They settled in soft chairs by a window that looked out on the tree-covered valley. “Perhaps I should know who you are,” Thackery said.
“My name is Harmack Wells.”
Thackery gestured in the air with one hand. “I’m afraid I’ve rather completely eloigned myself from the affairs of the world. Your name is not one I have heard before.”
“Four years ago I was named Director of USS-Defense.”
“Ah,” Thackery said, his hand going to his chin. “That explains some things. Not all, by far. How did you find me?No one in the Service knows where I am.”
Wells smiled. “I have access to resources beyond those the Service can call on.”
“And what are those?”
Wells hesitated. For all the information he had gathered on Thackery, the man had already surprised him more than once. Wells had expected Thackery to vigorously resist the intrusion; that was why Wells had come himself, and alone. Yet Thackery’s easy concession was no victory. Wells still had to prove himself, and one of the tests would be honesty.
“I am also an Eighth Tier member of the Nines,” said Wells.
It was an admission Wells rarely made to those outside the organization. A conflict-of-interest clause in Service contracts prohibited membership in certain types of partisan organizations and any sort of involvement with planetary politics. The Nines were at the top of the blacklist.
Contract notwithstanding, Wells was admitting not only to membership but also to a very high level of involvement. Consequently he was not surprised when Thackery frowned and looked away, out the window.
Wells continued, “As you might expect, a number of our members work in information science. They were able to access the payment records from your Service trust and your primary credit account. Following the money is usually a good way to find someone.”
Thackery turned back and regarded Wells with a level gaze. “Then it’s the Ninth Tier that sent you? Or does the Chancellor of the Service now condone its Directors coming downwell to violate the Privacy Laws and harass Earth citizens?”
“Certain issues transcend such considerations.”
Thackery scowled. “That’s the kind of arrogance I’ve come to expect from the Nines. I’ve long suspected you believe that Council law applies only to others. This episode demonstrates that I was right.”
Wells felt himself tensing. “Perhaps you should wait until you hear why I sought you out before judging.”
“I’ve been waiting since you first disturbed me,” Thackery said, folding his hands on his lap.
His irritation on the rise again, Wells wondered when he had lost control of the encounter. “I don’t know what you know of the strategic situation—” Wells began.
“Nothing, and I have even less interest.”
“Can I continue?”
Thackery waved a hand. “Of course.”
“When I became Director of Defense, I inherited a passive establishment capable of doing little more than warning that an attack was coming. We had no way of blunting another attack. We still have no way of carrying the war to the Sterilizers.”
“An oversight you no doubt intend to correct.”
“The only way to assure our own peace is to be ready to go to war.”
“If you say. What have I to contribute to this?”
“We need to know more about the Mizari. As a matter of political necessity, we need conclusive proof that they still exist. As a matter of military intelligence, we need to know what they are like and what they are capable of. It would be best if we could acquire both without reminding them of our own existence.”
“Why come to me? All I know of the Sterilizers can be found in the reports I made.”
“I know that. I’ve read Jiadur’s Wake.”
Thackery raised an eyebrow in mild surprise. “Then you are one of the few,” he said with some bitterness. “But that still doesn’t answer my question.”
“I need your help only to contact the D’shanna. They can provide us the rest of what we need.”
Thackery seemed to shrink into his chair like a turtle withdrawing into his shell. “There is nothing I can do for you.”
“You have to,” Wells pressed, sensing Thackery’s vulnerability. “No one else has ever been on the spindle. No one else has ever contacted the D’shanna.”
“I do not have the information you seek. I know no way too what you want,” he said stonily. Then his expression softened to one of wistful reflection. “And if I did, I no longer have the confidence of purpose to trust myself to know the right thing to do with it.”
“I have the confidence. Trust me.”
Thackery sank back into his chair, slowly drew his legs up, and twisted to one side, a trembling hand hiding his eyes.“This is the world you built,” Thackery said wearily, “you and your kind. I neither know nor care about your squabbles. Please go away.”
With those words the last remnants of the idolatry Wells had once felt for Thackery melted away, and with them, Wells’s inhibitions. “You’re human. You’re blood kin to the whole Affirmation. How can you favor an alien over your own kind?” he demanded.
“My own kind?” Thackery said with a bitter laugh. “No one anywhere is like me. I waited too long to retire—about four centuries too long. There’s not one person on Earth who’s seen half of what I have or understands what seeing it did to me. I don’t belong here.”
“Where do you belong, then?” Wells asked cuttingly. “On the spindle, with Gabriel? Is that why you’ve isolated yourself, so no one will know when you go away with him?”
Suddenly Thackery was on his feet, shouting. “If I knew how to return there, do you think I would still be here? Do you think I haven’t called out to the sky ten thousand times hoping Gabriel would answer, that he would return and take me back? Why do you think I’ve clung to life this long?”
As though his legs had gone to rubber beneath him, Thackery slowly slipped back down into his seat and buried his face in his hands. Wells looked away, embarrassed for the man.
The courtesy also helped mask Wells’s own fierce disappointment. He did not want to believe Thackery, for that would require him to abandon hope for an ally against the Mizari. But Thackery’s pain was no pretense; Wells did not doubt that he had tried to make contact and failed, not once but many times. Even so, Wells could not help but play one last card.
“Director—”
Thackery looked up.
“I’m going to leave now. You’ve made your attitude clear. There’s something I have to make clear to you. I’m afraid it won’t be possible to protect your secret. There is a whole generation who knows you only as a name. They will be curious to see you as a man. Many will want more from you than I do.”
“That threat was implied the moment you appeared,“Thackery said, his face and voice regaining the gruffness they had projected in the garden. “It makes no difference. I have nothing to tell you.”
Wells pursed his lips and nodded. He extracted his long frame from the chair and stood there for a moment, looking down at Thackery. “You were once a hero to me,” he said, a bare hint of the sadness he felt escaping with the words.
Thackery raised his head and met Wells’s gaze levelly. “I trust you know better now.”
“Yes,” Wells said, and turned away.
Somehow the walk back down the hill to his skeeter seemed endless.
For a long time after Wells left, Thackery sat in his chair and thought the things he had not said.
If being with Gabriel on the spindle had been the high point of his life, it had also served to make the years that followed seem all the more hollow. Not thirteen years restructuring Survey for its new, more limited role, not his final mission to Rena-Kiri, not his brief stint as Director of the Service had been enough to make him whole again. The degree to which he was lionized following the Council’s announcement of his discoveries only accentuated his empty feelings.
After his resignation he had b
egun an emotional odyssey, a search for a community in which he could be comfortable, to which he could experience a sense of belonging. He tried to inject himself into one Terran subculture after another, commune and clan, archaicist and mysticist, hoping to find minds attuned to his own perceptions of existence.
But the respectful deference of people who might otherwise have been his friends, the endless attempts by smiling influence-peddlers to place him in their debt, the ingrained misperceptions of what he had actually done, the shallowness and temporality of their vision of the world, all worked to deny him what he was seeking.
It was then that he began work on Jiadur’s Wake, naively hoping to free himself of the burden of his own fame. When it was rejected—he could not view the decision to censor it in any other light—he considered it a rejection of himself and turned his back on them.
In fact, the only lesson of enduring value that emerged from that time was one of rejection—that he was a foreigner, an oddity, an alien. There was no one else like him anywhere. Acceptance of that lesson had brought him at last to the Susquehanna.
There had been little enough pleasure in the four decades since he had retired, but most of what there had been, he had found here, in his woodland sanctuary. Now it had been violated, and Thackery knew he could not stay. But where he could go, he did not know. One thing was clear: There would be no sanctuary for him now anywhere on Earth.
His deepyacht, Fireside, had been downwell for a long time, but he had provided for its upkeep by means of a testamentary trust. He had had no conscious reason for doing so, beyond the natural inclination of a sailor to care for his ship. She had no great sentimental value to him, as he had made only one voyage in her. She had no practical value so long as he wished to maintain his pseudonymous hermitage.
Now the ship beckoned to him, offering escape. But where could it take him that Wells could not reach? To regain what he had lost, he would have to leave not only Earth but also the Affirmation. To attempt that in a deepyacht too closely resembled suicide.
It was several hours before he hit upon an alternative, but when he did, its rightness compelled him to embrace it. The first step required but a phone call. “Prepare Fireside for space,” he said. “I’m going out.” The word again was so strong in his mind that he wondered if he had said it.
Thackery had not quite admitted to himself until Wells had torn it from him that his time in the Susquehanna had been a vigil. If he was to fail to find a place in the human community, if he was to be denied reunion with Gabriel, he could at least choose not to surrender his remaining life to those hurts.
He had had enough of being lonely; now it was time to be alone.
Three hours after leaving Thackery, Wells rode an empty twelve-seat executive shuttle out of Newark back to orbit. The Brazilian orbital injector was closed twenty-four hours for maintenance, and he preferred enduring the extra gees and extra cost of the any-field shuttle to either waiting or going halfway around the world to the still operating African or Far East injectors. He briefly considered accepting the forced layover and flying west to see Chaisson, but in the end he decided he had left too many matters hanging to justify more time away.
Almost until he boarded the shuttle Wells had been unable to look past his disappointment at the outcome of his visit. But as the swollen-bodied vehicle lumbered upward, vibrating in sympathy with its roaring chemical engines, he at last put the disappointment behind him.
The whole business had been false to his basic beliefs. He was embarrassed remembering the threat he had made, the emotional barbs he had attempted to lodge in Thackery’s conscience. It had been so tempting to hope that Thackery could pave smooth one of the most difficult parts of what lay ahead.
But despite what Berberon thought, and even if the same could not be said of the Nines generally, coercion was not Wells’s way. It was usually better that something not be done at all than be done by unwilling hands. And it was always better to take responsibilities on oneself than to drop them into the laps of the unprepared.
Seduced by the prospect of a quick and easy solution to the problem of scouting the Mizari, he had allowed himself to be distracted at a time when more essential matters had required his full attention. Now Triad had been derailed, Berberon alienated, and Erickson alerted.
As the sky outside the shuttle’s windows faded quickly from blue to violet, and then to black, Wells took advantage of the privacy of the passenger cabin to make two calls, closing out his business on the surface.
The first was to Chaisson. The historian was off-line, so Wells left a brief message: “Richard—the business with Merritt will take some time to complete, and I don’t think it will withstand any extraneous contacts. Please put off indefinitely any plans to see him, and treat his existence as the strictest possible secret.” Tradition would give the request the force of an order.
The second call was to Arlett. “We’re going to have to keep watching Thackery, and you’re going to have to coordinate it,” Wells told him. “Anybody who doesn’t already know that he’s there isn’t to find out. Anybody who does know is under interdict.”
“I understand, Mr. Wells. Nobody comes to see him except you.”
“I won’t be coming back to see him,” Wells said. “But so long as he stays in that house, I want him left undisturbed. If he should leave, that’s another story. I’m to be alerted immediately, and he’s to be monitored as intensively and invasively as we’re capable of. Barring that, though, leave him be.”
“I understand. Sir—if I might ask about the possibility of promotion—”
“No. Never ask, Brian. And never make it part of your decision to lend service. Do for yourself and the things you believe in and not for the rewards that might come.”
“That would be easier if it were always clear how the things we are asked to do serve what we believe in.”
“It would be clearer if you did not always expect it to be easy,” Wells said sharply.
“Yes, sir,” Arlett said in a subdued voice.
In fairness, finding Thackery was service at least equal to that on which many promotions had been granted, and doubtless Arlett knew that. But he also doubtless knew that the jump from Fourth to Fifth brought with it so large a measure of additional authority—including the right to recruit new First Tiers and the first, albeit limited, authority to place referral requests—that it was not uncommon for the overtier involved to “load up” on the candidate.
Wells was content to let Arlett think that was the reason and grumble to himself if so inclined. To grant a promotion now, Wells would have to make known to the community of the Nines the service that had won it, and that he was not prepared to do. He would sustain a small, short-lived injustice in expiation of a larger one, so that he might quell his conscience and quiet his backward-looking curiosity, and so focus his efforts on shaping the still malleable future.
That business dealt with, he made one final call, to Kioni.
He felt within him a growing restless energy, an impatience with the endless jockeying of move and countermove, pawn traded for pawn—an eagerness to press on to the endgame. There was no cure at hand for the root cause, but he was pot above treating the symptoms.
Kioni was much preferable to Ronina for such matings. She was much less his physical ideal than Ronina, small-breasted where Ronina was well gifted, thick-thighed where Ronina was long-limbed. But Kioni allowed him to come to her without promises and to touch her without touching, in whatever way he chose and whenever he pleased. They came together as animals, in mutual selfishness, and parted as strangers, in mutual satiation. Or so he had come to expect of her from their half dozen previous encounters.
She was waiting in his bed when he arrived, and she did not disappoint him.
Chapter 7
* * *
Recall
Felithe Berberon had fully expected to hear from the World Council concerning his report on the challenge to Chancellor Erickson. But he had not e
xpected to be ordered to Capital three hours after transmitting it.
Nor was the order a welcome one. For a variety of reasons, it had been more than seven years since Berberon had been on Earth. One reason had to do with personal biology. Berberon was allergic to more than two hundred varieties of atmospheric flotsam and did not care either to flood his body with mind-dulling drugs or to go without and spend his time down-well feeling as though his chest were in a vise.
An even larger factor was that the trip down and back quite thoroughly terrorized him. Having no comforting faith with which to sanguinely accept his own mortality, Berberon chose to avoid placing his life at even minimal risk. That was not possible where spaceflight was concerned—particularly the orbit-to-ground and ground-to-orbit regimens.
True, shuttle crashes were rare, and failures of the orbital injectors even rarer, but when accidents did occur, there were never any survivors. As he habitually reminded those amused by his phobia, “Bags of protoplasm make notoriously bad meteors.”
A final consideration was that, thanks to three decades in reduced gravity and an aversion to exercise for its own sake, he was now thoroughly maladapted to a full gee field. Climbing a ramp or stairway on Earth left him panting, his heart beating angry protest against the exertion. Too, the altered environment clashed against his learned reflexes, turning his gliding steps into graceless stumbles. And what were pleasingly rounded body contours in orbit became loose, sagging folds of flesh on Earth; the first day down, the man in Berberon’s mirror was a stranger.
In light of such considerations, and not being notably sentimental about verdant hills and pristine brooks, Berberon had gladly forgone many opportunities to return to his home world. The last event he had thought important enough to come downwell for had been the election of Jean-Paul Tanvier as World Council President. Being present at the inauguration and endearingly visible during the social functions that surrounded it had doubtless been a factor in Tanvier retaining Berberon as Observer, especially considering that one of the President’s aides had been angling for the post for himself.
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