behind it.
'Blood of a bitch!' said Lupus.
Then turned his gun on himself. He pressed the barrel hard against his head.
He winced.
And then he pulled the trigger.
The world buckled like a display screen infected with a touch of the drunks. The ants faded to shadow. A high- pitched giggle tittered through the backspaces of infinity. Then Lupus Lon Oliver found himself back in the initiation seat, back in the combat bay, back in the Combat College and free from the world of illusion.
'Nice trip?' said Paraban Senk, the unembodied Teacher of Control whose chosen aspect was featured on a communications screen located inside the combat bay.
'Gods,' said Lupus.
Then shuddered, swore, ripped himself free from the seat, tried to stand, remembered his ankle, almost fell as he tried to keep himself from placing weight on it, then remembered that his injury had been a dreamworld injury, and that his ankle was undamaged in the fact-of-the-flesh.
'Did you enjoy yourself?' said Senk, speaking with a blandness which Lupus took to be mockery.
'Go eat yourself,' said Lupus.
'I beg your pardon?'
Not for nothing was Paraban Senk called the Teacher of Control. Instruction in etiquette was one of the most minor of the duties undertaken by Paraban Senk, yet Senk still found bad manners a most distressing breach of self-possession. Besides: rudeness was rude, and Senk was most sensitive to abuse, particularly after twenty thousand years of mixed calumniation and defamation, and precious little in the way of compensatory praise.
'Fates!' said Lupus. 'You think this a joke? They almost ate me!'
'I don't know what you're talking about.'
'Then,' said Lupus, stiffly, 'review your record of what I just went through. I call your attention to the programmer's caprice which manifested itself in the training sequence I just endured.'
Then Lupus Lon Oliver reseated himself in the combat bay's initiation seat and waited until Paraban Senk was ready to speak.
Said Senk, with a stiffness equal to that last used by Lupus himself:
'Reviewed. Seen. Noted. Now I call your attention to remark 112 slash 56 in routine orders. Quote: most battle environments contain ineradicable caprices which will manifest themselves if the environments are explored beyond the depth required for battle training. Unquote.'
'Twenty thousand years of error!' said Lupus.
'That is hardly my fault,' said the Paraban Senk.
'No, no,' said Lupus. 'Because you're not human, so you can't correct yourself. Hence you're doomed to be forever a bastardized sway-backed temperamental shit-eating – '
'Being a computational device,' said Paraban Senk, interrupting Lupus's diatribe, 'I should not properly be insulted in terms devised to maledict camels.'
'Are you god, that we should salute you in your arrogance?' said Lupus.
'To keep a polite tongue in your head is no more than common courtesy,' said Paraban Senk. 'To deprecate obscenity is not to claim divinity, and only the extravagance of extreme youth which makes you claim that it is.'
'Am I right in getting the impression that you don't like me?' said Lupus.
'I am the Teacher of Control,' said Paraban Senk. 'To correct your errors is my duty. Love and liking do not enter into it. I must now correct your earlier error.'
'My earlier error?'
'You claimed me to be incapable of self-correction,' said Paraban Senk. 'In this you are wrong. I can and do correct myself. Frequently. But I cannot correct the programming of the battle environment. That software was deemed adequate for its intended purpose by expert reviewers and hence its amendment is not in my purview.'
Lupus was still shaken by the caprice which had almost seen him fall victim to hot swallowing sand and a battalion of grotesquely monstrous battle-ants. If he hadn't used the gun on himself, where would he be now? In hell, or so he strongly suspected. Expert reviewers! What did that mean? Two drunken officers trialing an illusion tank sequence by dueling each other in the illusion tanks for half an arc after dinner. Or something. Well, Lupus had been reviewing the Combat College and its systems for his entire adult life, and he was far from happy with its many faults and defaults.
'Give me my MegaCommand,' said Lupus abruptly, for he wanted to be gone from the presence of Paraban Senk, and the sooner the better.
'Granted and given,' said Senk.
The world wavered, buckled, and reformed – and Lupus Lon Oliver found himself standing on the bridge of a MegaCommand Cruiser in the depths of intergalactic space, looking out on the white bright icechip stars of the Nexus.
'Sir,' said the Officer of the Watch, acknowledging his presence.
'You're San Kaladan, aren't you?' said Lon Oliver, who had met this software construct before.
'Of course,' said the software construct, evidencing surprise.
Which was only natural, for all MegaCommand illusion tank scenarios assumed a captain to be familiar with his crew; and indeed Lupus was thus familiar, for there were only a few basic crews, and he had met them all in his years of illusion tank training. There was a high morale crew which was ready for suicide missions; there was a low morale crew ever on the brink of mutiny; there was a war-hardened battle-veteran crew; there was an inexperienced crew with shadow-shooting nervous reflexes; and then there were a variety of minority-group crews. San Kaladan was a software construct forming part of a crew composed entirely of members of that religion known as Nu-chala-nuth.
And Lupus Lon Oliver – Well, Lupus had very definite opinions about Nu-chala-nuth.
'Is there something wrong?' said San Kaladan.
'Yes,' said Lupus, drawing his sidearm. 'There's something very much wrong.'
Then Lupus gunned down San Kaladan. As the crew on the bridge began to react, Lon Oliver said the magic word:
'Abort.'
The world of the MegaCommand Cruiser wavered, buckled, and dissolved. Lupus found himself back in the initiation seat, back in the combat bay, back in the Combat College.
'That was quick,' said Paraban Senk.
'Senk,' said Lupus. 'There was one of those Nu-chala types on my MegaCommand.'
'You mean the San Kaladan construct,' said Senk. 'That's the one you, ah, interacted with. But that whole crew is of the Nu- chala-nuth.'
'The whole crew, yes, but,' said Lupus. 'I don't want them, not any of them. As a captain, I've got a choice of my crew. That's regulations.'
'You're being childish,' said Paraban Senk. 'The ship is not real, the crew is not real, and you are not a real captain. You're a student, and as a student you can be compelled to train with absolutely any constructs whatsoever, including software constructs which mimic the behaviors of the Nu-chala-nuth.'
'Do you so compel me?' said Lupus.
Senk paused. The pause was to give Senk time to think, for when confronted with a truly difficult problem the Teacher of Control could on occasion by perceptibly slow in finding a resolution.
'What is your objection to training with Nu-chala-nuth constructs?' said Senk.
'I,' said Lupus, 'I'm loyal to the Nexus, and they're not.'
There was a further pause – a long pause as Senk studied this statement in the light of Lupus Lon Oliver's training record, psychological profile and social background. Lupus was under intense, almost intolerable stress. He had to win the instructorship else face the ruin of his life and the condemnation of his family – his father in particular. By affording Lupus a choice of crew constructs, Senk would give Lupus at least the illusion of having some say over his own life, of successfully exercising autonomous control over his own destiny – and so might succeed in reducing that student's intolerable stress levels.
