igenlode | Blue Remembered Hills (ch22) (Reply)

And finally, four years and seventy-five thousand words later... Erik gets the last word. Well, it's canon!

Although I had quite a lot of trouble getting Dar to feel plausibly sympathetic towards him, given that he basically sabotaged everything the two of them had been working for in a fit of pique...

A pair of scenes here to mirror the pair at the beginning; I'd forgotten how amusing Carla is to write, with her overweening self-deception -- she takes care not to think in a straight line even about herself (and very rarely thinks about anybody else). But I did want to show that a lot of the faceless goons on the 'other side' would actually have been boys just like Rall, with people to grieve them. Revolution isn't all bright colours and heroism and Good versus Evil :-(

Chapter 22: The End of the Ghost’s Love Story

Carla trod down the street with a spring in her step, humming a little.

She’d cried buckets — positively howled — when she heard about Salj, of course she had. She wasn’t completely heartless, whatever some people might think, and they’d had a lot of fun together. The last thing she’d expected was to come into work one morning and learn that he’d died in some stupid botched-up attack on the Federation ships just outside her office.

He’d done his duty, defended his post to the last, and helped to beat off the dissidents; no doubt they’d make sure he got some kind of posthumous medal. But all it came down to in the end was that handsome, black-haired Salj, who’d known how to give a girl a good time, had been shot in the head by some angry lunatic with an antiquated energy gun and had his brains boiled out there on the landing field. She hadn’t been able to walk past that point for days.

But it had only ever been strictly temporary between them, she’d always known that, and he’d been leaving anyway. They’d said their goodbyes the night before, and he’d given her a big brooch she could sell if she needed a credit or two. He’d died happy, Carla told herself firmly: exhausted and happy, if her efforts on that last evening had had anything to do with it.

And there was no future in space fleet officers, anyway. They never stayed around long enough to be worthwhile. Now Beran up in Civil Administration was an Alpha-grade, and reputed to be generous with his cash... She contemplated her next campaign cheerfully.

Plaza-E was as crowded as ever, but Ogar’s Bar on the corner was starting to look more than a little shabby. It had been closed for weeks after what Newparis had taken to calling the Incident; everyone knew Dar Ogar was hand in glove with the administration up at the port, and most of his custom had come from spacers, in any case. His old Security experience must have been just what they needed to help sort out the mess at the dockyards, as Carla had explained to everyone who would actually bother to listen.

But most people had simply stopped going. Even Carla had given up, after the first few times she’d called in for a meal and found the lights shut off and no sign of life inside. Besides, it wasn’t the same without Cris, anyway.

Not that she missed Cris — she’d been seeing hardly anything of her by the time of the Incident, anyway. The girl had been a pallid little creature who’d never appreciated Carla’s conversation or been properly grateful for the attention she’d spared, and of course it hadn’t been any surprise when she’d run off and come to a bad end. Really, Carla had always expected it. Hadn’t she said so a dozen times since?

But she had to admit she’d been very curious when the package had come this morning. Especially as the covering note had been unsigned, but quite obviously from Cris.

So she’d come down to Ogar’s Bar again with this errand for an excuse, and it seemed that Dar had re-opened after all. The frontage still looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in over a month, and there was only one other customer when she ducked into the dim interior from the daylight outside, a grimy-looking servo tech sitting in one of the half-booths at the back and nursing a solitary drink. But Dar was there behind the counter, looking grey in the face and rather drawn — she didn’t usually pay much attention to these things, but she thought maybe he’d been ill — and he actually seemed pleased to see her. It was almost like old times... and then she did remember Salj, the way she’d said she wasn’t going to, and shut down that hint of nostalgia in a hurry.

Dar was busy trying to explain that he wasn’t serving food right now, so she pointed out that she hadn’t come for that anyway and produced the parcel.

“She said she’d sent it to me because she wasn’t sure if you’d still be around,” she told him — and wondered, for the first time, just how Cris had guessed. Dar really didn’t look well. In fact, he looked as if he’d been in some kind of accident.

“And you’re sure this is from Cris? For me?” He was giving her an odd intense look, and Carla scowled.

“Of course it is, I’d recognise her style anywhere. You remember her, don’t you? The dreamy washed-out little thing who used to trail round after me, and ran off with that plain-faced boy who murdered his captain...”

“Yes, I remember her,” Dar said quietly. “I never knew what happened.”

Carla didn’t think there was any great mystery about what had happened, but she was much more interested in the contents of Dar’s mysterious box. “Well? Aren’t you going to open it?”

Dar glanced around the room, his dark face closed-in as if making some kind of calculation, and shot her an assessing look. But the next moment he was smiling at Carla across the counter and reaching to crack open the seals, and she decided she must have imagined it.

His hands folded back the lid. “Let’s see what I’ve been sent, then.”

Dar wasn’t quite sure what he’d been expecting.

Something innocuous: the whole package would have been scanned again and again on the way from its planet of origin, and certainly before being issued to a low-grade tech like Carla. And if he’d died in the dockyard, or ended up in questioning — and he still woke up sweating at night in the knowledge of just how close he’d come — there was no way Carla would have resisted opening the package herself.

Not a vistape. That would have been all too traceable, and he’d taught her better than that.

But, when he pushed aside the packaging within the hard plastic shell, the clean, sharp aroma that rose up to meet them took him completely by surprise.

“Why, it’s a doll.” Carla’s bright bob of hair had swung forward as she leaned eagerly over the box. She thrust it back, clearly disappointed. “One of those crude carved things from primitive planets... why would anyone send you that?”

The little wooden figure nestled between his hands as he lifted it out, gently. It was visibly human, but that was about all you could say for it as a piece of art. Still, the style was familiar and the scent more so, the bright resinous odour of forests beneath another sun. He’d seen dolls like this before, in bazaars and cheap trading places across the galaxy: spacers’ souvenirs of a wide-open sky and trees without end.

The raised band all around the mid-section was something new, though. He plucked at it and found the attachment was loose; a stiff strip of printout tape came free and uncoiled beneath his fingers, anonymous and unsigned. The wording inside was guarded and brief.

Yet still, somehow, very much Cris.

“My Lieutenant says you will know where this comes from. We are happy and safe. I am so sorry about Erik. I know now he was your friend, and, I think, truly mine.”

Erik. A stab of memory from the half-healed wound in his side, and for a moment he was pinned down again beneath howling shots with that broken thread of voice in his ear.

Erik: the one name in that whole careful message she had not needed to shield. Not for him that laughing allusion to “my Lieutenant”; no sweet subterfuge of possession there, not for the man who was already half a legend. Mention of the Ghost on Newparis might still have raised unwanted alarm... but Erik was gone from that handful who had ever known him. Gone beyond hurt and beyond shame, Dar told himself, thrusting down pain like fire beneath his heart.

It had been almost the end of the fighting when he had taken that wound. Any sooner, and he might not have made it off the field... and the Organisation, even battered as it now was, would no longer exist. It had been a lucky hit from the Federation point of view: enough to disable, not enough to kill him outright, and they’d been taking prisoners by that stage. Dar had no illusions about his own ability to withstand interrogation — he’d seen it administered too many times — and he knew too much.

He’d always been aware he couldn’t afford to get caught. He’d never planned on finding himself fighting Erik at the same time as the Federation.

They’d had no warning; only implacable disaster on the verge of victory, as their enemies seemed to know every move before they made it, and every command as it was given. He’d lost too many men before he understood that Erik was his true opponent, and he blamed himself for that.

After that... well, he’d reckoned all communications compromised, and worked to abort the attack and pull out what he could; there’d been a time when he’d thought it would be pitifully little.

And then the Federation shot had seared across his ribs from out of the shadows and left him stunned and helpless, and he’d believed it was the end, and that they would save nothing at all. Fire had scorched the skies overhead, and he had done his best to double to his feet and run. He’d barely managed a crawl.

Dar had waited for them to come and drag him out of cover; waited, with a sick lurch of anticipation, to be held for questioning and the inevitable betrayal. But the anticipated rush had broken in the other direction, where only bodies and a few stragglers remained. And Erik’s voice had been harsh in his ears, a haggard rasp, as he’d fumbled a field-dressing out of his belt to numb the charred red-and-black crater and made it to his feet at last.

“What did you think you were doing, Dar Ogar, siding with that little fool? You could all have died here for all anyone cared... but she pleaded for you. Yes, I promised to save you to please her...”

“What have you done with her?” Dar, staggering for the boundary fence, had wasted no air on courtesies.

“I am dying, Dar, dying....” A long bubbling breath. “That boy was born here — I think he will live. But I am dying.... Still it was worth it, to share her breath. To lie one moment in her arms and know that she staked her life in the hope to save me....”

“What have you done?” Dar drew his gun again and sent a blazing charge against the wire, no longer caring if alarms sounded. Metal slumped and ran as he emptied the weapon, and he set his teeth. “Erik, is Cris dead?”

“No, not dead... I don’t think so, it’s out of my hands now....” He coughed, uncontrollably. “I sent her... with the boy. She loves him... and I am dying... for love....”

There was a dragging pause, and Dar’s nerve snapped. “I sent Blake and Gan to reason with you! What have you done?”

“You had better... crawl through that wire now... Dar.” The wrecked voice held a trace of the old sardonic humour they’d shared, once. “I have only... a few moments longer... to protect you. I am dying... and this place must not be found....”

He’d heard the pulse of the activation code without understanding; but he’d been halfway through the wire, for all that, before the open channel had roared into overload and oblivion.

Erik, what have you done? But this time — this one last time — Dar Ogar had known the answer.

Had known before the rumours came in, phantom whispers flying across the airwaves in advance of official announcements and denials; rumours of Federation failure at the Garnier, of compromised security and communications blown, up and down the line. Known enough of Erik’s power and intent to be sure that all those lives in the complex above had not been averted from disaster by chance, but spared. A cornered Ghost would have lashed out to kill. Erik had chosen — chosen to do as he had.

But then hadn’t he always done precisely as he pleased? Those following days for Dar had been bitter ones, spent trapped in hiding beneath what medical equipment the Operation could obtain and anticipating betrayal at every moment as the reprisals went on. He’d trusted to reasoning with Erik. Since when had that been a good idea? The Ghost had saved what was left of the Operation; but he had all but destroyed it first.

Arrests had taken place, but Dar’s cover had held. Other survivors, worse injured, had come straggling in — all too pitifully few of them — and he had discharged himself, to creep back home and allay suspicion while nursing his hurts alone.

Oh, Erik.... He had felt— responsible for the Ghost for so long that it was still hard to feel anger. Had Erik even seen it as friendship? With Erik, you could never be sure.

He’d wondered once if the man was even capable of caring for anything beyond his own whims and desires; he’d glimpsed enough of the world through Erik’s eyes to know it for a place of irrational actions and hatreds, aroused on impulses to which the Ghost’s genius was somehow blind. No wonder he had exploited it, fled from it, despised it... and yearned for it, poor monster that he was, crippled in more ways than one.

‘I want that girl out of there before she destroys him’: Dar’s own words came back to him now in savage unfeeling prophecy, and he stared down at the little carved doll in his hands, turning it over and over as if to touch the warmth of that eager, loving heart.

Sweet Cris; gentle Cris, who had deserved better than to be a pawn in such a game. Her pleas in the end had saved Dar and the rest. She would have saved Erik if she could. Now she was free to find a life of her own, and two fair-haired innocents were far away beneath a wider, more merciful sky.

And Erik — Erik, who had known no law beyond the cravings of his will — Erik had chosen, at the last, to give her that happiness and set her free.

If he’d been born otherwise, the man could have been anything. In or out of the Federation, he could have had fame in any field, to create, to teach, to design— but then, of course, Dar told himself with the grim lift of a half-smile at his own expense, they would never have met at all.

He’d tried so hard just to teach Erik to be human. He’d seen — could still see — no future but disaster in this latest obsession of his: disaster not least for Erik. He’d been right... and gratefully, painfully wrong. Erik had glimpsed in Cris everything that he himself had lacked, and grasped at her with the terrified greed of a drowning man.

‘Your friend, and I think truly mine’: perhaps. But perhaps never more truly than when he’d found a love greater than his own desires, and for the first time in his life let go.

She had wanted to save him. Dar thought it was in that final moment that she had.

He released the end of the printout, and watched it spring back into its stiff curl. Carla, inevitably, pounced.

“What’s that? Is it a message? Is that what all this was about? But why—”

She had twitched the tape from his hand and was staring down at it, her mouth moving in a silent scowl. Dar steeled himself for the next question as she looked up.

“Who’s Erik?”

For a lonely, heartsick instant he almost told her. The impulse left him shaken.

“No-one.” He retrieved the message from the bright malice of Carla’s curiosity and dropped it behind the counter into the disposal chute, watching it flash into vapour. “Just... someone I used to know.”

He closed his fingers around Cris’s gift, token of a happiness that could hurt none. None... now. Erik was gone. And the legend of the Ghost would be needed on Newparis in the years to come.