Since the number of gods on Aurore must be finite, reflects the Marshal, and since the power he had already seen can be terribly concentrated, he advises the Fleet Commander of his recommendation, the Flying V to a Point, and his reason.
concur, prints the screen from the command bridge, and the decision has been made, and the Grand Fleet spreads from its subspace breakpoint.
Marshal Reitre feels a chill wind at his back, dismisses it as imaginary, but rechecks his laser sidearm all the same.
The lead scouts sprint toward the growing image of the star, toward the star and its single planet, where waits a god of darkness in darkness. Here's where the myth came from! The far lead scout sees the blackness, the darkness deeper than that through which it travels, and attempts to reverse its momentum. “Captain! No indications ahead!”
“Full reverse!” commands the Lieutenant, but as he does the stars in the scout's screens wink out.
A black-shaded rainbow coruscates across the controls and is gone.
The stars, rather another set of stars, reappear on the screens. Buzz! “Navigation null!”
The Lieutenant scratches the back of his head. The star on which they are closing is not the F0 type on which the Bassett had been centered instants before.
The navigation banks contain enough data to reconstruct virtually any locale within ten thousand lights of Karnak and have come up blank. The Lieutenant wipes his forehead. “Proceed,” he creaks out, hoping they can discover where they are, somehow.
Back in another time, Martel refocuses the tunnel that he has willed into existence and picks off the rest of the lead scouts. Leaves 985 to go.
On the command bridge far out from the F0 star in question, the screen makes the reports, one after the other, sometimes separated by moments, sometimes by close to half a standard hour.
LOCALIZATION AT 10.0. ABNORMAL ENERGY CONCENTRATION OBSERVED AT TARGET. PROCEEDING. RATE 1.5 AND CONSTANT. PROCEEDING. TARGET AT 9.5 RATE 1.5 AND CONSTANT. SPATIAL DISCONTINUITY, CLASS 8. INBOUND RADIAN 0. Marshal Reitre raises his bushy eyebrows. Class-eight discontinuities were only theoretical. Six is the greatest ever observed outside an actual nova. Reitre wonders whether the Fleet Commander understands what he is getting into.
The second advance line consists of three spread chevrons of corvettes, 120 in all, and Martel prepares to spray them all into the past after the scouts. TARGET AT 8.5.
SPATIAL DISCONTINUITY. CLASS 9. SQUADRON 7. REPORT.
SQUADRON 7 DOES NOT REGISTER ON MASS DETECTORS. RADIATION NIL. DRIVE DISCONTINUITIES NIL. REGROUP AND CLOSE LINE. REGROUPING COMPLETE.
PROCEEDING. TARGET AT 7.0 RATE 1.5 AND CONSTANT. SQUADRON 5 DOES NOT REGISTER ON MASS DETECTORS. RADIATION NIL. DRIVE DISCONTINUITIES NIL. PROCEEDING. TARGET AT 6.0.
SQUADRON 4 DOES NOT REGISTER ON MASS DETECTORS… Marshal Reitre's hand reaches for the commweb. abort mission, he signals, knowing the Regent will have his position and possibly his head for the override of the Fleet Commander. But the transmission from the command bridge screen tells him what he does not want to see. NEGATIVE. CLOSING AND CONTINUING, the signal returns. Reitre sighs, wonders if he should use the sidearm on himself, hopes against hope that something, somehow, somewhere will save the Grand Fleet, for the squadrons are disappearing faster than the screen can script, and of the Fleet the Viceroy has dispatched to Aurore nothing will return to Karnak. Of that the Marshal is absolutely certain. He returns his eyes to the screen to watch what he fears will happen.
The remaining flanks of the Grand Fleet are beginning to curl away from Aurore, and for that reason Martel concentrates his attention on the right flank, the heavy cruisers commanded by the Duke of Trinan, who certainly would not have minded being the next Viceroy.
You can be Viceroy wherever you are. No one will be there to tell you no.
Martel does not count, only continues his tunnels to the past until a single ship remains, waits until the light cruiser Eltiran turns and reenters its subspace tunnel back to Karnak.
The critics were right. A thousand ships didn't fall across the skies of the past. Only 999, and none of them before the time of the first flight from old Home. That would not have been fair. Martel pauses. Though who's to say what's fair? He has one other task, perhaps the hardest, yet to do. Martel hangs in the darkness, suspends himself, juggles his thoughts and the long-buried feelings he knows churn beneath.
He turns toward Aurore. His planet. His impossible planet and the home of his impossible dreams.
* * *
LXVII
Midnight cloaks the Petrified Boardwalk… true midnight, moonless, for Aurore has never had a moon, with the stars only for light. For who had ever thought to provide outside lights for a planet that had never seen darkness?
The polished stone walks are deserted, and Martel can sense the fear. For darkness was accepted only when it was rare and isolated, but now that night has fallen, truly fallen, not a few of his worshipers are having second thoughts. Let them.
He shrugs and surveys the low waves that still break across the night-silver sand. Tonight there is no Emily to rescue you. Nor Rathe.
Nor even a Marta Farrell to recall. Hollie and Gates Devero shipped back to Halston, what—nine standard centuries ago? They're doubtless dust, or buried in some family vault.
On Karnak waits Kryn. Or Emily, if you wish to open that issue. You're an Immortal, perhaps the last who can claim godhood, or what passes for it. Now that the field of Aurore, flickering glittermotes and all, is gone, who is left?
Emily, the answer comes. Or Kryn, for they are one and the same, and both are older than Martel. Far older. “Are they, really?” he asks the breakers in a low voice. The waters mumble back the answer, which he cannot hear because he has lifted his eyes to the brightest star in the east.
Martel does not address a question to the star, instead drops his head and looks across the dark jumbles that are homes and shops and taverns where darkness and fear are being rediscovered again, and yet again. A stone rattles, displaced by a cat.
Odd, a cat that has not known darkness. Does she see as well?
Martel tries to follow the small beast with his thoughts, but he is too late, and cannot locate that particular feline.
Do we seem that indistinguishable to whatever gods there are?
He smiles a hard smile as he asks himself the question, then lets his cloak flutter in the night breeze. The sea wind bears a saltier tang than it used to.
Martel takes three steps northward, recalling another night when it was night only by the clock, and perpetual day by the light. With another step/he recalls the second night like the first.
The images mix, and on top of them comes another, a young woman, dark-haired and dressed in blue leathers. And all three are the same.
Truly a goddess you are, Dian. Or Emily. Or Kryn. He snorts, a rough bark that causes three cats and a dorle to jump from their respective perches. The third cat pounces on the dorle, but before she can dispatch the hapless songbird, Martel throws a handful of darkness at the pair and separates them.
Do you dare to hope, Martel? Or are you still refusing to act? Turn the universe upside down on principle, but don't make the last move?
He shakes his head and observes the northward hills, his eyes centering on a space where he knows a building of white marble stands. Has stood a good millennium or longer.
Silence drops like a second darkness on the Petrified Boardwalk.
Shortly, a large raven flaps toward a white villa, dark, unlit, and deserted now for some time, though visited once by a recently created ancient god.
Martel roams from room to room, from chamber to chamber, from porch to portico, as he waits for the dawn.
Even you, last god, bringer of darkness, cannot bring the dawn quicker.
The rose color of the eastern horizon is only the first of a handful of dawns since the re-creation of Aurore. Martel sits on the columned wall above the ravine, dangling his black-booted feet over the edge.
Corel… Emily's villa, and Kryn's scent. Can you separate them?
He reflects upon his twists in time, letting his feet drum against the stone.
Can you put them back together again? Should you? A dorle chitters with the first ray from the rising sun. So much smaller than on Karnak the sun was, and yet the heat was the same. Should be, since he'd planned it that way, but the visual sense was different, a touch of strangeness, with the high sky a greener shade, holding a hint of green, green seas.
In the early-morning light, the villa is still vacant, emptier now than when the white marble had stood gray in the predawn darkness.
Martel gathers his own blackness and casts it, extending himself throughout the villa and the grounds, letting time flow around him as he becomes one with the deserted structure.
As he touches the stone, reinforces it, repairs it, he rejects time itself. As he changes half the marble from white to black. As he wills the gardens back into their formal states, and the emerald grass back into the lawns, and the rose trees back into their guards. As he adds black roses among the white. As he hopes… If not, someone will be most amazed. His last effort is to bind a corner of time around what he has wrought, letting the villa sleep immaculate and untouched, until he returns. If he returns.
Once more, the raven spreads wing and departs, this time to cross the Middle Sea toward the White Cliffs.
Atop the White Cliffs the raven alights, still a black bird that perches above a smooth circular pool of whitestone. Three black footprints, inked into the white rock, yet lead to the circular stone depression that resembles nothing so much as a petrified pool.
A pair of dorles chitter. The lone sea gull has been gone for some time.
The raven stares unblinking at the white stone pool, at the black footprints.
The bird disappears, and a man stands atop the boulder. For a space he stands. Then he walks down through empty air to the precipice, from where he looks over the edge, as if to reassure himself that the waves still crash in against the sheer stone face far below.
They do, and the water foams golden green, as it did before and will again.
Martel steps out into the emptiness. He gathers his cloak about him and is gone, replaced instantly by the wide-winged raven he also is.
The two youths who have climbed the gentle slope from the upland meadows drop their jaws open as they watch the transformation. The taller one, red-haired, recovers first and sprints for the edge, peers over, and sees nothing. He looks up and sees the raven beating into the distance.
The shorter, brown-haired boy has found the stone pool and the black prints.
The two look at each other. The shorter makes the sign of the inverted and looped cross. They shake their heads and hurry back to tell their parents, who have not slept well in previous nights, and who will sleep even less well in nights to come.
Martel notes this as he flaps off, but does not hesitate. His destination is a small cottage behind a larger home, south of the city called Sybernal, a cottage he once thought of as home, or the closest thing to it.
Someone has kept the quince pruned, even planted a younger tree close by the oldest, as if to ensure there will always be the same number of quinces. Which means there will not be.
The cottage is as he left it days, or has it been years, ago. Except that a black velvet rope is looped to bar access from either the porch or the front entry. A small black looped and inverted cross is mounted upon a black marble pedestal beside the pathway leading to the cottage. The cross is not new, though its location is.
Martel extends his perceptions and finds that the cottage is empty, although recently it has been cleaned.
Seeing the black velvet ropes, he does not enter, though he knows that two sets of black tunics and trousers hang in the closet in his sleeping chamber, as do three preserved sets of pale yellow tunics and matching trousers.
Instead, he crosses the hillside and stretches his steps toward the crest from where he can see both sides, the cottage and the sheltered bay. The heavy grass on the hilltop is longer now, and thicker, as if it relished the nights and grew in response. Is that true of men and women as well? There is no answer, not that he expected any. The bay is calm, and only the smallest of waves lap at the golden sands.
The times when the waves roiled and beckoned he remembers, and when he walked the sea, and the seabed.
Thetis? Gone. You, too, and that demigod you tried to protect. And how many others have I banished? Yes, how many, Martel?
But she has gone where he has sent her, and there is no answer.
He recalls the last image from Thetis—a leaden shield, circled in black—cast at him as he left her and her charge next to a wine-dark sea.
Should you regret what is done? Should you undo it? Those are not the questions. They never were, Martel knows as he gazes down at the green waters.
The time for gods, for an ever-growing pantheon of powerful beings with little restraint and less morality, has gone.
Morality now, Martel? How high and mighty you sound. Morality from you? How moral was it to force the Prince to use his hunting laser? How moral was it for you to block Emily's memory to create your own dreams? To send Thor back to the barbarians? To scatter nearly a thousand ships across desolate planets? To do nothing when Apollo snuffed out Rathe?
Morality aside, what he has done is right. You hope.
Martel turns from the sea to the cottage, its lines as firm as when Mrs. Alderson first owned it. The dories chitter in the quinces. The grass grows, and now there is sunlight, and a natural shadow down the slope of the lawn. Sunlight… and shadow.
What more is life… than sunlight and shadow? He turns back to the other side of the hill to watch the waves. They have picked up, and gnaw at the beach, already beginning to change, ever so slowly, the contours of the sand, to change what was so long unchanged.
“… Tell me now, and if you must, Is a man much more than dust?”
His words are low, hardly louder than the dorles, or the swish of the water against the sand. But the birds cease their twittering, as if to hear the next line of the ancient song. The waves pause. The air is still. The shadow of the cottage shortens, darkens, as the distant sun rises.
The hillcrest is empty, and not even a raven crosses the heavens.
* * *
LXVIII
“Where did you get it?” the Matriarch asks as she freezes the holo that fills the end of the hall.
More than three battle lasers are focused on the figure of a man, dressed in black and hanging in the void. Although he wears only a cloak to guard him against the chill of deep space, the power sheets around him, haloing him. “Where did you get it?” This time her tone is sharper. “From M-7a. The molecular patterns match those of the Viceregal forces. So do the focal lengths and energy levels.”
The Matriarch takes a last look at the figure, tries to identify the face shrouded in shadow, but finally touches the control on her throne. The holo vanishes. “Do you believe what's on the cube?” Her Admiral turns his eyes to the floor without answering. “Do any of you believe what you see?” Still there is no answer. “Then why did you bring it to me?”
“Because we dared not to do otherwise…”
“What are the associated probabilities?”
“According to Stats, the probability is nearly unity that he destroyed the Grand Fleet of Karnak. We ran the series twice, with a complete systems check in between.”
The Matriarch smiles, a cold smile, one that would make the poles of Tinhorn seem warm by comparison.
“There's one other thing, Matriarch…” The tall woman who wears the winged stars of a Commodore waits. “Yes?”
“Aurore has been moved.”
“Impossible, I'd say. At least if the conventional wisdom is correct.”
“According to conventional wisdom, Matriarch, that holo is impossible as well, but every test we can devise bears out its truth. And Stats computes that the destruction of the Grand Fleet and the removal of Aurore to its present distance from its primary are linked. Probability eighty-five percent. And Aurore was moved before the Grand Fleet broke subspace.”
“Before? Are you positive?”
“Absolutely.”
“Command the Fifth Fleet to avoid the entire Karnak system. Otherwise proceed on plan. And make it a standing order that no armed Matriarchy ship is to approach Aurore. Ever!”
“Yes, Matriarch…” The quiet stretched out. “You question my orders, or the wisdom behind them?” The Matriarch barked a sound that might have been a laugh. “Remember that the Grand Fleet of the Viceroy was ten times the size of our Fifth Fleet, and even the Grand Fleet couldn't move planets. If we're fortunate, the Fuards won't understand that in time, but I doubt they are that dense.”
“Matriarch… I don't understand,” confessed the tall Commodore.
“You will, one day. Just because some gods are men doesn't lessen their powers. Check the name Martel under the Apollo files. You might also note why he fled to Aurore.” The Matriarch gestures, and both the Admiral and the Commodore step back, bow, and depart to carry out their orders.
* * *
LXIX
Except for Forde, the Viceroy knows, the palace is vacant.
The screens will hold against small arms for a century, if necessary, although the mob has not yet formed.
The four towers strike into the morning, blunted spears glittering as they have for more than nine centuries, ever since she completed the rebuilding from the ruins of the Prince's Palace.
The gold-shot blue of the synthestone walls stands unmarred, stands on the hill above the rubble that is the city that has fallen to the vagaries of two gods.
Kryn had hoped that her city of Karnak would have stood longer than the city of the Prince Regent which it replaced, much longer. Instead, she stands on the East Tower, overlooking the tumbled chaos that had been order such a short time before.
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