The Web and the Stars

by Brian Herbert

  So, he suffered through his quiet misery.

  As the ruler of Dij, with the concomitant duties his father had assigned to him, Hari had countless matters on his mind. He remained busy when Parais was away, filling each day with work to keep from having to deal too much with his emotions. But these days, ever since the Zultan had started his psychotic Demolio program, Hari was having trouble focusing on much else.

  While the young Emir had taken no part in leading his people into the mass insanity, which ran rampant on every Mutati planet except Dij, each day that passed without him rectifying the situation made him feel more and more culpable. He was, after all, the eldest son and heir of the Zultan of the Mutati Kingdom.

  As the designated ruler of the planet Dij, he ran it like a fiefdom, deriving a substantial income for himself and sending taxes to his father on the capital world of Paradij. Bucking pressure from the Zultan, Hari had steadfastly refused to use Adurian gyrodomes or portable gyros, and had issued edicts on Dij making them off-limits to his subjects as well. Even though the Adurians were military allies, he had never trusted them, believing they were too smooth and always had answers that sounded as if they have been coached.

  Now, after long contemplation and soul searching, Hari had decided upon a radical course of action. / am a sane person, but I must do an insane thing, he thought.

  His plan would require the ultimate in security precautions as he dealt secretly with a brilliant Mutati scientist named Zad Qato. Ideally, Hari would have liked to have gotten together personally with Qato … which would have meant having the Paradijan take a solar sailer to Dij, since Hari could not go to him without calling unwanted attention to himself. Unfortunately Qato was under close scrutiny himself, and could not go flitting around the solar system on long journeys that took weeks in each direction.

  Qato did, however, have the highest level of military security clearance in the Mutati Kingdom, which gave him access to the Mutati variation of nehrcom communication. It was by this method that the two sent coded messages back and forth. The quality of the transmissions was poor, since the Mutatis had not solved all of the problems of the system. But it did work, and they sent instantaneous transmittals to one another at prearranged times.

  Zad Qato, long in years and wisdom, shared Hari’s aversion to Adurian gyro units, and to the entire Demolio program that the Zultan had forced on his people. At Hari’s urging, Qato had performed careful calculations of trajectory for the Demolio torpedoes, and had adjusted the projected route of a particular shot.

  Only the two of them knew this, and Hari prayed that they would not be discovered before they could put their ambitious plan into effect. Everything had to go just right, and the guidance problems had proven to be very difficult. But for the particular target they had in mind, it just might be possible.…

  Chapter Eighty

  Life is not fair,

  But death is,

  The great and eternal equalizer.

  —Noah Watanabe, Galactic Insights

  Francella Watanabe, after all of her schemes and dark triumphs, had withdrawn from virtually everyone and everything. For months she had refused to allow anyone into her private quarters at the villa, and had received her food and other necessities through pass doors. The connected rooms smelled horrible, and bore evidence of her increasingly dismal moods, with furnishings overturned and broken, paintings ripped from the walls and smashed, and dirty clothing strewn about.

  Periodically Francella hurled heavy objects off the balconies and loggias. Sometimes when she threw things out they went over the cliff, but once in a while she intentionally hurled heavy objects into the gardens and onto walkways when she saw people down there. More than once, she had struck servants, and had seriously injured two of them.

  One evening a private investigator came to inquire about the injured servants. He stood on the loggia outside the entrance to the main floor, while Francella shouted at him through a closed door, refusing to open it. “I warned them to stay out of the way!” she screeched. “It’s their own fault if they didn’t listen!”

  “Get yourself some psychological help,” the man shouted back. “You’re not well.”

  “Don’t tell me what I need! I’ll give you three minutes to leave, or I’ll destroy your career!”

  She heard low voices outside, and departing footsteps. Then, watching from a curtained window, she saw the investigator hurry along a walkway, looking back nervously, wary of getting hit by something. He climbed into a groundjet and sped off.

  Satisfied for the moment, Francella turned a chair right-side up, and sat down, breathing hard.

  She continued to rake in profits from her various corporate operations, but had stopped selling elixir, owing to the unpredictable and potentially dangerous nature of the product. As Dr. Bichette had so wisely pointed out, if it worked on the only Mutati known to have taken it—Princess Meghina—could it possibly work on all Mutatis if they got their hands on it, and render them indestructible as a race?

  Francella had always considered her own interests above those of anyone else, but with her own death staring her in the face, she did not want to become the laughing stock of galactic history. No, she would rather give up her own life than risk being responsible for the elevation of the Mutatis to the immortal—rather than mortal—enemies of humankind.

  On one level, she did not wear such an altruistic sentiment easily, for it ran counter to the narcissistic spine of her lifetime, and subjugated her to a footnote of history at best—without a chance of rising above the corporate legacy left by her father. But on another, deeper level, she was actually enjoying the new sentiments, and they felt right to her. Near the end of her existence now, when she was having trouble walking without a cane, when her own breathing was becoming labored and she looked a hundred years old, she was at least connecting with her inner self. It had not really taken her a century to achieve that, not in terms of elapsed years, but spiritually and emotionally she’d had at least that much experience.

  No one would believe it if she revealed these innermost thoughts, so she felt it best to keep them to herself, not writing them down or recording them in any way. Many people found religion (or at least spirituality) at the end of life, and perhaps she was doing the same. In any event, it was private and personal, and she had nothing to prove to any other Human being, only to herself. Francella had set events in motion, and had attempted with all of her energy to destroy her hated brother, but it had all backfired on her.

  Running parallel with that, even her attempt to bring Princess Meghina down were failing miserably. Francella had always disliked the attractive blond courtesan, since the two of them had been long-time competitors for the affections of Lorenzo del Velli. Francella had tried to ruin her by revealing her true identity as a Mutati, but that had not gone as she had envisioned. Through a cruel twist of fate, Meghina had gained the upper hand. She had become an exotic personality at the gambling casino and an attraction for the guests, going out and mixing with them, telling colorful anecdotes. Even worse, Meghina had received the precious gift of immortality, while Francella had suffered the exact opposite—a death sentence that was being carried out on her with tortuous certainty.

  Ever since the discovery that Meghina and five others had achieved immortality from the elixir, Francella’s medical laboratories had been taking samples of their blood and flash-freezing it. All the while, Francella had been pressing Dr. Bichette to make more elixir from these samples. But he had resisted, pointing out that it had only been a few months since their apparent transformations, and computer projections indicated that their bodies could eventually reject the elixir, setting in force a reaction like that suffered by Francella, or worse. He didn’t want to make any new product from them until he conducted more extensive studies. And in her decline, Francella was running out of the energy to argue with him.

  She felt as if she had been chopped up mentally and spiritually, just as she had tried to hack apart N
oah’s body. On one level, Francella still wanted to destroy her enemies, principal among them her own twin brother. But on an entirely different level, she had been experiencing something new and surprising: altruistic feelings for all of humankind.

  It occurred to her now that maybe she only thought she felt such benevolence. Maybe, subconsciously, she was really concerned about her own spiritual legacy, and didn’t want to risk leaving herself out there as the consummate idiot of all time who had set loose a demonic elixir that led to the downfall of the entire Human race.

  Francella could still risk that, widening the elixir studies, and maybe the worst would not come to pass. Maybe Princess Meghina had only achieved her apparent immortality because of some quirk in her body chemistry. She was, after all, unlike other Mutatis psychologically, and physically as well, now that her body would no longer change form. Francella had to admit that the courtesan had never acted like a Mutati, and investigators had never turned up any evidence against her to show that she was disloyal to the Merchant Prince Alliance or to Lorenzo.

  She was too perfect to suit Francella, irritatingly so.

  If only I wasn’t so impulsive, she thought. If only I hadn’t injected Noah’s blood into my body.

  With newfound clarity Francella wished she had waited for her laboratory to make elixir and that she had taken only that, without first contaminating her body, harming it with the raw primal energy that flowed through Noah’s veins. But even if she had waited for the processed product, she reminded herself now, that would not have guaranteed the success of the elixir on her.

  Still, the odds had not been that low: six in two hundred thousand … one in thirty-three thousand.

  Through all the horrors that Francella had been through, her skin was not only wrinkling and drying out, it was also changing color to a sickly yellow-orange cast, as if an artificial tanning lotion had not mixed well with her body chemistry.

  Across the room, a tabletop telebeam projector blinked, signifying the arrival of a message. If this communication did not please her, she would destroy the projector and open a new one, from those she had stacked in a closet, all in their original containers.

  Opening the electronic message, she read the words that danced in front of her face, then changed her mind and touched a voice activation panel to listen instead. It was Dr. Hurk Bichette:

  “Your troubles might have something to do with the fact that you are Noah’s fraternal twin,” Bichette said. “Perhaps there is a ‘Janus Effect’ at work here, with an opposite outcome for each twin. Noah is immortal, while you have become the opposite, and are suffering from a form of the aging disease progeria. We are following this line of research, and hope to provide you with an antidote.”

  Bichette went on to list, in his usual self-serving way, all the things he and his staff were doing for her benefit, how they were working around the clock, never relenting in their efforts to save her. She’d heard such drivel from him too many times.

  In the midst of a sentence, Francella fired a puissant pistol at the projector, causing it to disintegrate.

  But Francella had more telebeam projectors in storage, behind locked doors where she could not easily go on rampages and destroy things. She also had more than five thousand doses of the Elixir of Life, the same formula that had been sent out to the public. So far she had only consumed a few doses, and it had not gone well for her. Now she would try something different.

  Shoving trash out of the way, the desperate, aging woman brought all of the elixir out and sat in the middle of the floor with it. Surrounded by laboratory boxes, she took dose after dose by squeezing the blood-red capsules between her fingers and feeling the prick of the injection needles. In a few minutes she felt no effect, only pain on the tips of her fingers, which were bloody from all the needles.

  Dr. Bichette had warned about the danger of overdose, but at this point she could not see what she had to lose.

  Chapter Eighty-One

  If something disappears entirely, with no trace remaining of it, how can anyone ever prove it was ever really there? Aren’t memories notoriously unreliable?

  —From Worlds and Stars, one of the philosophical plays

  The operators of a Mutati deep-space telescope saw a blinding flash of light, but it was not what they had hoped and prayed for, to God-On-High.

  A fraction of a second later, the Mutati homeworld of Paradij—with billions of the Zultan’s citizens—was obliterated. An armed lab-pod had gone off course and split open the core of the planet. The massive explosion had taken Paradij’s three moons with it as well.

  Receiving confirmation of the destruction by messenger from the communication station, Hari’Adab screamed, “It can’t be! No!”

  He could not hold back the flood of tears. It was late at night, with the cold darkness of an eternal shadow seeping into his soul. Trembling, he knelt in his family’s private chapel, gripping the sheet of parchment that had just been handed to him. Behind him he heard the gently beating wings of the messenger as he flew away, and the opening and closing of the doors.

  The ominous words had been etched on tigerhorse skin by the Mutati version of a nehrcom transceiver, and even contained—like the audio-video versions of other transmittals he had seen—gaps and static markings, reflecting the imperfect quality of the transmission. But enough remained to tell him what had occurred.

  It was not supposed to have gone like this. He could not comprehend the immensity and error of the disaster … or his own part in it.

  The old scientist Zad Qato had assured him that the Demolio would only hit one of the moons of Paradij—Uta—the location of the primary Demolio-manufacturing facility. Once the main factory had been on Hari’s own world of Dij, but eventually the Zultan decided to move them to an automated facility on Uta, where he could visit the operation regularly.

  In an engineering marvel that might have been one of the Wonders of the Galaxy if it had been widely publicized, the ancient moon Uta had been sealed with an Adurian-generated atmosphere, a living organism that cocooned the moon in an oxygen-rich enclosure that allowed Mutatis to breathe the air. Automatic gravity systems further enhanced the moon for habitation, enabling the shapeshifters to walk about normally on the surface.

  After making hundreds of Demolio shots from Paradij, the Zultan had recently decided to move the launches to Uta. In a gala kickoff ceremony, Abal Meshdi went to Uta to broadcast the event to all the citizens of the Mutati Kingdom.

  Infiltrating the Uta facility and gaining the trust of the Zultan, Zad Qato had calculated the trajectory carefully, and after Abal Meshdi’s speech the lab-pod was supposed to have boomeranged around and hit Uta, killing the Zultan, a handful of Mutatis in his entourage, and a small number who supervised operations at the automated factory. In setting up the assassination, Hari’Adab had not liked the prospect of collateral damage, but under the plan it would have been a necessary sacrifice, saving trillions and trillions of war deaths—both Mutati and Human—at the hands of his insane father.

  For some time, Hari had contemplated the unthinkable familial sin, the act of patricide. Sometimes, as he stood with his father, he had considered killing him on the spot, but always he had weakened. In close proximity, the old Zultan had intimidated him, and had prevented the movement of the younger Mutati. Hari had stood frozen, unable to go through with it. Even when he visualized making the attempt he worried that something might go wrong and he would fail. If that happened, he would never get a second opportunity.

  He had considered countless other ways of accomplishing the dreaded task, such as sending an assassin after the old terramutati, or bombing the Citadel of Paradij. But his father had dramatically tightened the network of security around himself and all of his palaces, so Hari could not come up with any such plan that had the remotest chance of success.

  That only left two workable options, doing it himself in close proximity or blowing up the Uta moon. Since he could not accomplish the first method, th
at left only the second. It was beyond unthinkable, especially for a Mutati who had always prided himself on his high morals. But it was the only way.

  Zad Qato had assured Hari that the trajectory calculations and guidance system adjustments would be absolutely perfect. Now, Hari could not even yell at the old scientist, since Qato had been on Uta at the time of the launch, and the powerful detonation of Paradij had taken the moon with it.

  Hari was deeply saddened at the tragic loss of his own father, as well as the old scientist and so many other shapeshifters. It had gone horribly wrong. By this horrendous act, Hari knew he had put a stop to his father’s murderous aggressions. But that realization did not help assuage his conscience, not in the least.

  There might be a few outriders still in deep space with the capability of firing torpedoes, and he could only hope that they were not on prearranged attack schedules. But he knew that the Demolio torpedo program could not continue on a large scale, since the Zultan had coordinated everything himself, and Mutatis would not do anything important without his blessing.

  Now, in his private chapel, Hari went to a cabinet and removed a ceremonial sword. Unsheathing it, he pressed the tip of it against his fleshy midsection. And prepared to fall upon it.

  At that moment, Parais d’Olor—hurrying to tell Hari about the podship landings—flew by the chapel window and looked through it. Seeing what he was about to do, the beautiful aeromutati crashed through the plax and knocked the sword away with one of her powerful wings.

  “My darling, my darling!” she exclaimed, gathering her wings to pull him to her bosom.

  Looking up at her gentle, compassionate face, Hari wished he had been faster with the sword. But that would have required bravery, which he did not have. He felt the deepest, most mournful sadness anyone could ever experience, for he knew with certainty that he would be condemned to the eternal damnation of the undergalaxy for this. He had indelibly blackened his soul.