“The new Advocates are aboard the Augmenter ship, you say.”
“Not yet born.”
“This is something of a break with tradition. Normally new Advocates are only appointed after a long and rigorous period of training, usually under the tutelage of the existing incumbents. Does the Noocracy intend them to begin their duties fresh from the womb?”
I had no answer to this.
“A question of rather vital importance, wouldn’t you say?”
“I’ve told you everything I know.”
“I wonder if the Advocates are aware that their successors in waiting are so close. These are murky waters we are plumbing.”
“What do you intend to do?”
Bezile didn’t answer, though I knew she was contemplating the possibilities. She had continued to speak inwardly to me throughout. Physically she remained in some discomfort, but she had a robustness of spirit which made me realize that I could not act through her in the way I had done with Tunde or Imrani. There was no way in which she would allow her own mind to be usurped.
“Do you think it’s true what Julius and Orela said about the Noosphere being an illusion?” I asked.
She snorted her dismissal. “Could a creature such as you infiltrate my consciousness if it was merely the mirror of my soul?”
• • •
This time I experienced the translation as a flight into a deeper blackness. I called out for Chloe and Lucian, but they did not manifest themselves.
Time passed, and I had the strange sensation of it both rushing and crawling: there, alone in the blackness, I had nothing to measure it against. I could only endure it, let it pass without protest or expectation.
When I surfaced I was back in Tunde again. He was stirring from sleep, stretched out on a foldbunk with Cori cradled in his arms. I sensed the echo of a dream in which he and Adele were doing a zeegee dance in a cavernous silver floatdome, a dream which my sudden return had unwillingly forced him to leave.
He sat up slowly, laying Cori back down on the pillow. As before he was subdued, even morose. The bunk relaxed its lip and he swung his feet down.
Marea lay asleep in another bunk opposite. Tunde stared at her as if he were looking at a stranger. There was a confusion of emotions within him, but guilt and unease predominated.
He knew I was back, but it hardly registered on his consciousness.
“Is everything all right?” I asked him.
He said nothing. I could tell that he was already weary of the whole enterprise. For him the wider drama meant little, the issues were remote. He did not want to be out here pursuing the armada; he wanted only to be somewhere safe and comfortable with his daughter.
“She looks so changed,” he said with reference to Marea.
“She’s been through a lot,” I replied.
“Are we going to die?”
To his credit, he was thinking more of his daughter and Marea than himself. I couldn’t offer him any certainties, but I said: “Would I be here if I thought that?”
“Do what you want through me. Just keep us safe.”
Then he sank down mentally, as if temporarily ceding his body entirely to my uses.
Across the bridgehead, Vargo was intent on the controls. Had he slept himself? It seemed unlikely, given that the ship was giving out a soft unintelligible murmuring; he could not have trusted it to fly itself.
Ahead of us was the Augmenter armada, filling the entire space of the eyesockets. We were following them, keeping a prudent distance but matching velocity. Beyond the sphere of ships hung the silver spiral of the Sanctuary, its attendant craft a diffuse halo around it.
Marea began to stir, much to Tunde’s discomfort. I took over, rising and going across to Vargo.
“Enjoy your nap?” he said, eyeing me with his usual suspicion.
“Julius and Orela are going to attack the Augmenter fleet,” I told him. “They’re using Dementia victims as drone-pilots in the plagueships. Each ship is carrying a newborn photoplasm as payload.”
He had removed the cosmetic lens, and he squinted through his blind eye at me.
“That’s a good one,” he said. “Mad pilots and plasma balls.”
“It’s true.”
“Bull.”
“I promise you.”
“How do you know?”
I told him, while in the background the ship started to regale us with a faint but falsetto version of the theme song from Augmenter Alert!
Marea was also listening, standing framed against one of the eyesockets, her cloak wrapped tight around her. She was feeding it crumbs from a meal cracker. Judging by her face, it did not appear that Nina was present in her. I knew I was expecting a great deal of them simply in accepting my presence and my various comings and goings. They would have to take my story on trust, in much the same way as Nina and I had had to accept everything that Chloe and Lucian had shown us. Everything was conditional. Yet none of us had any choice but to act on the basis of what we believed to be true.
“So what are you telling me we should do?” Vargo was asking, a clear edge of impatience in his voice.
I had no answer from Chloe and Lucian, but I said, “We maintain our course. Wait and see what happens.”
Vargo switched off the ship’s vocal. “Marea?”
She didn’t speak; her attention was on Tunde.
Vargo made an exasperated noise. “I say we head for Europa like we originally planned.”
Marea fed the cloak another morsel. She shook her head.
“He could be leading us into anything,” Vargo said.
Marea kept staring at me. “Is Tunde there?”
I waited for Tunde himself to reply, but when he remained silent, I said: “Yes.”
“I need to talk to you. In private.”
She walked off towards the rear of the ship. I shrugged at the scowling Vargo, then followed her down the corridor.
Marea didn’t stop until she reached the shrine. She stepped through the doormouth. I went in after her.
“Tunde?”
She stood at the centre of the chamber, her cloak still drawn tight around her. Tunde remained reticent, more than ever reluctant to communicate.
“He won’t talk,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I think he’s feeling guilty.”
This had the effect I intended, Tunde coming to the fore, determined not to let me explain for him. He took her by the arms, said, “I’m here, Marea.”
Gently she pulled herself free of him. I wanted to retreat as much as possible, to leave them to have this private moment alone. But my curiosity, my very presence, wouldn’t allow it.
“I can’t marry you, Tunde,” she said. “Not ever.”
“Marea—”
“Once upon a time I thought of asking you myself. It was only the perfect picture you painted of life with Yolande that stopped me.”
“That wasn’t true.”
“I know that now. I know a lot more. Things have changed. They can never be like they were.”
Tunde’s disappointment was more a matter of pride than desire; underneath it was a barely acknowledged relief.
“Can you forgive me, Marea?”
She gave a brief laugh. “What did you do? You took the womb off my hands. They’d have tried to kill me for it anyway. I was only angry because you profited from it, whereas I ended up marooned on a hellhole. That was hardly your fault.”
“I feel as if I used you.”
“Maybe you did. Maybe you didn’t prove to be the man I thought you were. So what? There’s worse things.”
“I lied to you.”
“You rescued me.”
“Only with Nathan and Nina’s help. At their urging.”
There was a dark mist of hair on her scalp: it was growing back. On Io they’d been forced to use depilants to keep leechflies at bay.
“They couldn’t have done it without you, could they? You must have consented to it.”
/>
I tried to echo that fact within him, but he told me to be silent.
“We’re quits, Tunde,” Marea said. “You don’t have to marry me to make amends.”
“We could try a short-term contract.”
“Is that what you really want?”
And I saw that the honest answer was “no”. I urged him to say it. He couldn’t bring himself to speak, but at last he shook his head.
Marea smiled. “Thank heaven for that!”
Despite himself, Tunde was hurt. “Am I that bad?”
She put a hand to his cheek. “It isn’t that. We missed our time, Tunde. It’s no one’s fault. But we can’t go back.”
There was an awkward moment. Then a voice said, “So there you are!”, and Cori walked in, full of juvenile bustle.
She saw the rather solemn looks on both their faces and stopped.
“Oops,” she said. “Did I interrupt something?”
Tunde smiled and swept her up in his arms.
“I think,” he said, “your timing was perfect.”
• • •
Imrani surfaced to intense pain.
“Try playing the organ now,” Felix said, like someone reciting a joke he didn’t quite understand.
I felt the pain almost as much as Imrani; but because I was not totally him I was able to help him withdraw a little from it, put up barriers with his mind to blunt some of its fierceness.
He looked down at his hands; some of the fingers were twisted out of shape. All of them had been broken.
“You moron!” he yelled at Felix in rage.
Felix took hold of his hands again. There was another crack, another blaze of pain.
Imrani’s anger enabled him to ride it, to swallow it down. Felix had snapped both his thumbs, but he hadn’t cried out and did not lose consciousness. He was in danger of hyperventilating with the effort of controlling himself. This time it was I who had to try to calm him. I urged him against provoking Felix to unrestrained violence. Imrani grudgingly subsided. I searched his mind. There was no sense of Nina’s presence.
The ship gave a slight lurch. Moments later the skulldeck optic began blinking. Felix opened it.
“We need you down here,” Elydia said.
“What about this one?”
“Make sure he’s secure, then get down here. Quickly.”
Felix took something from a pouch and pressed it against Imrani’s face. It was a fragrant pad, and Imrani’s head filled with the overpowering aroma of nepenthe. We swam away, not losing consciousness entirely but stupefied by the drug. Felix departed without another word, leaving the optic on in his haste.
For a while we drifted in a haze. It might have been pleasant had we not been trapped and in pain. Imrani began to blubber. He was ashamed of himself for doing so, especially in my presence, but I assured him I didn’t think the worse of him.
“Where’s Nina?” he wanted to know.
Her absence bothered me as much as him. She did not appear to have been inhabiting Marea during my brief visit to the scuttleship. Why was I back here, as much a prisoner as Imrani?
“I don’t know,” I told him. “This time there’s only me.”
“You got me into this!”
He tried to thrash out in sheer anger and frustration, but the webbing held us tight.
I searched for Chloe and Lucian, for a magic code to set him free. There was nothing, not the merest hint of their presence.
The skulldeck suddenly flared with light, then dimmed just as abruptly. Seconds later, we felt a buffeting.
“What’s happening?” Imrani asked.
I hesitated, then said, “I think Orela and Julius have launched their fleet.”
I explained about my visit to Bezile and about the Advocates’ plagueships. Imrani was woozy and might have easily slipped down into sleep had I not kept rousing him. There was another flash of light, and on the optic I could make out figures scurrying on the ship’s bridgehead. Felix had turned off the sound, but there was no mistaking the urgency. The armada was under attack.
Again I searched for Chloe and Lucian. There was no response. Imrani kept closing his eyes, wanting to blank everything out, and I was just as adamant he stay awake. The ship gave a powerful lurch, then started ululating an alarm.
The nepenthe had blunted our senses, but now a sharper odour began to clear them. A figure was looming over us.
Addomatis.
She was alone, breathing heavily through her mask, the reek of ammonia stronger than ever. Both Imrani and I inwardly recoiled at her proximity.
Laboriously she reached down, and instants later the seat webbing retracted, freeing us.
She stood before us, not speaking, regarding us with her strange bruised eyes. Her hands were outstretched, lilacskinned blotched with purple, hands like those of a festering corpse.
“Nina?” I said through Imrani.
There was only the heavy intake and exhalations of her breathing, the acrid miasma that clung to her. I thought I saw her nod, but I couldn’t be sure. Imrani was immobile, terrified. I lifted up his arms.
Addomatis’s fingers coiled around his wrists. With surprising strength, she lifted us up.
Fifteen
Bezile stood over the unconscious form of Leanderic. He lay on the open sickbed, hands resting at his sides. The regrown skin showed no hint of the former burns, and even his fingernails were a healthy pink. His face was tranquil at last, as if the pain and anguish had been washed away. Yet Bezile was troubled.
“What’s up?” I asked immediately.
She accepted my return with all the equanimity of her calling. I was also surprised at my own calmness in the face of my abrupt transitions. There was little time to question anything when events themselves were moving so rapidly.
“He’s been infected,” she said.
“What?”
“Tell us, bed.”
The sickbed spoke in a feminine monotone: “Diagnostic analysis suggests the subject is experiencing the incipient mental traumas associated with the early stages of the Dementia. Synaptic firing is abnormal—”
“Enough,” said Bezile.
Leanderic continued to breathe gently in sleep.
“It’s recent,” Bezile said. “Since our return to the ship. We both undertook communion the moment we were back.”
She spoke with the careful calm of someone who had considered the worst and found it possible. I understood what she was saying.
“Has the bed tested you?”
“No point, my boy. What purpose would it serve?”
She was matter-of-fact, as if nothing could be achieved by fretting about it.
“They would hardly have done that to you. You’re their new Prime Arbiter.”
A mirthless laugh at this. “Leanderic has served them loyally for many years. He has far more claim on their affections.”
“But they’re risking themselves.”
“Of course. Why else do you think they’ve contrived all this?”
Nearby stood the wardrobe which Orela and Julius had used for their visit to Earth. It lay open, the black suits and Julius’s pistol inside. Bezile had summoned it before my return. She went across and took the gun out. It was surprisingly light for its size. Bezile set the charge to maximum, then slipped it into one of the inner pockets of her robe.
She sighed. “How absurd that I should have to descend to this.”
She made for the doormouth. On the sickbed Leanderic gave a faint moan.
“Is he sedated?” I asked.
“Postrecuperative sleep, my boy.”
“He might wake.”
“Indeed he might.”
The doormouth opened.
“You’re going to leave him here? Unattended?”
“What do your advisors advise?”
I confessed that I had had no recent contact with Chloe or Lucian. It hardly seemed to concern her.
“Our Advocates must be aware of the possibilities, don’t you think?�
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Then she stepped outside and began heading briskly down the corridor.
As before, there was none of the crew about. Bezile joined the slideway, gripping the handrib with some fierceness, mustering all her considerable mental resources. I could detect no signs of madness within her, yet I did not truly know what it was like to experience the Dementia. I had only seen its effects.
The crew were busy in the navigation pit, and no one paid Bezile special attention as we made our way up to the skull-deck. Explosions of light intermittently filled the eye blisters, flooding the entire bridgehead.
Orela and Julius were sitting where Bezile had left them, watching the clash between the fleets with outright glee. The Augmenter armada was attempting to counterattack, white plasma tracers flashing, antimatter borbs whirling through space, bursting like miniature novas. But the resistance to the plagueship assault appeared sporadic and uncoordinated, the armada already scattered, clearly unprepared for the direct and suicidal attack from a lesser fleet they had believed to be unarmed. The motley plagueships were flying straight at their enemy, blind to any defensive fire. I watched two Augmenter sicklewings desperately targeting a bulbous drone with twin fusillades of plasma-pulses. The drone burst apart in a golden inferno, but both sicklewings were caught in the blast, one spinning wildly out of control, the other fountaining luminous secretions from its ruptured carapace as it spiralled towards Earth. Orela enthusiastically informed Bezile that an exploding photoplasm radiated electromagnetic pulses that could destroy or disrupt the control cortex of any ship that was close.
Various optics below the blister were on longsight, and I could see the phoenix framed in one of them. It seemed to be swaying like a bird riding a thermal, though it was difficult to be certain since most of the remaining ships were now swamped by the blue glare of Earth, which hung so close it was as if they were fighting for possession of the planet itself.
Bezile gripped the pistol handle, determined not to let the savagery of the battle deflect her from her task. But if I thought that she would immediately pull out the pistol and shoot the Advocates I was wrong.
“Your steward is sick,” she announced. “He has the Dementia.”
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