The Enemy Papers Page 24

  Mind, she would say, look at Mallik. And she would see Mallik.

  Move among the stars, mind. And she would see great blinding spheres race by.

  She explored the bottoms of oceans, the layers of clouds surrounding gas giants, tangled tropic jungles ....

  ...A fog of sound; her head on a dizzy high; the smell of flowers; the singsong that was Dracon:

  "...Joanne Nicole, can you see this light?"

  ...Light? What light? Her lips felt thick and fuzzy as she tried to speak. "I can't see anything unless I open my eyes." She tried to open her eyes.

  "I don't seem to be able to open them."

  "...They are open, Joanne Nicole ...."

  Hours or years later, her mind allowed what she had perceived before to be explored. Blind? Was this the horror so many feared? Not to see?

  She swam in drug-soaked dreams; seeing. Seeing things she had never seen with eyes.

  ...I should react, feel.

  But she was detached from her pain, from her awareness, from her feelings. The darkness was something warm, friendly, comfortable. Long stretches of silence, sleep, and a delicious, drugged something between nonexistence and being. Thought, feeling, and reality were mundane irrelevancies as she let herself drift endlessly upon black billows ....

  ...Bursts of light, sound, the taste of copper. The dirt and rock glowing, exploding; the blue streaks of assault landers against the night sky.

  Benbo's face floating in front of her. "We lost the foothills, Major. But toadface paid for them."

  "How much did we pay to collect, Sergeant? How much did we pay to collect?"

  His confused expression disappeared in a flash of white ....

  It seemed as though she had been treading water endlessly; but she was not tired. Numb, detached; but not tired. And Joanne Nicole took notice of voices. Sound—any sensation—was something approaching a gift. The voices became louder.

  "Jetah, the human master is in the corridor. She is a female."

  "Send her in, Mitzak. And be restrained. She is Akkujah vemadah and owes us no favors."

  Footsteps.

  "Your name—ha! Your skin! It is yellow!"

  "No shit, toadface. So is yours."

  "Yes, but ... I didn't mean ... your name?"

  "Tokyo Rose. And who is this one?"

  "Leonid Mitzak, Captain."

  "No guts for the Madah, eh Mitzak?" A pause. "Where's the patient?"

  Pur Sonaan's voice. "Here, then, is the human you were told of, Tokyo Rose."

  More footsteps. Nicole felt a presence over her, then a gentle hand on her face.

  "What is her name?"

  "Joanne Nicole."

  "Very well, you scumbuckets take off while I examine her."

  "...You want us to leave the room?"

  Silence, then soft footsteps, as the hand moved and a finger pulled at the skin above first the left, then the right eye.

  "Damn ..." The hand left Nicole's face. "Nicole? Nicole? Can you hear me?"

  As she answered, her mouth felt fuzzy. "Is that you, Tokyo Rose?"

  Surpressed laughter. "Captain Tegara. I'm a doctor. What in the hell did they do to you?"

  Nicole heard Tegara moving some objects around on a hard surface. "Fire. I was in a fire."

  Again Tegara bent over Nicole and opened her right eye. "You must be someone pretty special, Nicole. Toadface pulled me out of the Madah on Akkujah to give you a checkup. Can you see anything with your right eye?"

  "No."

  A click. "Now?"

  "No. Tegara, what's happening with the war?"

  Her hand moved to Nicole's left eye. "Up until my unit was snagged, everybody seemed to be losing. Can you see anything with your left eye?"

  "No."

  "Where did they get you?" A click. "Anything now?"

  "No. I was garrisoned on Catvishnu."

  "Catvishnu?" She moved away; more objects clattering. "We didn't think anyone lived through that."

  "I'm about it." Nicole felt Tegara lift her left arm; "Well? What about my eyes?"

  A pause. "There's nothing anyone can do about your eyes, Nicole. Maybe if you can get to a USE hospital. I don't have either the skills or the equipment. It looks as though they used some of their own burn ointment on you. The surfaces of both eyes have been burned and stained black. I think the damage might be repairable, but not here. A lot depends on how long the ointment was used."

  "What do my eyes ... look like?"

  "Wall-to-wall black." She lowered Nicole's left arm, then walked behind her head and picked up her right arm. "You're going to look like a boiled beet for a while, but I think the scarring on your skin will be minor." She lowered the arm. "Are you in any pain?"

  "No. None at all. In fact, I can't feel much of anything. It's like I've been swimming in morphine for a hundred years."

  "Catvishnu was a while back. Can you feel that?"

  "Feel what?"

  "How about that?"

  Nicole felt something. "A pressure; scratching on my upper right arm?"

  Tegara called out: "Hey, toadface!" There was the return of soft footsteps.

  "Yes, Tokyo Rose?"

  "Cut the amount of that d'nita anesthetic you are giving her by fifty percent. Understand?" Light scratching, then paper ripping. "Here. Do you understand what that says?"

  "Yes. They are common chemicals."

  "Make that up exactly as I have specified and spread it gently on the burned areas of her skin—not her eyes—every four hours ... six times a day. Understand?"

  "Yes. Can you do anything for her vision?"

  "You don't have the equipment; and you need a specialist—a special kind of health master, understand? I can't do anything except to keep telling you kizlodes to stop using that burn ointment on humans."

  The Jetah was silent as it absorbed the loathing in Tegara's voice. "What equipment and what skills are necessary?"

  Tegara laughed, ignoring the Jetah's question. "Nicole, I have to go now."

  "Can't you stay?" Nicole's hand grabbed at empty air, then fell back to the bed.

  "No. I'm sorry, but the Madah on Akkujah is full of sadsacks that need me more than you do. Almost four thousand of them, and I'm the only doctor. Once you get to a USE hospital ... Maybe not. Anyway, the war won't last forever."

  Her footsteps and a set of the soft footsteps left the room. One of the Dracs had remained behind. It was silent for a long time, then its footsteps left the room, stopped, and returned. "Joanne Nicole." It was the voice of the older Drac, Jetah Pur Sonaan. "Joanne Nicole."

  "Yes?"

  "The surgeon who treated you in V'Butaan ... it had no way of knowing. Everyone has been warned now, but then ... it had no way of knowing." Pur Sonaan's footsteps faded from the room.

  "Mitzak, are you here? Mitzak?"

  "Yes."

  "I'm not in V'Butaan?"

  "No. The nearest city is Pomavu. You are on the home planet. Draco."

  Draco? On the opposite side of the Drac empire from Ditaar? Why? "Why?"

  "You have been made the ward of Ovjetah Tora Soam, first Master of the Talman Kovah. The Talman Kovah is here, near Pomavu."

  "I ... I don't understand."

  "In the fire at the V'Butaan kovah; one of the children you saved was the Ovjetah's third child, Sin Vidak." The footsteps began leaving.

  "Mitzak?"

  The footsteps paused. "Yes?"

  "The others that were with me in the Madah on Ditaar; Where are they?"

  "Do you remember me telling you that all of your soldiers were killed?"

  "Yes ... I remember it. Benbo?"

  "I don't know. I left Ditaar with you."

  "Mitzak, what are you doing here?"

  "The Ovjetah insisted that you have some human company; I'm it."

  "Are you happy in your work?"

  Mitzak moved a few footsteps toward the door. "The Ovjetah is a very powerful person. And, as you know, rank has its privileges."

  Mitz
ak's footsteps left the room.

  ...That humming again ....

  Nicole continued smiling as dizziness lowered her into a non-caring half-sleep. The smile wasn't an expression of anything; it was just left over from something before ....

  SIX

  As do all creatures, we seek the comfort and the security of the safe path, its direction to be found through eternal knowns and indestructible verities. But to be creatures of choice, we must necessarily abandon the comfort and security of instinct, for all our knowns are probabilities, and all our truths are doctrines amendable when truer truths are presented.

  —The Story of Shizumaat, Koda Nuvida, The Talman

  Blind.

  With the reduced anesthetic, awareness returned. Awareness and pain.

  Joanne Nicole began to have a sense of time—the eternal slowness of it—monotony. The limitations on her universe.

  Blind.

  It was an affliction from the previous century—harnessed dogs, bumpy paper, and red-tipped canes attempting to fill in the chasm left by the removal of sight. She would lie on her bed, her heart waiting for someone to turn on the lights; to wake her from the nightmare. But no one turned on the lights. No one awakened her from the nightmare.

  Anger.

  It was, first, anger; rage that would have blinded her if blindness had not already become her reality. There were other concerns. She was almost totally helpless, at the complete mercy of the Dracs. What would the Dracs do? How far did the protection of this Tora Soam extend? Who was it anyway?

  Deep within her seclusion was a hard knot of rapidly rising fear. If she could only see them. The visible is so much easier to fight, to deal with. She didn't even know what her room looked like—what she looked like. If she could only see them.

  ...At the Kidege ed center on Baina Ya.

  She was thirteen, and that gawky, rawboned Mallik Nicole would run after her as she headed toward the Ndugu Wawili transit tube.

  "Joanne! Joanne! Wait!"

  "What should I wait for, Mallik Nicole? You?"

  "Who else? Do you see anyone else chasing you?"

  "And why do you chase me? Tell me that."

  "You are beautiful, Joanne. That's why."

  "Liar."

  "I never lie!"

  "Do you really think I'm beautiful?"

  "Haven't you ever looked in a mirror? Of course you're beautiful! Perhaps not very smart, but beautiful."

  "I am not stupid!"

  "Asking me if I think you are beautiful is a stupid question."

  ...That night she looked into her mirror and saw a different person—a stranger—someone who was beautiful ....

  ...now burned; now blind. Blind ....

  Days would pass, but she had no way of telling when. Her sleepiness lied; her stomach lied; the pattern of the kovah's routine lied. Empty time became an enemy more dreaded than death.

  She would lie on her back, only the sound of her heart beating in her ears, exploring with her fingers the hard bed, the spongy covers, her naked body, and the empty air around her.

  She was alone in the room, and if she remained still, she could just make out the sounds of fluid running rapidly through piping. From the area outside the room came only the hush of a robe brushing a wall, a whisper, footsteps.

  She discovered that there is nothing in reality to compare with the horrors of the world of imagination. Given the choice between thinking and listening, Joanne Nicole listened.

  The soft footsteps separated in her mind and became as recognizable as fingerprints.

  Mitzak walked slowly, with regular, measured steps. The heavier tread; that was Pur Sonaan. The light, slow footsteps belonged to Vunseleh Het. It was the one who came regularly to administer medications and read the health monitors.

  Food was a nameless, brisk step.

  Cleaning dragged its heels and smelled like flowers.

  Bedpan had a slow, heavy step and smelled like fish.

  The slow measured tread.

  "Mitzak?"

  "Yes."

  He walked to the side of the bed and sat upon some kind of platform. "It's companionship time, Nicole. What do you want to talk about?"

  "What were you, Mitzak? Before you took on the blue robe?"

  There was a silence, then Mitzak cleared his throat. "Before the war my home was on Akkujah. When the war started, I offered my services to the Dracon Fleet."

  "Why?"

  "Is protecting one's home too complicated to understand?"

  His fingers tapped against something hard. The tapping stopped. "I was a member of the Christian Mission Council—"

  "A minister?"

  "Priest ... Our mission was invited there by the Jetai Kovveda on Akkujah. A sharing of philosophies. We instructed the Jetai, and, in turn, we were entered into Akkujah's Talman Kovah. I had been there three years before Amadeen flared up and the war started. By that time we had been in the kovah long enough to read and understand Talma. After studying the diagrams, most of the mission chose to serve the Dracs."

  —Diagrams. In that flaming library in the kovah in V'Butaan; on the walls, complicated diagrams, logic circles, flow. charts—

  "Mitzak, you gave up your religion for this?"

  "A simplistic way to look at it. Yes." He was silent for a moment, then he laughed. "Can you give up yours, I wonder."

  "I have no religion."

  He laughed again.

  ...A lull in the fighting, and she had heard Taiseido talking to Sergeant Benbo: "What they say about there being no atheists in foxholes; its true."

  For an instant Benbo turned away from staring down the sights of his rifle and glanced at Taiseido, his right eyebrow raised. He turned back to look for Dracs to kill. "What about foxes?"

  "You don't believe in a god?"

  "I believe in this rifle, in those yellow bastards down there, and in Amos Benbo...."

  Besides Mitzak, the only two that talked to her were Pur and Vunseleh; and their conversations were limited to her health. And, after a while, Pur stopped coming. Eventually her hands and face stopped hurting and began to itch.

  Between the silence, the dark, and the itch, her mind felt as though it were beginning to bend.

  Mitzak would speak, his voice devoid of sarcasm.

  "Now is when the priest would tell you to pray for strength, or to think of those who are injured more severely than you. Perhaps he would call up the image of the crucified Christ, describe in graphic detail the saviour's suffering, and then demand to know what in the hell you've got to bitch about."

  "The Dracs have something better?"

  "They have talma."

  "What is talma?"

  A bitter laugh. "talma to a human is like relativity to a cockroach. Even if you could understand it. I doubt that you could use it."

  She played every mental game that she could remember a thousand times over. She searched her mind for memories and the memories she could find—Mallik's corpse, the burning Drac children, the thundering defeat at Storm Mountain—chased her from the past.

  She dropped down a bottomless well of self-pity, then shot back up again with an anger so intense that it made her vomit. In the midst of her wretched mess, she passed out....

  ..."What is Talma. Mitzak?"

  "It took me months to understand, Nicole."

  "Try."

  "Nicole, you are in a place. There is a place that you want to be. Your task is to get from the first to the second."

  "How?"

  "You must know where you are; you must know where you want to go; you must know the limits on the paths between the two.... "

  After cleaning had dragged its heels out of the room, Vunseleh entered.

  "Joanne Nicole, was there something wrong with the food?"

  "Why?"

  "Your digestive tract threw it"

  "Vunseleh, why won't the ones who clean, bring the food, and bring the bedpan talk to me?"

  "Talk to you! Why ... why. they are forbidden. " />
  "Do you think I'll sneak bedpan secrets off to the USEF?"

  Vunseleh was silent, then Nicole heard its robe rustle as its hands moved.

  "I do not understand. They may speak to none of the patient here. The patients would not stand for any talk or other noise. Healing is a time for quiet—meditation."

  "Meditation?"

  "Joanne Nicole, most of that which we call healing is conducted and performed by the mind."

  "Drac, I am just about all meditated out!" She sat up for the first time, her stomach doing flip-flops. "Me! I want talk! I want noise!" Her left hand hung onto the edge of the bed while her right hand fumbled trying to hold the spongy cover to her breasts. How much clout do I have as the ward of Tora Soam? She was in that half-way. I-don't-give-a-damn state between desperation and prudence. "And, Vunseleh, I want to get up."

  "Get up? Walk?"

  "Yes; I still have legs. I want to get up and walk around. If I lie here much longer, I'll turn into a plant."

  "This is a joke ... of course." Vunseleh made a nervous clicking sound with its mouth. "I can't have you among the other patient; but I shall tell the Jetah. Pur Sonaan must give its permission."

  "Then get it."

  Vunseleh's footsteps left the room.

  Nicole remained seated until her stomach stopped heaving. Pulling the spongy cover from the bed, she wrapped it around her shoulders, and gingerly moved her legs to the edge of the bed. She grunted with the effort. How long have I been in bed?

  She moved her legs over the edge of the bed, letting her feet touch the cool softness of the floor. The bed was very low. She leaned forward, pushed on the bed, and stood.

  Her head reeled, her legs threatened to collapse, and her stomach radiated warning signals. But she was standing and could feel the coolness of the air upon the sores of her back.

  Pur Sonaan's heavy tread raced into the room. "Joanne Nicole, what are you doing?"

  "I am standing."

  "This you should not do. You are not well."

  "If I stay on that bed like a piece of meat in a butcher shop, I will never get well; I will die."

  An exasperated silence ensued. Then Pur Sonaan spoke: "Vunseleh gave me your requests. You cannot wander the corridors at will. I must think of the other patients. Also it would not be safe for you. You cannot see. And you are still a human."