Chapter Thirty-Eight

Duet

General Malcolm Reed

It's not a good day. My belly hurts, my muscles are aching, my bones are made of spaghetti and I can hardly stand on my own two feet. Worse, I'm still wearing a nappy. A FUCKING NAPPY!

I'm in the sort of mood where aboard Enterprise I'd normally go round the place like a bloodhound till I found someone, anyone, to throw in the Agony Booth. During the days in the Triad, I'd order a strike on a suspected rebel cell. People dying had a remarkably mollifying effect.

Here, however, my options are reduced to hissing at Doktor Frankenstein and cursing his Monster, who is running the madhouse in which I am currently incarcerated.

Unfortunately, Lieutenant Elizabeth Cutler is singularly unimpressed by my temper tantrum. She simply continues to hold the Zimmer frame that has been thoughtfully provided to allow the patient to totter around his cage, sorry I mean bedroom of course, and look expectant.

My temper's so foul that I couldn't give a shit for the fact that she's shown me nothing but kindness since I woke up here, nor that she's only trying to help me. I balance as best I can on my unsteady legs, wrap myself up in the blankets and curse viciously under my breath. Fucking nappies and fucking Zimmer frames, what the fuck next?

A touch on my shoulder. If she'd whacked me with a crowbar at least I could have smacked her one back (eventually), but as it is, I just jerk my head up and glare at her. "Why the fuck do you care, anyway?"

Instead of retreating as she would if she'd a functioning brain cell in her head, she simply shrugs. "Somebody ought to," she says. "Sometimes I get the impression that nobody ever has."

Hell's bells and buckets of blood! I feel my temper straining at the leash. I tell her, just about on the sane side of shrieking it: "I don't need your bloody pity!"

I thought for sure that would get her out from under my nose. As it is, she slams aside the Zimmer frame and fairly marches up to me, from where she glares up at my chin from all her extremely diminutive height. "Good! Because you're not getting it! I don't pity you, Malcolm, I never have.

"But I do feel compassion for you."

Semantics. I really never was any good at them. I shrug myself defensively into my blankets and plump back down on the bed, scoffing. "You say that like there's a difference."

She's not buying it. To my colossal indignation, she pulls the blankets off again and grabs me by the nose, presumably to get my attention. "There is. Pity looks at someone who's suffering and says, 'Poor thing, but what can you do?' Then it shrugs and walks away. I know pity. I've endured a lot of it since I met you."

I'd been about ready to push her away, but at that my storm of anger and self-pity deflates into an emotion I hardly recognise – shame.

I jerk my head away, regardless of the smart to my ill-used nose, and snatch the blankets back again, wrapping them around me with unsteady hands. I don't want to look at her any more. My chest gets tight, oddly juxtaposed by a feeling of relief. All this time I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop, and now, finally, she's going to take the revenge she's entitled to. She's going to tell me I'm an evil bastard who isn't worth her time or anyone else's, and then she'll walk away and leave me to my nappies and my Zimmer frame and the humiliation of falling flat on my face and peeing myself while I'm trying to make it to the bathroom.

Instead she just keeps talking. "Compassion, on the other hand, looks at someone who is hurting and says, 'Poor thing, how can I help?' Then it rolls up its sleeves and gets to work. You know who taught me that?

"Martin Roberts."

Roberts. Pathetic little shit. I hardly knew he existed till the day I heard him offering to help her. Then he was a dead man.

I remember his face as I told him what happens to traitors. To the families of traitors, after they're convicted. He had two little sisters. Pretty. Golden-haired. They'd be in big demand, in one of the big Comfort Houses. Hell, I went on, watching him, I'd be amazed if a traitor's mother didn't end up in there as well. Catering for the mature clientele, or those who couldn't pay for the pretty little young ones.

How careless of me to have left the phase pistol within reach.

At the time, it meant nothing. He meant nothing. He was a nuisance and I was going to get rid of him, and his untimely end would put me a long step closer towards getting rid of an even bigger nuisance.

He didn't stand trial, so he couldn't be convicted. As he hadn't been convicted his family would be safe enough, though without his earnings there was always the possibility that one if not both of the pretty little golden-haired sisters might still find themselves flat on their backs in one of the Comfort Houses, catering for the clientele. But his death still provided me with the tool I needed to set Tucker up with the injury that should have blinded him for life.

Now I imagine Liz as one of the pretty little golden-haired sisters. I imagine her sold so that the rest of her family can eat. Roberts thought that fate so dreadful it was worth dying to keep it from the women he cared about, and now, I have the weirdest feeling that he ought to mean something.

I imagine, too, what my fate would have been if I'd succeeded in my plans. There's not another man I know (or woman either, possibly excepting Liz Cutler) who'd have extrapolated a reason to spare my life from the three words 'End of Humanity'. I'd have given birth, exactly as planned. Possibly I'd even have survived the experience. Perhaps, if I had, by now I'd be recovered enough to be deemed ready for re-use. I can guarantee you one thing: if things had got that far, I wouldn't have stopped howling afterwards.

Ever.

I feel exhausted, confused and despairing – and filled with a misery that is almost more than I can bear. My head is aching, my entire body is aching. I feel ill, guilty, ashamed, sad, scared, a whole thesaurus full of emotions I can't deal with, and two words slip out before I can stop them, almost before I even know I'm going to say them at all: "I'm sorry."

I don't specify for what. The truth is, I don't even know. Maybe I'm just sorry for myself, and if that's the case well I ought to go and find myself a convenient airlock and be done with it, because I can't be having with that at any bloody price.

Nappies, Zimmer frames and maudlin self-pity. For Lucifer's sake, how are the mighty fallen.

She puts her fingers under my chin and lifts my head up, and then she licks me lightly on the mouth. "I know, Malcolm," she says gently. "We'll get there."

I look down at the blankets. My fingers are trembling as they clutch them around me, but the cold isn't external; it's internal, and I'm only just discovering how cruel and all-consuming it is. It's been my refuge since the day of the… of the windflowers… of the…

"I'm sorry," I whisper again.

If my life depended on it – if the alternative was to be hanged, drawn and quartered – I still couldn't say 'for what'. I don't even know.

Sorry for what I did to Roberts?

Sorry for what I did to Liz?

Sorry for mistaking her compassion for pity, for yet again hurling the one thing of value left in my life back in her face?

Sorry for making an art form of cruelty, for killing for fun, for making myself an object of fear and loathing to everyone in the Empire? For making the whole fucking universe pay for half an hour's suffering and horror in a secluded corner of the gardens of Nottingham Old Hall, and the school-wide sniggering that followed it?

After a career like mine, how pointless, how pathetic would it be to say 'I'm sorry I exist'?

There are no words in human language to express my anguish. I let my head fall back and close my eyes. Back there, the loneliness had a language all its own. In that, at least, I can make myself understood.

"Owooo-ooo-oooooooooooooo…"

As I draw another deep breath for another howl, I catch movement beside me. In pure reflex I open my eyes.

Liz has dropped to her knees and put her hands on the arms of my chair; at a guess, not presuming to touch me. But her head too has gone back, and even as the start of the next cry bursts from my throat, one does from hers too: lighter and purer, but answering me as the most faithful of echoes.

Wolf answers wolf, and suddenly there is not loneliness, but voice answering voice across the freezing distances.

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