Bill 7 - the Galactic Hero (18 page)

The opening of the speech didn't have quite the impact that Bill expected. Bgr had told him that this speech was guaranteed, start to finish. It had been carefully constructed by the Chinger computerized speech-writing program. But there was no shock of recognition electrifying the crowd.

“Friends, Humans, Eyerackians, lend me your sneers. I come to borrow Grotsky, not to raise him!”

A few more people were paying attention now, but they didn't look particularly excited. One of them, following instructions, did sneer though. They must have been a pretty impressionable lot.

“Vice in defense of liberty is no extremism!”

This was supposed to be a rousing speech, but only a few of the students in the quad looked roused at all, and those seemed to be paying more attention to students of the opposite sex than to Bill.

Bill didn't really understand that, but he didn't really understand most of the speech, either. This was not a surprise, all things considered, but it did interfere with his giving the truly brilliant performance he knew was in him.

It couldn't be that the speech was somehow defective. Bgr had explained it all in excruciating detail.

“You see, Bill, the speech is the culmination of extraordinary research and intelligence work by some of Chingerkind's finest minds. MA-5, our crack military archaeology unit, dug up an ancient human memory bank, and reconstructed a large dictionary of quotations. You can imagine how old it was — it still had favorable references to liberty and freedom, and included quotes from people who were not related to the Emperor.”

Bill whistled in awe at such inconceivable age.

“We're pretty sure we got the quotations right. So before I had my computer here write the speech, I ran a keyword and subject search on the quotations, looking for victory, freedom, liberty, democracy, and the like, and added the results to the data file. And that means that much of the speech you'll be giving will really have been written by many of humanity's greatest politicians and thinkers and orators. You will be drawing on the deep-seated archetypes that lead humans to altruistic behavior. Do you understand?”

Bill nodded sincerely. “No,” he said. Bgr sighed loudly.

“Never mind. Just trust me. We cannot fail!”

Bill had had some considerable experience with human military geniuses, and that experience told him that when they said “Just trust me. We cannot fail!”, the wisest course of action was to keep your head as low as possible to prevent its being shot off. His experience with Chinger military geniuses was much more limited; in fact, the only Chinger, military genius or no, he had ever known, was Bgr, and that wasn't much of a sample on which to base vague generalizations. But Bgr sometimes seemed to know what he was talking about. That alone placed him head and shoulders above the human military geniuses.

So Bill had taken Bgr's words at face value.

Now he plowed on through the text, pausing occasionally only long enough to try to get the pages in order or accept another beer. He bellowed parts of it. He whispered other parts of it. He cajoled the audience, and he threatened it. He was eloquent, and he spoke plainly. He emoted his guts out.

Yet, bit by bit, the students drifted away.

The last of them were climbing out of the tank when Bill grabbed one.

“What's going on?” he demanded with a shake.

“Op-op-op-op-sh-sh-sh-sh-ak-ak-ak-i-i-i-i,” she said.

He stopped shaking her. “What?”

“I said,” she said as he lowered her to the ground, “'Stop shaking me.'” She straightened out her clothes and Bill watched approvingly. “That's better.”

“Certainly better than most. But what's going on?”

“Oh,” she said, “there's a lecture demonstration on goldfish-swallowing as a deconstruction of alligator wrestling in the swimming pool at the gym.”

“What about my speech?”

“Old. Tired. Irrelevant. What else?”

Sid and Sam helped Bill and the dark-haired young woman down from the tank.

“Irrelevant?” Sam asked, horrified.

“Yeah. As in, nothing to do with the situation, you know?”

“But it was a call to the highest principles, freedom and democracy and all that.”

“Yeah. So?” She started toward the gym, and the men followed.

Sam was stumped. Sid stepped in. “Don't you believe in democracy? Don't you believe in President Grotsky?”

“He's probably dead. What's the diff if I believed in him?”

Bill took a turn, “Don't you want to fight the tyranny of the junta?” That phrase came out of the speech. “Do you want the military running everything?” That phrase, and the genuine terror it carried, came out of Bill's own experience.

The girl stopped in her tracks. She waited for the three men to find her again, and said, “Look, under the Empire, things were peaceful. Rotten, maybe, but peaceful. Then Grotsky came along, and the Troopers — guys just like you, hotshot,” and she poked Bill in his gut with a remarkably strong finger, “— started dropping bombs on us. Students were getting drafted. So under Grotsky we had bombings and the draft, and under the junta we have bombings and the draft. What's the difference?”

“Is that how everyone feels?” Sam asked.

“Pretty much,” she said.

“All the students?” She nodded. “You've all talked about it?”

“Of course. That's what we do. We're students. What did you think we're in college for?”

Bill thought it over. “For the parties?”

“Okay, yeah, but in between parties we talk.”

This was a possibility that Bill and Sam and Sid had never considered. For Bill the new idea was that people did something besides enjoy heterosexuality and drink at college. Since all of his knowledge of higher education was gleaned from the comix this was understandable. But Sam and Sid were horrified that no one seemed to care that their beloved President Grotsky was being held captive by the military high command. The bodyguards muttered darkly to each other about this while the group proceeded toward the lecture demonstration.

Bill, meanwhile, was trying to convince Calyfigia, for that was indeed the coed's name, that he was the moral equivalent of a student and thus eligible for the party perks that went with being in college. She wasn't buying any of it, but that didn't deter Bill in the slightest.

He was concentrating fully on this project when his erstwhile bodyguards interrupted him.

“Bill, we've made a decision.”

“Sure guys, whatever. Just give me a few minutes, Okay?”

“Bill, we're leaving.”

“Why?”

“We owe Millard too much to let him rot in some jail. We're going to take the armored car and find him and rescue him so we can restore democracy.”

“Sure, great. Good luck,” Bill enthused with complete indifference, his eyes fixed on Calyfigia's most attractive bottom.

Sid scuffed one shoe back and forth on the pavement. “We wouldn't object if you decided to come with us.”

Bill looked at them, and at Calyfigia, and back again. On one side, a grand moral enterprise. On the other side, a remote chance at immoral behavior. On one side, the certainty of good company and adventure, and the possibility of glory. On the other side, almost certain humiliation and failure.

It was the “almost” that was decisive.

“If it's all right with you guys I think that I'll stay right here. It's time I got myself an education, think of the future....”

This flood of insincerity was interrupted by the sound of exploding bombs. The afternoon attack had begun.

Some of them were exploding quite close to Bill and Calyfigia as they waved goodbye to the fleeing Sam and Sid.

Kaboom!

“That was the math building,” Calyfigia said. She checked her watch. “There isn't even supposed to be an attack now! Those bowby Trooper buddies of yours have changed the schedule again.”

Bill tried to explain that despite his uniform the Troopers, and particularly the people who made up the attack schedules, were no buddies of his, except in the most technical sense, but Calyfigia didn't listen.

“We've got to get to a shelter. The one under the math building's probably no good.” She looked around to see which one might be closest.

Kaboom!

“Athletic dorm,” Calyfigia said absently.

Bill noted that the athletic dorm had been a lot closer to where they were standing than the math building had been.

“Geology building!” Calyfigia said emphatically.

“I didn't hear the kaboom,” Bill said.

“No, that's where the nearest shelter is. Follow me.”

Calyfigia already understood the zig-zag run that Bill had had to teach Sam and Sid, and she used it even though nothing was falling out of the sky directly at them. Bill admired the professionalism of that. He also followed it closely.

He was following so closely that he was able to hear the bomb coming and throw Calyfigia to the ground just before the geology building blew up.

Buildings, even the ones with shelters, didn't seem to be a very good bet for survival.

Bill and Calyfigia stayed where they were for a while, trying to become one with the ground. Bill also made a few tentative attempts to become one with Calyfigia, but with all those little bits of ground and bomb and building and who knew what else flying around, his heart wasn't really in it.

Eventually, the attack wave passed over them and the bombs stopped falling and the ground stopped shaking. Bill stopped shaking not long after, and stood up to find Calyfigia already brushing herself off.

“I guess the semester's over,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Look around.”

Bill did that. She was right. School was out for the duration, unless they wanted to hold classes outdoors. And live in tents. Parts of a few buildings were still standing, and most of the stadium, but basically the campus was ready for planting. Beyond the campus there was more rubble, and even a few buildings standing. People were already picking through the rubble, looking for friends or possessions or anything that might still be in a usable condition.

A line of people was threading across the campus, heading for what remained of the highway that led into the countryside.

Central Square was being abandoned.

By the time they had salvaged what they could of Calyfigia's belongings from her dorm room (a pencil, a lace nightie, three pairs of socks, and a lead-weighted cosh) and joined the stream of refugees, the road was so crowded that even those with working vehicles were moving at a walking pace.

Bill had offered to help carry Calyfigia's things, but she rightly suspected that he just wanted to handle her lingerie, and besides, there was room for it all in her pockets. Bill's own few possessions had gone off in the armored car with Sam and Sid, but he was used to traveling light.

He was also used to marching, and being able to do it without the standard Imperial hundred-pound pack (a supply of stones was kept in most barracks, in case the men had trouble getting their packs up to weight) was almost a pleasure.

In fact, as he got into the rhythm of it, he did start enjoying himself. There was an attractive woman at his side, and even if she didn't like him much she hadn't hit him with the cosh yet. The weather was good — sunny with moderate smoke and intermittent shrapnel, along with a seventy percent chance of heavy bombing toward evening — and his boot (an Eyerackian replica of Trooper issue made to Bill's description) was comfortable.

So he was a little surprised by Calyfigia's foul mood. Sure, her home had been blown up, her school had ceased to exist, everything she owned had been destroyed, and many of her friends were dead or missing, but Bill knew that you could get used to all these things. They had happened to him plenty of times. He tried to cheer her up by pointing out that (a) they were still alive, and (b) they were likely to stay that way for at least the next few hours. But even that didn't seem quite to do the trick.

Finally she exploded. “This is all your fault, you know!”

Bill was flabbergasted. “Me? What did I do?” he flabbergasted.

Calyfigia stabbed her finger into his stomach. “This is a uniform, isn't it? You're a soldier, aren't you?”

“Sure, but I'm not one of your soldiers.”

She looked at him and his uniform carefully. “I've seen you somewhere before, haven't I?”

Patiently, he explained. “I was the guy standing on the tank back on the quad, when there was a quad. I gave a speech. You remember, don't you?”

“Not that, you military moron, before that. Not one of ours. That's an Imperial Trooper uniform, isn't it?”

With a certain reluctance he admitted as how it was (although again, it was slightly modified, since the Eyerackian tailors had made it from his description, out of real cloth instead of recycled paper).

She took a good look at his Swiss Army Foot, which was indeed pretty distinctive even in this crowd. “You're Bill, aren't you?”

“Sure. Didn't I introduce myself?” He stuck his hand out.

She ignored it. “You're the celebrity prisoner of war, right?”

Bill looked around nervously. “Actually, right now I'm the celebrity escaped prisoner of war. That's why I've kept this beard.”

“So this is all your fault!” She glared at him and made a sweeping gesture that included the refugees, the bombing, the war, the coup, and her former holorecord collection.

Bill considered for a moment whether he should take the credit, but not only wouldn't that be honest, but he was beginning to get a sneaky notion that this would not make much of an impression on Calyfigia. “Actually, none of it was my idea,” he sniveled, wallowing in self-pity. “You could even say I was opposed to it, although not in front of an officer. That's not the Trooper's way.”

“And you're a Trooper through and through. You're a cog in the war machine!”

“Is that bad?”

It was Calyfigia's turn to be flabbergasted. She was so upset that she couldn't talk for another mile or so.

Bill didn't quite understand what she was getting at, although he sort of liked her company a lot more when she wasn't talking. He'd been a Trooper for so long, and had been so thoroughly indoctrinated, that even though he hated being a Trooper he couldn't see himself in any other kind of life. He was Bill, Trooper. It was more like an equation than a name: Bill = Trooper.