He struck a match, puffed, blew smoke.
“A related problem,” Shenai began. “Over the last months we’ve constructed a vast military and security apparatus, which may be reluctant to disperse. Or which the leadership may find too useful to disperse.”
Aristide looked down the table with a grim smile. “Solve one problem with mass drivers,” he said, “and all problems begin to seem solvable by mass drivers.”
“We want all that stuff under control!” said the onetime Minister of Industry, his eyes wide. “Mass drivers, homicidal robots, biological weaponry… we’ve got to work out ways of decommissioning it all before we get too used to it being there, looking over our shoulders.”
“Indeed,” said Shenai. She ran her fingertips through her yellow hair. “Well, I have done my bit for the open society.” She lifted her eyes to Bitsy. “Or so I believe, yes?”
“Endora,” said Bitsy, “has carried out your instructions.”
Shenai gave a tightlipped smile. “Excellent.” And at the sight of the others’ wondering looks, she said, “Before I returned my keys of office to the President, I ordered that all official war deliberations were to be released by Endora into the public record as soon as the menace from Courtland was ended. Which was—what?—ninety minutes ago?”
Aristide looked at her in admiration. “Brilliant!” he said.
“Of course it only deals with my own administration, here on Topaz. But within those limits, all that was classified secret will now be revealed. Who said what at which meeting, and,” she smiled grimly, “what heads of other governments counseled what course of action, including surrender.” She nodded. “I expect some heads will roll,” she said. “Metaphorically speaking, of course.”
Her former deputy prime minister looked at her in shock.
“Kiernan can’t stop it?” he said.
Shenai’s little smile grew smug. “If he had known about my orders to Endora, and if he had countermanded them, then of course all the records would still be under seal. But he didn’t, and he hasn’t, and so…” She waved her glass. “There’s a good deal that Kiernan still has to learn about politics, and he just got a big lesson.”
The former Biological Sciences Minister looked at her with admiration.
“Will you be opposing Kiernan in caucus?”
She shook her head. “I’ll stick around long enough to help choose his successor. But I don’t want to stay long enough to become a complete political creature. Look at du Barry or Shu Meng—they’ve been in politics for four or five hundred years, and they look at everything in terms of political relationships, networks of power, architectures of prerogative and authority… Half the relationships they see don’t even exist, and most of the remainder don’t matter.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to turn into that. Best to walk away while I can. End on a high note.”
“What shall you do, then?” asked Lin.
“I told Pablo,” she said, looking at Aristide, “that I might emigrate.”
“A worthy choice,” Aristide said. “Though given recent events you may discover that you’re more popular than you think you are, and that will make it difficult to leave.”
Her lips quirked in a skeptical smile. “An agreeable fantasy,” she said. “If true.”
“For myself,” said Aristide, “I think I shall adopt the ultimate aim of the Venger’s program, and carry it forward past his death. I propose to storm Heaven.”
The others stared at him. He shrugged.
“Well, why not? It’s a worthy goal—to find out who made us, and why. And unlike my late double, I won’t insist that you all accompany me.”
“Possibly,” Lin ventured. “But if you announce that goal now…” He shook his head. “Speaking strictly from the professional point of view, I would not care to guarantee your security.”
“People are going to wonder,” Shenai said, “if the right Pablo returned from Courtland.”
“Admittedly,” Aristide said, “the public mind may have to mature a bit before I make the announcement.” He nodded at Shenai. “I’ll take the advice of political professionals on the timing.”
“Besides,” said Bitsy, breaking in, “the technology isn’t quite there yet. We can project a wormhole into a universe we create, and now—as with the overpocket—we can now project one anywhere in our universe, but to project one into a pre-existing universe, like Heaven, will require some work.”
“And we’ll want to rescue our lost pockets first,” Shenai said. “We’ll want to reconnect Midgarth and Hawaiki and the others—and if we can send a hypertube to New Qom or any of the Venger’s other strongholds, we’ll still have to invade and occupy them.”
“Before they do it to us,” said the deputy prime minister.
There was a moment’s uncomfortable silence.
“The ability to project a wormhole within our own universe will create enough changes as it is,” said the quondam Minister of Industry. “Instead of uploading ourselves into a projectile and firing ourselves across light-years to reach another star, we’ll be able to walk there with a single step. Everything will be open to us—stars, clusters, other galaxies.”
“And other times,” Aristide said. “Though apparently the math won’t let us violate causality—a restriction for which, on mature consideration, I am thankful.”
Shenai leaned forward, a frown on her face. “But getting back to your project, Pablo. How are you going to get political agreement on this? Half the religious pockets are going to be against it, right from the start.”
Aristide looked ceilingward in calculation. “There are how many political entities now, in the various pockets? A hundred and fifty-something?”
“Something like that.”
“All I need is for one to agree with me,” Aristide said. “We’re all experts in creating wormholes now—it shouldn’t be that hard, once the basic theory is done. And besides, now that the idea of its possibility has escaped into our universe, the act itself has become inevitable—so why shouldn’t it be me who does it?”
Shenai laughed, and raised her glass.
“Your logic is irrefutable.”
“You said you might emigrate,” Aristide said. “Why don’t you come with me—to Heaven?”
She shook her head. “I’ll need another demi-bottle before I consider that.”
“Well,” said Aristide, “shall we order?”
More bottles and demi-bottles arrived, and food as well. As the party broke up, Aristide offered Shenai a ride, and she accepted.
“Where shall I take you?”
Her face turned doleful. “Anywhere but the miserable little apartment Kiernan gave me,” she said.
“I have only a suite in a hotel.”
She smiled. “Does it have a view?”
“It does.”
“Of Heaven?”
“Perhaps,” he said, “a distant prospect.”
The Destiny took them to the pink-and-white hotel. The desk clerk looked at him with surprise as he walked past—it wasn’t every day, Aristide supposed, that he entered with a drunken Prime Minister on his arm.
In the elevator, she rested her head on his shoulder. He put an arm around her and kissed her. She smiled, and kissed him back.
Perhaps, he thought distantly, one would have preferred to kiss another. But that longing was not sufficient to keep him from kissing this one. And in any case, if one lived long enough, one would meet the other again.
The limbic system, he reminded himself, was what kept one human.
The elevator doors opened. Bitsy walked ahead, too obvious in the way she was not paying attention to the couple.
Aristide’s biometrics opened the door. They followed Bitsy inside, he closed the door, and embraced Shenai. Her perfume swirled in his senses.
He frowned, straightened. Something was different.
A man came through the bedroom door. Tecmessa gleamed in his hand. Looking in his face was like looking i
n a mirror.
“Uh-oh,” said Aristide.
23
“Hello, Bitsy,” said the stranger with Aristide’s face. “It’s been a long time.”
He thrust the broadsword toward the cat. Bitsy leaped; there was a crack; and the end table behind her disappeared. In Aristide’s arms, Shenai gave a nervous leap. The lamp that had sat atop the table crashed to the ground, the shade tipping wildly.
Bitsy dived under a sofa, and with another whipcrack sound a coffee table set before the sofa vanished.
Pablo turned back to Aristide with a rueful smile. “I seem to be having a little trouble controlling your weapon,” he said.
“No point in shooting Bitsy now,” Aristide said. “She sent the alarm the second she became aware of you.”
Pablo tilted his head and looked at Aristide curiously, as if judging an item of clothing perceived in a mirror.
“I’m sure alarms are going off everywhere,” Pablo said. “It won’t matter, as I have loyal soldiers stationed in this building who will keep the police at bay long enough for me to… accomplish my mission.”
Aristide gently released Shenai and guided her toward the door. She stared at Pablo in complete bewilderment.
“Pablo,” she said. “Who is this?”
“This would be Vindex,” Aristide said. Her eyes widened, and she stared at Pablo in wonder.
“His appearance has changed since I saw him last,” Aristide added, “and I’m not sure how he got here.”
“I wanted to fool any biometric devices designed to protect you,” Pablo said. “And as for my arrival—well, once you hid half the solar system in a bubble, I knew what was coming as well as anyone. I knew I’d lost. I set out to find out how you’d done it, and what Courtland discovered was a method of projecting wormholes from one universe to another. I’d planned to lead an invading army into Topaz, but unfortunately you destroyed Courtland, wrecked Pamphylia, and wiped out my army before I could move against you. I and my personal guard survived only because we were in a hardened research facility.” He looked at Shenai and frowned. “Who is this exactly?”
“An old friend. Shenai Ataberk.”
Pablo’s eyebrows lifted. “You’ve changed.”
“So have you,” said Shenai, more cuttingly.
“And by the way,” Aristide said, “I’d like to register an official complaint at the way you’ve been interfering with my love life. It really is your most annoying trait.”
Pablo’s eyes shifted back to Aristide.
“This will be the last time,” he said. “I promise.”
Aristide took a cautious step away from the door, farther into the room. The sword’s point followed his movement.
“What are you doing here?” he said. “You’ve got the technology now. You could be confronting the Inept at this moment, and instead you’re here talking to me.”
Scorn glittered in Pablo’s eyes.
“I’m an outlaw, a refugee with a few dozen followers,” he said. “The Inept, whoever they are, are hardly likely to take me seriously. No—” His eyes narrowed. “The Inept are safe from me. I suppose I can take comfort in the likelihood that someone will probably seek the Inept eventually.” He scowled. “Possibly even you.”
“The idea has its charm,” Aristide said. “Would you like me to represent you?”
He took another step into the room. From outside the hotel the sound of sirens was faintly heard. Pablo took a sideways step to maintain the proper distance from Aristide.
“I doubt you’ll approach them with the proper disdain,” he said. “And besides—you’ll be elsewhere.”
Aristide took another step. The sound of gunfire echoed up from street level.
“Stop that creeping!” Pablo commanded. “What are you trying to do—get to a weapon? It won’t work.” He took another gliding sideways step into the room to match Aristide’s movement.
“I was trying to get away from Shenai,” Aristide said. “So she wouldn’t be hurt.”
“I don’t intend to hurt anyone.” Pablo’s features glowed with triumph. “You forget that my motivation throughout this entire adventure has been the desire for revenge. And that while my feelings for the Inept, due to their remoteness, necessarily partake of a degree of abstraction, my feelings for you, who have thwarted me at every turn, are entirely concrete.”
“Oh, come off it,” Aristide said. “If you kill me, they’ll just reload me from backup. There’s hardly any point to it at all.”
Tecmessa’s point described a small circle in the air. “I have no intention of killing you. While it is likely that I may spend the rest of my existence in prison, allowed to die of old age with no backup and no resurrection, or to have my brain rearranged to a more socially acceptable norm, I will in the interim be able to comfort myself with the knowledge that by using this weapon I can send you to a place—Holbrook, is it?—occupied entirely by individuals who hate your guts and who will want to see you suffer the most painful death—or life—imaginable.” Eyeteeth glimmered in his smile. “What did you say was in the place? Tubers and cruciferous vegetables?” His smile broadened.
“Bon appétit,” he said.
The lamp swung violently on the end of its boom and connected with the back of Pablo’s head. He took a staggering step, and a black-and-white form streaked from beneath the sofa, electricity arcing from bared fangs.
Bitsy bit Pablo on the ankle, and his body straightened with the shock.
Aristide stepped forward and wrapped his left arm, snake-style, around Tecmessa’s bare blade.
The sword was, after all, a lever. Whoever had the best leverage controlled it.
He slammed Pablo away with the palm of his right hand and pulled the sword away with the left.
Shenai stepped forward and hit Pablo on the head with a vase she’d plucked from the chest of drawers. Pablo staggered, and as he recovered Aristide shifted the sword to his right hand and ran Pablo through the heart.
Vindex fell, his face fixed, an expression of baffled fury.
Aristide looked critically at his left forearm, which was bleeding rather freely after having wrapped the sharp-edged weapon.
He and Bitsy had planned the whole thing, Aristide communicating silently on his implant.
Shenai was gazing at Pablo’s dying form with sick anger.
“Don’t look,” Aristide advised. “The sight won’t be pleasant.”
She turned away and put her head against his shoulder. After a moment’s hesitating, Aristide put his bleeding arm around her shoulders.
Gunfire rattled the windows.
“It shouldn’t be long now,” he said, “before we’re rescued.”
24
Birdsong entered through the slatted blinds, and with it the fragrance of flowers and the airy tinkle of the wind chime. The last quarter-tones of the guitarrica danced in the air as if in answer to the gay water that spouted from the mouths of the bronze fishes atop the fountain.
Discontent settled upon her like the fine grey dust of the high plateau. She thanked the musicians, but waved them away before they could begin another ghazal. The young girls bowed and retreated, leaving her alone with the fountain and her thoughts.
Recline and watch the dance of the butterfly, Ashtra thought idly, and the dance of the heron.
She frowned and rose from the divan, her hands supporting her heavy belly. Her silks swished lightly on the cool marble as she walked to the tall window, and adjusted the blinds so that she could gaze out.
The city of Gundapur lay below her, its domes and towers bright against the sky. Beyond she could see green fields, and on a hill the white pavilion of the sultan. The Vale of Cashdan, the great cleft in the escarpment that led to the grey upland desert, was far away, invisible even from the city’s tallest tower, but sometimes, when the wind was right, dust carried all the way from that plateau turned the sky the color of iron.
Farther still, months away, was the Womb of the World. A rider had come to
the sultan with the message the Womb was now closed, a result of a war between the sorcerers on the other side. The opinion at the court was that this on balance was a good thing. “Fewer adventurers,” her husband had proclaimed, “fewer bandits, fewer wars.”
Fewer magicians, she thought.
Idly she tapped one heavy sapphire ring against the cypress windowsill. Its facets cast sunlight on the ceiling.
Her husband had proved to be considerate, even lavish. He had given her silks, jewels, and a large household staff. He gave her a generous allowance, and—for Gundapur—a fair amount of freedom.
But in this decisive man she could see no trace of the boy she had married seven years before. And though he was generous, he didn’t have the gift of intimacy. He spent little time in her company, preferring the society of other merchants or of companions he had made on his long journey. From excursions with his friends he returned late, if at all. He remained a stranger.
So, at times like these, when the dim sun’s heat hung heavy in the air, and the wind chime rang softly to the fitful, uncertain breeze, she thought of the swordsman and sorcerer she had met on her journey from County Toi, and recalled the hours spent beneath the willows next to the oasis where her caravan had tarried for fear of the evil Priests of the Venger…
Lucky, she thought, that the child she carried was her husband’s. She had counted the days, and was certain.
But with that anxiety faded, Ashtra could afford to indulge her fantasies.
He had called her “Ashtra of the Sapphire Eyes.” He had made verses for her. Her husband had never done such things, and never would.
Was he truly a prince in disguise? She liked to think he was. He was certainly more princely than the sultan, who she had now met on several occasions, and found a coarse, greedy man, too fond of the consumption tax, the bastinado, and the strangler’s bowstring as instruments of state policy.
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