by Leo Lukas
Boryk seriously considered doing them the favor. He just had to climb high enough until he found a sufficiently deep crevice that he could fall into. It seemed tempting to him. Putting an end to the constant fear and agony, the biting mockery and feigned sympathy. To rest in peace ... The more he thought about it, the more he liked this option. "Do you still remember little Boryk with the big ears and the bow legs? Gujnar and Rautsh's crèche-brother? Yeah, he wasn't worth anything, wasn't any use, kind of a freak. Poor guy. But still, you gotta admit he showed some class when he checked out. He even took off his leather trousers beforehand and laid them down so one of his younger brothers could wear them, and then ... Say, guys, what do you think of naming this crevice after him? 'Boryk's Ravine' doesn't sound too bad, does it?"
He was already some fifty or sixty meters above the ceremonial plaza when he suddenly realized that he had started out. Boryk looked at his naked feet in disbelief. He immediately stumbled over a root, lost his balance, and had to hang on to the stunted trunk of an olive tree to keep from tumbling down the slope. Wind that smelled of rancid oil and rotting, half-fermented fruits slapped his sweat-drenched hair against his forehead. Boryk stopped to rest.
Below him, the village lay in pale violet moonshine. No smoke rose, no window was lit. Everything was asleep. Boryk was suddenly surprised by himself. How he had hated that place and most of its inhabitants! The crowding, the narrowness, the mindless brutality, the lack of interest in anything beyond eating and drinking, working and reproducing.
Now, however, the small village nestled between the foothills of the mountain seemed to him like sheer Paradise.
The Garden of Everwas ...
Beyond the families' cottages and the animals' stalls stretched the fields, berry bushes, and groves. They gave way to meadows and savannahs, which then mixed with swamps and dunes that ended at the seashore. There he had learned to swim, as usual the last of his Year. Rautsh had not missed any opportunity to dunk him and hold him underwater for seconds that seemed to last an eternity. Boryk had been subjected to utter terror in what for the others was a harmless game. Each time he had gasped and howled, to the amusement of his crèche-brothers. And had wished for nothing more ardently than to be grown up, grown up at last.
Strange. Now that he was finally at that point, he yearned for his childhood ...
On the shore a misty veil rose. Still, Boryk could see to the horizon, where the sea curved upwards and merged with the sky. "What exactly lies beyond the horizon?" he had once asked, and got baffled, long-lasting laughter in response. The story quickly spread. Months later, Gujnar was still making fun of him over it. "Do you know where Boryk lives?" he would ask pointedly. And the other children and youths answered in chorus: "Beyond the horizon!" Then they held their stomachs as they brayed and cackled, while Boryk wanted to sink into the ground in shame.
And what lies beneath the ground, anyway?
Angrily he kicked the stunted tree trunk. Often he himself thought that he was a freak: poorly endowed physically, and on top of that not quite right in the head. No one else asked such stupid questions. What for? The world was perfectly arranged and contained exactly everything that humanity needed. People were content with how things were, end of story. No wonder he always lagged behind if this was how he wasted his time.
Just as now. The two moons, whose paths crossed in the sky at midnight, already stood a good distance apart again. In a few hours they would go down in the green-blue sea, from which the bright sun would soon rise.
"Cover as much distance as you can during the night," Fosse, his favorite father, had impressed upon him. "Daylight will be brighter the higher you go. So bright that it will burn your eyeballs and you'll soon be blind. So leave off with your daydreaming and hurry for once, little one!"
What would Fosse say if he could see him at this moment? Boryk hesitating again, incapable of tearing himself away from the sight of the village although he was already a considerable distance behind the others?
What will Fosse think of me when they show him the trousers? And tell him where they found me?
And how will my Mama take the news?
Boryk pressed his lips together. He pushed himself away from the olive tree and went on, with longer, more furious steps than before.
2
A Double Double-Life
14 March 1327 NGE, Akon System
"Mark my words—he'll amount to something someday!" Mechtan tan Taklir roared. His loud voice, accustomed to command, easily overpowered all conversations and incidental noise. "Something big! He's destined for higher things. It's too bad that all my granddaughters are already married—and unfortunately the whole lot of them to zeroes!"
"Grandfather, please."
"But I'm not giving up hope," the Takhan went on in his bluster, "that one of these aesthetes will soon get so lost in his philosophizing that he'll trip and break his own neck! Then his place will be free for a real man! Har! Har!"
The space officers who stood around the Admiral of the Seventh Fleet in a half circle dutifully joined in his laughter. Aykalie did not. Indignant, she raised her left eyebrow, though only a little.
When he saw that his granddaughter was upset, Mechtan abruptly broke off. With a curt nod he excused himself from his subordinates and came over to her. He took her by her arm and guided her gently though firmly in the direction of the terrace.
"No offense," he said to her in a considerably lower voice as they walked along. "Saying things like that is what they expect from me. You know that I would never stand in the way of the happiness of my children and grandchildren. Although I've never been too comfortable with the fatal attraction you girls have for civilians. I don't even have any problems with your beloved, the existential rhetorician ... "
"Experiential theoretician."
"Whatever. Nor do I mind talking with him now and then. Or rather he talks to me, and then I only understand about every fifth word. Still he seems like a reasonable and well-mannered fellow to me, and he makes you happy—that's the important thing. Nothing else counts."
Tenderly, almost a little clumsily, he squeezed her fingers. She returned the pressure. "Admit it, Grandfather—you still would have preferred it if I had chosen one of your officers. Like Achab ta Mentec."
"You can read me like an unsecured data crystal." Mechtan gave her a wink. "I won't deny that I would have gladly seen you two united. But the lack of interest was on both sides. I personally couldn't understand how a healthy Akonian could fail to succumb to your charms. Even had a suspicion that the fellow was from the other quadrant, if you get what I mean."
"I can reassure you on that account. The gossips in the various palaces chatter constantly about his womanizing exploits. Excuse me—amorous affairs."
"Is that so? I'm delighted. Not that the other would have been such a serious indiscretion. Even has a certain tradition in the Fleet. One of my most highly decorated commanders ... well, never mind. No, it would worry me more if out of sheer devotion to duty the man forgot to live. Unhealthy in the long run, that kind of thing." Mechtan reached for a glass of beer from a tray floating by and emptied it in a single gulp.
"Does he work so much, then?"
"Like a beast of burden. And always well-groomed, polite, nonchalant. Impartial, too, sets an example that way. First-rate leadership material. At the risk of repeating myself, he's going to amount to something."
Bending down to a psychoactive flower and carefully inhaling the exquisite aroma, Aykalie said, "Achab means a great deal to you."
"I won't try to fool you. I probably see in him the son I always would have been glad to have and which Fate denied me in spite of all the concubines. However ... "—the Takhan stiffened, making his chest muscles bulge through the uniform that was covered with innumerable medals and rank insignia—"I'm much too old a soldier to let myself be blinded by personal feelings and wishful thinking. Achab ta Mentec impresses me all over again almost every day. He has a sixth sense and poss
ibly a seventh as well. Have you heard what he's been fiddling with lately in addition to his duties as Maphan?"
Aykalie looked around, regarding the mob of society movers and shakers with a contemptuous batting of her eyelashes. "It can hardly be anything special if you're telling me about it out here in the open like this."
"Oh, but it is, girl, but it is. That's actually the beauty of it. Long obsolete technology, perfectly familiar to all the powers of the Galaxy. Detection shields and by the same token fine-scale hyper-detection, based on neutrinos. It would immediately make any hyper-physicist's eyes glaze over, probably. As the saying goes, you couldn't lure a new-born Okrill baby out from behind the rocks with that."
"But?"
"It's a matter of what you make of it. Just in the experimental stage, Achab has already discovered things that even in times like these would have otherwise stayed unknown and undiscovered until the end of time."
"Which are?"
"Have to wait until the first readings are confirmed. He's working on that now. Looks as though we've got ourselves a sensation that could shake the Blue System."
Aykalie heard something amid the music and a not entirely harmonious song sung by many voices that sounded from the hall. "That concerns you, Takhan," she said.
"Was afraid of something like that. They want to pin another tin medal on me because of that oh so successful Fleet maneuver. I presume from your body language that you're about to take off?"
"I promised my husband that I'd listen to at least part of his lecture to the Academy."
"Give him my regards. But by all that is precious, don't tell him they're from me. Was very nice to chat with you again. Thank you for coming. You made an old soldier very happy."
"I was glad to, Mechtan. Farewell!"
"All the best, child."
They embraced. If Aykalie hadn't known that her grandfather was considered the toughest military man in the entire Akonian Empire, she would have suspected that he was having a sentimental moment.
She hurried to the exit, slipping through the small groups of social strivers and pretenders like a slim boat through bending reeds. In the foyer she placed her right thumb on the input field of the teleporter terminal. Mentally composed her destination. Stepped into the flickering rainbow ...
... and stepped out.
The dry, utilitarian plainness of the Academy enveloped her like a coat of dust. Fuzzy. Oppressive. Under the robes the funk of a thousand years, Aykalie's rebellious classmates had joked during her student days. Many of them now wore those selfsame robes and strode through the halls in them no less solemnly and arrogantly than their predecessors.
The lecture hall, one of the smaller ones, was less than half filled. It virtually smelled of boredom. Even so, Jars tan Aburrir, Aykalie's husband, acted on the podium as though he were presenting the scientific discovery of the century to an enthusiastic crowd of four thousand people.
" ... leads us without further digression to the central, fundamental question," he lectured with his own brand of purple eloquence, glowing with enthusiasm. "And that is: Does the practicality of time travel, as it has often been indisputably documented in Galactic history, therefore demonstrate the existence of free will? Or does it serve us on the contrary as a significant indication of the inevitable predestination of Fate? Supported by the recently published theses of my highly esteemed faculty colleagues Noiso, Langweil, und Uzun-Dalga, I dare to assert ... neither! Only the deliberate and demonstrable causation of a time paradox would tip the scales of a conclusion in the direction of the recognition of chance, which means unlimited self-determination. The focus of our attention should be on the term 'demonstrable.' I think you realize where I am leading with this. A time paradox changes the past and thus logically the present as well. How, then, can it be verified beyond any doubt that such a thing is involved? Hmm? It is even quite possible that, depending on the reordering of the past, the question is no longer even relevant. Yes, it could even be that in the thereby modified present, the one who originally asked it never would have been born!"
Jars tan Aburrir smiled as though he was amusing himself over the highly polished formulation of his point, and let his gaze sweep out over his listeners in a bid for applause. As he did, he discovered Aykalie, who waved to him. He returned the gesture, then continued with the lecture. As soon as his attention was concentrated entirely on his subject again, she slipped inconspicuously out.
She used a teleporter to reach her personal core apartment, which consisted of only a few rooms: study, bedchamber, dressing room, bathroom. Since the Akonians had developed teleportation technology to the peak of perfection, it was customary for members of the upper class to spread parts of their living quarters all over. Thus Aykalie's kitchen and garden were on a farmstead far outside the city, her studio was on the coast of a different continent, her veranda on an orbiting space station, and her library in a loft in the booksellers' district on the moon of Xolyar. She and Jars maintained several other living and reception rooms scattered across the entire Akon System. All these rooms were connected by personal teleporters and so could be reached with a single step as easily and as much a matter of course as stepping through a doorway.
With a few movements of her hand, Aykalie freshened her make-up. Then she traded the conservatively tailored, modestly high-necked cocktail dress for skin-tight slacks that emphasized her figure and a soft, flowing blouse whose fabric slowly shifted among various pastel colors and even occasionally turned briefly transparent. For shoes she selected high heels that consisted only of loosely woven, ultravioletly luminescent threads. The ten-centimeter high, needle-thin heels were supported by mini-antigrav fields; their projectors and batteries were located in the lower seam of her trouser legs.
After she had checked her appearance one last time in the mirror and judged it to be satisfactory, she stepped through the teleporter arch.
Her lover awaited her in his indoor garden. Where it was located, Aykalie had no idea: a Syntron program developed for privacy protection prevented anyone from using a terminal to call up the coordinates of the destination. The glass surfaces that made up three of the walls and the domed ceiling were always set to opaque during her visits. The gravity and atmosphere seemed normal, but of course they could have been produced artificially.
"Am I right in assuming that we don't have much time?" she asked with a lightly amused undertone after they had greeted each other with a long kiss.
"What gives you that idea?"
"I was just at Mechtan's maneuver party. He's already waiting feverishly for the sensational data you promised him. Shouldn't you be busy analyzing it?"
Smiling boyishly, Achab ta Mentec, wrapped in a flowing, silken leisure toga whose rich orange contrasted charmingly with his flawless light brown skin, sank onto the wide sofa. "Already taken care of. I just wasn't in the mood for rousing speeches and heroic drinking sessions. Besides, all things considered, I prefer your company to that of your grandfather."
"I certainly hope so." She sat down next to him and cuddled under his arm. "Although ... If the matter is as important as you told the Takhan ... can you allow yourself even this slight delay in good conscience?"
"In comparison with 55,000 years, I think it can wait a few hours."
"Fifty-five thou ... ? What have your neutrino detectors stumbled on? An artifact from Lemurian times?"
He ran his finger gently over her lips. "Let's not waste this hour with business, Darling. Before the end of the day I will inform Admiral Mechtan tan Taklir in detail about my discovery. And don't worry—you'll get a data cube, too, so you can be the first to make a report to the Energy Command!"
Aykalie made a pouting expression, then seized Achab by his gray, lightly shimmering pigtail and pulled on it teasingly. "I hate being tortured on the rack like this. But I must surrender to overwhelmingly superior forces."
They enjoyed the stolen hour to the full. Ta Mentec was an excellent lover, sensitive and reserved, as wou
ld otherwise be expected only from considerably older, more experienced men. When it came to passion, he was perhaps a little too clear-headed and she had not yet been able to lure him completely out of his reserve. But that was probably a consequence of his profession, and not least of the nature of their relationship.
It was evident to both of them that they were using each other. Aykalie worked for the Akonian secret service, the legend-shrouded Energy Command. True, it no longer constituted a state within the state as it once did, but stood under the democratic control of the Ruling Council and its agencies. However, it was still a significant power in its own right in the present day. Neither her grandfather nor her husband Jars, who required pleasantly little care and attention and who was dedicated to the theory of experience rather than to its practice, knew that Aykalie led a double life. Usually everyone accepted her as the rich heiress, artist, and art-gallery owner. After all, every noble family had at least one member matching that picture.
Achab ta Mentec, however—the "ta" identified him as member of the mid-level nobility; the highest families had a "tan" in their names while the lowest ones a "cer"—had seen through her almost from the start. Probably because he was cut from similar cloth. Like her, he was not content with what his parents, educators, and patrons had arranged for him. Like her, he preferred to pursue his own goals without revealing more than necessary.
They had quickly agreed to keep their affection secret. That way they profited considerably more from it. To push his career forward, Achab needed a good connection to the Energy Command. In return he supplied Aykalie with inside information about the Fleet that she could not easily have swindled out of her grandfather.