The Web and the Stars

by Brian Herbert

  So far Anton had used his own influence to keep his forces and other government resources out of such operations, asserting that they were needed elsewhere. In reality he still admired his uncle, and could never envision taking overt action against him. Anton had also resisted making any contact with him, thinking it was best to remain essentially neutral and let the warring factions fight it out among themselves.

  I must not allow personal feelings to interfere, Anton thought as he went back into his office. I must make the right decision for the Alliance.

  From youthful inexperience, he was not certain whom to consult about this situation. As time passed, he had come to the realization that he would need to make the decision on his own. He added the letter to the others, locked away in a cabinet.

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  It is one thing to know you are going to die someday, at an indeterminate moment. It is quite another to see the process accelerate in front of your eyes.

  —Francella Watanabe

  With money, all things are possible, she thought. What a lie that is, what a cruel lie.

  Money could not buy love or happiness, or the salvation of Francella’s life, which continued to dwindle away while she suffered helplessly. For weeks, the wealthiest woman in the Merchant Prince Alliance had been holed up on the lower floors of her cliffside villa, avoiding all Human contact. She took her food through slots in the door like a prisoner, and she wasn’t much different from that, because she was trapped inside her ever-weakening body. She looked like an old lady now, like her own grandmother. The elixir that had been prepared from Noah’s blood was not working on her at all, though she had been trying it in all conceivable doses, taking care to space them out (as Bichette had recommended) so that she did not overdose.

  Enraged, she hobbled through the villa, even going to the top floor that was still leased to Lorenzo, though he had not been there in months. She smashed every mirror in the elegant home, even breaking anything that showed the slightest reflection of her aging face. Hardly any piece of glax survived, and she had every window covered on the inside (and many on the outside) with shutters. She even ordered that every serving robot be painted in dull colors, and that their synthetic eyes and other forms of visual sensors have no sheens whatsoever. Everything in the villa had to be either modified or replaced, to meet her demands. Even the smallest item that could cast a reflection.

  Throughout Francella’s increasing madness, money rolled in. Much of it amounted to paper profits, since she received regular nehrcom-transmitted statements on how her holdings continued to mount around the galaxy. But a lot of it was real and tangible, profits that she could get her hands on from her extensive Canopan operations, and from her generous share of her son’s tax collection revenues, much of which came in from the many companies that had their galactic headquarters on Canopa. This planet, home to Prince Saito Watanabe, had been second in its wealth only to Timian One. And now, with the obliteration of the capital world, Canopa was preeminent.

  She had enough money to keep CorpOne’s expensive medical laboratories and other industries going strong for a long time, facilities that were now heavily guarded by her own corporate military forces, along with contingents of Red Berets that Anton had assigned to her. With money, it should be possible to find a cure for her malady. But how long would it take? She was running out of time.

  In her rising despair, she had considered hurling herself off the cliff by her villa, shooting herself in the head (or having someone do it), taking poison or having it injected, and even getting into a vacuum rocket and flying far away into space, bound for unknown regions. How romantic that last option sounded, and how utterly foolish. If she did that, or decided on any of the other options, it would amount to giving up. And she wasn’t about to do that. As long as she could manage one breath from her lungs, she would struggle to have a second, and a third.

  Each mouthful of air and each moment had become precious to her, but the effort to sustain herself was hellish. She wished she could just rest and stop thinking about her problems, but knew she had to keep trying. Something would turn up, a medical procedure or even a miracle that had seemed impossible before. If her brother could have his miracle, she deserved her own, too.

  Her thoughts ranged from philosophy to the pits of gloom, from hope and light to dark, homicidal rage. Her medical researchers lived in terror of her, and well they should, for their inexcusable failures. Periodically she had been getting rid of the people she felt were incompetent, or getting in the way of progress. All of her medical laboratories had been fitted with video-recording devices, enabling her to watch the progress of each experiment closely, listen in on the conversations, and send out her killers. All while never leaving her villa. Thus far she had spared Dr. Bichette, but with her own increasing medical knowledge—from observing and from her studies of technical holobooks—she had been selecting the doctors to work with him.

  Bichette had been recommending that she broaden the scientific study of the elixir by bringing in more test subjects than just herself and the handful of others they had been using. She was coming around to agreeing with him. By seeing how the elixir worked on different people, it would surely reveal more information, and might open up new, critical avenues of research.

  So it was that one day Francella transmitted her orders directly to Dr. Bichette, who had been ordered to never go out of range. “I want you to immediately distribute elixir to a broad spectrum of Canopa’s population,” she said. “Charge a price for it, but not too high, so that we pick up a variety of social strata and genetic types. Don’t put any limitations on it. I want all galactic races—at least those on the planet now—to have access to the elixir. Include a sampling from Lorenzo’s space station, too.”

  Francella could not see Bichette on any screen at the moment, but she heard him muttering angrily, followed by the suction sound of a toilet. She smiled to herself.

  Presently, she saw him in the hallway outside the restroom, staring up into an electronic eye. “Did I hear you right?” he asked.

  She saw two robots with dull silver patinas pass by him and continue on their way.

  “You did, and I want it instituted immediately. My lawyers will form a new subsidiary of CorpOne to handle the sales. Mmm, we’ll call it LifeCorp, and its product will be the Elixir of Life. How does that sound?”

  “Excellent, ma’am, but I must tell you something we have discovered. We can produce millions of capsules, but we must be careful not to use up all of Noah’s blood plasma in the manufacturing process. Until we locate him, the blood supplies we have are irreplaceable.”

  “Of course, of course.”

  “Very well then, ma’am. I’ll take care of it right away.”

  “I know you will.”

  Everything in Francella Watanabe’s life was on the fast track, including her bodily decay and the commands she issued in a desperate attempt to stave off the end.

  In a matter of days, LifeCorp salesmen spread out to the major cities of Canopa, using old-fashioned hucksterism and showmanship to draw crowds and sell the product. In this manner, they sold more than two hundred thousand capsules of elixir, as many as they had been allotted, while leaving plenty of Noah’s plasma for Francella herself and for other studies.

  Even in the face of mounting military and political tensions, her new profits were substantial. But she didn’t care a whit about the money. Concurrent with the marketing program, she dispatched an army of medical researchers to study the path of each capsule of elixir after it was sold, analyzing how it affected those who took it. Each purchaser had to sign a holodocument, agreeing to cooperate with the research program. Offered the prospect of eternal life, no one argued with that.

  Out of all the elixir capsules that were sold, the product did enhance the DNA of a small number of people … but only six. This was in line with a computer projection that Francella discovered Dr. Bichette had withheld from her. Against what have been expected, she ac
tually forgave him for that, as she came to realize he had not wanted to discourage her, and she would not have wanted him to. Even if the odds were pitiful, and they were close to that, she wanted every chance she could get. Every straw of hope.

  The sales and research program became like a lottery, with the prize going to only a few. But what a prize it was! The winners emerged under widespread publicity and then tried to continue their lives and vocations, envied by all who knew them.

  One of the lucky winners was Princess Meghina, the infamous Mutati who wanted to be Human, and who had remained in that shape for so long that she could not change back. She lived in her own private apartments on Lorenzo’s orbital Pleasure Palace.

  Far across the galaxy, at the Tulyan Starcloud, Eshaz was summoned to the private office of the First Elder. As Eshaz entered, he saw Kre’n standing at her central work table, with Dabiggio sitting in a sling chair on one side. Uncharacteristically, the big Tulyan Elder had a smile on his bronze-scaled face, which surprised Eshaz.

  “And where is your Parvii friend and her vast fleet of podships?” Dabiggio asked.

  “She’ll be back,” Eshaz said.

  “With the ships?” Dabiggio’s large body caused the sling chair to sag low, just above the floor.

  “If anyone can do it, she can.”

  “So, she’s a super Parvii, just as Noah Watanabe is a super-Human. Is that it? My, you certainly have influential friends. But has she even sent a message? Any word at all?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” Eshaz admitted.

  “We should never have let her go,” Dabiggio said. He hefted himself out of the chair and stood by Eshaz, at least a head taller than him. “She admitted having information beyond the reach of our truthing touch … all that stuff about breedmasters, war priests, and unstoppable telepathic weapons. She was probably a spy, and has given military intelligence about us to the Parviis.”

  “After millions of years, the Parviis have a lot of dirty tricks,” another Elder said, a thin male who was one of the followers of Dabiggio. “The way they magnify themselves should tell us something. They never are what they appear to be. How do we know they even resemble Humans in their appearance? Maybe they’re something else entirely, something they don’t want us to know about. Think about the way their swarms move, too, defying physics and even the imagination. They breathe without air? What are we to believe about such a race?”

  “Even if Tesh Kori brings the ships,” Dabiggio said, “we shouldn’t let her back into the starcloud. I say we keep the mindlink barrier up and strike the fleet the way we hit the swarms.”

  “If she brings the ships, we’re going to let her in,” Kre’n said, interrupting the exchange between the Elders. “Bringing them here would be a feat never seen in the annals of history.”

  “And you would sacrifice our race just to see it?” Dabiggio asked. “There is no limit to the tricks they could pull on us if we let them in. These are Parviis we’re dealing with, remember, not innocent children.”

  “We’re all in trouble anyway,” Kre’n said. “Even if she brings us half that many, or a hundredth, we have to take the chance.”

  “OK,” Dabiggio said, grudgingly. “But if she doesn’t get back soon we need to embark on repair missions with what we have, making a last-ditch effort to save what’s left of the galaxy.”

  “Agreed,” Kre’n said.

  “She’ll be back,” Eshaz repeated. “I know she will.”

  At that moment, thousands and thousands of Tulyan repair teams were being assembled on the three worlds of the starcloud, along with the potions and other supplies they needed for their work. As it looked now, there would be many more teams than ships, a reality that would restrict the efforts considerably.

  To deal with this serious limitation, the Elders were assembling reports from all of their web

  caretakers. The trouble spots were being prioritized on a triage basis, like injuries on an immense galactic battlefield.

  Chapter Seventy

  We have discovered six immortals—the Mutati princess, four Humans, and a Salducian diplomat. It is not too early to declare all of them immortal. Their cellular structures have changed dramatically, with the addition of what we are calling ‘warrior antibodies’—proteins in their bodies that annihilate all disease pathogens, both overt and latent. As stipulated in the contracts they have signed, we are now drawing their blood and flash freezing it. This offers the potential that much more of the elixir can be produced, and that we will not need to worry so much about using up the plasma of Noah Watanabe.

  —Dr. Hurk Bichette, report to Francella Watanabe

  Whenever Lorenzo gambled in his magnificent orbital casino, he did not relax, not even when he was winning, which was virtually all of the time, due to the unregulated programming of the games and machines. He always had a lot on his mind, and as the revenues poured in, he was not much happier than Francella.

  One glittering evening he stood in front of his elegantly dressed patrons to promote his newest game, which featured a smiling Mutati simulation. Behind him an oversized mechanical creature changed smoothly into a variety of alien and animal shapes, while the patrons oohed, aahed, and hissed good-naturedly.

  “The players sit at those stations,” Lorenzo said, pointing to chairs and screens that ringed the faux Mutati, which continued to metamorphose. “When the bell rings, you have one minute to place your bets and select from the shapes on the screen, as you guess which shape the monster will take when it stops.”

  “Like a roulette wheel?” a woman asked.

  Lorenzo laughed. “Certainly not. It’s like a Mutati! Can’t you see that?”

  The crowd laughed, and people moved forward to take seats at the play stations.

  At a gesture from Lorenzo, the large mechanical creature stopped metamorphosing, and became what looked like a flesh-fat Mutati, in its hideous natural state.

  Leering at the creature, a drunken nobleman asked loudly, “Is that what Princess Meghina looks like when she takes off her makeup?”

  Some people laughed nervously, while others gasped in shock, since it was known that Lorenzo had stood steadfastly by his courtesan wife, and had even given her private apartments on the orbiter.

  “I shall consider that the liquor talking,” Lorenzo said with a hard stare. “Otherwise, I would have to create a new game just for you, based upon the torture chambers in the Gaol of Brimrock.”

  This elicited hearty laughter among the nobles and ladies.

  “It’s nice to see all of you enjoying yourselves,” Lorenzo said, “but keep this in mind. My lovely wife will get the last laugh on all of us. She has not only changed her appearance to that of a Human, but she may have become immortal, enabling her to dance on our graves.”

  This dampened the amusement somewhat, but Lorenzo knew these foolish people would soon be back at the games, transferring their assets to him. He only had to make their losses amusing, and even verbal jousts served that purpose. The gamblers would keep coming back.

  In the midst of the throng, Lorenzo recognized a tall, sharp-featured man and nodded to him. It was Jacopo Nehr’s younger brother, Giovanni. Lorenzo heard he had been traveling, so he must have made it back to Canopa just before the cessation of podship travel.

  As the Mutati game got underway, Lorenzo slipped into an office to discuss the events of the day with his attaché, Pimyt. The Doge Emeritus greatly appreciated the loyalty of this aging Hibbil, and had raised his salary to even more than he had earned as a government employee.

  “What are you doing with all of your money?” Lorenzo asked. He and his aide sat at a table where cups of steaming mocaba juice had just been set out for them.

  “Hiring bounty hunters,” the Hibbil said, as he took a sip of the beverage without waiting for it to cool. High temperatures never seemed to bother him, though this was not reportedly a Hibbil characteristic.

  “Eh?”

  “To bring Noah in.” Pimyt had wet fur on hi
s upper lip, from the drink.

  “Oh, but you don’t have to pay for that personally. Just pay it out of my accounts.”

  “I’d like to bring Number One in with my own money. Somehow, it sounds more special.”

  “Ah, nice idea. I’ll raise your salary to make up for the payments. Come to think of it, maybe I’ll pay for some bounty hunters myself, making it like one of my gambling ventures. I am a lucky man, you know. Despite my recent political challenges.”

  “You are, indeed. Now, onto business. So far, even with the help of our powerful corporate friends on Canopa, we cannot locate Noah’s hidden headquarters. We could use help from the new Doge, but to get to your son we have to go through Francella, and she’s gone into seclusion.”

  “So much for her promises of access to Anton. Well, we’ll have to get Noah without him. I want him more than anything.”

  “We’ll get him anyway. I have a devious move in mind. Since Anton’s ascension to power, Noah has gone to ground and is no longer attacking government facilities, perhaps under some secret arrangement that we don’t know about. Even so, we can make it look like he’s still operating.”

  Pimyt laid out an intriguing plan, causing Lorenzo’s eyes to narrow in concern.

  “We can penetrate some of the corporate guard forces on Canopa and destroy assets, making it look like the Guardians did it.”

  “Which corporate assets?”

  “NehrGem. They have a jewelry-manufacturing operation in the Valley of the Princes.”

  “But Jacopo Nehr is one of our friends.”

  “And he hasn’t been helping enough, not as much as some of our other friends. I have incontrovertible evidence, if you want to review it.”

  “No, that’s your job. I trust you.”

  “Thank you. Maybe Jacopo has been distracted by his military duties, but—as you know—we don’t accept excuses.”

  Lorenzo nodded.