Tom Paine Maru - Special Author's Edition Read Online Free PDF

of laid out in front of me. Now you...”
     
    Now I... I had thrown her an unpinned grenade by promising to become the officer she wanted. What else could I do? Did I want a commission for its own sake, for my own sake? I knew I wanted Eleva. Like most individuals of my class, I had learned not to want much of anything else.
     
    “Say you will wait for me, Eleva,” I answered, trying hard to cover the anger, the frustration I felt, “Or say you will not. Either way. You will not say you love me. We have never... But let me know, now.”
     
    “Please do not force the issue, I do not know what to say! Whitey, I do not know what I feel. Three years? Why, by then, I will be...”
     
    “Three years older. Eleva, go marry a captain. I will learn not to care. Anyhow, it is too late, I am stuck here with this mission, all on account of—”
     
    “Do not dare blame me!” she pouted. The door-guardsman looked our way, raised eyebrows under his titanium helmet. “I never asked you to volunteer for the Asperance, did I? I did not ask you to do anything at all—except let me alone!”
     
    This was turning out all wrong, not at all as planned, as dreamed about. Saying goodbye to the only girl—woman—I ever loved, I had expected something different from her, something warm to take with me to the cruel stars. Now I watched myself ruining it, heard myself say all the wrong things, helpless to stop myself saying them.
     
    “Then what the Ham are you doing here, Eleva Dethri? Why did you come?”
     
    “I do not know!” she cried, flinging herself off the stool. She ran out of the room while I could think of nothing to say but “Eleva! I love you! Please do not go like this!”
     
    But of course she could not hear me. The press-to-talk switch popped up the moment she released it.
     
    -3-
     
     
     
    Three years earlier, I stood before the battered desk of my CO/conductor, Colonel Gencom, trying hard to understand what they were doing to me. The office walls were lined with photographs of the band over two generations, half a thousand men in uniforms of varying obsolescence, half a dozen wars of varying unbearability. On the window sill behind his desk lay a tarnished trumpoon with a bullet-hole through its bell; the unit color-cords hanging from it were stained with something which matted the braids together. Something dark, nearly black.
     
    “Whitey,” the Colonel shuffled through the sheaf of paperwork as if he, too, could not comprehend the reasoning behind this order, “You are the best damned mandolar player in the band. I hate to see this happen; you know how it is: ‘Ours not to reason why...’”
     
    Never mind that, in an orchestra, nobody hears the mandolar except the other musicians who rely upon it for harmony, chord-progression, rhythm even the percussionist depends on.
     
    Never mind that the papers on the Colonel’s desk were reassigning me to training as a field-armorer, a sort of meatball gunsmith—something I knew nothing about, possessed no background for. There was a war on; there was always a war on; war imposes its own reasons, its own demented logic. There existed a greater need, in the eyes of the State, for field-armorers than for mandolar players no one except the other musicians could hear.
     
    Never mind that I had been trained to play the mandolar, by edict of the same government, since the age of seven.
     
    I doubled as company supply-clerk, meaning in the first place that I was in charge of spare reeds, mouthpiece-covers, mutes, assorted junk like triangles, ceram-blocks, train whistles, sand whistles, slide whistles. In the second, it meant I billeted with what I was in charge of, spending my days—except for rehearsals, performances—among endless shelves of odd-shaped semi-musical detritus, inventory forms, the storeroom dust of a hundred military years.
     
    In the third place, I was de-facto repair officer: if a thumb-key broke off a picconet, if the bass saxonel got