Hardfought Read online

  The residence was sixteen square meters in area, not elegantnatural, as rentOpts described it. Clevo called it a “garret,” inaccurately as she discovered when she looked it up in his memory blocs, but perhaps he was describing the tone.

  On the last day she lay in the crook of Clevo’s arm. They had done a few hours of nature sleep. He hadn’t come out yet, and she looked up at his face, reached up with a hand to feel his arm.

  It was different from the arms of others she had been receptive toward. It was unique. The thought amused her. There had never been a reception like theirs. This was the beginning. And if both were to be duplicated, this love, this reception, would be repeated an infinite number of times. Clevo meeting Prufrax, teaching her, opening her eyes.

  Somehow, even though repetition contributed to the death of history, she was pleased. This was the secret thought she carried into fight. Each time she would survive, wherever she was, however many duplications down the line. She would receive Clevo, and he would teach her. If not now—if one or the other died—then in the future. The death of history might be a good thing. Love could go on forever.

  She had lost even a rudimentary apprehension of death, even with present pleasure to live for. Her functions had sharpened. She would please him by doing all the things he could not. And if he was to enter that state she frequently found him in, that state of introspection, of reliving his own battles and of envying her activity, then that wasn’t bad. All they did to each other was good.

  —Was good

  —Was

  She slipped from his arm and left the narrow sleeping quarter, pushing through the smoke colored air curtain to the lounge. Two hawks and an over she had never seen before were sitting there. They looked up at her.

  “Under,” Prufrax said.

  “Over,” the woman returned. She was dressed in tan and green, Grounds colors, not ship.

  “May I assist?”

  “Yes.”

  “My duty, then?”

  The over beckoned her closer. “You have been receiving a researcher.”

  “Yes,” Prufrax said. The meetings could not have been a secret on the ship, and certainly not their quartering near the Grounds. “Has that been against duty?”

  “No.” The over eyed Prufrax sharply, observing her perfected fightform, the easy grace with which she stood, naked, in the middle of the small compartment. “But a decision has been reached. Your status is decided now.”

  She felt a shiver.

  “Prufrax,” said the elder hawk. She recognized him from fibs, and his companion: Kumnax and Arol. Once her heroes. “You have been accorded an honor, just as your partner has. You have a valuable genetic assortment—”

  She barely heard the rest. They told her she would return to fight, until they deemed she had had enough experience and background to be brought into the polinstruc division. Then her fighting would be over. She would serve better as an example, a hero.

  Heroes never partnered out of function. Hawk heroes could not even partner with exhawks.

  Clevo emerged from the air curtain. “Duty,” the over said. “The residence is disbanded. Both of you will have separate quarters, separate duties.”

  They left. Prufrax held out her hand, but Clevo didn’t take it. “No use,” he said.

  Suddenly she was filled with anger. “You’ll give it up? Did I expect too much? How strongly?”

  “Perhaps even more strongly than you,” he said. “I knew the order was coming down. And still I didn’t leave. That may hurt my chances with the supreme overs.”

  “Then at least I’m worth more than your breeding history?”

  “Now you are history. History the way they make it.”

  “I feel like I’m dying,” she said, amazement in her voice. “What is that, Clevo? What did you do to me?”

  “I’m in pain, too,” he said.

  “You’re hurt?”

  “I’m confused.”

  “I don’t believe that,” she said, her anger rising again. “You knew, and you didn’t do anything?”

  “That would have been counter to duty. We’ll be worse off if we fight it.”

  “So what good is your great, exalted history?”

  “History is what you have,” Clevo said. “I only record.”

  —Why did they separate them?

  —I don’t know. You didn’t like him, anyway.

  —Yes, but now…

  —See? You’re her. We’re her. But shadows. She was whole.

  —I don’t understand.

  We don’t. Look what happens to her. They took what was best out of her. Prufrax

  went into battle eighteen more times before dying as heroes often do, dying in the midst of what she did best. The question of what made her better before theseparation for she definitely was not as fine a fighter after has not been settled. Answers fall into an extinct classification of knowledge, and there are few left to interpret, none accessible to this device.

  —So she went out and fought and died. They never even made fibs about her. This killed her?

  I don’t think so. She fought well enough. She died like other hawks died.

  —And she might have lived otherwise.

  —How can I know that, any more than you?

  They we met again, you know. I met a Clevo once, on my ship. They didn’t let me stay with him long.

  —How did you react to him?

  There was so little time, I don’t know.

  Let’s ask….

  In thousands of duty stations, it was inevitable that some of Prufrax’s visions would come true, that they should meet now and then. Clevos were numerous, as were Prufraxes. Every ship carried complements of several of each. Though Prufrax was never quite as successful as the original, she was a fine type. She

  —She was never quite as successful. They took away her edge. They didn’t even know it!

  —They must have known.

  Then they didn’t want to win!

  —We don’t know that. Maybe there were more important considerations.

  —Yes, like killing history.

  Aryz shuddered in his warming body, dizzy as if about to bud, then regained control. He had been pulled from the mandate, called to his own duty.

  He examined the shapes and the human captive. There was something different about them. How long had they been immersed in the mandate? He checked quickly, frantically, before answering the call. The reconstructed Mam had malfunctioned. None of them had been nourished. They were thin, pale, cooling.

  Even the bloated mutant shape was dying; lost, like the others, in the mandate.

  He turned his attention away. Everything was confusion. Was he human or Senexi now? Had he fallen so low as to understand them? He went to the origin of the call, the ruins of the temporary brood chamber. The corridors were caked with ammonia ice, burning his pod as he slipped over them. The brood mind had come out of flux bind. The emergency support systems hadn’t worked well; the brood mind was damaged.

  “Where have you been?” it asked.

  “I assumed I would not be needed until your return from the flux bind.”

  “You have not been watching!”

  “Was there any need? We are so advanced in time, all our actions are obsolete. The nebula is collapsed, the issue is decided.”

  “We do not know that. We are being pursued.”

  Aryz turned to the sensor wall—what was left of it—and saw that they were, indeed, being pursued. He had been lax.

  “It is not your fault,” the brood mind said. “You have been set a task that tainted you and ruined your function. You will dissipate.”

  Aryz hesitated. He had become so different, so tainted, that he actually hesitated at a direct command from the brood mind. But it was damaged. Without him, without what he had learned, what could it do? It wasn’t reasoning correctly.

  “There are facts you must know, important facts—”

  Aryz felt a wave of revulsion, uncomprehending f
ear, and something not unlike human anger radiate from the brood mind. Whatever he had learned and however he had changed, he could not withstand that wave.

  Willingly, and yet against his will—it didn’t matter—he felt himself liquefying. His pod slumped beneath him, and he fell over, landing on a pool of frozen ammonia. It burned, but he did not attempt to lift himself. Before he ended, he saw with surprising clarity what it was to be a branch ind, or a brood mind, or a human. Such a valuable insight, and it leaked out of his permea and froze on the ammonia.

  The brood mind regained what control it could of the fragment. But there were no defenses worthy of the name. Calm, preparing for its own dissipation, it waited for the pursuit to conclude.

  The Mam set off an alarm. The interface with the mandate was severed. Weak, barely able to crawl, the humans looked at each other in horror and slid to opposite corners of the chamber.

  They were confused: which of them was the captive, which the decoy shape? It didn’t seem important. They were both bone thin, filthy with their own excrement. They turned with one motion to stare at the bloated mutant. It sat in its corner, tiny head incongruous on the huge thorax, tiny arms and legs barely functional even when healthy. It smiled wanly at them.

  “We felt you,” one of the Prufraxes said. “You were with us in there.” Her voice was a soft croak.

  “That was my place,” it replied. “My only place.”

  “What function, what name?”

  “I’m…I know that. I’m a researcher. In there. I knew myself in there.”

  They squinted at the shape. The head. Something familiar, even now. “You’re a Clevo…”

  There was noise all around them, cutting off the shape’s weak words. As they watched, their chamber was sectioned like an orange, and the wedges peeled open. The illumination ceased. Cold enveloped them.

  A naked human female, surrounded by tiny versions of herself, like an angel circled by fairy kin, floated into the chamber. She was thin as a snake. She wore nothing but silver rings on her wrists and a narrow torque around her waist. She glowed blue green in the dark.

  The two Prufraxes moved their lips weakly but made no sound in the near vacuum. Who are you?

  She surveyed them without expression, then held out her arms as if to fly. She wore no gloves, but she was of their type.

  As she had done countless times before on finding such Senexi experiments—though this seemed older than most—she lifted one arm higher. The blue green intensified, spread in waves to the mangled walls, surrounded the freezing, dying shapes. Perfect, angelic, she left the debris behind to cast its fitful glow and fade.

  They had destroyed every portion of the fragment but one. They left it behind unharmed.

  Then they continued, millions of them thick like mist, working the spaces between the stars, their only master the overness of the real.

  They needed no other masters. They would never malfunction.

  The mandate drifted in the dark and cold, its memory going on, but its only life the rapidly fading tracks where minds had once passed through it. The trails writhed briefly, almost as if alive, but only following the quantum rules of diminishing energy states. Finally, a small memory was illuminated.

  Prufrax’s last poem, explained the mandate reflexively.

  How the fires grow!

  Peace passes

  All memory lost.

  Somehow we always miss that single door,

  Dooming ourselves to circle.

  Ashes to stars, lies to souls,

  Let’s spin round the sinks and holes.

  Kill the good, eat the young.

  Forever and more,

  You and I are never done.

  The track faded into nothing. Around the mandate, the universe grew old very quickly.