Cascade Point

A few minutes later Javier was back on the street, trudging toward the tube with his travelbags. He walked mechanically, only dimly aware of his surroundings, his mind numbed by emotional fatigue. On the way he dropped his letter in a mailbox; Dr. Rayburn would receive it in a day or two.

Wonky hadn't understood, of course. How could he? To know someone had died each time you were awarded the dubious privilege of watching someone else die—it was too far out of his experience. And he probably wouldn't have been able to live with the idea if he had understood it.

For Javier, though, there was no escape, either from the knowledge or its consequences. He could leave the city now, but he knew he'd have to return. Even if Dr. Rayburn believed him, experiments and massive data searches would have to be performed to prove it to the rest of humanity. And that would be only the begi

Himself.

The thought of it was terrifying—his hospital experience multiplied by a hundred. But he had no choice. The truth had to be told; the Cassandras had to learn, at whatever cost, how to use their curse.

Because Earth was going to need all the resources she could muster. Glancing involuntarily at the sky, Javier shivered as he remembered that terrible hospital vision. Somewhere out there, sometime in the future, a war fleet powerful enough and vicious enough to burn off an entire planet was going to win a great victory. If the race that owned that fleet was expanding their own empire into space, they would someday reach the Colonia... perhaps very soon.

And if the cost of developing the Cassandra ability into a weapon against that threat was enhanced public hatred and the loss of a few lives, then so be it. It would, Javier knew, be worth such a price.

Even if one of those lives was his own.

Afterword

"The Cassandra" was one of those stories that I simply couldn't let go of, no matter how many rejection slips it collected. From 1979 to 1983 it underwent two complete rewrites and quite a bit of incidental fiddling on top of that. Eventually, the persistence paid off.

Why I pushed the thing so hard is a little more difficult to explain. Certainly it's not a particularly upbeat story (and if you've made it this far you've surely noticed my fondness for upbeat stories); in fact, it almost qualifies as a tragedy. And, unlike the case in many of my stories, I would emphatically NOT want to be in the protagonists shoes.

All I can suggest is that it was the story's underlying philosophy that had a grip on me. In an era where mankind too often considers itself to be a meaningless accident of nature, perhaps I needed to remind people that that wasn't necessarily so. We could just as easily be important—even vital—to the universe at large; and until and unless that's proven wrong, I intend to keep on believing it. You can't very well care about people, after all, unless you feel those people are ultimately worth the effort.

I wax overly philosophical. Let's get to the next story.

Dragon Pax

Scholars and doomsayers had been predicting the Great War for almost a century beforehand, and when it finally came it was brief and furious, erupting like a fusion bomb among the sixty worlds of the Empire. The more strategic planets were fought over by as many as seven separate factions, and were often reduced to rubble in the process. Other planets—the poor or unimportant ones—were largely neglected by the starfleets, and were left to their individual fates as space travel all but disappeared.

Power, not the destruction of civilization, was the goal of those in the struggle; but, too late, they realized they were in over their heads. For although each faction had carefully calculated its strength and chances before making its move, none had anticipated the wild-card effect of the Dragonmasters who had suddenly appeared from nowhere onto the scene. These twelve men—virtual unknowns, all of them—had no warships and only minimal troops. But the powerful nightmare shapes that were their dragons evened the odds tremendously. Huge, virtually indestructible, appearing and vanishing on command, the dragons wreaked havoc on any ground forces that opposed their masters, crushing soldier and armored treader with equal ease.

Their size and sheer impossibility inspired almost universal fear and hatred, but it also prompted new alliances and betrayals among the warring factions as each tried to guess who the ultimate victor would be. But the forces unleashed were too destructive and the scramble for power quickly became a fight for survival. For many, even this goal was not to be achieved.

One of the few planets untouched by the war was Troas, and this was due more to luck than good pla

Royd Varian was three years old when the war began; he was five when Dragonmaster Harun Grail arrived at Troas and declared himself absolute dictator. At his age, Royd knew nothing of the politics of the situation. All he knew was that, later that year, his father was taken away to fight against the Easterlings from the other end of the continent, a war from which he never returned. Lying awake night after night, tears streaming down his cheeks, Royd listened to his mothers muffled sobs in the next room and resolved that, someday, he would kill the Dragonmaster.

His mother died barely a year later, and Royd—with no close relatives at hand—spent the rest of his childhood in a state-run orphanage. Though with the passage of the years the fire of his hatred waned, his resolve remained firm, and as he grew up all aspects of his life began to shape themselves toward his goal.

He studied history and political science in school, the better to know his enemy. On his own he learned military science and the use of weapons, and he worked at building up his physical strength and stamina. He sent letters asking about the chances of working on the household staff at either of the Dragonmaster's two estates, and landed a temporary job as mason's assistant; at about the same time he made his first delicate contacts with the outlawed Rosette Freedom Party. He rose through the ranks upon both sides, his single-minded determination driving him over all obstacles.

And finally, at age twenty-four, he considered himself ready.

—

Royd hefted the little four-shot dart gun doubtfully. "I don't know, Phelan," he told the tower of muscle standing beside him in the backroom darkness. "This doesn't pack much punch."

Phelan Hapspur shrugged. "You want something with punch or something you can hide? We've only got a limited arsenal, you know."

"Yeah." Royd frowned, then stuck the gun into his waistband, pulling his tunic down to conceal it. "All right, I guess this'll have to do. I'd better go now; the loading should be finished out front."

"Good luck." Phelan slapped him on the shoulder. "We'll be watching for your signal."

Royd nodded and slipped out the door into the meat market's main room. A burly man in a bloodstained apron came up and handed him a piece of paper. "All loaded, sir," he said. "If you'll sign here..." Royd glanced through the store window in time to see one of the butchers boys closing the doors on the cold-truck outside. As one of the food buyers for the Dragonmaster's city palace it was Royd's responsibility to personally check all the meat as it was loaded; but he knew Temmic could be trusted. Taking the paper, he glanced over it and then signed.