The Man Who Would Be Nyder

Nyder arrived in the Trainee's Barracks with the clothes on his back and nothing more. He was issued a ration card (he immediately hid it under his clothes, against his skin - he had learned) and a schedule of lessons. The other boys looked at him with angry eyes as he entered the room, and he was shoved to the least desirable bunk. Nobody talked to him; nobody even told him their name. They treated him like an enemy, for no reason that he could see.

That night, two of the older boys came and stood over his bunk, where he lay with his back to the wall through long habit. The bright marks of bruises were still prominent on his skin, but they didn't seem to care.

"Get up," one of them ordered. "Let's see what you've got for us."

Nyder got up, slowly, and then peeled out of his newly issued pyjamas with dispatch. He had thought that seeing his body, the shadow of hair in his armpits and groin, would repulse them as it had repulsed Nenno. But it didn't work that way.

"All right then!" one of them gloated, pinning Nyder to his cot and straddling his face, thrusting himself forward. "You know what to do, now do it!" And when Nyder did, the other boy assaulted him in turn.

The teachers had taught him nothing about how to relate to his fellow Kaleds, except in the context of the military. He had no idea of how to respond to any sort of social interaction: he only knew to take orders from those above him. Here he was the youngest and the smallest: here, everyone was above him.

The war lessons were the same as before, just more elaborate, more intricate. But Nyder learned them all very quickly, and hid his learning, sitting there blank-faced and attentive as the teachers drummed the same lessons again and again and again into the other boys.

They taught weapons improvisation, terrain evaluation, and emergency medical self-treatment. They taught war. They did not teach about war: they taught the children to be war.

At night, the bigger boys used Nyder. He always fought back, but he wasn't their match. They would use him again and again, not let him sleep. And he couldn't afford to lose sleep, because if he was tired he might make mistakes. He might fail. Failure meant not just starvation and beatings, but possible culling: all of them knew what happened to students who failed the training, or who went mad. There were no more crops on Skaro: bodies went to the food processing plants, so that life and the war could go on.

When the boys' rough abuse drew responses from his own body, Nyder felt betrayed by himself twice over. He had thought once that nothing could be worse than being dead, than not being. In his despair and endless exhaustion, he was starting to think differently. Sometimes he wondered if being culled might not be easier, all things considered.

There was only one teacher that made him feel anything but indifference and fear and frustration, and that was Combat Instructor Erem. Erem was huge, and his face was a mask of scars. But his calloused hands were wonderfully quick, adjusting a student's stance, catching one who was about to fall from the overhead crawl bars. And unlike most of the other instructors, he never struck his students without reason. He taught carefully, and for once it wasn't just lessons that were absorbed in a single session: it was learning how body and reflexes and mind all could be controlled, and all could work together. And he praised Nyder for his swift and skilful hands, which nobody else did.

It was under Erem that Nyder learned real weapons. Not the play guns and plastic grenades he had used before: these were sharp gleaming knives and real guns heavy in his hands. He only fired blanks, because bullets were too precious to waste, but he could already see in his mind's eye the bloody holes his weapons would tear in the Thals.

The Thals: he'd seen them now, in newsreels and training footage. Horrible pale-haired monsters, with flat blue eyes, and some of them were female. That was a part of their perversion, their decadence: that they would send their women out onto the battlefield to fight, rather than honouring them and keeping them in safety, as the civilised Kaleds did. Nyder knew that women and babies were somehow connected; he vaguely thought that babies grew out of something women ate. Like a special food pill.

He had seen the leaders of his people in those newsreels, grave-faced men in long white robes. And he had seen the Supreme Commander, Davros. The greatest scientist in the world, who had defeated even death to lead his people to victory. His body might be blind and scarred and shrivelled, kept alive only by machines, but his words were like bolts of lightning to the heart.

Nyder dreamed war; dreamed of fighting and killing, honours, medals, a great Victory Parade after the Thals had been exterminated. And sometimes he dreamed of a gun that never ran out of bullets, which he used to kill the entire world. Sometimes when he dreamed that, he touched himself, pleased himself as best he could. Nobody else was ever going to touch him to please, after all.

* * *

Today Erem had issued javelins, and his class was handling them, getting the heft and testing the roughness of the shafts against their hands. Pikk was one of the boys who most delighted in tormenting Nyder, and when Erem was looking the other way, Pikk slammed his hand atop the butt of Nyder's javelin, driving the point downward and into Nyder's foot right through the boot.

Nyder did not cry out; instead he said in a clotted voice, "Man down!" Erem was beside him in an instant, removing the javelin with a single straight-up tug. He pulled a cutting tool from his belt with his free hand and sliced Nyder's boot and sock from top to toe.

"Between the bones. Nyder, you've got one minute to clean and wrap this. Go!" Without a word of protest, Nyder hopped to his medical kit (they carried full kit everywhere now, as heavy as a real soldier's or heavier), bared his foot, and started to smear antibiotic around the edges of the puncture. He was concentrating on getting the bandage tight enough, and didn't look up until the sound of the third whistling blow. Then he did, and his mouth hung open even while his hands adjusted the bandage.

Erem was beating Pikk; he had the boy bent over by the hair, and was thrashing him across the shoulders with the flexible shaft of the javelin, hard enough that a little spray of dust and sweat rose from Pikk's clothes with every blow. The other boys stood open-mouthed as well. Aggression towards other students had always been rewarded in their training, not punished.

"You - are - never -to - strike - a - trainee - unless - I - order - it!" Erem shouted; each word was punctuated with a blow. Then he pulled Pikk upright by the hair, face to face, and stared at him; the scars around his eyes pulled the skin in odd directions as he squinted. "This isn't a game, Trainee, this is war! If you play games with real weapons, you die!"

"But he dropped it!" Pikk wailed. Erem's response was to bend him over again, and thrash him hard across the arse; each blow was louder than a pistol blank, louder than Pikk's sobs. When Erem stood him up again, the boy's face was red-purple with pain and tears.

"I'm finished, sir," said Nyder, quickly stepping back into line. He wiggled his toes in the boot; they all moved, but the wetness was already starting to seep out. Well, the boot was ruined anyway. He kept his face blank, not allowing his delight in Pikk's beating to show.

"Good. Trainee Pikk, never lie to me. Ever. Those javelins are too light for droppin' to go through a boot. And I saw that hit. Push-ups to fallin', all of you!" The boys groaned inside; that meant exercise until you collapsed. "Nyder, inspection."

Nyder walked carefully back to the bench beside the wall, and watched Erem's marvellously quick fingers tenderly remove the boot and test the binding of his wound. "Good," the teacher finally said. "No tendon damage. I'll give you a pass for the doctor when class ends. The lacin' will hold that boot until Stores issues a new one. Back to class for you, then."

"Yes, sir," Nyder said crisply, replacing and adjusting the boot. Then he licked his lips nervously, and silently mouthed, Thank you.

Erem didn't say anything, but his eyelid shivered in what was not quite a wink. "Right!" he roared, standing and turning to the panting students. "Now you are goin' to learn how to throw these javelins, smoothly an' with accuracy - and no games or I flog you 'til your so-called brains run out your nose!"

When Pikk stalked to Nyder's bunk that night, rage in his face and in his fists, Nyder was ready. The boys were always searched for weapons when they went into their sleeping quarters, but Nyder had managed to wheedle the doctor into issuing him a hard plastic cast, rather than just a bandage.

Pikk snarled, "I'm going to shove my whole fist-" and Nyder rolled to his feet and kicked, hard and accurately, just as he had been kicked in the past. The cast did not break, but it bent, and Nyder felt agonising pain in his foot. He didn't care; it was worth it to see Pikk fall, white-faced, hands clutching in-between his legs. Nyder kicked him again, twice, driving him across the floor with each blow.

The entire bunk room was silent and staring as Nyder bent his head and said to Pikk, in a voice all the more frightening for being totally mild and unemotional, "Touch me again and you'll be sorry." That was all he said. That was all he needed to say.

Pikk tried to stand, but he couldn't; instead he crawled back to his own bunk. The bruising on his shoulders and arse and ribs was agony, and the shooting pain in his hip was worse, even worse than the gnawing pains in all his joints: he lay on his side, staring at Nyder's dark head against the pillow, planning for the day when he would crush him like a broken food pill.

In the morning, Pikk didn't wake up. The boys were sent to stand in the hallway; a few dared to lurk by the door and try to listen, but only Nyder knew where to lean near the ventilation duct and hear everything that was said.

"-beating?" was the first thing he heard, and he tensed. Was Erem going to be blamed for this?

"No," said the voice of the doctor. "Brittle bone disease. His hip's broken; probably a clot or a bit of marrow got into his circulatory system."

"Brittle bone - it should have manifested by now!"

"These genetic diseases vary. So, mark him down as culled for genetic defect. That way, there's no mark against us."

"Clever, Mnuu."

"Dirty." Doctor Mnuu made a noise like spitting. "And maybe he fell and broke his hip, or maybe someone helped him along, but according to this scan he'd have washed out within the month anyway." Another spitting noise. "The pain must have been excruciating, why didn't he tell anyone?"

"Too busy taking it out on the other boys," the teacher suggested, and then sent for a body bag.

The lessons went on. The rougher boys turned their attention to other victims. Nyder was no longer the smallest or the weakest; he watched the other boys be taken, the new boys, with absolutely no interest in coming to their defence. Now that he was known as the boy who had killed, he had a certain amount of chilly prestige, which he did not hesitate to use.

He grew sinister, in a fashion quite ludicrous for a boy barely a man: but there was nobody to call him a fool. He stopped talking unless spoken to, and cultivated a level-eyed stare that concentrated on body language and gestures rather than words. He found it fascinating how easy it was to read intent in people, perceive what they were really going to do, once you ignored what they were saying with their mouths.

Some of the teachers might have noticed how he had withdrawn, but they ignored it, just as they ignored the students who compulsively counted their food pills, or pulled out their hair in red clots, or paced back and forth every night until they collapsed into their bunks. It was their job to deliver these boys to the battlefield; it was not their job to keep them perfectly sane. If a boy became too unbalanced to train, he was handed over to the psych techs: what came back was generally sniper bait at best.

* * *

Assignment Day was coming. War was coming. Nyder was going out to war, to embrace it and bathe in it, to become one with it. And to die.

He could see war in the shape of his body, lean but with muscles standing out across shoulders and chest, thick calves and calloused feet and hands. A soldier's body. He could field-strip a rifle blindfolded, march and run and crawl and roll, kill a man with his hands or his knife or his mess kit. Behind his face, still barely shadowed with beard, was a soldier's mind, filled with knowledge of weapons and orders. He'd had his last medical exam and been fitted for a real uniform, and that meant he was going out within the next few weeks.

There was frequent debate among the boys as to when it would be worse to be outside: in the summer or winter? Nyder secretly hoped it would be winter: he preferred cold. He didn't know about the seasons, of course, except in books. His battlefield assignment would be the first time he had ever seen the outside world.

Behind his blank face, Nyder was afraid. He was so afraid that it felt like there was a hole in his chest, and nothing inside it but fear: no heart, no lungs, no nothing. He was nothing but a solid mass of fear, with tiny arms and legs, frail now in his mind's eye, tiny insect legs, somehow dragging the giant fear along.

There was so much he'd never learned! It was like he was in some great dark room filled with treasures, and he could only touch a few things, in the dark, and never see everything he was missing. It drove him mad, that he was going to die with his mind so empty.

But there was one thing he was going to do before he went. He'd watched the teachers, carefully and closely, as they worked the pushbutton locks that sealed every door. Counted how many times they used each combination, and on which days. Listened to them talk about the work they did outside the classrooms. He'd managed to get lost on several strategic occasions, and accepted the floggings mutely, remembering the rooms outside, and the barely-understandable lettering on them.

* * *

That night-cycle, he escaped.

Nyder knew that the passcode to the main doors was 40309. And that the passcode to the office section was 90304. The cameras here were like the ones in the Children's Barracks; they only registered movement above waist level, so he crawled, fast and determined in his worn and too-small grey pyjamas, with a single precious piece of stolen paper tucked under his shirt.

Outside the office with Erem's name by the door, he paused. He carefully folded the paper into a low box shape, and leaping as though hurling a grenade out of a trench (a leap he had practiced many times), he got the paper in place, covering the black part on top of the camera, but not the lens.

He paused a long moment, and then waved his hand over his head for an instant, ready to dive for the floor and scuttle away if he had to. The camera's light stayed off. He looked at Erem's door, and shuddered. This was his last chance.

When he touched the door control, it opened and he darted inside.

Inside, Erem sat at a desk in front of a box that cast a faint green glow onto the side of his face. He looked up with his usual unreadable expression and spat, "How the shit did you get in here, boy?"

Nyder swallowed, and quickly spilled out what he knew about the passcodes and the cameras. He tried to relax, to talk evenly, but it all blurted out. He looked at Erem, his breath seeming to be frozen in his lungs, certain that everything he was feeling was showing in his face for once. And not caring.

Erem choked, and then abruptly roared with laughter; Nyder started breathing again. "You are too smart for your own good," he said, and then all the laughter drained out of his voice. "Damn smart, and you shouldn't be."

Nyder dared to move a little closer to the seated man, and saw that there were flickering green characters on the glass-fronted box. That had to be a- "Is that a computer?" he said, his voice turning up with excitement.

"That? No, it just talks to one. Nyder…you shouldn't be here, it's strictly against regulations. If they flog you now, you'll still be limpin' when you go outside on your assignment, it'll slow you down and you can't afford that!" Erem leaned forward, eyes blazing. "Nyder, you've got to go."

Nyder licked his lips. "I came to say goodbye to you. Because," his voice hitched, and then he went on flatly, "because I'm going to die, most likely, and I wanted you to know that you're the only person who's ever been kind to me, ever. And I'm sorry that I'm going to die. But there's nothing else I can do."

Erem pushed back from his desk and just stared at Nyder. Then he sighed deeply, and gestured for him to come closer.

"Nyder," he said, putting one hand on the boy's shoulder. "I meant it when I said you're damn smart. You're smart enough for Elite, and I've looked at your record, and I can't see why you aren't Elite."

Nyder felt a little spark of something he barely identified as hope in his chest. The Elite: they stayed in the Dome, they didn't have to fight outside, they got all the food they wanted. If he could be one of them…he was good with tests, very good!

"But the machine don't make mistakes, Nyder. It can't make mistakes, and even if it did, I don't think there's anyone alive who can fix it." Erem reached out with his other hand, and touched the banks of little buttons with letters on them, set into his desk. "You can't edit the Testing records. There's no way to change that, or if there is, I don't have the power to do it."

Nyder felt that spark die out, leaving only a little black hole in him. His face quivered, and without knowing quite why he buried his face in Erem's shoulder, and cried. He cried out loud, as he had never cried in front of anyone before. He barely noticed as Erem put his arms around him, helped him sit down on what must be Erem's lap. All he felt was pain inside, pain and fear, and only gradually did he realise that Erem was still there, holding him, trying to talk to him.

He finally snuffled hugely, and looked up, into Erem's face: and saw tears there too.

"Nyder," Erem said, putting one huge hand on the boy's face and wiping away a tear with his thumb, "you're too good for this war. All of you are, even little backstabbin' shits like Pikk. None of you should have to fight."

"That's-" and Nyder choked on the obscenity.

"Pacifist talk?" Nyder's eyes went huge at the sound of the forbidden word. Erem didn't seem to notice; instead he went on. "Maybe it is. But right now us and the Thals are fightin' like two rats on a floatin' log, never noticin' that it's about to float right over a waterfall. We need to end this war, or we will all die."

Then he pointed a finger at Nyder's face, a finger that looked as huge as a cannon from Nyder's point of view. His scarred face seemed cold, although his eyes were still warm. "So here's three things you're goin' to do for me. And maybe someday you'll come back to the Dome, for good. I did it, and I'm not near as smart as you. So here's what you're goin' to do.

"First, you are goin' to live. Live because you're not an animal, because you're too good to die out there like an animal. Can you do that for me?"

Nyder was shaking with tension, and Erem must have felt it, because he stopped pointing in that threatening way and put both arms back around him. Nyder pressed his mouth close to Erem's ear and held his voice as steady as he could as he whispered, "I'll live."

"Yes, you will." Erem rocked him back and forth in his embrace for a long moment. "And the second thing is, be happy."

"Be happy?" Nyder leaned back and looked at Erem. "How?"

"Any damn way you can, Nyder. Be happy that you're alive, be happy to eat, be happy to see a patch of blue sky. Grab happiness with both hands and keep it, because it's your happiness, always. Nobody can take it from you. It's all yours."

Erem's eyes grew sad now. "And the last thing is the hardest." He put his hand on top of Nyder's head; it was so big that it practically covered it. "Try to be kind. When your fellow Kaled is starvin', share. When the next raw recruit comes out into the Wastelands all scared and weepin', give him a helping hand. Be kind to those who deserve it, and the back of your hand to those who don't. Someone was kind to me once, and I've tried to be kind, so you follow on after me, boy.

"And be kind to yourself, always. Because if you can't be kind, you might as well be an animal, fightin' and dyin' without even knowing what you are. I know it's harder than anything else: harder than being happy, harder even than living sometimes. Try to be kind."

Nyder snuffled again, and finally said faintly that he should get back to his bunk. Erem let him get up and go to the door, and then in all a rush Nyder came back and kissed him, like he'd seen the big boys kiss sometimes. It was fast and clumsy and wet and their noses were all squashed, and then he slipped out the door.

Nyder jumped to retrieve his bit of paper from atop the camera. He took it back with him to his bunk, intending to bring it out onto the battlefield as the only thing he had to remember Erem by. But in the rush of the morning's preparation, he forgot it, folded up small and tiny under his pillow. The next boy assigned to the bunk threw it away.