"Explain."
"For every two deaths, there is less than one born to take their place. The actual numbers." Fordyne stroked the side of the controller. The ruby beam brightened as the images Fordyne desired insinuated themselves into the others' heads. "For every thousand deaths, there are only four hundred and eighty-nine births."
"As I said, an anomaly. Time will ease this."
"There is more than an accelerating death rate, a declining birth rate, and the ... seizure numbers." Fordyne found himself unable to even mention epilepsy. His hand shook harder and fear rose within him, fear of personal shame. Nothing controlled his trembling, not even the illicit drugs he had been using. "These are to be considered restricted data." The murmur around the Table of Rules showed the Councilors' disapproval. Secrecy solved nothing. And from whom would they keep such knowledge? They had been at peace for well over a hundred years, war only a vague, disturbing memory.
Fordyne pressed on. "Innovation and scientific discovery are on the wane."
"Really, Fordyne, don't be absurd. You've carried this distasteful folly of yours far enough." The Chief of Rules rose and leaned forward on the table, knuckles bent under and supporting his weight. "I want to hear nothing more from you on this."
"Denying our trouble will not erase it," Fordyne said. "Look! Examine the figures. In the folders. Here!" He almost crushed the projector as he squeezed down hard on it. Columns of numbers, the correlational coefficients, the matrices laden with proof raced across the surface of their unwilling minds.
"Begone. We have other matters to deal with..."
"As you will it, Chief." Fordyne bowed his head, both in deference to his leader's command and in defeat. He stroked the projector and a sigh of relief went around the Table of Rules. Once more they could deny without the interference of truth.
"They refused to listen?" Young Jerad stood staring at his instructor. Fordyne could only nod. "But the facts! The numbers! The high correlations!"
"They meant nothing to the Chief. Or to the others." Fordyne collapsed into an amorphous cloth cushion that threatened to swallow him whole. He almost wished that it would and put him out of his inner torment.
"But can't they see what is happening all around us?" Jerad hadn't learned patience. Fordyne closed his hot eyes and felt the welling wetness at the corners. Jerad would never learn. There wouldn't be enough time. Not for Jerad, not for anyone.
"They dismiss it all as anomaly, an unexpected singularity in the data. Such turnings in the number patterns have happened previously," Fordyne explained, more for the comfort of hearing his own voice than for any other reason. More softly he added, "But never with such impressive force."
"The results of my research," Jerad said, kneeling beside Fordyne. "Look!" The young statistician thrust out the folder. Fordyne laid his hand on the first page. Images flashed through his mind. He pulled his hand back and stared at his assistant.
"Yes," Jerad said, anticipating Fordyne's words. "One reason our research has deteriorated over the past few decades is irreproducibility. A classic experiment, even one as well-documented as the light-speed determinators, give varying results with each new test. Even when the same instruments are used."
This shocked even Fordyne, who had thought himself beyond surprise. "How?"
Jerad shook his head. Bright purple eyes blazed and his lipless mouth pulled into a thin, determined line. "Cossia thinks it might have something to do with the pass-by."
Fordyne frowned. What had been hailed fifty years earlier as the greatest event in scientific history had proven to be anticlimactic. Worse, the astronomers who had focused their telescopes on the cometary object had been ridiculed when the promised cosmic display of winter-sky-brightening coma had failed to appear. It had set space research back a hundred years and had, in Fordyne's mind, been responsible for the Council canceling all attempts to reach either of the nearby planets. Since those days, research funds had gone into geophysical research, not astronomical. A race that had once soared on wings doomed itself to remaining planetbound.
Fordyne sighed as he thought of missed opportunities. The data to be accumulated upon reaching a near orbit of the planet would have been immense. Even the geologists would have benefitted. He sighed again. It wasn't to be. The bulk of data accumulated by the specialists in volcanoes defied mathematical analysis, being of a subjective nature. Lost opportunities. So many. Too many.
He shook himself from the sad reverie, and asked of Jerad, "What effect could the comet have had on us?"
"Cossia is unsure. She says it may have been a potent force field, not unlike this electromagnetic field Illfon and the others speak of. The comet may have cast its unseen net in front of the planet, and we may have passed through it."
Fordyne did not call the theory farfetched. What he had presented to the Chief of Rules and the other Councilors counted as far-fetched. Jerad merely theorized. A hypothesis and nothing more that might explain their data.
"Fordyne, your pallor... " Jerad stood, flapping his arms futilely as if to take wing, as their ancient ancestors had done at the first hint of confusion.
Fordyne tried to answer. He bit his tongue, felt the dental plate severing the rock-hard appendage, drawing blood, choking him. He reached out and found himself trembling uncontrollably. Panic seized him. Fordyne flopped forward, thrashing about, knocking over tables laden with folders and drinking saucers.
"Help me," he croaked. Froth coated his lips and caked on his chin, hardening with dried blood. The world exploded in vivid, crazy colors and his eyes rolled up. Back arching, limbs beyond command, Fordyne dissolved into misery as the seizure fully possessed him.
"I am so ashamed," Jerad said, his head hanging low between his thin shoulders. Cossia's hand fluttered along a quaking arm. She stroked and soothed, as if Jerad were a fledgling who had fallen from his birthing nest.
"Fordyne is at peace. He counts numbers in a land beyond our understanding. He is happy."
Jerad turned stricken eyes to his friend. "You don't understand. He did not simply die. He was ... taken."
Cossia pulled away.
"Yes," Jerad cried. "Like the others. He died in an"--he fought down his revulsion—"epileptic seizure."
"How awful! Such a great mathematician to be so dishonored."
"I did nothing for him." Jerad pleaded with Cossia for absolution. He did not find it in her amber eyes.
"You were his friend. While he lived, he conducted himself honorably. None can do more than Fordyne."
"I'd just told him of your theory concerning the pass-by."
They gazed at the funeral tree, now ablaze and consuming Fordyne's remains. They backed from the heat, waiting for the flames to die. In older times the trees had been real, but with the need to deal with thousands of deaths every year in the city alone, the funeral pyres had become increasingly symbolic. The trees were now of steel, and gas jets fueled the cleansing fires.
Jerad spun and stalked off, hardly trusting himself. His nose spasmed with the smell of Fordyne's cremation. Did that nose twitch signal the onset of a seizure? Or did he merely react to the odor of his mentor and friend's funeral? How could anyone tell in time to avoid dishonor?
Jerad shuddered.
Cossia's strides lengthened. She matched his bobbing gait perfectly. "We have no evidence, but much became confusing when the comet passed so close."
"Close?" Jerad shook his head. "It didn't even come near enough to the sun to leave a tail. What sort of comet is that?"
"My point, Jerad," she said, gripping his arm. "What if it left a gas in space and the planet swept through it? We might have been poisoned. The"—she swallowed and avoided naming their friend's affliction—"unfortunate disease might be curable, as many have suggested. We might find an antidote to this poison."
Jerad sucked in a deep lungful of air. Only the taint of Fordyne's passing marred the perfect spring day. Cool breezes blew off the ocean and pure rain would fall before sunset. He had alw
ays cherished the rain, enjoying its wetness against his thick hide. Jerad flexed one yellow hand, pushed back the sleeve of his robe and let the strong radiation from the sun bathe him.
"Why has no one detected this poison?" He didn't put into words his feeling that such a fine day put the lie to Cossia's claim. It felt good in the sun. She caught the sense of his emotions.
"We are dealing with problems beyond our understanding," she said. "Fordyne believed that nothing could be known unless it could be quantified. He failed. And from that we learn a valuable lesson. We must trust our instincts. Not in science but in emotion." She thumped her rounded chest. "Here lies the answer, not here." Cossia tapped her skull.
Jerad shrugged. Fordyne's death had left him stunned and peculiarly hollow within. Such dishonor for a researcher he had so admired.
"We must try. We must solve this problem or we will all end up stripped of life and dignity." Cossia glanced over one of her sloping shoulders. The heavenly flight crews had already prepared the death tree for another funeral. They had developed an efficient system for their task; too many left this world for the promise of clear skies and limitless flight.
"We must try," Jerad repeated listlessly. "Perhaps Dial's project is the answer."
Jerad doubted any answer to their problems existed, especially such a feather-headed one as Dial pursued.
The riots raged only a few blocks down the street. Cossia and Jerad peered out through a slit cut in the thatched wall of their refuge.
"It's no use, Cossia. They are caught in the throes of hysteria. The mob will destroy all Merno before dawn."
"If only we could understand. The answer is so close. I feel it!"
Jerad nodded. He, too, sensed their nearness to understanding. They had taken Fordyne's folders and gone over them, the numbers burning into their brains throughout long nights until they saw the clean, neat columns intruding into their dreams--and their nightmares. But they had studied these past two years since Fordyne had died in disgrace. To no avail.
The Chief of Rules had been assassinated. The Council's attempts to restore order had failed with the rise of one demagogue after another. Each subsequent fanatical leader brought civilization closer to the brink of dishonor. Any would-be leader who attempted to preserve discipline in the capital was not a leader for long. The mobs usually rebelled and destroyed them, as everything of worth was being destroyed.
Worst of all, even those such as Dial with his strange notion of escaping the planet had vanished in the ensuing years. All that remained to them was preserving what they could of their culture in hopes of a reborn society at some later, less chaotic, time.
A much later time.
"The fires burn closer," Jerad said, all emotion gone from his voice. Death no longer held the fascination and fear for him that it once had. To be gone from this world of illogic seemed a worthier goal than continued life.
"We can escape through the back," said Cossia, always the more tenacious of the two. "The vaults are still months away from completion. We need to work harder if we ... "Her voice trailed off. Her large, mobile ears rotated. Cossia frowned. The sounds carried on the hot summer winds were confusing.
Then she felt what she feared most. Cossia spun and faced Jerad. Her friend, her lover, the most precious of all those left on this declining world jerked and twitched as if someone had attached wires to his limbs and sent electric charges surging. Jerad smashed hard against the thatched wall and fell to the floor, arms windmilling out of control, purple eyes wide and showing yellow sclera as vivid as his hide. Cossia ran to him, but his strength startled her. With the ease of someone ten times stronger, Jerad batted her away--and did not know that he did so.
Cossia watched in horror as Jerad died from the epileptic seizure, as so many others before him had done.
"The virulence," she said, her voice low and choked. She had felt the onslaught, but it had taken Jerad so fast! Less than a, dozen frenzied heartbeats had passed from beginning until death.
Jerad gave another death jerk, snapping his spine like a dried twig. From past experiences, Cossia knew the twitching would continue for some time. Jerad had died following the first seizure, but his body's resilience persisted.
Cossia looked at her own hands. They shook. Fear rose and died within her. "Reaction," she said aloud. "Shock. Nothing more." But Cossia knew she lied to herself. The epileptic convulsions that had killed Fordyne and Jerad would soon claim her.
She felt it.
With the rioters only a dozen paces from the door of the thatched house, Cossia burst into the street. She saw the demonic. stares on the faces of the crowd, the expressions of lost hope. Cossia almost despaired enough to join them in their fear and frustration in burning down the city's most magnificent edifices.
Cossia turned her misted eyes aloft to the majestic spire of the Aerie where the Chief of Rules and his Council had once met around the Table of Rules to decide the proper path for all to tread. No longer. They had died in the riots, and now licking tongues of orange flame sampled the base of the mighty building,
Cossia watched as the symbol of her world began to burn. At first only the lower levels filled with bright oranges and yellows. Then upper levels began belching black plumes of smoke. As the fire quickly spread, the top floors crumbled and the entire building's integrity was compromised.
The Aerie died, as did Cossia's world.
She let herself be carried away by the vortex of the crowd. Slowly, Cossia worked her way into eddies and backwaters, finally fording a deserted street leading into the countryside. Arms flapping in mock flight, she hurried along to the vaults. The others worked feverishly to complete the last of the accumulated displays, to seal them before the mobs thought about this final legacy and rebelled against informing future generations of their shame. But Cossia allowed herself a gut-wrenching doubt about the effectiveness of what she and Jerad and the others had done.
For whom were the vaults constructed? Cossia had seen the statistics compiled by Fordyne and his successors. This world died. There would be no survivors, no successors to carry on civilization.
Cossia felt it.
The Weapons of Chaos trilogy
About the
author:
Robert E. Vardeman is the author of more than one hundred novels and scores of highly acclaimed short stories. Although his main interests are science fiction and fantasy, he also has written mysteries and high-tech thrillers, as well as westerns under the "Jackson Lowry" pen name and was recipient of the 2017 Western Fictioneers Lifetime Achievement Award.
His f&sf novels include the awards nominated, gaming tie-in novels, Fate of the Kinunir and God of War 1 & 2 in addition to the Cenotaph Road series, the Swords of Raemllyn series and steampunk stories.
For more information about other fiction please see Robert E. Vardeman's website Cenotaph Road
Connect with me online:
Twitter: http://twitter.com/BobV451
Facebook: http://facebook.com/bob.vardeman
Amazon:https://www.amazon.com/Robert-E.-Vardeman/e/B000APTPDI/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1498846438&sr=8-2-ent
My blog: https://robertvardeman.wordpress.com
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Ch
apter 30
Chapter 31
Echoes of Chaos
Author Biography
Darklight Pirates Page 32