outside interference.”)
“Right. But that won’t bother us now, with the war going on.”
(“You want to go back to it, don’t you?”) “Yes, and so do you.”
(“Guess you’re right. I’d like to learn to probe a little deeper this time. And maybe find out whoever or whatever’s behind the horrors.”)
“You’ve hinted at that before. Care to explain?”
(“That’s all it is, I’m afraid: a hint … a glimpse of something moving behind the scenes. I’ve no theory, no evidence. Just a gnawing suspicion.”)
“Sounds a little farfetched to me.”
(“We’ll see. But first we’ll have to heal up this hole in the chest, get the original heart working again—if I may quote you: ‘What kind of a healer would The Healer be if he couldn’t heal himself!’—and try to think up some dramatic way for The Healer to reappear.”)
After a quick change of clothes, they went to the roof and steered their flitter into the night, leaving it to the Meltrin authorities to puzzle out two babbling idiots, a broken button-head, and a respected physicist named Cheserak who had vanished without a trace.
They blamed it on the Tarks, of course.
Part Three: HEAL THY NATION
YEAR 1231
The horrors persisted at varying levels of virulence for well over a millennium and during that period certain individuals with the requisite stigmata of flamestone, snowy patch of hair, and golden hand, purporting to be The Healer, appeared at erratic intervals. The efforts of these impostors were somehow uniformly successful in causing remissions of the malady. And although this was vigorously dismissed as placebo effect by most medical authorities (with the notable exception of IMC, which, for some unaccountable reason, refused to challenge the impostors), the explanation fell on deaf ears. The Children of The Healer would have none of it. Rational explanations were meaningless to them.
And so the cult grew, inexorably. It crossed planetary, commonwealth, and even racial barriers (we have already discussed the exploits among the Lentemians and among the Tarks during the postwar period), spreading in all directions until … the horrors stopped.
As suddenly and as inexplicably as the phenomenon had begun, the horrors came to a halt. No new cases have been reported for the last two centuries and the cult of The Healer is apparently languishing, kept alive only by the fact that various individuals in Healer regalia have been spotted on vid recordings in public places here and there about the planets. (The only consistency noted in regard to these sightings is that, when interviewed later, no one in these scenes could ever remember seeing a man who looked like The Healer.)
The Children of The Healer say that he awaits the day when we shall need him again.
We shall see.
from The Healer: Man & Myth by Emmerz Fent
XVI
Federation Central: first-adjutant’s office, Federation Defense Force.
Ros Petrical paced the room. He was fair, wiry, and prided himself on his appearance of physical fitness. But he wasn’t trying to impress the other occupant of his office. That was Bilxer, ah old friend and the Federation currency coordinator, who had been passing the time of day when the report came in. Bilxer’s department was responsible for tabulating and reporting—for a fee, of course—the fluctuations in the relative values of the member planets’ currencies. There had, however, been a distinct and progressive loss of interest in the exchange rates through recent generations of currency coordinators, and consequently Bilxer found himself with a surfeit of time on his hands.
Petrical, until very recently, could hardly complain about being overworked during his tenure as first adjutant. At the moment, however, he wished he had studied finance rather than military science. Then he would be stretched out on the recliner like Bilxer, watching someone else pace the floor.
“Well, there goes the Tark theory,” Bilxer said from his repose. “Not that anyone ever truly believed they were behind the incidents in the first place.”
“Incidents! That’s a nice way of dismissing cold, calculated slaughter!”
Bilxer shrugged off Petrical’s outburst as semantic nitpicking. “That leaves the Broohnins.”
“Impossible!” Petrical said, flicking the air with his hand. He was agitated, knew it, and cursed himself for showing it. “You heard the report. The survivors in that Tark village—”
“Oh, they’re leaving survivors now?” Bilxer interjected. “Must be mellowing.”
Petrical glared at his guest and wondered how they had ever become friends. He was talking about the deaths of thousands of rational creatures and Bilxer seemed to assign it no more importance than a minor devaluation of the Tark erd.
Something evil was afoot among the planets. For no apparent reason, people were being slaughtered at random intervals in random locations at an alarming rate. The first incidents had been trifling—trifling, at least, on an interstellar scale. A man burned here, a family destroyed there, isolated settlements annihilated to a man; then the graduation to villages and towns. It was then that reports began to filter into Fed Central and questions were asked. Petrical had painstakingly traced the slaughters, reported and unreported, back over seven decades. He had found no answers but had come up with a number of questions, the most puzzling of which was this: If the marauders wanted to wipe out a village or a settlement, why didn’t they do it from the atmosphere? A single small peristellar craft could leave a charred hole where a village had been with little or no danger to the attackers. Instead, they arrived on-planet and did their work with antipersonnel weapons.
It didn’t make sense … unless terror was part of the object. The attack teams had been very efficient— they had never left a witness. Until now.
“The survivors,” Petrical continued in clipped tones, “described the marauders as vacuum-suited humanoids—no facial features noted—appearing out of nowhere amid extremely bizarre atmospheric conditions, and then methodically slaughtering every living thing in sight. Their means of escape? They run toward a certain point and vanish. Granted, the Broohnins are unbalanced as far as ideology goes, but this just isn’t their style. And besides, they don’t have the technology for such a feat.”
“Somebody does.”
Petrical stopped pacing. “Yeah, somebody does. And whatever they’ve got must utilize some entirely new physical principle.” He stepped behind his desk and slumped into the seat. His expression was gloomy as he spoke. “The Tarks are demanding an emergency meeting of the General Council.”
“Well, it’s up to you to advise the director to call one. Do you dare?”
“I don’t have much choice. I should have pushed for it some time ago, but I held off, waiting for these slaughters to take on a pattern. As yet, they haven’t. But now that the Tarks have been hit, I’m up against the wall.”
Bilxer rose and ambled toward the door. “It’s fairly commonly accepted that the Federation is dead, a thing of the past. A nice noisy emergency session could lay that idea to rest.”
“I’m afraid,” Petrical sighed, “that the response to this emergency call will only confirm a terminal diagnosis.”
XVII
Josif Lenda inventoried the room as he awaited Mr. Mordirak’s appearance. The high, vaulted ceiling merged at its edges with row upon row of sealed shelves containing, of all things, books. Must be worth a fortune. And the artifacts: an ornately carved desk with three matching plush chairs, stuffed animals and reptiles from a dozen worlds staring out from corners and walls, interspersed with replicas of incredibly ancient weapons for individual combat… maybe they weren’t replicas. The room was windowless with dusky indirect lighting and Lenda had that feeling that he had somehow been transported into the dim past.
In spite of—and no doubt because of—his almost pathological reclusiveness, Mr. Mordirak was probably Clutch’s best-known citizen. A man of purportedly incredible wealth, he lived in a mansion that appeared to have been ripped out of Earth’s preflight days and placed here upon a dizzy pinnacle of stone amid the planet’s badlands. As far as anyone could tell, he rarely left his aerie, and when he did so, he demonstrated a remarkable phobia for image recorders of any type.
Lenda felt a twinge of apprehension as he heard a sound on the other side of the pair of wooden doors behind the desk. He desperately needed the aid of a man of Mordirak’s stature, but Mordirak had remained studiously aloof from human affairs since the day, nearly a half century ago, when he had suddenly appeared on Clutch. Rumors had flashed then that he had bought the planet. That was highly unlikely, but there grew up about the man an aura of power and wealth that persisted to this day. All Lenda needed was one public word of support from Mordirak and his plans for a seat in the Federation Assembly would be assured.
And so the apprehension. Mordirak never granted interviews, yet he had granted Lenda one. Could he be interested? Or was he toying with him?
The doors opened and a dark-haired, sturdy-looking man of approximately Lenda’s age entered. He seated himself smoothly at the desk and locked eyes with the man across from him.
“Why does a nice young man like you want to represent Clutch at the Federation Assembly, Mr. Lenda?”
“I thought I was to see Mr. Mordirak personally,” Lenda blurted, and regretted his words as he said them.
“You are,” was the reply.
Despite the fact that he had expected him to be older, had expected a more imposing appearance, Lenda had recognized this man as Mordirak from the moment he’d entered the room. The man’s voice was young in tone but held echoes of someone long familiar with authority; his demeanor alone had beamed the message to his subconscious instantly, yet the challenge had escaped of its own accord.
“Apologies,” he sputtered. “I’ve never seen an image of you.”
“No problem,” Mordirak assured him. “Now, how about an answer to that question?”
Lenda shrugged off the inexplicable sensation of inadequacy that this man’s presence seemed to thrust upon him and spoke. “I want to be planetary representative because Clutch is a member of the Federation and should have a say in the Assembly. No one here seems to think the Fed is important. I do.”
“The Federation is dead,” Mordirak stated flatly.
“I beg to differ, sir. Dying, yes. But not dead.”
“There has not been a single application for membership in well over three centuries, and more than half of the old members can’t stir up enough interest in their populations to send planetary reps, let alone sector reps. I call that dead.”
“Well, then,” Lenda said, jutting out his jaw, “it must be revived.”
Mordirak grunted. “What do you want of me?”
“Your support, as I’m sure you are well aware.”
“I am politically powerless.”
“So am I. But I am also virtually unknown to the populace, which is not true in your case. I need the votes of more than fifty per cent of the qualified citizens of Clutch to send me to Fed Central. To get those votes, all I require is your endorsement.”
“You can’t get them on your own?”
Lenda sighed. “Last election, I was the only candidate in the running and not even half the qualified population bothered to vote. The Federation Charter does not recognize representatives supported by less than half their constituents.”
Mordirak’s sudden smile seemed ill-fitted to his face. “Doesn’t that tell you something, Mr. Lenda?”
“Yes! It tells me that I need someone who will get them out of their air recliners and over to their vid sets totap in a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ during the hour that the polls are open next month!”
“Andyou think I’m that man?”
“Yourname is magic on this planet, Mr. Mordirak. If Clutch’s famous recluse thinks representation is important enough to warrant endorsement of a candidate, then the voters will think it important enough to warrant their opinion.”
“I’mafraid I can’t endorse you,” Mordirak said, and his tone held an unmistakable tone of finality.
Lendatried valiantly to hide his frustration. “Well, if not me, then somebody else. Anyone … just to get things moving.”
“Sorry,Mr. Lenda, but I’ve never had much to do with politics and politicians, and I don’t intend to begin now.” He rose and started to turn.
“Damnit,Mordirak!” Lenda cried, leaping to his feet “The human race is going to hell! We’re degenerating into rabble! A group here doing this, a faction there doing that, out-of-touch, smug, indifferent! We’ve become a bunch of fragments with a common genetic background as our only link. I don’t like what I see happening and I want to do something about it!”
“Youhave passion, Mr. Lenda,” Mordirak said with a touch of approval. “But just what is it you think you can do?”
“I… I don’t know as yet,” he replied, cooling rapidly. “First I have to get to Fed Central and work from there—from the inside out. The Federation in its prime was a noble organization with a noble record. I hate to think of it dying of attrition. All the work of men like LaNague and—”
“LaNague…” Mordirak murmured as his face softened momentarily. “I came of age on his home planet.”
“Soyou’re a Tolivian,” Lenda said with a sudden nod of understanding. “That would explain your disinterest in politics.”
“That’sa part of it, yes. LaNague was born on Tolive and is still held in high regard there. And I hold a number of late Tolivians in high regard.”
For the first time during their meeting, Lenda felt as if he was talking to a fellow human being. The initial void between them had diminished appreciably and he pressed to take advantage of the proximity. “I visited Fed Central not too long ago. It would break LaNague’s heart if he could see—”
“That tactic won’t work,” Mordirak snapped, and the void reasserted itself.
“Sorry. It’s just that I’m at a loss as to what to do.”
“I can see that. You’re frustrated. You want desperately to be elected but can’t even find an election in which to run.”
“That’s unfair.”
“Is it? Why then do you want to go to the seat of power? ‘Born to rule,’ perhaps?”
Lenda was silent He resented the insinuation but it struck a resonance within the bowels of his mind. He had often questioned his political motives and had never been entirely satisfied with the answers. But he refused to accept the portrait Mordirak was painting for him.
“Not to rule,” he replied. “If that were my drive, I’d rejoice at the downfall of the Federation. No one ever went to Fed Central to rule unless he was a Restructurist.” He paused and averted his eyes. I’m a romantic, I guess. I’ve spent most of my adult life studying the Federation and know the way it was in the days before the war. I’ve seen the old vid recordings of the great debates and decisions. In all sincerity, if you knew the Federation as I know it and could see it now, you would weep.”
