Echo Round His Bones (15 page)

Or was it himself that seemed so? He had read a story once, or seen a
movie, of a man who sold his shadow -- or perhaps it was his reflection
in a mirror. Hansard felt like that now -- as though at the moment of the
Mars jump five weeks before, he had lost some essential, if intangible,
part of himself. A soul perhaps, though he didn't exactly believe he
had one.
He wished that the countermand to the President's order would come, but
he wished even more that be might be called back to the fuller reality
of earth. Yet these were neither very strong wishes, for the reservoirs
of all desire were drying up within him. He wished mainly for an ending,
any ending, an event to accent this drear, uninflected, trickling time.
So perhaps there had been a sort of wisdom behind the decision to keep
the men at the Mars Command Posts two months at a stretch, even though
there was no technical necessity for it, the same wisdom that is at the
root of all the compulsory dullness of military life. For boredom makes
a soldier that much more able and that much more willing to perform the
task that it is especially given a soldier to perform.
Ex-Sergeant John Worsaw sat in the guard bay before the door to the control
room reading a tattered personalized novel. Because of his reading habits,
Worsaw had a reputation around Camp Jackson/Mars as an intellectual. This
was an exaggeration, of course. But, as he liked to point out in his more
ponderous moments (after about two beers), you couldn't get anywhere
in the year 1990 without brains, and brains wouldn't do you much good
either -- without an education. (Worsaw had earned a College Equivalent
Diploma in Technics.) Take Wolf Smith, for example, the Army chief of
staff. That was a man who had more facts at his command than a CASS-9
computer. For a man like Smith, facts were like ammunition.
Facts. Worsaw had nothing but contempt for people who couldn't face hard
facts. Like that fairy Pittmann in the control room now, worrying about
the bombs probably, and afraid of the button. No one had told Worsaw of
the President's order, but he knew what was in the air by the looks on
the two officers' faces. What were they scared about, as long as they were
here on Mars? It was the sons of bitches back on earth who had to worry!
Thinking something to this effect, though rather more hazily, Worsaw found
that he had read down a quarter of a page of the novel without taking any
of it in. With a more concentrated effort, he returned to the last passage
he remembered:
Worsaw lobbed another grenade in the bunker entrance and threw himself
flat, pressing his face into the jungle dirt. Thunder rent the air,
and thick yellow smoke belched from the crumbling structure.
"That oughta do it, Snooky!" yelled the corporal, thumbing the safety
off his M-14. "Let's mop up now." And Corporal O'Grady leaped to
his feet.
"Look out, Lucky!" Even as Worsaw screamed, it was too late. The sniper
bullets had caught O'Grady in a vicious cross-fire, spinning him and
flinging him mudward, a dead man.
"The yellow-belly sons of bitches," Worsaw muttered. "They'll pay for this!"
A few feet away the blood of Lucky O'Grady seeped out into the jungle
soil. The man who had been Worsaw's best friend had run out of luck
at last.
Strangely moved by this last paragraph, Worsaw laid his book aside. He had
heard someone coming down the corridor, and it was likely, at this hour of
the day, with the men playing cards in their barracks, to be Hansard. The
captain spent a lot of his time roaming about in the corridors.
"General Pittmann?"
"Yes, he's inside, sir."
Hansard went into the control room, closing the door after him. Worsaw
cursed him softly; but there was in that quiet obscenity a trace of
respect, even affection. Despite the pressure to restore his rank that
Worsaw had put on him through Ives (who owed Worsaw more than a few
favors and could be counted on to pay his debt), Hansard wasn't backing
down. Which showed guts. Worsaw admired guts.
But the deeper motive of Worsaw's admiration was simply that he knew
Hansard to be a veteran of Viet Nam, the last of the big fighting wars.
Worsaw himself had been born four years too late to enlist for that war
and so he had never, to his chagrin, undergone a soldier's baptism by
fire. He had never known, and now perhaps he never would, what it was
like to look at a man through the sights of a loaded rifle, squeeze
the trigger and see that man fall dead. Life had cheated Worsaw of
that supreme experience, and it had offered very little by way of
compensation. Why else, after all, does a person go Army?
He fished the novel out of his back pocket and started to read again.
He skipped ahead to the chapter he liked best, the burning of the village
of Tam Chau. The anonymous author described it very well, with lots of
convincing details. Worsaw liked a realistic-type novel that showed what
life was like.
FOURTEEN
THE BRIDE
Love will intrude itself into places where it simply has no business to be
-- into lives or stories that are just too occupied with other matters to
give it its due. But somehow it can always be squeezed in. Marriage is an
exemplary institution for this purpose, because conjugal love can usually
"go without saying," whereas the more exotic forms of romance demand the
stage all to themselves, scornful of the ordinary business of life.
A married man can divide his life comfortably in half, into a private and
a public sector which need never, so long as both run smoothly along,
impinge upon each other.
Thus Hansard had fallen in love, paid court, proposed, been accepted,
and now it is the very morning of the wedding -- and all these things
have already taken place, as it were, in the wings. We should not
suppose, because of this, that Hansard's was a milder sort of love than
another man's, or that the romance was so ordinary and undistinguished
as to be without interest for us -- or even, perhaps, for the principals
involved. We need only point out the singular circumstance that the rivals
of the beloved were essentially her exact doubles to dispel such a notion.
No, if there were time, it would be most interesting to linger over
their month-long idyll, to document the days and nights, to smile
at the follies, to record the quicksilver weathers of their growing
love. For instance, notice how Hansard's expression has relaxed. There
is a sparkle in his eyes that we have not seen there before. Or is it,
perhaps, that they seem deeper? He smiles more often -- there can be
no doubt of that; and even when he is not smiling there is something
about his lips . . . what is it? Do they seem fuller now? See, too,
how his jaw has relaxed, and when he turns his head how the tendons are
less prominent. Small changes, but taken as a whole they give his face
an altogether different stamp. Surely it is a change for the better.
Already it is May 26, the morning of the wedding. How quickly a month
can go by! And is there no time left to tell how splendid a month it
has been, or what has been happening back there in the wings? By all
means, let us take the time, while the bride and her three bridesmaids
(for Bridgetta-Sub-One had gone through the transmitter once more,
increasing the Sub-Two population by one; and the newcomer immediately
assumed the role of Bridget, for the bride would now be neither Bridie
nor Jet nor yet Bridget, but Mrs. Hansard), the two Panofskys, and
Hansard are walking down the May-morning streets to the church.
The month had gone by as though they'd been playing a game all the while.
There had been such
fun
. Sometimes Hansard spent the day alone with
"his" Bridgetta; at other times one or more of her doubles would come
out with them to "swim" in the municipal police station or in the Senate
buildings. He and Bridgetta had made love in heaps of flowers in a
florist's window. They had taken picnic lunches to diplomatic dinners
where, because there was no room for them around the table, they had
sat on top and dangled their legs through the tablecloth.
They'd played tennis, singles and doubles, after spreading slices of
the linoleum rugs about the court so that they wouldn't lose the tennis
balls. The greatest lark, once Hansard got over his embarrassment
at playing a child's game, had been Bridgetta's special version of
hide-and-seek which they played in the most crowded streets and offices
of the city while the sober workaday population milled about them.
They'd sneaked into the most expensive theatres and left during the
first act if they found the play not to their liking -- left without
any regret for the money wasted. (And, more often than not, the plays
were boring because they had to be seen in dumb show.) At especially
bad performances, Hansard and one or more Bridgettas would get up on
the stage and ham it up themselves.
Such fun, and much, much more, too; gentler moments that might be only
a word, a caress, a glance, forgotten as quickly as it happened. But
what, if not the sum of such moments, is love? A moment, a month --
how quickly -- and here they are already on the way to the church!
The bride was wearing a makeshift gown sewn together from damask
tablecloths and synthetic lace plundered from various articles of
lingerie, no one back in the Real World having had the forethought,
or the occasion, to provide for such a contingency as this today. If
only fashion were considered, the bridesmaids might have been thought
a good deal better dressed than the bride. But the bride was wrapped in
the glory of a myth that quite out-tops all that fashion can do.
Both Panofskys were wearing formal clothes, because they had usually set
off through the transmitters attired formally for the theatre. Hansard,
however, had nothing better than his everyday uniform, for which the
hat was still missing.
The church was crowded when they arrived, and there was no room for the
invisible intruders except before the altar. Bridie put a tape of the
Tannhäuser wedding march on the portable phonograph and let it play at
medium volume. There was a stir in the waiting crowd, and heads turned
to regard the bride advancing down the center aisle, her train borne up
by three children. "A pity we couldn't get orange blossoms for you, my
dear," Panofsky whispered to the bride-to-be, who was holding a bouquet
of yesterday's wilted roses, the transmitters of Elba having provided
nothing more appropriate for the day.
Bridgetta took three steps forward to stand behind the other bride,
her feet planted squarely in the billowing train. The two grooms came
out of the sacristy to take the hands of their betrotheds. The minister
began to speak the silent words of the ceremony, which Panofsky, reading
his lips, repeated after him.
Hansard had to dodge out of the way when the groom reached around to
receive the ring from his best man. Panofsky handed Hansard the ring
that Bridie had made from a costume-jewelry ring of her own by removing
the stone and filing away the setting until there was only a thin gold
band. Hansard placed the gold circlet on Bridgetta's finger.
He leaned forward to kiss her. When his lips were almost touching hers,
she whispered, "Say it again," and he said, " I do, I do!" Then they
kissed, man and wife now, till death should part them.
"I've written a small epithalamion for the occasion. Would anyone like
to hear a small epithalamion?" Panofsky asked.
"Afterward. Epithalamions come with the dinner," Jet said.
The sub-one bride and groom turned around and, stepping to invisible music,
descended from the altar and went out of the church. Bridie ran the tape
ahead to the sprightlier Mendelssohn theme. Hansard and Bridgetta
stopped kissing.
"Stand back, and let me look at you," he said, smiling broadly.
She stepped back, and then, when the shot rang out, stepped back again.
Blood stained the makeshift bridal gown just beneath her heart. Her mouth
dropped open, and the smile was vanished from her lips, from her eyes.
He caught her in his arms.
She was dead.
"That's
one
," shouted a half-familiar voice. Hansard turned to see Worsaw
standing in the midst of the wedding guests crowding into the aisle.
"And this is two." The rifle fired again, but he missed Bridie, who had
been his second target.
"Get down, out of sight!" Hansard shouted, though he did not think to
take his own advice. Jet took hold of the wheel chair of one Panofsky
and pushed him into the sacristy. Bridie and the new Bridget both dove
into the floor. The other Panofsky had driven off under his own power
and Hansard could not see him, though indeed he could see very little
beyond the widening circle of blood staining the damask of the bridal
dress. Forgotten, the tape recorder continued to play the Mendelssohn
march tune.
"Beast!" Panofsky's voice shouted. "Monstrous, loveless beast!" He was
driving his wheel chair through the crush of people in the center aisle.
He aimed a revolver at Worsaw, but even from where he was Hansard could
see the old man's aim was wide. A third and fourth shot rang out,
the pistol and then the rifle, and Panofsky pitched forward in his
chair. The wheels penetrated the surface of the floor, but the chair
scarcely slowed in its headlong motion forward. Soon the wheel chair,
bearing the crumpled body, had passed out of sight downward.
Hansard realized that the moment demanded action, but he was reluctant
to let his bride's still-warm body sink to the floor.
Another rifle shot, and the tape recorder was silenced.
"That was dumb, Hansard," Worsaw called out. "Playing that music was
plain dumb. I wouldn't of known you was in here without that."
Gently, Hansard lowered Bridgetta's body, keeping his eyes always on
her murderer.
"Oh, you don't have to worry yourself yet, Captain. I won't touch you
till I've wiped out your friends. I've got a score to settle with you.
Remember?"
Hansard reached inside the jacket of his uniform for the pistol with which
Panofsky had provided him. He did not move fast.
"Don't be stupid, Captain. How can you pull that out, when all I have to
do is squeeze a trigger? Now put your hands up in the air, and tell those
women and that other old man to come out from where they're hiding. If
they're good-looking enough, I might not have to kill them after all. How
about that?"