“Tyger, tyger, burning bright . . .” —William Blake
When the Sommen Came
Lev reminded himself to keep his head bowed and to avoid staring. An entire mob passed, all of them wearing combat suits, many patched to the point where he wondered if the garments had any chance of protecting their wearers but protection wasn’t really the point—not for the Sommen. The more patched, the greater the warrior. That was the point.
One of the soldiers kicked as it walked by, sending Lev into a drift of ammonia snow, fine and dry. “No-name, keep your head lower.”
No-name.
“Don’t let it get to you,” said Michael, helping Lev back to his feet. “And I know your name.” They glanced down the road, in both directions, to confirm that no more Sommen were in sight before resuming their commute.
“How many more resupplies?” Michael asked.
Lev sighed. “One.”
“One? Imagine. Soon you’ll be like that old Lupan Merchant. I forget his name, but you know the one: barking orders as though born to the Merchant class, more Sommen than the Sommen themselves. It’s good that you’re so lucky because you’re the only other human in our group and we’re both from Zaporozhye, so that has to mean something—like we wound up together and we’re both still alive. Luck is with us.”
Lev didn’t feel lucky; he felt old—old enough to remember what it had been like on ten different worlds, his pressure suit replaced three times, twice barely repaired in time to seal in the oxygen. He flexed the right gauntlet and winced. His knuckles had gotten worse in the last few months, the suit’s wrist joints were too tight and a slight whiff of ammonia tainted his oxygen with maybe some methane, and Lev forgot if the contamination caused arthritis but that’s what he blamed; old age often had an accomplice. Everything blurred now. It was better to not think, better to forget that at the end of this run he’d have what he came for: Sommen Merchant status, and with it? A name. Lev banished the dream as soon as it materialized. Too many things could happen in no man’s land, so many opportunities for the misfortunes of age, and he hadn’t seen Earth since he was twenty-five and had trouble remembering what it was that he missed; it bothered him, the lack of memories an infected splinter that he had to excise. Better to think of things lost—or better still, things lost and forgotten—than what could be gained in the future. The already lost never brought new disappointments.
Vushka. The name triggered memories, the door to his past kicked in. These were his mother and father, crying, just before waving good-bye to watch Lev march across the steppes toward the waiting Sommen merchant fleet. This was his grandmother. Grinning, toothless, she poked the logs in her Lviv fireplace and wheezed in a hoarse laugh that made him smile and cringe at the same time, made him wonder if maybe she’d die on the spot and fall into the fire to be consumed and forgotten. Vushka. It was all his parents ate, all they fed him as a child, but then that wasn’t true because there were plenty of other foods but vushka was the only thing that Lev remembered these days, the only thing that ever came to him. And it was enough. Enough to invite other memories so he could recall his family just one more time, to accept the fact that by now they were dead.
“Are you blind?” Michael hissed.
Lev blinked. They had arrived at the outpost and a line of no-names gathered to wait, all of them showing their respect, all staring at him until Lev dropped to his knees.
“Idiot,” said Michael, “you won’t make Merchant if you keep acting the fool.”
“Misha, why did you do it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean why. Why didn’t you stay on Earth, at home?”
Michael waited a moment before answering. “It wasn’t a hard decision, Lev. You left years ago and things got worse, not better. When I left we had finally exhausted metals in the asteroid belt and still the Sommen trapped our ships within the solar system. The Americans sent an entire fleet against them—to try and get beyond, out into the galaxy.”
“And?”
“No survivors.”
Lev chuckled at the thought of dead Americans, trying to figure out why it should seem so funny until he gave up; it wasn’t funny; he had become perverse. The temperature indicator crept downward and he imagined the planet’s always-there clouds thickening, pregnant with a snow that would come whether anyone wanted it or not. It began as a sprinkle—as if someone flew overhead scattering salt to patter against his helmet. Within minutes a new layer coated the road and surrounding hills, muffling everything, and Lev suspected that should he remove his helmet it would be difficult to hear anything beyond a few meters away, anything less than a scream. The snow would be dry. Squeaky and slick. Once his exhaust melted the ammonia-water mix he could slide down a gentle slope to get lost in a mile-deep drift or sail off a bottomless cliff and maybe both were a fine way to go—better than a slow death on Earth . . .
“Misha,” said Lev, “they hadn’t invaded by the time you left Earth? The Sommen still hadn’t taken her?”
“No. Just quarantined the entire system.”
Lev was about to ask another question when he doubled over coughing, one blending into the others in a continuous roar until blackness took everything, forcing the suit lights to fade. He wasn’t gone for long. The chronometer indicated that barely a minute had passed by the time he came around, watching as the mules danced in the snow around him, their engines whining and blowing cones of exhaust into the air to crystallize and drift downward in sparkling veils, making him grin. Warsaw. The frost reminded him of the city’s winter just before he left, when Marina had dragged him from the club and into the snow on one of those mornings so cold it made his nose hurt, made his fingers numb in seconds except for where they touched her. She had smiled at him, called him crazy. For wanting to leave Earth he was eccentric, but for wanting to leave her he was a true nut case, someone to be pitied except that neither of them felt sad about the parting because they had both been in it for the sex anyway, too self-absorbed for anything approaching love and so . . . she gave him one last kiss and headed into town, calling over her shoulder a kind of good-bye: “Don’t forget what my ass looks like, Lev.”
The mules were as old now as Marina had been then. Twenty. And Lev cared for them in spite of everything because his life depended on the things, because facing the laughter from the named Merchants who never bothered to hide contempt for humans was easy; it was their curiosity that was difficult. The first Sommen warrior who had seen the mules approached Lev with amusement and it had been early in the game so that Lev hadn’t yet learned the protocol: When speaking with a warrior you never looked it in the eye. He lost three teeth and part of his tongue when the Sommen had kicked in the side of his face, dragging one claw through his right cheek and then out the left. A lesson—to mind one’s manners.
Yet even the Sommen got the point of mules, knew what Lev was thinking, because after the blow the warrior had tossed Lev a suit-sealer. “Robots so primitive they have almost no signatures. Nothing. You will live a long time, a breather of oxygen and poison and a true coward whom death cannot find.”
But that was almost as old as his memories of Marina. Today the alien steppes stretched out to the horizon and blended into the sky, white and gray so that he had a moment of difficulty in telling up from down and had to sit again, the coughing threatening to resume.
Michael helped him to his feet. “It’s good this is your last trip, Lev. The ammonia. It’s taking to your lungs, eroding your tissues.”
“And someday, Misha, all this will be yours.”
Michael’s voice sounded raspy over his headset, and Lev wondered if the ammonia had already started its work on him. “Mules. Everyone else uses grav carts and high-speed auto-tractors, but old Lev Sandakchiev? He uses ancient robotic mules that need oxygen tanks to even function.”
“And grav carts leave an electromagnetic trail that can be spotted for thousands of kilometers, from space. I’ve seen entire resupplies wiped out before the Merchants ever heard a sound or knew what was coming.”
“It’s all about planning, old man,” said Michael. “You plan your runs to go between satellite passes, shut down at the tiniest sign of remote detection or scanning. Planning, Lev, and by now you’d have moved more than enough cargo to afford a thousand mules.”
Lev pushed past him toward the general direction of the front lines, not bothering to check the guidance system, trusting instinct to get them through the snow. Angry.
“I have a thousand mules, Misha. And while other humans died for the sake of speed, I live. Slow and steady, like the tortoise, so I don’t have to shut down for overhead surveillance and don’t have to worry about dark angels above because nobody ever thinks to look for old Earth technologies. You are of Earth, Misha. Have some pride.”
A sea of headless mules kept pace with them, bouncing up and down through the snow on four legs, cutting a path for the two men as they followed. Lev enjoyed controlling the things with his keypad, watching them turn in unison when he commanded it—like having control over a flock of grounded sparrows. Each one carried five hundred kilos of cargo. He grinned with joy when fifty of them slammed into a massive ammonia drift, sending a spray of snow into the air as if the planet itself had just vomited ice.
“My mules are magnificent!” Lev shouted, almost missing the alarm indicator on his display.
“Lev?” Michael asked, his voice a whisper. “A nano-mine just activated.”
“I see it. You know the procedure, Misha. Run. It’s your only chance.” Lev refused to look at him now, fought the urge to scream and keep on screaming, the twin sensations of futility and despair so familiar that he almost failed to recognize them. Michael was young—too young to deserve this, and it wasn’t fair and he hated the Sommen for it, for forcing the boy to leave Earth because staying home had become just as dangerous as serving them on resupply. Just as dangerous as war.
“Lev, they’ve locked on, help me!”
“I can’t help you, Misha,” Lev explained. The tears flowed freely now, his knowing that he had no help for Michael—that nobody could have helped—making it worse. “Once nanos zero on a signature, there’s nothing I can do but go on; supplies have priority, Misha, I’m sorry. We’ll both die if I stay. You must have had a suit defect that went unnoticed during inspection, something that caused a characteristic emission, one that triggered an old minefield geared toward organic life. That must be it. We just wandered into an old nano-minefield, one that’s not even charted. I’m so sorry.”
Lev closed his eyes. He imagined. It didn’t take much to imagine anything so horrible, not since he had seen it all happen before, and especially not since Michael screamed until the last second before being consumed.
Better to forget, Lev reminded himself. Better to pretend that boys such as Misha never existed and instead focus on the beauty of the mules as they bounded through the drifts, their engines whining and screaming with perfect effort, oblivious to the threat of nanos because no nanos would have been calibrated to target anything so simple and so harmless. So terrestrial.
And the front was close now. Vibrations shook the ground under his feet.
Lev had just finished offloading cargo into the nearest storage unit when he felt his gut twist in fear, plasma artillery ripping open the air to send him flying against the entrance to a bunker. He slid down the stairs. But before he could collect himself—hand in his invoice and confirm the final shipment—the door opened and one of them snatched Lev by the helmet, lifting him off the ground and several feet into the air where his feet kicked like a child’s. The thing tossed him inside and shut the door.
An isba. The term was old, so old that Lev shouldn’t have even remembered it but he did, recalling the time he had gone skiing near Almaty during a cold spell that kept them from setting foot outside the cabin: an isba, half earth and half log with a blaze that allowed his friends to lounge in underwear, made them all sweat while the wind howled outside at forty below. The bunker reminded him of that time, but in nightmare. More than thirty Sommen had arranged themselves in a circle and were half naked, their skin covered with scars and mottled with the signs of deep plasma burns, so horrific that Lev forgot himself and stared until he appreciated his mistake and flinched to close his eyes. He waited for the blow.
“You are the Apprentice, the human on its final run,” one said, Lev’s suit translating its voice into a sterile Ukrainian, coaxing his eyes open again. “I uploaded coordinates into your computer, so that you can navigate alone to one last supply point, your mission incomplete until then. None of your robots will accompany you. In an hour we attack and you will prepare the way by supplying our forward post, after which you are to report here. To complete your service and receive your name.”
The Sommen handed Lev a packet, which, as soon as he took it, felt so heavy that he thought it would pull him to the floor. He pushed it into a pouch and bowed. “I will deliver it immediately, as you wish.”
Once he had shut the door behind him, he breathed again and then gasped. The plasma shells, when they burst, sublimed ammonia ice into incandescent gas that floated through the air so Lev imagined he was crawling through some kind of fairyland, where the ammonia wasn’t ammonia, it was cotton candy in pale green, weightless. Misha would have liked this, he thought. But the memory of Michael scuttled in to make Lev scream, and he buried his helmet in the snow and pounded the ground until his friend’s face disappeared and even then Lev stayed motionless, wanted to ensure his thoughts traversed a path just as safe as his body so he lay there as the detonations vibrated everything, including his teeth; Lev studied the map display, staring at the blinking light. His legs shook. They refused at first to propel him forward, as if the nerves had suddenly split and gone dead but then he noticed the ground shift below him, the snow parting in front of his faceplate as he slid closer to the front.
Plasma flashed overhead and Lev thought about the funhouse outside Zaporozhye, in the summertime, where the gypsies strung colored lights and kept wolves in steel cages. He believed in cages. Cages kept bad things in, trapped, but they also kept bad things out if you crawled inside. Lev’s thoughts spiraled down into his memories as if they were a feathered cage, soft and warm to keep him free from plasma and snow, a Gypsy charm against the wolves that waited for him out there, robotic wolves which hid amongst an alien forest of ice and boulders on the far banks. When he passed onto the frozen river, solid ammonia and water, he didn’t notice. The artillery barrage had heated it to create puddles, over which he slid, not even recognizing that the dots representing his body and destination had almost merged. Lev smiled when the old Gypsy woman tried to distract him (so her son could pick his pocket) because he had come forewarned—no money except the bills he kept in a secret belt. Her wolves growled. But caged wolves, Lev knew, were fine, their fur a mixture of gray and black that swirled with each movement, the creatures barely alive on a diet of squirrel, anything found dead on the road. His memories faded then as if a switch had flipped. Lev rested in the middle of the river, a tiny beige figure just a shade off from the surrounding white of ice and snow, terrified now that he realized what the problem was.
There was no outpost. They had lied to him, but the Sommen never lied. He imagined Michael then, somewhere nearby, a ghost that refused to materialize but who stared along with the ghosts of everyone else, all the humans who had come into space to die alone.
“I am not of you yet,” Lev said to them, “and it doesn’t matter that there is no outpost; these are the coordinates and there is a delivery to be made.” He pulled out the package and unwrapped it.
Nanos. Lev rested a box on the ice and watched it open so that a wave of dark material spilled out to form a puddle, its edges spreading in a perfect circle, quickly enough that Lev had trouble scrambling out of its way. His spine went rigid. Nanos would attract attention, would call the robotic wolves, and he stumbled to his feet oblivious to the new plasma barrage that had begun, sending massive chunks of the river skyward like car-sized shards of glass. The wolves howled as he fled. Lev had never seen one of the enemies; resupply meant going to the front but never staying there, never actually observing what the Sommen fought, what could be so important to them that it formed the focal point of Sommen consciousness. And besides, the wolves changed. Each system held something different so that even if he had seen a Sommen enemy before, it mattered for nothing, didn’t apply to whatever chased him now.
He reached the bank and turned. What the nanos had attracted had nothing to do with flesh and Lev cried at the sight of metal creatures, mechanical and lifeless at the same time their sensors glowed with at least a hint of consciousness. One of them clicked its legs over the river directly toward him and fired, a pulsing cannon that caused puffs of snow to erupt but the shifting ice must have prevented the thing from getting a good lock, must have made its targeting system lapse because it kept missing. Lev closed his eyes. He embraced Michael now, smiled at the memory of the man’s face and lost all sense of time, floating in conversations that had taken place only the day before or two years prior, the words clear and fresh regardless of their age so that minutes congealed into an hour.
“And still it lives,” said Michael.
But it wasn’t Michael and Lev opened his eyes to find the Sommen in front of him, the same one who had given him the package to deliver. Hundreds of robots smoldered on the ice, burning and melting through. Already forgotten.
“You lied,” said Lev. He saw the Sommen tense and half-expected the thing to reach out and crush his helmet, but this time Lev wasn’t afraid and stood his ground. “There was no outpost.”
“I lied. It is part of the ritual, a last test to determine if the Gods want you to live in combat, and we are permitted to lie for it. Now you must choose.”
Behind the thing Lev noticed hundreds more Sommen gather, a plasma burst occasionally sending one or ten into the air, charred. Even so, the rest watched and listened—ignoring the danger.
“Choose what?”
“Your name. You may stay with us, a full Merchant with title rights, the right to live on any of our worlds and to hire your own no-names. Or you may go home. Back to Earth.”
Lev had trouble concentrating and laughed at the irony: It had ended but the prize was decrepitude. Age and ammonia, he thought, and a little methane, the smell of the Sommen, the legacy of having lived with them a road map of scar tissue on his lungs, a map he’d never see but followed with each inhalation. Oxygen was expensive and N2 a waste of good nitrogen potential, and so no-names made do with what they could afford, the cheap gases, impure, the same ones he used for his mules’ engines. These had robbed him of youth. And he’d been gone too long. The memories that had kept him alive or at least provided a refuge for the moments in which the main part of his mind melted and rebuilt itself, screamed at him now—that they were tired. They wanted rest too. If Lev dusted off the thought of vushka one more time it might crumble into nothing. Real vushka, in Zaporozhye, that was the thing.
“I want to go home. To Earth,” he said.
Lev stepped back. The Sommen shouted, a war cry that he had heard only in the distance from the rear, and never directed at him so that he almost turned and ran until he understood they had knelt. All except the one, who grinned to reveal the black fangs of the Sommen, a sharp horror.
“You honor us. To be a Merchant is to accept a life of shame, but to refuse is something else. When we found you Earth was not ready for war; we had to test it.”
Lev let his mind slip further into haze, the day’s events having hit harder than he realized so that he wondered if he’d pass out. “I don’t understand.”
“This race, the mechanical one dying here today, is unworthy of being even Merchant filth because they exchanged flesh for metal. So we destroy them. Most of Earth has so far retained its flesh and you, among all the Merchants from Earth, have proven that your kind has worth; you delivered the final supply. And now, because of your decision to reject Merchant, your race will be given time to prepare and when ready we will war against each other. Eternal in glory and honor for all.”
“Eternal in glory and honor for all,” the rest of them chanted.
Lev dropped where he stood. Before passing out he noticed that the air mix had gone out of whack and he wondered why the alarms hadn’t warned him, until he glanced down and saw that portions of his suit had been blackened by plasma. He smiled. With a flick of a finger, he corrected the mix and began to fade, knowing that he’d wake up with a headache. It was OK. The Sommen lifted him, throwing his body over its shoulder to begin the trek to the rear, when the rest of them rose and screamed again, the noise of their shouts fading as the one carrying him rammed through snow drifts at the same time inhaling the ammonia atmosphere with a deep hiss.
His suit translated the fading Sommen screams. “Honor for all!”
Lev woke some time later in the snow. The Sommen knelt beside him, one of the thing’s hands on his shoulders, pressing him into a deep drift as it used the other to work on his chest plate, and he waited for the thing to say something but words never came and both speakers only crackled in his ears. The Sommen finished whatever it had been doing, and must have seen that Lev was awake because it pulled him to his feet.
“Keep your head up,” the Sommen said. “Your back straight. If we pass my kind, look them in the eye and do not turn away, no matter what happens.”
“What?”
“Raise your head. You are not a Merchant, not a no-name; you are a thing with promise. I fixed your suit and uploaded into it all of our plans, weapons data, and thought. In this way, your people can prepare for our coming. Tell them. Tell them that we will allow space outside your system to gather resources and they have only a short time to become our equal, a century before war finds all of you and my killers come to collect.”
“That’s what you were saying at the river. I’m going home, to Earth?”
“Home. And keep your head raised, no matter what.”
“What if I had chosen to stay—picked the Merchant path?”
The Sommen spat, the stuff freezing before it hit the snow. “We would have harvested more of your people for our supply ranks, destroyed Earth because it had no value, and moved on. Not much farther now, to the port.”
Lev looked up and recognized the path. They stepped from the empty plains and onto a road, the same one he and Misha had traveled earlier and the outpost was close now, beyond that the Sommen transit area, their beachhead onto this world. Did they know of Brodyaga—the song or any of Siberia’s rivers? Did Lev anymore? It took a moment for the words to come, much longer than it had ever taken for vushka, and he sang so the melody echoed in his helmet, and he had to pause at the end of each line to breathe, to force more air into damaged lungs, lungs that just wanted it to stop, screamed that they’d had enough. But he sang anyway and at the end the Sommen growled; Lev’s translator changed the sound into artificial laughter.
“This is a song about convicts. Prisoners.”
“Yes,” said Lev.
“You are no convict. Ten times our enemies aimed for your breath, for your exhaust, and you stood on the ice, never moving and showing no sign of fear. You are no convict.” The thing pointed then, down the road toward the transit port but stopped Lev so it could use a device to mark the front of his suit, draw a symbol that he had seen many times on Sommen armor and ships. “A warrior’s symbol,” the thing continued. “They should not touch you as long as you bear the mark, and by now word will have spread so all will expect your arrival and meet you as a hero. Act like a hero; keep your head raised no matter how tired or wounded you are.”
Lev thought of something to say but nothing came, and so he walked away, shuffling through the snow and not even noticing when more fell from the sky, not even recognizing that, out of habit, he had shifted his attention to the navigation screens because now the snow came so heavily that the road disappeared.
His head pounded. It pounded like a hangover, and made him thirsty for vodka, the sensation that Earth was so close bringing a wave of exhaustion when it should have kept the energy up, the energy that he had gathered just moments ago. But it was OK. Even if he woke up every day with a headache it was more than OK, because he’d already decided on the first thing he’d do when he got back, the thing that scared him the most and almost made him choose a name.
Lev lost all interest in the Sommen. Others could take the information he’d been given, decide if man would go to war someday. To him there were more important things, the kinds of things that mattered only to old men like the fact that Misha had been young. His parents might still be alive. Lev would have to find them, to explain why the mules hadn’t saved their son and he missed his mules but he’d miss Misha even more, and just before arriving at the spaceport he laughed, finally seeing their mistake: The Sommen thought men had spirit—that Lev had chosen to go home because he wanted to fight.
But the Sommen had never kissed Marina Boroshenko.