In the Balance

Then the feeling of invincibility started to fade. The harder he clung to it, the more it slipped between his fingers. Finally, too soon, it was gone, leaving behind the melancholy awareness that Ussmak was only himself (all the more melancholy because he so vividly remembered how he’d felt before) and a craving to know that strength and certainty once more.

Dull hospital routine was all the duller when set against that brief, bright memory. The day advanced on leaden feet. Even meals, till now the high points on Ussmak’s schedule, seemed hardly worth bothering over. The orderly who took away Ussmak’s tray-not the same male who’d given him his moments of delight-made disapproving noises when he found half the food uneaten.

Ussmak slept poorly that night. He woke up before the daytime bright lights in the ceiling went on. He lay tossing in the gloom, imagining time falling off a clock until at last the moment for the broom-pushing orderly to return arrived.

When that moment came, however, he was not in his cubicle. The doctors had trundled him into a lab for another in a series of metabolic and circulatory tests. Before he tasted the Tosevite powder, he hadn’t minded being poked, prodded, and visualized by ultrasound and X-rays. None of it hurt very much, and it was more interesting than sitting around all day like a long-unexamined document in a computer storage file.

Today, though, he furiously resented the tests. He tried to get the technicians to hurry through them, snapped when they sometimes couldn’t, and had them snapping back at him. “I’m sorry, landcruiser driver Ussmak,” one of the males said. “I didn’t realize you had an appointment with the fleetlord this forenoon.”

“No, it must be an audience with the Emperor,” another technician suggested.

Fuming, Ussmak subsided. He was so upset, he almost forgot to cast down his eyes at the mention of his sovereign. As if to punish him, the males at the lab worked slower instead of faster. By the time they finally let him go back to his cubicle, the orderly with the green rings on his arms was gone.

Another desolate day passed. Ussmak kept trying to recapture the sensation the powder had given him. He could remember it, and clearly, but that wasn’t the same as-or as good as-feeling it again.

When the orderly did show up at last, Ussmak all but tackled him. “Let me have some more of that wonderful stuff you gave me the other day!” he exclaimed.

The orderly put up both hands in the fending-off gesture the Race used to show refusal. “Can’t do it” He sounded regretful and sly at the same time, a combination that should have made Ussmak see warning lights.

But Ussmak wasn’t picking up subtleties, not at that moment “What do you mean, you can’t do it?” He stared in blank dismay. “Did you use it all up? Don’t tell me you used it all up!”

“As a matter of fact, I didn’t” The orderly nervously turned his eyes this way and that. “Keep your voice down, will you, friend? Listen-there’s something I didn’t tell you about that stuff the other day, and you better hear it”

“What?” Ussmak wanted to grab the cutpurse or malingerer or whatever he was and shake the truth-or at least some more powder-out of him.

“Here, come on, settle down, friend.” The orderly saw-would have needed to be blind to miss-his agitation. “Well, what you need to know is, this stuff-the Big Uglies call it ginger, so you know that, too-anyhow, this stuff is under ban by order of the fleetlord.”

“What?” Ussmak stared again. “Why?”

The orderly spread clawed bands. “Am I the fleetlord?”

“But you had this-ginger, did you say? — before,” Ussmak said. Suddenly, breaking regulations seemed a lot less heinous than it had.

“The ban was in force then, too.” The orderly sounded smug. Of course, he had the green arm stripes to show what he thought of regulations be found inconvenient in one way or another.

Up until the moment his tongue touched ginger, Ussmak had been a law-abiding male, as most males of the Race were. Looking back on things, he wondered why. What had obeying laws and following orders ever gained him? Only a dose of radiation poisoning and the anguish of watching friends die around him.

But breaking a lifetime of conditioning did not come easy. Hesitantly, he asked, “Could you get me some even if-even if it is banned?”

The orderly studied him. “I might-just might, you understand-be able to do that, friend-”

“Oh, I hope you can,” Ussmak broke in.

“-but if I do, it’s gonna cost you,” the orderly finished, unperturbed.

Ussmak was confused. “What do you mean, cost me?”

“Just what I said.” The orderly spoke as if he were a hatchling still wet with the liquids from his egg. “You want more ginger, friend, you’re gonna have to pay me for it. I’ll take commissary scrip, voluntary electronic transfer from your account to one I have set up, Big Ugly souvenirs that I can resell, all kinds of things. I’m a flexible male; you’ll find that out”