Absence of Blade

by Caitlin Demaris McKenna

  “Very good,” the Father praised them. “Now go stand by the doors until I call for you.” The two Arashal dipped their heads less elaborately to their master and shuffled off.

  “Shall we seat ourselves?” Berkyavik gestured toward the desk.

  “Of course.” A chrome chair grew out of the floor before the desk. Black padding sprouted from its surface to accept the Father as he sat down across from Berkyavik.

  “Now.” The Father steepled his fingers on the mahogany desktop. “What is the status of your project? I want you to tell me everything you have done concerning Shomoro Lacharoksa.”

  Everything. Berkyavik swallowed; he was not certain how the Father might take what he was about to suggest, though that little demonstration with the Arashal had given him some hope. A personal project. Perhaps he would understand why Berkyavik had taken the opportunity he’d been given just a bit beyond the letter of his assignment.

  Still, it was best to make a good presentation first.

  Berkyavik explained the structure of the interrogations and broadly outlined the information they had gleaned from their Osk captive thus far. He was proud of the calm evenness of his voice as he concluded his official presentation:

  “The details will be in my final report, but I think that gives you a good overview of what we’ve learned from her. We have yet to learn Oskaran’s location—we cannot utilize much of this other information until we do. I don’t imagine it will be long before we break her completely. Shomoro Lacharoksa was a formidable seph, but she is only an Osk, after all.”

  Berkyavik took a deep breath, and the Father raised his eyebrows in surprise. “There’s more?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Berkyavik sighed. “Sir, I, uh . . . I have taken the opportunity to implement some of your theoretical conversion techniques during our interrogation sessions with Lacharoksa. Carefully monitored, of course.”

  “Have you, now?” the Father replied. The corners of his mouth turned down slightly, and nervousness shivered anew in Berkyavik’s gut.

  He hurried on. “Yes, sir. I took that initiative. Speaking frankly, I think Shomoro Lacharoksa could be a candidate. She’s responded well to the conversion drugs, and we have the equipment—”

  He stopped. The Father had reached across the desk and taken Berkyavik’s pale hands in his own. His moss-green eyes looked huge across the small space. “Tor . . . my son . . . no.” The Father closed his eyes and shook his head, smiling sadly. “The time for that is past with them. The Osk made their choice on Aival, when they took up arms against our Church.”

  “But that was one enclave on one world,” Berkyavik argued. “Would you damn the entire species over the actions of a few dozen Osk?” A note of pleading had entered his voice, making him flinch inwardly; he heard the flaw in his argument as soon as it was out of his mouth, but it was too late to take it back.

  The Father reclined his chair, that sad smile still on his lips. “Ah, but they weren’t acting alone, were they? Za made an excellent show of innocence—the colony’s officials were quite courteous, from what I heard from my acquaintances in CoG’s legislature. They had them going for years . . . until Expansion Intelligence revealed that those courteous Osk officials were giving aid and succor to the insurgents terrorizing Diego Two. The truth came out, as it always does.” Berkyavik ran a hand over his brow, suddenly very tired. He knew this was an argument he wouldn’t win with the Father; he knew where it was going to end up.

  “You know, Michael used to say the same thing,” the Father went on. There it is, Berkyavik thought. “He believed as you do: that the Osk, no less than any other species, could be guided toward light; toward the truth.” The Father rose from his chair slowly, as though he were feeling every year of the three hundred he was rumored to have lived. Berkyavik stood back from his own chair quickly.

  “Your faith is admirable, but don’t let it cloud your judgment. I did, once. But Michael was the one who paid for it.”

  “Sir.” They shook hands; Berkyavik found the Father’s gaze again, and the green eyes turned hard.

  “There is no forgiveness for those who have chosen to be damned. Learn what you can from Lacharoksa—then kill her.” Berkyavik nodded, and kept his head bowed until he heard the Father turn away.

  “Goodbye, Father,” he called as his guest reached the door, his two Arashal exiting ahead of him. The Father turned.

  “Farewell, my son.”

  His voice quavered the slightest bit toward the end; then he was gone.

  10

  Jan Shanazkowitz shifted in his leather chair and looked around the room he’d taken for an office in Nheris, trying to settle his thoughts as he had settled his body into the seat. He’d ordered the desk with its mess of holofiles to sink into the floor and programmed two small tables and a food console to extrude from the smartwalls near the chamber’s panoramic window. The console had prepared tolerable versions of dolmas, cheeses, and a bottle of white wine infused with glassfruit.

  A chime resonated through the office’s silver walls. Jan rose, brushed the lines of his navy suit into place, and strode to the door to buzz in his guest. The door slid open to reveal a trim man of average height and apparent middle age. Though he had worn a long, ivory robe during the hyperwave call, today he was clad in a casual yet elegant suit of polished gray cotton.

  “Hello, Father.” Jan brought up a light smile from somewhere as they shook hands. “Welcome to Nheris.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Did you have a good flight?”

  “Very pleasant. You get a lot of sun here.”

  “Two hundred fifty days a year. Of course, the other hundred are rain.”

  A hum of silence fell on them. In his military days, Jan would have gotten straight to the point, but he’d managed to learn a degree of hostly finesse since then. He gestured toward the table with its spartan hors d’oeuvres.

  “Would you like anything to eat or drink before we get started?”

  The Father gave him an amused smile and glided farther into the room, toward the picture window. “You make it sound as if you invited me to run a marathon rather than engage in a simple negotiation.”

  Some negotiations can be marathons. That thought quickly gave way to another: I invited him? Huh. The ’wave call had come in to his Nheris office only a few weeks after Jan had arrived to his new duties, piped through hyperspace all the way from the Universal Church’s seat on Rosetta. Jan had been more than a little surprised—taken aback, even—to have the Father of the Church onscreen asking about the status of their little colony. A place like Olios 3 should be the tiniest crumb on a very big plate to an institution like the Universal Church.

  Yet here was the Father himself, nibbling on a bit of dolma, a healthy glass of wine in his hand. Jan joined him beside the window with a wine flute of his own, both of them looking out over the gleaming towers of Nheris. Jan’s office was in a good location: he could see a band of green parkland between the buildings, and beyond that, a flashing wedge of cobalt ocean.

  “Have you been here long, Father?” Jan asked.

  “A few days. Long enough to see the other side of Olios 3. I visited the New Great Plains not long ago.”

  “Really?” Jan was surprised; not many visitors to Olios 3 were eager to venture onto the ancient lava flow.

  “Checking in on one of our envoys. He’s been out there a while, heading up a special research project.” The Father swirled his wine, sipped. “Well, I know you’re a busy man. I might as well get straight to the point.”

  Jan waved his guest on.

  “The Universal Church has a diocese in Nheris already. I requested this meeting to personally offer you the services and resources of our Church as you develop Olios 3 into a member world of the Expansion.”

  Jan realized he was staring, but the Father didn’t seem to mind. “The Church
wants to help govern Olios 3?”

  “Oh my, no!” the Father laughed, his brief good-natured grin revealing square, even teeth. “We’re not a governing body, have never claimed to be. The Church only wants to advise Nheris going forward. You’re planning to open Olios 3 to non-Terrans, from what I hear.” Jan nodded, though of course it had been a committee decision. The Father went on.

  “There is no human organization that has had more experience with the sentient beings that surround us than my Universal Church.” His words had the feel of dogma, an incontrovertible argument. Setting down his glass, the Father folded his hands behind his back and returned his eyes to the view, as though in his mind the discussion were over, with himself the unequivocal victor.

  When Jan said nothing for several minutes, sunk in his thoughts, the Father glanced over at him. “You need our experience.”

  “Your experience,” Jan sighed, “is exactly what we don’t need.” He scooped up his empty glass and returned it to the table, watching as the slim wine flute slowly sank into the white smartsurface for cleaning. Neither of them had said anything for several minutes when Jan heard the Father let out a tired breath.

  “You mean the Osk insurgency in Diego Two.” Half turned as he was from the window, the Father’s square features were limned in light that brought out the lines around his mouth and eyes. “It was ignorance which led to that crisis, not experience. And, I must say, more than a little arrogance as well. A misguided attempt to circle the wagons in a time of uncertainty. I don’t need to tell you how things changed after Rreluush-Tren. People were scared, especially on frontier worlds like Aival. They wanted to know there were institutions that could protect them.”

  Jan nodded: he’d heard the argument before, on numerous news spots and post-mortem analyses defending the Church’s actions after the civil crisis. Those actions they could defend.

  Jan rejoined his guest at the window. “By ‘people,’ I suppose you mean human beings,” he said.

  The Father nodded. “A sloppy choice of words on my part.”

  But a revealing one, Jan thought darkly. He wanted this conversation to be over; wanted to usher his guest out with a polite smile and a firm refusal of his offer . . . but another part of him was intrigued by this tack. He chose his next words carefully.

  “I’ll be frank, sir. I found some of the rhetoric coming out of the Diego Two diocese disturbing. The political climate undoubtedly had something do with it. People were afraid of another war; they were suddenly feeling just how far away from home we are. We’d been playing at being a galactic power when Rreluush-Tren made it real. The frontier worlds were starting to realize the scope of what we’d gotten ourselves into: billions of human souls huddled around campfires in the dark, surrounded by ‘dangerous aliens.’” Jan’s emphasis at the last reflected his contempt for the politics of fear that had come into vogue on Aival soon after the end of the Terran-Urd war. “From what I could see, the Universal Church slipped in and quietly took advantage of that fear. There was no thought given to the impact it might have on the alien enclaves.”

  It had been subtle at first: a slight uptick in Church membership on mixed-race worlds, especially on Aival where its gigantic frontier branch squatted. Then had come the media spots, with prominent Church ministers quietly advocating the urban segregation of the non-Terran enclaves. For security, they said. Temporary, they said, until the alien enclaves were ready for what integration was possible. Then even more subtle hints that perhaps it would never be possible: that alien minds were too bizarre, their cultures hopelessly out of alignment with human values. The best the Expansion could hope for was containment of the non-Terran populations within its sphere.

  “Containment was one of our initial positions after the war,” said the Father, as though he’d read Jan’s mind. “But an initial one. Our Diego Two branch blundered when they suggested it as a permanent solution.”

  Jan raised an eyebrow. “So you didn’t approve of the Aival branch’s leadership? I thought the whole UC was more or less behind them.”

  “The UC joined in mourning after the crisis. We’d lost—I’d lost—good people. Aival’s Grand Minister was a close personal friend of mine.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you.” The Father nodded. “The fact of the matter is that the Aival branch crossed a line; it made ministers out of members who were not merely zealous but militantly pro-Terran—openly xenophobic in many cases. People who were in favor of keeping the Osk and other enclaves at the fringes of our civilization forever, or expunging them from the Expansion entirely. It was all wildly out of line with the Universal Church’s message; unforgivable, even if it had gone no further than talk.” A corner of the Father’s mouth turned down with disapproval. “One of the first things the new Grand Minister did was eliminate the reactionaries from our ranks, but of course the damage was done.”

  Leaning his weight on one leg, the Father set down his wine glass and turned away from the window. He looked almost sheepish, hands in his pockets. “So . . . I take it you’re declining the Church’s offer of assistance on Olios 3?”

  “I’m afraid so.” Jan shrugged to show it was nothing personal. “I just don’t think it would be politically sensitive to allow your Church to hold anything more than religious sway in Nheris right now. It’s just too soon.”

  The Father nodded. “I understand. This entire war has been a ghastly affair for everyone concerned. It’s going to take the Universal Church a while to bounce back.”

  Jan was tapping his fingers on the sill, feeling he should say something to soften the blow, when the Father cleared his throat.

  “Tell me, Doctor, are you a Christian?”

  Jan took temporary refuge at the wine table, pouring himself another glass as he thought about it. “I majored in philosophy,” he parried at last. “Though no one has called me ‘Doctor’ since I graduated. And . . . yes, I suppose my beliefs inspired that path.”

  The truth was that he’d needed to stop being a soldier. Diplomacy and then academia had seemed like the safest, most honorable path away from that. The Father was gazing at him with calm green eyes, neither judgmental nor impatient. Jan suddenly imagined the other man holding that expression for hours, effortless as an oil painting. Somehow he found himself going on.

  “I fought a tour on Rreluush-Tren, near the end of the war.” Jan swallowed, shifted the glass to his opposite hand. “After that, I felt an intense need to . . . to make sense of what had happened, what I’d seen there. To justify the suffering somehow. You might call it a crisis of faith.”

  The older man nodded, his gaze fixed outside the window again. “You went looking for an answer that would explain the universe as it is,” he said, as though he’d known all along. Or was restating something he’d long ago concluded for himself. “What did you discover?”

  Jan set his glass down on the windowsill with a hard clink. “That there is no justifying that kind of suffering. I decided that if there is a God—meaning no disrespect, Father—but if there is one, and he put us here, it’s to end suffering wherever we can, as much as we can.”

  “That sounds like a Utilitarian argument. ‘The question is not, can they think? Or can they speak? But can they suffer?’” the Father quipped, rubbing the short gray stubble on his chin. “Jeremy Bentham, I believe, advocating for the rights of animals. Though as I understand it, his philosophy went much further than that.”

  Jan nodded. “I latched onto it early in my academic career. It works because it’s so simple: the role of any just society is to secure the greatest happiness for the greatest number. The definition of good government, to me at least, is one that gears all its actions and resources toward that end.” He shrugged. “It’s an ideal of course, but at least Utilitarianism gives us a place to begin.”

  The Father responded with a grunt—whether a disturbed or appreciative one, Jan couldn
’t tell. His guest stared into his wine flute contemplatively before downing the last of the pale green liquid. A quick, satisfied smile crossed his face. “Ah, but Utilitarianism missed the point.”

  “Which is?”

  “Which is that the manner of our suffering—no less than our ability for speech or logical thought—is what sets humankind apart from the animals. You see, when an animal feels pain its suffering fills the world; only human beings ask, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ Only human beings wonder what their suffering means.”

  Jan opened his mouth—

  “Or so we thought,” the Father went on, nimbly preempting him. “Until a shift occurred—perhaps the most profound shift in human history. For the first time, we encountered sentient beings who could think and feel, intelligent creatures like ourselves.”

  “The Drevl Char,” Jan supplied.

  “Well, they were the first contemporaneous ones, but I was actually thinking of Rosetta even earlier than that . . . though of course by our time it was all ruins. But there was at least the evidence that a people had lived there. Have you ever been to Rosetta, Doctor?”

  Jan shook his head. Rosetta was famous, of course, as the first world on which humans had found evidence of intelligent alien life. But Jan wasn’t particularly interested in archaeology. Recent history was more his bent. “I’ve heard it’s supposed to be incredible.”

  “Oh, it is.” The Father looked off into the middle distance, his face pensive. “It is,” he repeated with a hint of sadness.

  “I’m not sure I follow you, though,” Jan admitted. “What does all this have to do with . . . suffering?”

  “On an individual level, pain is a warning to the organism that something is wrong, that if it doesn’t act immediately it will be hurt worse, or even die. I believe our society is experiencing that kind of pain on a cosmic scale. It’s no coincidence that the Expansion has had three major armed conflicts with non-Terrans—four if you count the insurgency—in the last fifteen years. The warning signs couldn’t be any clearer: our civilization is going to tear itself apart . . . unless we engineer a complete transformation in cosmic affairs.”