The Warrior Within Read online

  Any conversation that had been going on before Karsman and Steck arrived had died away. A few of the men in the crowd held tools as if ready to use them as weapons, obviously distrustful of the strangers. They relaxed slightly as Karsman approached, relieved that the matter was now out of their hands.

  The ponytailed leader registered the movement. He turned toward Karsman. “You, big man—are you in charge here?”

  “Not me,” said Karsman quickly.

  The stranger continued as if he had not spoken. “Where can we get some food and a place to stay?”

  “If you’ve got scrip to spend, at any of the shops along the Road,” Karsman told him.

  “And if we haven’t?” asked the smaller of his two companions.

  “You can go turn a wheel at the Temple.”

  The soldier’s eyes narrowed, as if he suspected that he was being mocked.

  “Is this your town?” he asked.

  Karsman shook his head.

  “So if you don’t run the place, who does?”

  “The Muljaddy, of course,” Karsman said.

  “What’s a Muljaddy?” the stranger asked.

  Someone in the crowd at his back tittered, then fell quickly silent as the soldier glanced their way.

  One of Karsman’s personas, the one he thought of as Diplomat, tried to come to the fore, but Karsman quickly pushed the persona back. He felt a momentary disorientation before Diplomat reluctantly unloaded itself and let Karsman take control of his own mind again. Diplomat would be the right choice, of course. Diplomat was all about nuanced communication, about smoothing out the rough spots and the misunderstandings. But Karsman had no desire to take on the role of emissary. Whatever was happening, he suspected it was better not to get involved. The star people could find their way to the Temple, and the Muljaddy could deal with them. It was none of his business.

  “You’re not from here, are you?” said Steck. “Are you off a starship?”

  The stranger turned to look at him. “That’s right.”

  There was a ripple of movement in the crowd, as if the onlookers were uncertain whether to draw closer to the visitors or to pull back to a safer distance. “So why are you here?” asked one of the bolder spirits.

  “We’re here,” the stranger said, “to kill a woman.”

  * * *

  “They’re soldiers, aren’t they?” said Steck as he and Karsman walked back toward Kido’s.

  “Of a kind.” Karsman glanced back over his shoulder to verify that the three strangers were still walking the other way, headed down the road toward the Temple. A few curious townspeople followed them, keeping their distance.

  “Could you take them?” asked Steck.

  Karsman stopped. “What?”

  “Could you beat them in a fight?”

  Karsman shook his head in exasperation. “Steck, I don’t think you understand what soldiers are. Me, I’m a brawler. Round here, I pass for a tough guy. But those three are professional killers. They’re biohacked, chipped and wired. They can butcher you nine different ways while you’re still thinking about where to land the first punch. I wouldn’t last fifteen seconds.”

  Don’t sell yourself short, said Warrior, his speech a flicker of aggression in Karsman’s head. You and me, like old times. We could take the big one out, no problem. You saw the way he stood. Size always makes them sloppy. They get used to winning fights by sheer muscle and mass. Overconfidence kills.

  And what if he has a Warrior of his own? Karsman asked. He felt a tremor of hesitation from the persona.

  We’re better, Warrior insisted.

  You don’t know that, said Karsman. What were you saying about overconfidence?

  “Which one is the most dangerous?” asked Steck.

  “Huh?”

  “The soldiers. Which one do you think is the most dangerous?”

  Karsman shunted Warrior to the back of his mind.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “The little guy, maybe. Or the one with long hair.”

  Steck stopped and looked at him, frowning. “Not that huge guy?” he asked. “He’s bigger than you are.”

  Karsman shrugged.

  “Maybe,” he conceded, unwilling to go into his reasons. “Listen, Steck, they’re all dangerous. You stay away from them. Tell everyone else to do the same. Any idiot who gets in their way is going home dead.”

  “Do you think they’re really off a starship?”

  “Probably.”

  “And they came all this way just to kill a woman?”

  “That’s what they said.”

  “Why would they do that?” Steck asked.

  Karsman did not answer. He had been wondering the same thing himself.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Karsman passed a restless night, tossing and turning on his pallet. When he woke the next morning, he was still tired, his muscles aching as if he had not rested at all. A vague sense of foreboding hung over him. That feeling of impending doom puzzled him until he remembered the three soldiers who had walked out of the desert the afternoon before. Trouble, he thought gloomily.

  He lay on his bed, staring up at the pressed plastic ceiling of his shack. Perhaps the assassins had already done their work and moved on. Maybe their intended victim was at the Temple. He wondered if they had assassinated the Muljaddy. The Muljaddy was the only person in town that Karsman could imagine as being of sufficient importance to merit the attention of three hitmen from off-world.

  Technically, this Muljaddy was neither male nor female, but maybe the soldiers’ culture did not make the distinction. The more Karsman thought about it, the more he liked the idea. It was not that he felt any particular ill will toward the Muljaddy, or even toward the Muljaddy family in general. They were the rulers of the world, and nothing Karsman did or thought could change that. But it would make matters simpler if whatever business had brought the soldiers here involved the aristocracy rather than any of Karsman’s friends or neighbors.

  There had been a time in his life when Karsman had briefly entertained ideas of revolution. In his youth he had traveled off-planet, part of the entourage of a different Muljaddy. That brief exposure to a wider universe had opened his eyes in a number of ways. Among other things, he had been startled to learn that rule by a single family was not the inevitable order. He had been still more surprised to learn that the Muljaddy family that held such sway here were the smallest of small fish on a galactic scale. For a time, that discovery led him to all kinds of strange thoughts. Despite never having had the slightest political education, he quickly arrived at his own rudimentary model of democracy and began wondering how it might be applied at home.

  The brief revolutionary fervor burned out almost as quickly as it came. He soon also learned that there were worse forms of tyranny than the rule of the Muljaddy, who demanded little more than formal obedience and at least token adherence to the religion they preached. It became clear to him that trying to replace a relatively benign dictatorship was a potentially perilous undertaking.

  More to the point, he had recognized the futility of trying to preach revolution to people who had no conception that any other form of existence was possible. Aside from the maroons, no one chafed particularly under Muljaddy rule. They simply accepted it, in the same way that they accepted that the sun was always visible at more or less the same place in the sky, that the winds blew more or less constantly, and that the world was divided into zones of light and dark. It was the way things were. When Karsman returned home, he put aside the notions that he had acquired and took up the placid fatalism of his compatriots again. It was just easier that way.

  So he had no particular desire to see the soldiers kill the Muljaddy or anyone else at the Temple. Still, he would have preferred any bloodshed to happen there rather than in the strip-town. His real fear was that he might be called upon to do something, something that might bring him into lethal conflict with the three killers. Karsman’s unofficial mayorship might not have a salary attached, b
ut it did come with an implicit obligation to act as a general peacemaker, arbitrator, and occasional policeman. If any trouble started with the soldiers, his neighbors would expect him to resolve it, and Karsman was not optimistic about the likely outcome. Whatever Warrior pretended, Karsman knew when he was outclassed.

  So all in all, the idea that the whole affair might play out at a level far above him was very attractive. Let the soldiers try to kill the Muljaddy. Perhaps they would succeed, perhaps the guardians of the Temple would kill them first. Whatever the outcome, Karsman and the few people who he cared about would be sheltered from the storm. When the soldiers moved on, their job done, a new Muljaddy would arrive from the capital and life would go on as before. It was, Karsman thought, probably the best thing for everyone.

  He got up stiffly and splashed some tepid water on his face. He felt relieved, and suddenly hungry.

  * * *

  His newfound good humor lasted only until he reached Kido’s. When he pulled open the door of the shop, the first thing that he saw were three unfamiliar backs huddled in front of the tiny bar.

  He stood there stupidly, his hand still on the door handle. A gust of wind fluttered the ribbons that dangled from the ceiling. He caught a glimpse of Kido behind the bar, a worried expression on his face. There were no other patrons inside.

  Karsman pushed the door slowly closed and took a step back. He did not think that Kido had seen him. He could not be so sure about the soldiers. At least some of the three almost certainly had augments that would have told them of his presence. Perhaps they had scattered spy-eyes around the place. Sitting with their backs to the door might have been a deliberate gesture, intended to demonstrate that they feared no one here, but he doubted that they would really have been so unprofessional as to leave themselves truly unguarded.

  Guys who do that don’t last long, agreed Warrior.

  He let Warrior off the leash for a moment, allowing his heightened awareness to scan around him for possible devices. Like the other personas, Warrior was a specialist. An expert in personal defense, he would pick up clues that Karsman himself would miss.

  To Karsman’s surprise, Warrior found no sign that the soldiers had prepared a perimeter.

  Amateurs, Warrior said.

  Or true professionals, Karsman said. Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

  If I don’t see it, it isn’t, said Warrior.

  Maybe.

  He flipped Warrior back to background, leaving just enough of the persona’s consciousness resident in his mind to alert him to danger and allow him to react rapidly. He never liked running any of his personas fully in parallel, least of all Warrior. Karsman running Warrior was aggressive and impulsive. If Karsman let Warrior have his way, he’d probably want to take the soldiers on here and now.

  But at least running the personas in parallel rather than ceding control entirely left him some measure of control. That way he could rein in Warrior’s worst impulses. What Karsman feared most was that some emergency would trigger one of his personas to take full control. He hated the feeling of being submerged in his own mind. He hated the sensation of losing control. He hated the doubts it raised: perhaps the identity that he thought of as “I” might be just another persona, maybe not even the original. But most of all, he hated returning to consciousness with no awareness of the passage of time and no memory of anything he had done while backgrounded. Whichever persona had taken control, it was always Karsman who had to deal with the consequences. And when the persona in question was Warrior, the consequences might include corpses.

  He waited until he was a good distance from Kido’s and then switched Warrior out entirely, reducing him to no more than a flicker of awareness at the back of his mind. As he did so, he remembered again that he was hungry. With Kido’s closed to him, there was only one place where he could find breakfast. He stuck his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders against the wind, and started down the Road toward the Temple.

  * * *

  The Temple was dark and warm, its corridors and spaces heavy with the smell of incense and oil. Despite his lack of religious convictions, Karsman always found it soothing. He stood on the threshold and let the warmth and the odors and the muffled sound of the chanting from the main hall wash over him.

  He thought about going down and joining the ongoing service. Today was sacred to the goddess Arinna, Karsman’s favorite of the nine gods. The sculptors always gave her statues a rather ambiguous expression that Karsman liked. He thought it made her look less aloof than her peers, perhaps even a little roguish. If she were a flesh-and-blood woman, she would be good company, he thought, the kind who might share a drink and then slip into bed with you for a good-natured, friendly fuck. His type of goddess, in short.

  But joining the service would mean being around other people, and this morning he wanted to be alone. Instead of going down into the main hall, he climbed the stair that led to one of the side corridors on the upper level.

  The corridor was almost completely dark. The only light came from a line of tall prayer wheels set in niches along the wall, each drumlike wheel glowing with its own internal illumination.

  He chose a wheel close to the far end of the corridor. A speaker beside it relayed the sound of chanting from the main hall at a level scarcely greater than a whisper. He pressed his hand to the touch plate on the wall beside the wheel and waited a moment for the system to acknowledge his presence, then knelt down and grasped the handle that turned the wheel. The metal was cool to the touch, worn smooth by countless hands over the decades.

  Turning the wheel was a pleasant, repetitive activity that required no thought. In theory, the worshipper was supposed to repeat the words of the prayer printed on the wheel or recite a mantra, but Karsman preferred to let his mind go blank, losing himself in the simple, mechanical motion of turning the handle. In any case, the act was supposed to be effective whether one prayed or not, the words of the printed prayer flying from the slowly turning cylinder up to the ear of whichever god was depicted in bas-relief above the niche.

  The chanting from the hall below died away. There was a moment of silence and then he heard the shuffle of the congregation kneeling, followed by the call-and-answer that announced the beginning of the sermon. Karsman started to pay more attention. He was curious to know what the Muljaddy might have to say about the newcomers.

  The sermons never deviated much from the same general pattern. In the first part, the preacher would enumerate the sufferings of the worshippers in this imperfect world. The second consisted of general praise for the beneficence of the deity of the day. The third and final part was an appeal for intervention and the prompt transportation of the deserving faithful to the appropriate paradise.

  Interwoven with all this were laudatory references to the Muljaddy of the Temple and the larger family to which they belonged. Doctrine said that every Muljaddy was personally sinless. It was only their compassion for the people that kept them all from ascending to the better world that was their personal due, and it was only the sins of the people that made this compassion and guidance necessary. The subtext of the sermons was always that the people needed to hurry up and better themselves so that the Muljaddy could be released from the burden of caring for them.

  Karsman was not much interested in the sermons for themselves. What interested him was that they also functioned as a kind of news broadcast, more opaque than town gossip, but more informed on certain matters. They were a window into the mind of the Muljaddy and the Temple hierarchy, reflecting current concerns and containing subtle admonitions to their followers. Ever since he had ceased to pay attention to the religious message, Karsman had become increasingly adept at disentangling the other messages contained in each sermon. If there was something that the Muljaddy wanted everyone to know or think about the soldiers, it would be in the sermon.

  But if he hoped for a revelation, Karsman was disappointed. The junior priest who delivered the sermon appe
ared to have nothing to say about the soldiers at all. He mumbled through the usual litany of sufferings, the requisite praise, and the appeal for intervention without deviation or digression. However Karsman looked at it, there was nothing in the sermon that he could interpret as an allusion to the presence of strangers in town. Did this lacuna reflect a wait-and-see policy, a cautious refusal to take any definite position on the outsiders until the situation became clearer? Or could the Muljaddy actually be unaware that something extraordinary was happening? He frowned, puzzled.

  He looked down at the revolution counter at the base of the prayer wheel. He had completed enough turns to entitle him to a cup of broth, which would take the edge off his hunger. But if he continued to turn the wheel, the accumulated credit might be used to buy something more substantial. He hesitated, considering his options.

  In the time it took him to make up his mind, his decision was made for him. The priest chanted the closing prayer, and Karsman heard the sound of the hall below emptying out. If he went down now, he would need to stand in line behind all the other worshippers queuing for the food that their devotions had earned them. He sighed, settled himself more comfortably on his kneeler, and started to turn the wheel again.

  * * *

  When Karsman looked in at Kido’s later, the three strangers had gone. The little shop was empty of customers. Kido was sitting behind the bar with his chin in his hands.

  “No food, Karsman,” he said as Karsman entered.

  “I’ll have a drink then,” Karsman told him, settling himself at the bar. It was really too early in the day to begin drinking, but the events of the last two days had left him feeling on edge. A drink would settle him down and get him in the mood to begin working again. Sometimes he needed the mild buzz of alcohol to take the edge off the tedium of toiling over broken machinery or trying to chisel off fragments of old Builder structures to sell as salvage to the Temple.

  “No drinks either,” Kido said. His broad face was glummer than Karsman had ever seen it.