“Maybe not. Maybe it’s safe for me to turn and go back.”
“What happened?” Voigtland’s son asked. His cube hadn’t been activated before. He knew nothing of events since he had been cubed, ten months earlier. “Were you overthrown?”
Juan started to explain about the coup to Mark. Voigtland turned to his father. At least the old man was safe from the rebellious colonels; he had died two years ago, in his eighties, just after making the cube. The cube was all that was left of him. “I’m glad this didn’t happen in your time,” Voigtland said. “Do you remember, when I was a boy, and you were President of the Council, how you told me about the uprisings on other colonies? And I said, No, Bradley’s World is different, we all work together here.”
The old man smiled. He looked pale and waxy, an echo of the man he had been. “No world is different, Tom. Political entities go through similar cycles everywhere, and part of the cycle involves an impatience with democracy. I’m sorry that the impatience had to strike while you were in charge, son.”
“Homer tells us that men would rather have their fill of sleep, love, singing, and dancing than of war,” Goethe offered, smooth-voiced, courtly, civilized. “But there will always be some who love war above all else. Who can say why the gods gave us Achilles?”
“I can,” Hemingway growled. “You define man by looking at the opposites inside him. Love and hate. War and peace. Kissing and killing. That’s where his borders are. What’s wrong with that? Every man’s a bundle of opposites. So is every society. And sometimes the killers get the upper hand on the kissers. Besides, how do you know the fellows who overthrew you were so wrong?”
“Let me speak of Achilles,” said Alexander, tossing his ringlets, holding his hands high. “I know him better than any of you, for I carry his spirit within me. And I tell you that warriors are best fit to rule, so long as they have wisdom as well as strength, for they have given their lives as pledges in return for the power they hold. Achilles—”
Voigtland was not interested in Achilles. To Juan he said, “I have to call. It’s four days, now. I can’t just sit in this ship and remain cut off.”
“If you call, they’re likely to catch you.”
“I know that. But what if the coup failed?” Voigtland was trembling. He moved closer to the ultrawave set.
Mark said, “Dad, if the coup failed, Juan will be sending a ship to intercept you. They won’t let you just ride all the way to Rigel for nothing.”
Yes, Voigtland thought, dazed with relief. Yes, yes, of course. How simple. Why hadn’t I thought of that?
“You hear that?” Juan asked. “You won’t call?”
“I won’t call,” Voigtland promised.
The days passed. He played all twelve cubes, chatted with Mark and Lynx, Lydia, Juan. Idle chatter, talk of old holidays, friends, growing up. He loved the sight of his cool elegant daughter and his rugged long-limbed son, and wondered how he could have sired them, he who was short and thick-bodied, with blunt features and massive bones. He talked with his father about government, with Juan about revolution. He talked with Ovid about exile, and with Plato about the nature of injustice, and with Hemingway about the definition of courage. They helped him through some of the difficult moments. Each day had its difficult moments.
The nights were much worse.
He ran screaming and ablaze down the tunnels of his own soul. He saw faces looming like huge white lamps above him. Men in black uniforms and mirror-bright boots paraded in somber phalanxes over his fallen body. Citizens lined up to jeer him. ENEMY OF THE STATE. ENEMY OF THE STATE. ENEMY OF THE STATE. They brought Juan to him in his dreams. COWARD. COWARD. COWARD. Juan’s lean bony body was ridged and gouged; he had been. put through the tortures, the wires in the skull, the lights in the eyes, the truncheons in the ribs. I STAYED. YOU FLED. I STAYED. YOU FLED. I STAYED. YOU FLED. They showed him his own face in a mirror, a jackal’s face, with long yellow teeth and little twitching eyes. ARE YOU PROUD OF YOURSELF? ARE YOU PLEASED? ARE YOU HAPPY TO BE ALIVE?
He asked the ship for help. The ship wrapped him in a cradle of silvery fibers and slid snouts against his skin that filled his veins with cold droplets of unknown drugs. He slipped into a deeper sleep, and underneath the sleep, burrowing up, came dragons and gorgons and serpents and basilisks, whispering mockery as he slept. TRAITOR. TRAITOR. TRAITOR. HOW CAN YOU HOPE TO SLEEP SOUNDLY, HAVING DONE WHAT YOU HAVE DONE?
“Look,” he said to Lydia, “they would have killed me within the hour. There wasn’t any possible way of finding you, Mark, Juan, anybody. What sense was there in waiting longer?”
“No sense at all, Tom. You did the smartest thing.”
“But was it the right thing, Lydia?”
Lynx said, “Father, you had no choice. It was run or die.”
He wandered through the ship, making an unending circuit. How soft the walls were, how beautifully upholstered! The lighting was gentle. Restful images flowed and coalesced and transformed themselves on the sloping ceilings. The little garden was a vale of beauty. He had music, fine food, books, cubes. What was it like in the sewers of the underground now?
“We didn’t need more martyrs,” he told Plato. “The junta was making enough martyrs as it was. We needed leaders. What good is a dead leader?”
“Very wise, my friend. You have made yourself a symbol of heroism, distant, idealized, untouchable, while your colleagues carry on the struggle in your name,” Plato said silkily. “And yet you are able to return and serve your people in the future. The service a martyr gives is limited, finite, locked to a single point in time. Eh?”
“I have to disagree,” said Ovid. “If a man wants to be a hero, he ought to hold his ground and take what comes. Of course, what sane man wants to be a hero? You did well, friend Voigtland! Give yourself over to feasting and love, and live longer and more happily.”
“You’re mocking me,” he said to Ovid.
“I do not mock. I console. I amuse. I do not mock.”
In the night came tinkling sounds, faint bells, crystalline laughter. Figures capered through his brain, demons, jesters, witches, ghouls. He tumbled down into mustiness and decay, into a realm of spiders, where empty husks hung on vast arching webs. THIS IS WHERE THE HEROES GO. Hags embraced him. WELCOME TO VALHALLA. Gnarled midgets offered him horns of mead, and the mead was bitter, leaving a coating of ash on his lips. ALL HAIL. ALL HAIL. ALL HAIL.
“Help me,” he said hoarsely to the cubes. “What did I bring you along for, if not to help me?”
“We’re trying to help,” Hemingway said. “We agree that you did the sensible thing.”
“You’re saying it to make me happy, You aren’t sincere.”
“You bastard, call me a liar again and I’ll step out of this screen and—”
“Maybe I can put it another way,” Juan said craftily. “Tom, you had an obligation to save yourself. Saving yourself was the most valuable thing you could have done for the cause. Listen, for all you knew the rest of us had already been wiped out, right?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“Then what would you accomplish by staying and being wiped out too? Outside of some phony heroics, what?” Juan shook his head. “A leader in exile is better than a leader in the grave. You can direct the resistance from Rigel, if the rest of us are gone. Do you see the dynamics of it, Tom?”
“I see. I see. You make it sound so reasonable, Juan.”
Juan winked. “We always understood each other.”
He activated the cube of his father. “What do you say? Should I have stayed or gone?”