The Web and the Stars

by Brian Herbert

  In ensuing weeks, Jacopo and his daughter performed their own experiments in secrecy, with each of them on a different planet, transmitting back and forth. In this manner, the optimum cuts and configurations of the emeralds were developed for perfect sound quality. Subsequently, Jacopo’s miners found the special emeralds deep beneath the surface of other planets around the galaxy, and after testing them he took steps to provide security over all of the resources.

  But even with all of the research they conducted, Jacopo and his daughter never figured out how the gems transmitted across such vast distances … only that they did. Ever since then, Jacopo had paid Nirella more than she had ever imagined it possible to earn. She became his equal partner in the enterprise, even though he took all of the credit for it in public, and strutted about like a great inventor.

  She never seemed to mind, and for that, he loved her even more.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  If you consider any question and its apparent answer, you will come to realize that you still have a lot more to think about. Profundity is only a function of the power of the mind.

  —The Tulyan Conundrum

  The Tulyan Starcloud was a planetary system at the edge of the galaxy, surrounded by weak suns. Concealed from them by mists during their previous stay in the orbiting Visitor’s Center, Dux and Acey had only imagined what was down there, based on descriptions provided by the staff of the spacetel. But those words had been grossly inadequate for the wonders they beheld now as they returned from deep space, not coming close to what they were meant to describe.

  The beauty made Dux gasp and stare in speechless wonder. It was an otherworldly place that no one could tell him and his cousin about; they had to see and experience it for themselves.

  While Tulyan handlers took control of the podship herd, Eshaz said he would take the boys and Tesh on a tour around the starcloud. Tesh had refused to give up control of her podship, and had instead sealed the sectoid chamber in the way of her people and left the pod tethered to other vessels, floating in secure space, protected by the powerful energy shield of the strongest Tulyan mindlink ever conceived. Eshaz explained to his guests that Parviis had previously penetrated their security system, but that would not happen again. Every Tulyan on the starcloud was focused on this important assignment, and had created the most dense and unbreakable telepathic field in their history. It should be more than enough, Eshaz promised.

  Following Eshaz onto a wingless, pencil-shaped vessel, Dux noticed a circle design etched into the hull, which the Tulyan said was the sacred sigil of his people. After seating his guests in the cabin,

  Eshaz activated the computerized pilot system, and the small ship took off. It made hardly any noise as it flew. Presently, they were flying between the three planets in the unusual solar system.

  The legendary starcloud was unlike any place Dux and Acey had seen before, in all the travels they had made around the galaxy, on their vagabond adventures. The Tulyan lands over which they flew were pristine, a fairy tale realm of lovely meadows, sapphire-blue lakes, tall forests, and craggy, snow-clad mountains.

  “Each night the skies are filled with comets and meteor showers,” Eshaz said, “a truly remarkable ethereal display. Some of the heavenly travelers can be seen in the daytime as well, moving and flashing across the milky white backdrop of the starcloud.”

  “Sounds eerily beautiful,” Dux said.

  “It has that quality,” the big Tulyan agreed. “We have a defensive system called the Tulyan mindlink, and it is said that some of our most powerful Elders actually hitch telepathic rides on comets and meteors, and ride them into space.”

  “Wow,” Acey said. “Wish I could do that.”

  “You’re probably not smart enough, cousin,” Dux said. “And neither am I.”

  “Nor I,” Eshaz said. “This universe is full of wondrous things you can never do, no matter how long your life is.” He looked sadly at the boys, as if thinking of something he didn’t want to say to them.

  While the pencil-shaped vessel flew on, going in and out of the mists, Eshaz said his people did not live in cities. Rather, the four million inhabitants were widely separated in small settlements on the three gravitationally linked planets of the system. Tulyans lived quite simply, and one of the few examples of advanced technology they had was the starcloud transportation system they were using now.

  “The sigil of your people, the circle design on the hull of this ship,” Dux said. “What does it mean?”

  “Everything in life goes in a circle,” the Tulyan responded, “from life to death, from happiness to sadness, from beauty to chaos. We are all eternal beings , and yet we are not. Riddles and circles mirroring each other, truths and deeper truths, layers and layers of reality, all returning to a cosmic speck of singularity, a starting and ending point. That is what existence is all about, as my people have determined, with all of their collected wisdom.”

  Pausing, Eshaz added, “We Tulyans are a very ancient race, perhaps the first in the entire galaxy. We go far back, through the mists and veils of time.”

  Presently he brought the pencil ship down in a field of red and yellow flowers on the largest world of Tuly. Disembarking, he led them along a path to a knoll where he lived, a black, glassy structure overlooking an alpine lake that was surrounded by gnarled little trees.

  “This is the finest spot in the entire universe,” he announced, as he swung open a heavy door and went inside. “I am very fortunate, indeed.”

  The walls of his home, both inside and out, were of a deep black obsidian-like material. When sunlight glinted on it the hard surface became translucent and revealed glittering points of light deep in the surface. For Dux, it was like peering into the universe itself.

  After dinner that evening they went outside, where fiery comets and meteors swept through the mists of the starcloud, seeming to put on a show just for them.

  Far across the galaxy, Noah remained imprisoned at the CorpOne medical facility on Canopa. He had made numerous efforts to escape from the facility, and when the physical attempts had failed, he had resorted to mental excursions, using his powers in Timeweb. But those powers were nowhere near what they had once been, back in the days when he had been able to make mental leaps across space and pilot podships by remote telepathy … in the days before he advised Doge Lorenzo to set up sensor-guns at pod stations around the galaxy, to prevent deadly Mutati military ventures. The shapeshifters had been using a terrible weapon they transported in schooners aboard podships. Entire merchant prince planets had been blown to oblivion, scattered into space dust. Drastic measures had been required, and Noah had been at the center of the effort.

  As a result, several podships had been destroyed by sensor-guns. Circumstantial evidence suggested to him that the sentient spaceships had detected his culpability in the matter, and had taken steps to block his access to the cosmic web. Such efforts (if they occurred) had not been entirely successful, since Noah had still been able to burst out into the cosmos, for paranormal journeys. But his efforts had been erratic, unpredictable, and very frustrating.

  Now, after exhausting himself for hours in such efforts, he lay on a cot in his locked room, and found that he was caught in yet another locked room, a nightmare of the mind. In the dream he was trapped in a deep hole, with a huge Digger machine towering over him, piling dirt on top of him. Tesh Kori was at the controls of the machine, laughing fiendishly as she buried him.

  Noah screamed, but to no avail as she piled more dirt on. Somehow, even with the scooping activity he could still see her, and still retained a glimmer of life. He howled at her in protest, “How can you do this to me? Don’t you know I love you?”

  The roar of machinery drowned out his words, and then he heard only the ominous sound of dirt being piled on top of him. Darkness flooded him. He was completely buried. Moments of horror passed, in which he wished he could die, but somehow he did not. Then he sensed something opening up beneath him. The planetary crust cr
acked, and he tumbled into a deep, Stygian void, a frozen vault of time.

  He remembered hearing legends of another galaxy beneath his own, and as he tumbled into the unknown he felt chilled to the very depths of his soul. Various races called it the “undergalaxy,” the place of eternal damnation.

  Struggling with every last ounce of strength that he possessed, Noah flailed his arms and slammed into something. He woke up, and in the low light he saw that he was back in the Corp One room again. His left arm throbbed where he had struck a side table, knocking it over.

  Was this better than the nightmare his mind had displayed? Both scenarios were dismal, and offered him no respite. Not even death.

  Chapter Fifty

  “Every time you make a decision you are taking a gamble. In fact, the apparent act of not making a decision is really a decision per se, and is thus inherently a gamble. Since there is no way to escape risk, the only course is to embrace it.”

  —Remarks of Lorenzo del Velli, Grand Opening of The Pleasure Palace

  “Even from captivity, he has made a fool of you,” Francella said. She sat with Lorenzo in the dining hall of the space station, surrounded by the miniature forest of dwarf oak and blue-bark canopa pines that her brother had planted. “His Guardians attack us at will, then go into hiding. They’re causing a lot of damage, ruining industrial facilities and other key assets.”

  “A classic guerrilla war,” Lorenzo observed. “Not easy for a military power to fight. It can go on for years.”

  Leaning close to a cup of iced mocaba juice, the Doge inhaled, causing a narrow stream of brown liquid to rise from the cup through a narrow, invisible energy tube. A decadent manner of drinking, requiring hardly any effort, but he seemed to find it amusing.

  “If you would stop playing with your gadgets,” she huffed, “we might make progress in this little war.” With a sneer, Francella lifted her own cup of mocaba and drank it in the conventional fashion after deactivating the energy tube. She tasted the sharp, cold flavor.

  Something caught her eye in the woods, a movement that seemed unusual. Not birds or the small forest creatures that had been transplanted to the orbital enclave. A faint mist drifting in the air? She rubbed her eyes. When she looked in that direction again, nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary.

  “I do not play at war,” he said, a hurt and angry expression on his face.

  “But it goes on for too long. If you dedicated more effort to rooting out the evil, it would end. Why do you go easy on your enemies?” Beyond the Doge, she saw small, speedy birds flitting from branch to branch, kept separate from the dining hall by an invisible electronic barrier.

  “You are mistaken. I want nothing more than to end this nuisance, this swatting of gnats. But your brother’s forces—led by his adjutant—are a crafty lot, and have their own robotic forces.”

  Pausing, Lorenzo looked at her closely, an inquisitive expression on his face. “You do not look well, my dear.”

  That morning, she’d had makeup applied artfully by a personal servant, but obviously it was not enough to conceal the ravages of her ailment. Rage seeped into every cell and atom of her body. Somehow her brother had lured her into his spider web, and caused her to take the blood that would kill her. A deadly trick, and he had the immortal gift of being able to regrow his body, a gift that had undoubtedly been denied to her.

  Thoughts of revenge filled her. If she could not kill him, she wanted to destroy everything he had built in his lifetime, all of his plans, his hopes, and his dreams, turning them into a nightmarish charnel pile. Everything would die that he had worked for, and he would be left a broken shell, never able to escape his eternal confinement.

  “I want the Guardians annihilated,” she demanded. “They killed my father and destroyed CorpOne headquarters.”

  “It will be done,” the merchant prince leader promised.

  “Immediately!”

  “Of course. Now I want you to see a doctor.”

  “All right,” she said. But she did not see what good it would do.…

  In ensuing weeks the Red Berets, and especially Jimu’s machine forces, stepped up their activities. All over Canopa, people were arrested and brutally interrogated. It was something Jimu did well.

  Having been banished to the Inn of the White Sun by the machine officers on Ignem, the feisty little robot Ipsy pressed on. Despite the large amount of money he had garnered from his clever business operations, the officers had been paying little attention to him, and had rejected his offers of financial assistance to build a bigger army. He could not understand why, as military robots, they cared nothing for increasing the power and might of their forces. Without Thinker to guide them, they were only stupid machines, with no direction or sense of purpose. They just marched around down on the surface of the planet and engaged in foolish skirmishes.

  Yet, through hard work and an aggressive marketing strategy, Ipsy impressed the civilian leadership of the Inn. As a consequence, they promoted him to the directorship of the Inn of the White Sun. Very quickly, the little machine grew increasingly officious and ordered much larger civilian robots around in a gruff tone, demanding excellence from them. Under his management, the Inn was becoming more popular than ever, even though few Human or Mutati travelers journeyed there anymore, because of the limitations on space travel.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Consider sight. No matter what you gaze upon, there is always something beyond, something unseen. Consider the other senses as well, and every thought, and you will see it is true for them as well.

  —Noah Watanabe

  Now that Francella Watanabe knew she was dying, her surroundings took on an entirely different cast… more harsh and glaring, with hardly any noticeable loveliness or color. She could not imagine ever enjoying anything again, the beauty of music, the taste of fine wine, or laughter among friends.

  She felt that way about the soft dawn pastels that flooded across the sky now, which provided her with little enjoyment at all, certainly not enough to divert her from her bleak emotions. Essentially numb to her surroundings, Francella tried to walk up a walkway toward CorpOne’s largest medical laboratory building, but her steps were arthritic and painful. Every joint and muscle in her body ached. Even at this early hour, Dr. Bichette had better be there, as she had demanded. She had telebeamed him in the middle of the night with her orders, but he had sounded remote and peculiar, not his usual cooperative, obedient self.

  All the pleasures of life seemed to have been taken from her prematurely, and it did not seem fair to her. Francella was not dead yet, and by rights such things should not be taken from her until the very last moment of her existence, and her last gasp of breath, which should have been many years from now.

  On a deep level, she knew that she had been dying ever since she took her first lungful of air, more than thirty-eight years ago. Every mortal in the galaxy was given a death sentence at birth. The only question was when they would succumb to the frailties of the flesh, and under what circumstances. It was all so uneven, and so cruelly unpredictable within a predictable framework, the distinct limitations of the bodily container.

  She wanted to lash out at everything and everyone, to be even harder on people than she had been before, but somehow that seemed purposeless to her at the moment, and might even increase her unhappiness. Perhaps if she had been a more pleasant person, it occurred to her now, the Supreme Being might have blessed her with a less demanding, far happier life. But the difficulties she had experienced since her childhood had made her the way she was today, had molded the hard edges of her personality. She had only reacted to challenging situations, the primary of which had been the curse of having a brother like Noah. From the beginning, their father had favored her fraternal twin over her, giving him a charmed life while cruelly shunting her aside. As a result she had been forced to assert herself and develop a strong personality, one that could not be trampled upon.

  Nonetheless, deep in her soul she had
a sensitive side. And with death staring her in the face, she was terrified.

  Francella limped into the laboratory’s coffee shop, where she had told Bichette to meet her. To her relief the doctor was there, accepting a large cup of mocaba from a machine. In a slow, sleepy voice, he said, “This is already my second cup, but it doesn’t seem to be doing much good.”

  “Huh.” She stared at him, didn’t get anything for herself. He drank nervously, and seemed to be avoiding eye contact with her, as if afraid to anger her by focusing on the obvious—that she appeared to have aged ten years in only a few weeks. She hadn’t bothered to wear makeup today, and knew the effect must be startling to him. The muscles in her legs ached from the walk.

  Finally, he glanced at her and asked, “Are you ready?”

  “That’s why I’m here.” Her voice creaked and she felt tired, overburdened with her problems.

  “Of course.”

  They walked side by side down the corridor, saying nothing, encountering no one at this hour except for one of the maintenance men, wearing coveralls and a tool belt. The man looked at her oddly as she hobbled along painfully, and she stared him down.

  The examination went much as she had anticipated, a numbing blur of probing instruments and medical j argon coming from Bichette’s mouth. Essentially, she was taking this man into her confidence in revealing her physical debility to him. But she had no one else to turn to on this important health matter, no one else to give her advice. Though she had never admitted as much to him, she considered Bichette something akin to a friend. For years he had served her father and CorpOne well, as more than a mere doctor or the director of CorpOne’s Medical Research Division. But friendships were not something Francella had cultivated in her life. There had been no time. Other matters had been more pressing, more immediate, and she’d had to put certain things on the shelf of someday.