In the Balance (68 page)

Had he left off the second sentence, Daniels might have taken him up on the offer. But he discovered he had pride left to flick. He could think of himself as old and he’d already thought of his rifle as antiquated, but he wasn’t about to let this punk kid tell him he couldn’t cut it. “I’ll stick,” he said shortly.

“However you want it,” the tommy-gunner said, shrugging. Mutt got the idea that only his stripes kept the kid from tacking
Pop
onto the end of the sentence.

The Lizards skittered forward, firing as they came. The flames that leapt from the burning beam lit them up but also helped screen their movements. Daniels snapped off a shot. A skitter turned into a tumble. He raised a Rebel yell his grandpappy would have been proud of. “No good in a fight, am I?” The soldier beside him looked innocent. “Did I say something?”

The kid got up on one knee to fire, then went over backward with almost the grace of a circus acrobat. Something hot and wet splashed Daniels. The flickering firelight showed red-streaked gray on the back of his hand. He violently wiped it against his trouser leg. “Brains,” he said, shuddering. When he glanced over at the tommy-gunner, the top of the youngster’s head was clipped off, as if by a hatchet. A spreading pool of blood reached toward him.

He didn’t have time to be as sick as he would have liked. As far as he could tell, he was the forwardmost American still fighting. He fired at one Lizard—a miss, he thought, but he made the little monster duck—then whirled through a quarter-circle to shoot at another.

He had no idea what, if anything, that second round did. He did know that if he had to keep using a bolt-action rifle against what were in essence machine guns, he was going to get his ass killed—and the rest of him with it. He snatched up the tommy gun. The kid lying dead beside him was carrying another couple of drums of ammo, so he could use it for a while.

It bucked against his shoulder like an ornery horse when he opened up. He sprayed bullets hose-fashion out in front of him. The prolonged muzzle flash nearly blinded him before he dropped back behind cover. Hell of a way to fight, he thought—lay down a lot of lead and hope the bad guys walk into it

It was, he realized, a hell of a place to fight, too: gloom-filled ruins lit only by fires and muzzle flashes, echoing with gunshots and screams, the air thick with smoke and the smells of sweat and blood and fear.

He nodded. If this wasn’t hell, what the hell was it?

* * 

The hospital ship
13th Emperor Poropss—the Merciful
should have been a taste of Home for Ussmak. And so, in a way, it was: it was heated to a decent temperature; the light seemed right, not the slightly too blue glare that lit Tosev’s third world, and, best of all, no Big Uglies were trying to kill him at the moment. Even the food was better than the processed slop he ate in the field. He should have been happy.

Had he felt more like himself, he might have been.

But when the Big Uglies blew the turret off his landcruiser, he’d bailed out of the driver’s escape hatch into a particularly radioactive patch of mud. The detectors had chattered maniacally when males in protective suits got near him. And so here he was, being repaired so he could return to action and let the Tosevites figure out still more ways to turn him into overcooked chopped meat

Radiation sickness had left him too nauseated to enjoy the good hospital food at first. By the time that subsided, his treatment was making him sick. He’d had a whole-blood-system transfusion and a cell transplant to replace his damaged blood-producing glands. The immunity-suppressing drugs and the others that resuppressed triggered oncogenes made him sicker than the radiation had. He’d spent a good many days being a very unhappy male indeed.

Now his body was beginning to feel as if it might actually be part of the Race again. His spirit, however, still struggled against the most insidious hospital ailment of all: boredom. He’d done all the reading, played all the computer simulations he could stand. He wanted to go back to the real world again, even if it was Tosev 3 full of large ugly aliens with large ugly cannon and mines and other unpleasant tools.

Yet at the same time he dreaded going back. They’d just make him part of another patched-together landeruiser crew, another piece of a puzzle forced into a place where he did not quite fit. He’d already had two crews killed around him. Could he withstand that a third time and stay sane? Or would he die with this next group? That would solve his problems, but not in a way he cared for.

An orderly shuffled by, pushing a broom. Like a lot of the males who did such lowly work, he had green rings painted on his arms to show he was being punished for a breach of discipline. Ussmak idly wondered what he’d done. These days, idle wondering was about the only sort in which Ussmak indulged.

The orderly paused in his endless round of sweeping, turned one eye toward Ussmak. “I’ve seen males who looked happier, friend,” he remarked.

“So?” Ussmak said. “Last I heard, the fleetlord hadn’t ordered everybody to be happy all the time.”

“You’re a funny one, friend, you are.” The orderly’s mouth fell open. The two males were alone in Ussmak’s chamber. All the same, the orderly swiveled his eyes in all directions before he spoke again: “You
want
to be happy for a while, friend?”

Ussmak snorted. “How can you make me be happy?”
Except by leaving
, he added to himself. If this petty deviationist kept bothering him, he’d say it out loud.

The orderly’s eyes swiveled again. His voice fell to a dramatic half-whisper: “Got what you need right here, friend, you bet I do.”

“What?” Ussmak said scornfully. “Cold sleep and a starship ride back Home? And it’s right there in a beltpouch, is it? Tell me another one.” He nodded slightly while opening his own mouth: a sarcastic laugh.

But he did not faze the other male. “What I’ve got, friend, is better than a trip Home, and I’ll give it to you if you want it.”

“Nothing is better than a trip Home,” Ussmak said with conviction. Still, the fast-talking Orderly stirred his curiosity. That didn’t take much; in the middle of stultifyingly dull hospital routine, anything different sufficed to stir his curiosity. So he asked, “What do you have in there, anyhow?”

The orderly looked all around again; Ussmak wondered if he expected a corrector to leap out of the wall and bring new charges against him. After that latest survey, he took a small plastic vial out of one of the pouches he wore, brought it over to Ussmak. It was filled with finely ground yellowbrown powder. “Some of this is what you need.”

“Some of what?” Ussmak had guessed the male was somehow absconding with medications, but he’d never seen a medication that resembled this stuff.

“You’ll fmd out, friend. This stuff makes you forgive the Big Uglies for a whole lot of things, yes it does.”

Nothing, Ussmak thought, could make him forgive the Big Uglies either for the miserable world they inhabited or for killing his friends and landcruiser teammates. But he watched as the orderly undid the top of the vial, poured a little powder into the palm of his other hand. He held that hand up to Ussmak’s snout. “Go ahead, friend. Taste it—quick, before somebody sees.”

Ussmak wondered again why the orderly was sporting green stripes—had he poisoned someone with the stuff? All at once, he didn’t care. The doctors had been doing their level best to poison him, after all. He sniffed at the powder. The smell startled him—sweet, spicy …
tempting
was the word that sprang to mind. Of itself, his tongue flicked out and licked the fine grains off the scales of the orderly’s hand.

The taste was like nothing he’d known before. The powder bit at his tongue, as if it had sharp little teeth of its own. Then the flavor filled his
whole mouth; after a moment, it seemed to fill his whole brain as well. He felt warm and brilliant and powerful, as if he were the fleetlord and at the same time in the bosom of the Race’s deceased Emperors. He wanted to go out, hop into a landcruiser—by himself, for he felt capable of driving, gunning, and commanding all at the same time—and blast Big Uglies off their planet so the Race could settle here as it should. Getting rid of the Tosevites seemed as easy as saying, “It shall be done.”

“You like that, friend?” the orderly asked, his voice sly. He put the vial of powder back into the pouch.

Ussmak’s eyes followed it all the way. “I
like
that!” he said.

The orderly laughed again—he really was a funny fellow, Ussmak thought. He said, “Figured you would. Glad you found out it doesn’t have to be a mope in here.” He made a few haphazard swipes with his broom, then went out into the hallway to clean the next healing cubicle.

Ussmak reveled in the strength and might the Tosevite—herb, he supposed it was—had given him. He desperately wanted to be out and doing, not cooped up here as if he were being fattened for the stewpot He craved action, danger, complication … for a while.

Then the feeling of invincibility started to fade. The harder he clung to it, the more it slipped between his fingers. Finally, too soon, it was gone, leaving behind the melancholy awareness that Ussmak was only himself (all the more melancholy because he so vividly remembered how he’d felt before) and a craving to know that strength and certainty once more.

Dull hospital routine was all the duller when set against that brief, bright memory. The day advanced on leaden feet. Even meals, till now the high points on Ussmak’s schedule, seemed hardly worth bothering over. The orderly who took away Ussmak’s tray—not the same male who’d given him his moments of delight—made disapproving noises when he found half the food uneaten.

Ussmak slept poorly that night. He woke up before the daytime bright lights in the ceiling went on. He lay tossing in the gloom, imagining time falling off a clock until at last the moment for the broom-pushing orderly to return arrived.

When that moment came, however, he was not in his cubicle. The doctors had trundled him into a lab for another in a series of metabolic and circulatory tests. Before he tasted the Tosevite powder, he hadn’t minded being poked, prodded, and visualized by ultrasound and X-rays. None of it hurt very much, and it was more interesting than sitting around all day like a long-unexamined document in a computer storage file.

Today, though, he furiously resented the tests. He tried to get the technicians to hurry through them, snapped when they sometimes couldn’t, and had them snapping back at him. “I’m sorry, landcruiser driver Ussmak,”
one of the males said. “I didn’t realize you had an appointment with the fleetlord this forenoon.”

“No, it must be an audience with the Emperor,” another technician suggested.

Fuming, Ussmak subsided. He was so upset, he almost forgot to cast down his eyes at the mention of his sovereign. As if to punish him, the males at the lab worked slower instead of faster. By the time they finally let him go back to his cubicle, the orderly with the green rings on his arms was gone.

Another desolate day passed. Ussmak kept trying to recapture the sensation the powder had given him. He could remember it, and clearly, but that wasn’t the same as—or as good as—feeling it again.

When the orderly did show up at last, Ussmak all but tackled him. “Let me have some more of that wonderful stuff you gave me the other day!” he exclaimed.

The orderly put up both hands in the fending-off gesture the Race used to show refusal. “Can’t do it.” He sounded regretful and sly at the same time, a combination that should have made Ussmak see warning lights.

But Ussmak wasn’t picking up subtleties, not at that moment. “What do you mean, you can’t do it?” He stared in blank dismay. “Did you use it all up? Don’t tell me you used it all up!”

“As a matter of fact, I didn’t.” The orderly nervously turned his eyes this way and that. “Keep your voice down, will you, friend? Listen—there’s something I didn’t tell you about that stuff the other day, and you better hear it.”

“What?” Ussmak wanted to grab the cutpurse or malingerer or whatever he was and shake the truth—or at least some more powder—out of him.

“Here, come on, settle down, friend.” The orderly saw—would have needed to be blind to miss—his agitation. “Well, what you need to know is, this stuff—the Big Uglies call it ginger, so you know that, too—anyhow, this stuff is under ban by order of the fleetlord.”

“What?” Ussmak stared again. “Why?”

The orderly spread clawed bands. “Am I the fleetlord?”

“But you had this—ginger, did you say?—before,” Ussmak said. Suddenly, breaking regulations seemed a lot less heinous than it had.

“The ban was in force then, too.” The orderly sounded smug. Of course, he had the green arm stripes to show what he thought of regulations he found inconvenient in one way or another.

Up until the moment his tongue touched ginger, Ussmak had been a law-abiding male, as most males of the Race were. Looking back on things, he wondered why. What had obeying laws and following orders ever gained him? Only a dose of radiation poisoning and the anguish of watching friends die around him.

But breaking a lifetime of conditioning did not come easy. Hesitantly, he asked, “Could you get me some even if—even if it is banned?”

The orderly studied him. “I might—just might, you understand—be able to do that, friend—”

“Oh, I hope you can,” Ussmak broke in.

“—but if I do, it’s gonna cost you,” the orderly finished, unperturbed.

Ussmak was confused. “What do you mean, cost me?”

“Just what I said.” The orderly spoke as if he were a hatchling still wet with the liquids from his egg. “You want more ginger, friend, you’re gonna have to pay me for it. I’ll take commissary scrip, voluntary electronic transfer from your account to one I have set up, Big Ugly souvenirs that I can resell, all kinds of things. I’m a flexible male; you’ll find that out.”

“But you gave me the first bit of ginger for nothing,” Ussmak said, confused more than ever and hurt now, too. “I thought you were just being kind, helping me get through one of those endless days.”

The orderly’s mouth dropped open. “Why shouldn’t the first taste be free? It shows you what I’ve got. And you want what I’ve got, don’t you, friend?”