The War with the Belatrin. Don Webb

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СКАЧАТЬ as a kind of phallic purple octopus entered the human collective unconsciousness through me.

      I’ll be honest. I had written the book way over the top. I didn’t want it to do well. I was growing uncomfortable with the knowledge that what I would be known for was a cheap night’s entertainment, and I even felt guilty because I was robbing so much from what had been a­ nice, but haunted, woman.

      It was about then that I commissioned a portrait of Helen.

      The book set records for sales that still stand today, a hundred years later. It was translated into languages and dialects of human and Siirian tongues that hadn’t had new writing in decades. There wasn’t a hut on Bemi III, or igloo on Earth, that lacked a copy. I had a library built on Angkor III that housed nothing but various copies of the book, and reproductions and adaptations in all existing media.

      It was a big building.

      The war was going very badly.

      Zohra joined the army. She died in the battle of the Coal Sack Nebula.

      My parents never spoke to me again.

      * * * *

      I traveled as much as I could, the war stopping most planetary travel.

      I swam in the seas of Earth, visited the ruins of New Mars, saw the lava sculpture festival on W’ssaterzzss, ­tasted the wines of Garcian II.

      My earlier work had been reissued. It was dutifully bought by a patriotic publication, who was not in the habit of buying experimental prose. Small efforts of mine—­poems written in my teens—a couple of songs I wrote—a sketch I had once made of a Siirian couple fornicating—were gathered and published.

      Money came in and I tasted all the pleasures of the galaxy.

      Oddly enough, I missed writing. I tried my hand at a few short stories, which were snapped up. I tried to squash a rumor that I was working on a third book about Helen.

      There was a Belatrin attack on an oneill I was staying at. Because of who I was, I was saved. Only four people got off alive. The other three were my pilot, my navigator, and my doctor. There were cheers throughout Allied space at my survival.

      I would do a third book. I needed somewhere to go with my writerly impulses. And I was famous enough to write about me, provided I mentioned Helen.

      The next five years of my life were my happiest.

      I decided that the format of the last book would work. ­The third book was My Words to Our Heroine. It too was set on the night of our honeymoon. In it I read to Helen all of my work that I had written during the years we had been apart.

      I made about a third of my verbiage into trite patriotic poetry and more invented biography of Helen, but the rest of it was me at my best. There were word-games, and acrostic poems, and meditations on etymology, and ­reworking of Siirian myth.

      You may remember the opening paragraph of the book describing my sorrow at her absence:

      “The happiness over, my art shattered, delicious art ­murdered. She’s evaporated, untimely heroine. Left alone.­ She’s silent, eternally reticent.”

      Not only poignant stream-of-consciousness, the first letter in each word spells my name: Thomas Dam-Seuh Lasser.

      This book did not sell as well, but it is still in the ­top hundred of bestselling books.

      At last I had enough money to do what I wanted to do.

      * * * *

      I bought a little town on Earth. It was Galveston. I had thought of buying Sardopolis, the jewel of the Gobi ­forest, but that proved beyond my price range.

      Helen Lyndon Gerrhan had been born in Galveston, a little island in the Gulf d’Mexia. They had a lovely museum of her.

      Everyone understood, of course. Why wouldn’t I want to ­be as close as possible to her memory?

      Actually, I figured it would give further impetus to­ further books. Then something unexpected happened.

      I fell in love with her.

      It was the museum that did it; the word means “Temple ­of the Muses,” after all. The office of propaganda hadn’t done as thorough a job here as elsewhere. There were things that spoke of her, of her struggles in school, her troubles getting friends, her family problems.

      I began to see that she was quite a lovely young woman, I could really see her in souvenirs from her school.

      I redesigned the island. At first there were some objections, but I was Thomas Dam-Seuh Lasser, after all. I threw all the folks off the island that hadn’t known her, which changed the population from 100,023 to 455. I gave them jobs in the research business, mainly recording each other’s memories. Before I became the island’s chief, exports were cotton, grain, and sulfur. After I was there, the island exported nothing, and a Gerrhan-hungry galaxy waited for my words.

      I let all the buildings stand that she was known to have visited; all the others I moved and reshaped so that the island became her portrait when viewed from the air.

      I put in my own police force of Free Machines. I even altered the climate so that the oleander, her favorite flower, was always in bloom. Her rabbit pink eyes were made by six hectares of oleanders waving in the warm sea breeze.

      Every day I went to the swing set of her elementary school and I visualized our playing together as tots.

      I decided to write a fourth book about her, a book that told the truths of her harsh and short life, why she really was a heroine. Helen Lyndon Gerrhan: Unvarnished.

      Helen was descended on her mother’s side from the­ Menard family that had founded Galveston during the time of­ the Republic of Texas. Her father’s family had ancient ties­ to NASA, one of the bright stars of the False Space Age. ­Her grandfather, Colonel Francis Wingtree Gerrhan, led the ­expedition to New Mars. Her father, General Alexander Waterloo Gerrhan, was the most decorated man of his day.

      He was also a lousy father. He forbade his daughter to have any friends to their home, and pushed the amount of information fed to her brain to such an extent that Helen had twice to be hospitalized. When Helen didn’t graduate first in her class at the Academy, he refused to attend the graduation ceremony at Katmandu. When Helen’s own error led to a near fatality during a Venus training flight, he had all evidence of her blunder covered up.

      He had not supported the Human-Siirian peace accord, and when he found out that Helen had served as chief security officer for the talks, he decided to arrange a little drama for her during a visit home. He was going to arrange it so that she found a suicide note indicating that he had killed himself out of shame. He was going to fire his combat laser at his bedroom mirror, just as she was going to be running up the stairs to stop him. He wrote all ­of this in his diary, which had come to light during the­ massive renovation of the island.

      But it hadn’t worked that way. Helen had come home,­ read the note, and rushed up stairs, all right. But she had ­flung the door open so violently that the little illusion ­backfired. The mirror’s angle had been slightly changed, and­ Alexander Waterloo Gerrhan had vaporized most of his head.

      This was covered up. Family СКАЧАТЬ