Cook,Glen - The Heirs of Babylon

A RESTLESS couple sat on a blanket on a twisted, rusted

girder, holding hands sadly, occasionally glancing toward

the ancient ship at the pier in the distance, silent love

islanded in a forest of broken steel madness. The girl

moved nervously, stared through the bones of the

shipyard, hating the ship that would take her Kurt away—

Jager, a gray steel dragon specially evolved for the

dealing of death, crouched, waiting beside the Hoch-und-

Deutschmeister pier. Her hand tightened on his. She lifted

it, rubbed her cheek against his knuckles, kissed them, and

moved closer. He slipped his arm around her, lightly. Hers

passed around his waist. The cool, moist fingers of their

free hands entwined in her lap.

They were Kurt and Karen Ranke, married eleven

months, two weeks, and three days, and about to be

parted by the warship—perhaps permanently. Both were

tall and leanly muscular, blond, blue-eyed, almost stereo-

typically Aryan, alike as brother and sister, yet related

only through marriage. Their sadness was for the War, on

again.

A snatch of song momentarily haunted the ruins to

their left. They turned. A hundred meters distant, beside

the shallow, scum-topped water-corpse of the Kiel Canal,

sailors made their ways toward the destroyer; men without

attachments, accompanied by no women. One sang a

bawdy verse. The others laughed.

"Hans and his deck apes," Kurt murmured. "Almost

happy because we're pulling out."

Karen leaned her head against his shoulder, said noth-

ing. Through narrowed eyes she searched the torn iron

fingers surrounding them. Kurt ignored the question, un-

spoken, in her eyes. He understood the need to create

more such ruin no better than she.

A whistle shrieked at the pier, a foghorn bellowed—

Jager testing.

The warship had come through sea trials well, like a

great-grandmother proving capable of the marathon. Her

officers and men had once been delighted as children with

a new toy. But their joy was fading. The toy was ready

for the War, for the Last of All Battles, as the Political

Office had it. A pale specter on a far horizon dampened

all enthusiasms. The games were over, and death lay in

ambush on a distant sea.

Kurt knew Karen doubted the Political Office, and bore

a grudge against the destroyer. Already the two were

responsible for a dozen training separations. Her darkest

fear, and his, was that this one might be permanent.

Karen's fingers, teasing through his hair, quivered. He

tried to ignore it. He was going to the War—she said to

no purpose. He repeated her questions in his mind. The

War had managed without him for centuries. Why must

he go? He had been assigned a good position, and the

same wanderlust which had led him to spend three years

with the Danish fishing fleets demanded he not refuse it.

More than once she had called him a willing victim of

man's oldest madness. If gods there were, Ares was the

most enduring.

A murmur of low voices came from the direction of the

canal. Kurt stopped thinking of Karen long enough to

glance at Chief Engineer Czyzewski and his group of

Polish volunteers. Then came the sound of small bells

ringing. lager's gunnery and fire control people were

making a last check of the gun mounts. The main battery

trained left and right. Flags rose to the starboard yard-

arm. "Half an hour," Kurt observed. Karen said nothing.

More clatter along the canal. They looked. The

officers: Captain von Lappus; Commander Haber; Kurt's

cousin. Lieutenant Lindemann; and Ensign Heiden, the

Supply Officer. Other officers were already aboard—

except one.

He walked alone, a hundred meters behind the others.

Tall, thin, pale, with cold eyes that seemed to stare out of

a private hell in a bony face with skin stretched taut,

skull-like, beneath sand-colored hair, he wore a uniform

unlike those of the others, neither naval, nor of the Baltic

Littoral. This was black, silver-trimmed, bore death's-head

insignia at the collars, grim imitations of an age long

unremembered. A Political Officer.

"Beck," Kurt sighed, shivering.

Karen stirred nervously, kicking a mound of rubble. It

collapsed with a tiny clatter.

Beck stopped, haunted eyes searching the steel bone-

yard. The strangeness of the man projected itself through

10

the hundred meters of ruin. The couple shivered again. He

studied them a moment, then walked on.

"That man ..." Karen sighed with relief. "He makes

me freeze up inside, like a snake. Be careful, Kurt. He's

not old Karl."

Karl Wiedermann was Kiel's resident Political Officer.

He projected the same coldness, had the haunted eyes at

times, but did have a spark of humanness in him. He wore

black and silver only on military holidays, and seldom

invoked his power. Kurt had happy childhood memories

of his little shop on Siegestrasse where he crafted fine

furniture of imported Swedish oak. Old Karl was not a

bad man—for a Political Officer.

Beck—Beck was no Kiel-born man. He had no ties with

the Littoral. He was from High Command at Gibraltar, sent

to Kiel to summon Jager to the War. He appeared a

fanatic, cold as the devil's heart. Perhaps, as Karen had

once opined, there was an association. Kurt, however,

suspected he was as human as anyone, with loves, hates,

hopes, and fears. He could not credit pure evil, as many

believed Beck to be. He had seen strange men and

stranger behavior while with the Danish fishing fleets, and

always, no matter how unusual, a man's actions had been

explicable in terms of human needs.

Kurt's mind, unhampered because Karen was unusually

silent, drifted off to his years with the fishing fleets. A

great adventure they had been, until he came home and

found Karen grown into a lovely woman. He had aban-

doned the sea to court her, had won her, and had let her

talk him out of returning—until Commander Haber

offered him the post of Leading Quartermaster aboard

Jager because of his experience.

More sailors passed in time. Many were accompanied

by tearful wives and lovers and mothers. There were few

men. Kurt watched his sister, Frieda, as she and her

fiance. Otto Kapp, passed, she clinging to his arm so

tightly her knuckles were white. "We give so much to the

War," Kurt murmured. Karen nodded. Their families had

given for generations.

Their fathers had gone to the last Meeting, aboard

U-793, a salvaged submarine, and had not come back—

those who went to Meetings seldom returned. Three of

their grandfathers had sailed on the cruiser Grossdeutsch-

land, decades gone.

"Let's walk," said Karen, rising from the girder, tugging

the blanket. While putting his cap on and hoisting his

seabag to his shoulder, Kurt took a last fond, deep look at

11

the ruin surrounding them. This was his home, this brick,

concrete, and steel desert that stretched a thousand kilom-

eters to the east and south and west. Only the north,

Scandinavia, had been spared the mighty bombs. The

plagues had raged through, but the survivors were left

with livable land, and, in time, had developed a loose-

knit, quasi-medieval, viable culture. Yes, Kurt lived in

the bones of a fallen Germany, but this was his home

and he was loathe to depart, albeit he had been thinking

much of Norway lately, especially the province of Tele-

mark,

They walked beside the canal. Suddenly, Karen revealed

her own Norwegian thoughts. "Kurt, I'm going to Tele-

mark."

The seabag fell from his shoulder, thumped on the

earth. No words of rebuke could he find, though he

opened his mouth to speak. With dreamlike slowness he

turned and took her by the shoulders, held her at arm's

length while staring into the bottomless blue of her eyes.

They reflected the misery of the rusty wreckage around

her, they reflected ruin she must escape—and a crystal

tear. For a brief instant Kurt shared her soul's agony.

Somewhere a lonely seabird called, a stormcari.

"To the colony," she said, her voice soft as meringue,

yet with an edge of steel daring his reply. "I can't bear

Kiel anymore, Kurt. Look!" She swept an arm around,

all-inclusive. "The Fatherland. The best part. We're mag-

gots feeding on its corpse. We steal from the dead, create

nothing new, waste what little we have on this endless

madness—I'll not damn our baby to it! Not just to give

the Littoral another sailor to die at the next Meeting. ..."

There were gray clouds rising, shadows moving, and a

wind come down from the north soughed among the

girders. Perhaps a storm was brewing. Perhaps not. These

could be omens.

"Baby?" Kurt exclaimed, still off balance from the

shock of Norway.

"Yes, a baby."

"You're sure?"

She nodded.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Wouldn't've made any difference, would it?"

Guiltily, he avoided her angry eyes—because it was

true. The War was first in his life, even before babies.

"But Norway?"

'Too much? No. When Kari Wiedennann calls the

refugees traitors, do you have to break your neck agree-

12

ing? No one called you a traitor when you went to

Denmark. Must I love Germany less because I go to

Norway? And why do I want to go? Because there's got to

be something better than getting ready for the next battle—

and I can't have it here. Only in Telemark. Yes, Tele-

mark! Where the weird ones go, the dropouts, the pa-

cifists, the turncoats, the ones who go where there're no

Political Officers to make them think about killing.

"Go to your damned War! No, don't argue. You can't

change my mind. When the shells fly there, wherever,

remember me and tell yourself it's worth it."

He suspected this was a prepared speech, so readily did

her words come. Usually, she was as lame-tongued as he.

"But . . ." Exasperated, he ran a hand through his hair,

forgetting the cap he wore. With a curse, he caught it

centimeters above the earth. The accident sparked anger

he channeled toward Karen. "Why'd you marry me if I'm

such an idiot? Why not Hans?"

She smiled weakly. "Hans is a bigger idiot. He believes.

You're stupid sometimes, Kurt, but I love you anyway."

She slipped her arm around his waist and his anger began

to fade. "Come on. Let's get you to your boat before

Hans comes after you—or Beck."

They walked in silence until they reached the moldering

concrete surface of the Hoch-und-Deutschmeister pier,

where, with Jager's bow looming above them and her

decks ringing with the clatter of shoes, they joined Kurt's

sister and her fiance. They exchanged greetings, but

Frieda began moving around nervously, always keeping

Otto between herself and her brother. Kurt was startled

and a little hurt—although she claimed Otto's enlisting

was his fault, and was still angered by it—until he sudden-

ly realized that Frieda had broken her promise to herself

and had done what she had meant to avoid until mar-

riage. He chuckled, not at all dismayed. Indeed, he was

pleased for them.

Otto, too, seemed withdrawn, uncertain, no longer the

warm companion of childhood, prior to the death of

Kurt's mother, and before Kurt followed his cousin Gre-

gor into the self-imposed exile of the fishing fleets. Three

years' separation had seem them grow from boys into

men, and apart. Common experience no longer tied them

together. Both had striven for the old closeness after

Kurt's return, but soon realized they were trying to catch

the wind. It was gone, fading through their fingers like

gossamer on an autumn breeze. The old, once thought

13

eternal, binding magic had failed, and they could never go

home....

A shout broke Kurt's study. He looked up, saw sailors

preparing to single up mooring lines. Otto and Frieda

were growing increasingly uneasy. With Karen close, he

started down the pier.

A dozen steps onward, Karen said, "Put your bag

down." He did. "Kiss me." He did. "Miss me, Kurt. Miss

me bad." She was fighting tears against his shoulder, and

failing. "Be careful. Come back—please?" She kissed him

again, much harder, one to remember. Above, a boat-

swain's pipe shrieked. "Remember, I'll be in Telemark. I'll

wait. You'd better hurry on."

He kissed her once more, glad she closed her eyes and

missed his own tears. Then he shouldered his seabag and

walked stiffly along the pier, falling into step beside Otto.

Silently, momentarily, they shared, as long ago, their de-

parture despair. Kurt did not look back until they reached

the brow. Lord, he felt guilty.

"Come on, Kapp, Ranke, we can't hold movement for

you," someone shouted from the quarterdeck.

Kurt looked, saw Hans Wiedermann, an old enemy.

Karen had been his loss to Kurt and he had never forgiv-

en, though he had restrained himself well. He could have

gotten revenge through his father, Karl.

Then, as he climbed the brow, Kurt saw Beck watching

from the fantail. Fighting disgust, he jerked his eyes back

to Wiedermann. Hans had something of a similar aura,

but much mellowed. He was no Political Officer himself,

merely one's son. Yet some of the austere aloofness

(monastic? Jesuistic?) had attached itself. Beneath black

hair his face was pale, his eyes were icily blue, narrow—

but crinkle lines lurked at their corners, and about his

mouth. Hans sometimes laughed. Political Officers did

not, except at wakes and executions.

A false, stereotypical notion, Kurt knew, yet one he

thought uncomfortably close to the truth. He had strong,

perhaps exaggerated opinions about Political Officers, but

not much so. They were a cruel and mysterious tribe.

Wiedermann smiled as Kurt started aft, toward his

compartment. "We'll have the same watch."

Kurt felt ice-fingers caress his spine. Nominally, he and

Hans were of equal rank, the senior ratings in then-

departments, but Hans's was the senior rate. Boatswain

over Quartermaster. Kurt silently blessed Hans for the

warning. He would walk carefully for a while, hoping

14

Hans would realize a ship had no room for strong animos-

ities.

Soon, after stowing his gear, he went to the bridge,

looked around. Sea Detail was set. Hans was present, as

were Captain von Lappus, Commander Haber, and Mr.

Lindemann, Captain, Executive Officer, and Officer of the

Deck. Otto Kapp had the helm. Bearing takers were on the

wings, the walkways outside the closed bridge or pi-

lothouse. A messenger stood by, as did telephone talkers.

A full complement, once the lee helmsman arrived.

Outside, on a very light breeze, a drizzle began falling

from the gray sky, into the gray water. It was a dismal

day for beginnings, though no one aboard, or on the pier,

seemed to notice. There was dismay enough already.

Kurt stepped to the chart table, glanced at his charts,

opened his logbook—a handbound collection of scraps

garnered from the ends of the Littoral. After noting the

watchstanders, he went to the starboard wing—he did not

sense the rain—and waved to Karen. Peripherally, he saw

Wiedermann frown. But the Executive'Officer stood near-

by, waving to his own wife, and Hans dared say nothing

unkind. Kurt allowed himself the petty pleasure of a

smirk. He blew a kiss.

Strange. He felt sorry for Hans, never to have had the

love of a woman, neither mother nor wife. Nor had he

ever had close male friends, throughout his younger years

having been shunned because of his father's position. Al-

ways, he had interacted most with Kurt, because so many

of their interests and goals had been similar. What had

most recently flared in fistfights over Karen had begun at

the age of six, in a dispute over a torn and ragged picture

book, of ships, each had wanted to borrow from Kiel's

tiny library. . . .

"Cast off number four!" the Captain growled. Kurt

started, glanced down. Two mooring lines were already in.

He hurried inside to get it logged.

"Hard left rudder. Port engine back one-third." J'dger

shivered as her port screw came to life, a proud old lady

looking forward to another assignation with the sea. The

sea, the sea, the beautiful, lonely, endless sea, Kurt's first

love, which was leading him to forsake his second and

true for its sad, empty, rippled bosom. . . . lager's stem

slowly swung away from the pier.

"Cast off number one." Stay-at-homes scurried on the

drizzled pier as the last mooring line was freed. The

forecastle bustled as the Sea Detail hauled it in and

stretched it for eventual drying. The proud old lady was

15

on her way to her ancient lover,. Neptune, Poseidon,

Dagon, god of a thousand names, who dwelt where shat-

tered towers lie. .. . "Fair Atlantis ..."

"What?"

Kurt blushed when he saw Otto had overheard, embar-

rassed by having his daydreams aired like a lumber-room

carpet. "Nothing." He turned to his chart table, leaving

Kapp bewildered. Otto had grown into a hard, practical

man who was often bewildered by Kurt's lack of change

since childhood.

"All back one-third. Rudder 'midships."

Jager backed down slowly till she reached the center

of the fairway, then stopped and used her engines to swing

her bow to the proper heading for leaving harbor. During

a lull in engine orders and rudder changes, Kurt glanced

up from his log. Karen and Frieda had become tiny

figures waving pathetically, almost indistinguishable for

rain, crowd, and distance. His throat tightened. He sud-

denly feared he would never see them again.

His eyes shifted to the city, ruin forever on, angles and

planes and steel fingers clawing at the sky whence had

fallen the ancient death. Time had worn the sharp edges,

except around the shipyards where the corpses of tremen-

dous cranes and mysterious machines lay like scattered,

corroded, vanquished trolls. The neat little shops and

houses fronting the harbor to the southeast were out of

place and time. Indeed, here, Man was out of place and

time, yet he refused to acknowledge his fall.

Still, Kurt told himself, this was the heart of his civiliza-

tion. All Europe, he knew, lay wasted from Hamburg

south. The descendants of Germans, Poles, Danes,

Lithuanians, and Latvians lived in small, scattered settle-

ments along the Littoral, the narrow remaining band of

tillable coastal soil, scratching out a meager living. This

new country had few cities: Kiel, Kolberg, Gdynia, Dan-

zig, a new port city fifty kilometers southwest of ancient

Riga. Kiel was the largest, the capital, with a population

approaching ten thousand.

Jager gathered speed as she nosed down the channel

toward the sea, until she was making fifteen knots. Soon

she entered the passage between Langeland and Laaland,

occasionally sounding her foghorn as warning to the Dan-

ish fishing boats. The sailing craft scuttled from her path.

Wide-eyed men in foul-weather gear watched the iron

lady pass—Kurt leaned against a bulkhead and stared

back through diamond raindrops on porthole glass, filled

with happy memories—and shook their heads. Another

one off to the War. "There, Gregor," Kurt cried, pointing.

"Dancer!" Near at hand was his own boat. He saw curious

faces he knew. But, when he turned to his cousin, his

enthusiasm died. Once again he had forgotten and let

familiarity carry him across the line between officer and

crewman. Eyes turned his way, anticipating. Kurt turned

back to the sea, but the fishing boat had now fallen far

behind.

Much to his surprise, Kurt found the mess decks

crowded when he went to supper. He had thought most

everyone would be too queasy to eat. Perhaps they wanted

to get a last fresh meal—without refrigeration, Jager could

store only imperishables. Kurt sighed. He should have

come early, to petty officers' mess. He grabbed the seat of

.a man just finished, settled down to his rough meal.

Five minutes later. Otto slipped into the recently va-

cated seat opposite him, said, "Well, we're finally on the

way. It doesn't seem real."

Kurt grunted an affirmative through a mouthful of

strudel. Otto avoided his eyes.

"It's like I'll wake up any minute and find myself at

home." Kapp nervously prodded his food with his fork.

"Uh ... about me and Frieda ..."

Kurt swallowed, said, "She's your problem, not mine.

You got troubles, settle them with her. She's a big girl

now." He hoped Otto would understand that he was

undismayed by the new deepness of Frieda's commitment.

Apparently, Otto did comprehend. The tension faded

from his face. He smiled weakly. "Think we'll catch that

pirate galleon this time?"

Kurt grinned broadly as he remembered raft-borne pi-

rate chases on the ponds of the silted-up Kiel Canal. That

had been his game, imagined into being after reading old

books. Then as now. Otto had gone along because Kurt

was his friend. Which thought killed Kurt's pleasure at the

question. He should not have talked Otto into coming.

Frieda was right in being angry with him.

"What we catch," said Hans Wiedermann, assuming the

seat beside Otto (which, Kurt saw by looking around, was

the only one available), "may be a Tartar, like Hood

catching Bismarck."

Kapp displayed puzzlement. Hans would not expand his

cryptic comment, apparently feeling ignorance was inex-

cusable. Otto looked to Ranke. "Old-time battleships,"

Kurt said. "An ancient war. Hood and Prince of Wales

were after Bismarck. Hood went down almost as soon as

the shooting started."

"History," Kapp snorted. "You two live in the past.

What good is it? Reading books about old times won't put

food in your stomach." He launched a set speech long

familiar to Kurt, who suspected Otto's feelings were based

in envy. He, like many Littoral children, had received only

the rudiments of an education. He could read numbers

and puzzle his way through the simplest primer, but all

else was beyond him, which had to rankle when conversa-

tions went beyond his scope. And, if he were working with

some machine and needed to know how to operate or

repair it, he had to do so by trial and error or knowledge

passed orally by someone more experienced.

Yet, despite no knowledge of theory. Otto was a first-

rate mechanic. Often, when not on watch, he worked in

one of the gunmounts, deftly maintaining hydraulics and

electrical servos whose physics he comprehended not at

all.

The whole of modern technology, Kurt supposed, was

mirrored in Otto Kapp. Very few people knew why things

worked any more, nor did they care. To bang on or fiddle

with a machine until it worked was enough.

It had to collapse. To maintain a technological culture

on hand-me-down skills was impractical ... it had col-

lapsed already, he decided. Jdger was an anomaly, one

of the few functional machines left to the Littoral. The

culture as a whole there operated at the level of the

sixteenth or seventeenth century.

Kurt grew aware that Hans and Otto were engaged in a

spirited argument over the value of studying history. Otto

maintained that the past was dead and useless while Hans

reiterated ancient notions of learning from others' mis-

takes. Said Otto, "Avoid past mistakes? Hans, that's stu-

pid. If it's true, why're we here? This mistakes's already

two centuries old." Otto was, probably, the most openly

anti-War person Kurt knew—with the understandable ex-

ceptions of Karen and Frieda. "You think people're sensi-

ble. That's the silliest idea ..."

Kapp stopped in mid-career. Kurt had kicked him

beneath the table. Beck had appeared. For reasons un-

known, he was eating at crew's mess rather than in the

wardroom. The mess decks were silent as scores of

breaths were held. Everyone waited for Beck to choose a

seat. The groans at Kurt's table were inaudible, but very

real within, when the Political Officer selected the open

place next to Kurt.

Cook, Glen - The Heirs of Babylon

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