by J. E. Gurley
I hope the dumb bastard doesn’t give us away, Jazon thought. If he starts talking, I might have to shut him up quickly. The professor saved him the trouble by promptly passing out and sliding down his chair onto the floor. Lord Hromhada gave him a brief disdaining glance before summoning servants to convey Lyton to his room.
“Our friend, here, has imbibed too deeply, but that is okay,” Lord Hromhada announced smiling as they carried away Lyton’s limp body. “Drink up, all of you, but remember, you leave tomorrow at noon.”
By the time the musicians appeared around the table, Jazon had had enough. He excused himself on the pretense of turning in early and visited the professor. He heard groans coming from inside Lyton’s room. He pressed the door chime.
A weak cry asked, “Who is it?”
“Jazon.”
The door opened. Jazon was surprised to see Lyton up and moving around. His alcoholic stupor had been at best, exaggerated.
“What gives?” he pointed to Lyton’s arm.
Lyton grinned, and then grabbed his stomach. He covered his mouth with his hand and rushed to the bathroom. He returned a minute later, pale and shaken, and sat down.
“I couldn’t risk the cylinder. I encapsulated the nanites, injected it into my blood stream. The alcohol prevents the capsule from dissolving.” Speaking seemed to make Lyton queasy. He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes.
“So you have to stay intoxicated the entire journey. A fat lot of good you’re going to be if you’re drunk all the time,” Jazon stated angrily.
Lyton looked as if he were suppressing another urge to throw up. After a few seconds, he managed to gasp, “No. A small amount will do. I needed a large dosage at first to sensitize the capsule’s coating.”
“Won’t Lord Hromhada ask about the case?”
Lyton opened his eyes and grinned. “I informed him I had conveyed it to Occam’s Razor along with my other equipment, which I did, only minus the cylinder inside.”
“And he believed you?”
“It doesn’t matter. If he examines the case, he’ll find a specimen stasis container inside just as I told him.”
Jazon had to admit, for an academician, the professor could think on his feet. “I apologize, Professor. I thought rather badly of you,” he admitted.
Lyton waved his hand in the air. “Think nothing of it. My little ruse was as much for your sake as it was mine. Lord Hromhada thinks of me as a simple-minded theoretician, hardly capable of plotting against him.” His eyes narrowed. “I suspect you, too, feel this way.” Jazon glanced down at his feet in shame. “Never mind,” Lyton continued. “I am a scientist, but I am also a patriot. I will not let the Cha’aita gain knowledge from nor allow them to control the life form we are to investigate. My orders are to … to destroy it if it proves dangerous to Earth in any way.”
Jazon noticed he did not sound happy with his orders. “What about the Three Principles?”
Lyton shrugged. He began rummaging around in a travel case. “I suspect the appearance of the Cha’aita in our galaxy may have already disrupted our delicate balance, regardless of the emerging, inorganic life form. If this is the case, we have nothing to lose.”
A horrible thought occurred to Jazon. “These nanites … what about your normal bodily functions? Won’t they break free?”
Lyton laughed. “No, my friend, they will remain encapsulated in my blood. If by some chance, some did escape, they are anaerobic and will not survive long enough in an oxygen-rich environment to cause damage.”
Jazon scratched his head. A small patch of light brown fuzz was beginning to grow back, making his scalp itch. “If you say so. What if the new life form can help us?”
“In that case, we try to make contact with it and enlist its aid.” Lyton had located a bottle of purple Queaze-Eze in his bag and swallowed a large dose. He sputtered and grimaced from its bitter taste. “I can’t afford to take a D-tox pill. This feces will have to suffice.”
Jazon grinned in sympathy. Here he was abstaining from alcohol while Lyton would have to stay half-drunk to prevent disaster. This raised a horrible idea. “What if you are injured or cut while on board the ship?”
“It will take at least six hours after the last of the alcohol has left my system before the capsule dissolves. I will take a shot or two every four or five hours to be safe. An injury will do nothing. If I die, however, you must jettison my body quickly. No long, boring oratories, please.”
“Just to be safe, I’ll jettison you before you’re completely dead,” Jazon replied.
Lyton looked at first alarmed, and then relieved when he understood Jazon’s attempt at humor.
“If it becomes necessary to free the nanites, I will do it in the rings, away from the ship, unless ….”
“Unless the ship is already compromised,” Jazon finished glumly.
They looked at each other for a few moments, co-conspirators well out of their respective leagues. They needed a James Bond-type hero or one of the handsome, square-jawed vid heroes so prevalent on the serial broadcasts. Jazon knew the professor was looking at him, stacking him up against their needs and watching him fall short. Jazon couldn’t blame the professor, of course. He had admitted from the start that his only goal was to reach Earth. His bungled attempt to jump ship at Lahhor had only heightened his ineptness to everyone and endangered the mission by killing Amissa.
Thinking of her brought an ache to his chest. She had died to save him. Even Lord Hromhada had not expected this. Did she save his life because of her duty to the Dastorans, or because of something that she had felt for him? While they had never had sex, the sexual tension between them had charged the air around them, making it dance with unfocused energy. He could feel it through every nerve of his body. The Dastorans had created her to ensnare him, or someone like him, and she had done her job extremely well, perhaps too well, something Lord Hromhada had not envisioned. She was not completely in Lord Hromhada’s control.
This meant there was a chance, however small, that he could reach her, woo her away from the Dastorans and back to her own kind. Lord Hromhada would do all in his power to prevent this, but they would be a long way from his reach once aboard Occam’s Razor. He would have to find a way to remove any threat the Drones might pose, short of murder. Murder was still, thankfully, beneath him.
With luck, he thought wryly, they would attempt to eliminate me at mission’s end, relieving me of that moral obstacle.
“Mr. Lightsinger, I don’t wish to be rude, but I must sleep now. The room is, er, spinning like a mad, Whirling Dervish.” Lyton was holding his head in his hands and moaning.
“Of course, Professor. Sorry to intrude. Sleep tight, don’t let the pink elephants bite,” he couldn’t help sniping, as he was leaving. He heard Lyton groan as the door sealed.
He checked on Ulrich before returning to his room, but Ulrich was busy with his computer, and Jazon didn’t wish to disturb him. His quarters were back in order, the smashed furniture replaced, and the bloodstains cleaned. A few tiny cleaning units scurried across the floor, avoiding his feet, intent on finishing their assigned tasks. The room was spotless with no remaining sign that he had almost died there. Jazon shuddered as he remembered how close he had come to death that night.
In combat, a soldier, especially a Marine, considered himself better than the enemy. He had to or the pressure of combat would wear you down little by little until you met someone just a little faster and a little tougher. If you didn’t have the expectation of winning on your side, your edge was gone, and you were dead. Jazon worried that his time as a civilian had dulled his competitive edge. Several times over the past few years, twice in the last few days, he had come uncomfortably close to death. The fact that he had survived helped ameliorate the pain, but he would surely face tough odds on this journey.
Was he still up to it?
He remembered one of the few times his father had shown concern for him. It was before his Vision Quest. He had turned thirteen
and was going alone, unarmed and naked, into the mesas to meet his Being of Power. The concept of power to the Diné, Weltanschauung, meant more than power over people or wealth. It meant power over oneself and over the Diyin Diné, the spirits. By fasting and praying for his animal guide, he would become a man, and his animal guide would teach him the ways of healing, like his father.
For four days, he had sat among the cacti and rocks off Black Mesa under the broiling sun by day, enduring the freezing desert air at night. For four days, he had starved and danced on bare, bleeding feet, and prayed for a vision. The closest that he came to an animal guide was when a tarantula he had startled bit him. There was no fear of poison, but the bite stung both his hand and his pride. He began to realize that he would never have the power of his father. He would never become a hataalii. He had staggered back home, bruised, starved, and defeated. The look in his father’s eyes had told him all that he needed to know. He knew he would never make a good Diné. Better to become a poor image of a white man.
As Jazon stripped off his clothes, preparing for bed, a chant came to his lips unbidden, a remembrance of things long thought forgotten, one of the chants taught him as a teenager. He repeated the words, at first only in his mind, then softly aloud as he danced across the room. He was amazed that his feet remembered the steps he had committed to memory so long ago. He danced around the room, singing. His hands longed for his father’s sacred rattle made from the dried skin of a horned toad filled with datura seeds.
A pleasant feeling of peace descended on him as he danced. He began to shed the tensions of the past weeks like the dead skin of a serpent. He closed his eyes and willed himself atop Black Mesa, looking out over the Painted Desert below him. The layered pastel hues of the limestone were the colors of Mother Earth; the blue above the color of Father Sky. Travelling among the stars, he had missed these childhood companions. Now, he could feel them reach out to him, enveloping him in their protective embrace. He opened his eyes and saw before him a great world, bound to his home by the same colors as the soil beneath his feet. Around this world circled rings of ice and stone, sparkling beneath an alien sun.
Somehow, he knew that this was his destination, the home of the new life form.
Racing across this vast plain of ice were millions of tiny spiders, weaving a blanket to catch the rays of the sun. One spider-like creature, black as the deepest obsidian, scurried to him on ten, tiny metallic legs. A beast of stone and metal rather than flesh and blood, it emitted no thoughts that he could grasp, yet he could feel a presence rising from the rings, a mind filled with wonder and something else – fear. It was afraid. It remembered its recent birth and feared an ending, a return to the emptiness from which it had arisen. Jazon reached out with his mind, attempting to contact this being, but its thoughts were too intense to enter. He stood at the edge of a vortex of images passing too quickly to comprehend, and felt awe.
He opened his eyes and found himself once again standing naked in his room. Sweat poured from his body in streams in spite of the room’s carefully balanced climate control. His muscles ached from the dance, and his mind burned from the images thrust into them. Had it been a vision or simply a dream? Not possessing even the energy to shower, he collapsed into his bed and slept, dreamless and undisturbed.
8
Conscience commands; love inspires. What we do out of love, we do because we want to do it.
Experience pt.1, ch.9 A.J. Toynbee
Early, much earlier than Jazon would have wished, Metak buzzed at his door and informed him that all were to gather in the Great Hall for one last feast before departing for Occam’s Razor. Jazon arose, took a long, hot shower, and once again removed the hair from his head. He stared regretfully at his closet full of clothes. For years, he had dreamed of owning more outfits than he could carry in his small pack. The clothing represented more than just something to wear, fashionable and stylish. In truth, he relished them almost as much as would have a stack of credits. If clothes made the man, then what he had been wearing for the past year had made him a pauper, a poor wanderer living by his wits. With any suit in his closet, he could walk into a business on Earth and talk himself into a good job. New clothes triggered some sort of self-esteem factor in a man, which others could see and relate to.
He wouldn’t need to impress anyone on this trip. Lightly running his hand over his wardrobe, he sighed, chose one plain, black suit and three blue jumpers. As a last minute decision, he did take the boots. He couldn’t bring himself to leave them behind. The rest, he packed carefully in a large trunk that he found in the closet and left them at the foot of his bed.
He met Ulrich exiting his own quarters. By the dour expression on his face, Jazon surmised Ulrich had not slept well. Black circles under his eyes looked like smudges caused by his glasses, but his glasses were unusually spotless.
“Are you ready?” he asked his friend.
Ulrich smiled weakly. He noticed Jazon’s small case. “You’re traveling light as well, I see.”
Jazon shrugged.
Ulrich held out two, blue, one-piece ships suits draped over his arm to match the one he wore. “Somehow, it seemed ludicrous to bring all my new clothes.”
Jazon nodded. “I know what you mean. Perhaps when we return.”
“When we return, yes,” Ulrich agreed somewhat dourly.
“Well, let’s go meet our crew.” Jazon placed his hand on Ulrich’s shoulder and squeezed lightly. He meant his smile to encourage Ulrich. Instead, it had the opposite effect.
“Don’t do that,” Ulrich gasped, squirming away from Jazon’s grip. “You’re giving me the creeps.” He turned and began walking down the corridor. Jazon followed.
The Great Hall swarmed with people, more than Jazon had seen since arriving on the ship. Nearly a thousand Highborn Dastorans were present and twice as many servants, and yet they seemed lost in the immense room. He began to realize just how large the Highborn’s ship was.
Three Drones stood beside Lord Hromhada. One was Protector Huumba. He didn’t recognize the other two. Professor Lyton stood a little apart from the others, looking downcast and otherwise reluctant to leave. He didn’t see the Trilock ambassador anywhere. A group of Highborn Ladies moved apart, and Jazon caught a quick glimpse of Amissa in the background, her eyes carefully studying the floor. Once again, his heart did a flip-flop, and his palms began to sweat. He would have to get over this teenage obsession, or it could affect the mission.
He could deal with the older Amissa, the one he had killed through his stupidity. She had been a known factor, even if her true purpose concerning him had been cloudy. This Amissa mystified him. She was by all appearances the same woman, simply younger, but Jazon could tell by her subtle movements and by the manner in which she glanced about, that she was not the same person. Others might not have noticed these slight distinctions, but he did.
“Mr. Lightsinger,” Lord Hromhada called out cheerfully. He motioned Jazon to his side and presented to him a document written in Terran English. “This is a writ entailing the scope of your authority. If you inspect it, you will find I have given you total command except in two areas.”
Jazon waited patiently. He knew there would be a catch.
“In all matters pertaining to the new life form, Professor Lyton will have full authority, except if the safety of the ship is compromised.”
Lyton offered Jazon a weak smile.
“The second?” Jazon prompted.
“Under no circumstances is the safety of Amissa to be compromised. Her safe return is of the utmost importance to me, to the Council.” He turned to the three Drones. Huumba glared at Jazon. “I have instructed my people to follow your instructions implicitly unless they in some way compromise her safety.”
If there had ever been a doubt about Amissa’s value to the Dastorans, Lord Hromhada had just cleared it up. Jazon nodded. “I understand,” he replied.
Lord Hromhada started to turn away. Jazon stopped him by adding, “I will abor
t the mission if I find you have omitted anything of importance, anything that might affect the lives of the crew.” His emphasis left no doubt he meant the Terrans onboard.
Lord Hromhada glared at Jazon, as if his veiled accusation had wounded him deeply. “If at any time you fear for your safety,” he sneered, “You may abort the mission. But, I warn you, the fate of the entire galaxy could rest in your hands.” He turned away and began to speak with his three Drones in Dastoran, ignoring Jazon.
Ulrich nudged Jazon in the ribs. “What was that about?” he whispered.
Jazon shook his head. “Later,” he whispered. He went to Lyton. The professor was nursing a glass of wine. “Ready to go?”
“I seem to be suffering from the classic symptoms of stage fright,” Lyton said with a chuckle. “I suppose I will get over it.” He downed the remainder of the glass and shuddered. “It is awfully early for a drink.”
Jazon looked around the room. “Don’t worry. I may have one myself before we leave,” he said only half-joking.
He felt Amissa’s presence even before he smelled her fragrance – desert rose. For me? He looked up.
“Mr. Lightsinger,” she began, and then stopped. Her cheeks turned red, and she turned away. Composing herself, she faced him once again. She stared into his eyes and seemed to see something in them that encouraged her to continue. “This is as awkward, I suppose, for you as it is for me.”
Jazon said nothing but glanced away and cleared his throat to steady his nerves before looking at her again.
“I don’t remember all that has passed between us, ah, you and my predecessor, but I feel as if I know you somehow. There is much I do not understand about this mission or about myself, but I know that whatever happens, I trust you.”
Jazon swallowed. His mouth had gone as dry as the Arizona desert. His hand reached up to touch her face, and then fell limply at his side. “I won’t let you down,” he whispered through cotton-dry lips.