Empery

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “Teo, this is not necessary,” Berberon said. “I am terminating your assignment. Resign your contract. You can return to Earth—”

  “Can I?” he asked, holding his head cocked at an angle.

  “Return to who, or what? What use will the Council have for an agent whose training is thirty-five years out of date, who’ll require not just retraining but a complete reeducation to be useful again?” He shook his head again slowly. “I don’t want war to come. But if it is coming, I want to do my part to protect my homeworld. Do you understand?”

  “Your attachment to Earth, yes,” Sujata said. “The rest—no.”

  “I understand,” Berberon said compassionately. “Teo—I’m sorry it worked out this way.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” Farlad said. “But it would be all right with me if you manage somehow to make what Falcon’s going out there to do unnecessary.”

  “We’ll keep that in mind,” Berberon said with a wry smile.

  After Farlad left, Sujata cast a weary glance in Berberon’s direction. “We have about an hour. Do you need to talk to home before we head back out?”

  “Yes.”

  “So do I,” she said, standing. “You can use the terminal here. I’ll let Hogue scare me up another one.”

  Even confined to a fifteen-centimetre screen, Tanvier managed to be imposing. Age had made his features cold, his sunken eyes remote. “There is no way that Farlad can carry out his instructions?”

  “No,” Berberon said. “He was right. Wells knows—or suspects. If Farlad shows up at Perimeter Command, all he’ll manage to do is get himself busted down for not following the orders Wells left here for him.”

  “Then we will have to depend on you.”

  “Jean-Paul, I haven’t the training—”

  Tanvier’s expression was hard and unyielding. “I will not let this insanity endanger what I’ve built. You went out thereto solve a problem. The problem is still unsolved.”

  “What do you expect from me?” Berberon shouted. “You created the problem. You signed this devil’s pact. This was never to be part of my responsibilities.”

  “I’m sure that when you have time to think about it, you’ll realize your objections are foolish,” Tanvier said, unmoved.“A lot of things that were never to happen, happened. You are on the scene. You will have to do what needs doing. Farlad’s mission is now your mission. I have no doubt that you will accept that necessity before the time to do something about it is on you.”

  As the link was established, Sujata was shocked to see that Wyrena had cut her long, splendid hair, the symbol of her Ba’ar heritage. The woman staring back at her from the terminal was a stranger, not ten years younger than Sujata and refreshingly naive but ten years older and serenely seasoned.

  “Everything’s coming apart,” Sujata told the stranger.“Wells has gone on to the Perimeter, and we have to follow him. So that we have a chance to catch him, we’re going to stay in the craze throughout the leg. You understand what that means—that you’re going to have to do without any help from here for—I haven’t even had time to figure out how long it will take us to run the leg.”

  Aware of her own weariness, Sujata plunged on. “Umm—we’ll be leaving Rice and Scurlock and the rest of Wells’s entourage here. They’re no friends of ours, and there’s no sense bringing them along. Oh, and I had to replace Captain Hirschfield—”

  Sujata lost the thread of her thoughts and stopped. “I know there’s five hundred things that need to be dealt with, and I can’t think of the first one,” she said finally. “I’m sorry. This has all happened so quickly, I’m still a little off-balance.”

  “It’s all right,” Ten Ga’ar said. “We’ll manage.”

  “Vice Chancellor Walker will probably have to pick his own successor, without my approval. I suppose you’ll need-that authority in advance,” Sujata rambled on. “And budget authority—”

  “We’ll deal with whatever needs doing,” Ten Ga’ar said.“We have the mechanisms in place. You do what you need to. We’ll keep the rest of the Service humming.”

  Her words made Sujata feel completely useless. “Of course you will. I don’t know why I’m worrying about trying to help solve your problems when I can’t even deal with my own,“she said self-hatingly, and sighed. “We don’t have much time before we have to board. Can you think of anything you need to know, anything I need to say to make what you do official?”

  Ten Ga’ar shook her head slowly. “This is no different than when you were en route to Lynx. The Vice Chancellor will act in your name while you’re out of touch.”

  Sujata found herself with nothing to say. “If it’s that simple at your end, then I suppose it’s time for good-bye. There are still one or two minor details here that require my attention—”

  A compassionate look touched Ten Ga’ar’s features. “Janell—don’t stop believing in what you’re doing. Wells is not beyond reaching. Remember the Canons.”

  “It seems like a very long time since you tried to teach them to me,” Sujata said, unable to silence the defeated note in her voice.

  Ten Ga’ar smiled affectionately. “For me, it not only seems, but is. But I believe in you, Janell. You have what is needed for this task. Only be certain that you know clearly what it is. Your goal is not to bend him to your will, to remake him as you would wish him to be. You must take him as he is. Know him, and you will have him. He is vulnerable to what he believes in. Remember that, and you will turn him.”

  Had her heart not been so filled with despair, Sujata would have found the reversal of roles amusing. “I wish I could hold you,” she said, though what she meant was that she wanted to be held.

  “I wish I could give you that,” Ten Ga’ar said, as though she understood. “But I know you will find the strength you need alone.” I’ll have to, Sujata thought as she signed off. Because that’s what I am—alone.

  Chapter 16

  * * *

  In the Palace of the Immortals

  In the three months he had been alone aboard Munin, Merritt Thackery had come to understand that he was losing a battle with madness. He knew that as certainly as he knew that the power to prevent it had already escaped him.

  Since there was so little else to think of, he thought most often about the fragile structure of his own thoughts. But all his thinking, and all he had learned through it, had done nothing to stem the decline of his reason.

  He understood that Munin was only a catalyst, not the cause. He had returned to her hopeful, in search of the sense of belonging he had last known aboard her. It was a vain hope, the kind that sprang from the heart to the will unexamined by the mind. He had been alone, and sought to end the aloneness. But now he was more alone than ever.

  It could not have been otherwise. Munin’s compartments and climbways sang to him of the familiar, inundated him with images of times lost and faces forsaken. The curators of the Museum had been astonishingly thorough: either they had had the assistance of some of Thackery’s former crew or the Service had known more about the details of life aboard its survey ships than he had realized.

  His allovers, a bit snug now, were the size he had worn then; he had found them in the locker where he had always kept them. His food preferences were still programmed into the synthesizers. The ship’s library contained nothing more recent than A.R. 538, the year of the Revision; nothing of the D’shanna, nothing of the Mizari, no word of the four colonies he had discovered—in fact, no mention of Thackery at all.

  It was as though all the intervening years had simply not happened, as if it were still A.R. 538 and Munin was still searching for the beings who had stolen life from the Sennifi, still chasing the floating tomb of Dove among the stars of Lynx Octant. In a perversely fitting reversal it seemed as though, instead of-being the one who had vanished, he had returned to the ship to find it suddenly empty of life. Munin screamed their absence to him, still bleeding from the wound made by that which had been torn from her—and from
him.

  The fact that he had not realized that it would be so told him that his madness had begun long before he had boarded her. But it had grown much worse in the days since. The evidence, perhaps even the cause, could be found in his changing reaction to the bridge holograms.

  There were six of them, remarkably real, disturbingly faithful to Thackery’s memories. Himself, of course, seated at the captain’s station, one hand on his chin as he studied an image on the primary display. Derrel Guerrieri, who had been Thackery’s shipmate from the time he left Earth as a novice surveyor until the day he left Munin to meet the D’shanna on the spindle. Feisty Gwen Shinault, whose engineering skill had rescued Munin from the scrap heap. Joel Nunn, the quiet, dependable astrographer. Elena Ryttn at the communications station.

  And Amelia Koi—Amy, a gentle good spirit with whom he would have shared a lifetime. Duty had cut their days together abruptly short, had stolen any future that might have been. He had paid the price of conscience in the coin of her love, and from that day his conscience had never been at peace.

  Five lost friends, near enough to touch yet forever beyond his reach. They spoke as well as moved—in their own voices, spliced or borrowed from recordings in the Service archives. To Thackery’s eyes and ears they were real. Missing only was the tang of human habitation in the air, the hundred exhalations of life that made of the ship a friendly cave shared to escape a colder winter than Homo neanderthalis had ever known.

  His first day aboard, Thackery stood by the climbway railing and watched the real-yet-not-real animations move through their five-minute ballet three times in succession. Then he broke down, crying. When he turned the projectors off, he vowed never to turn them on again. He knew the danger from the first. He sensed that to surround himself with such easy, but empty, comforts was to start down a road from which there would lie no returning.

  Yet on this day, three months later, he found himself well down that road. For there were six figures on Munin’s bridge: five ghosts and a man who was little more than that. Their motion stilled, their voices silenced, they stood as statues in a family gallery. One by one he had brought them back, first Derrel, then Elena, Joel, Gwen, and finally himself.

  One place, though, was still empty. He could not, would not, try to bring Amy back that way, could not endure the reminder. And yet he could not ignore the message of the empty chair, nor stop himself from thinking of her. The conflict was yet another thread of his madness—a thread he had woven into the fabric himself.

  Cognizant of the risk involved in his plan to return to Earth through the spindle, Thackery had thought it the merciful thing to allow Amy and the rest of Munin’s crew to think that he was dead—a goal accomplished when Gabriel allowed the corpse of Dove to plunge into the seething mass of a star.

  But by that same act he had started an emotional time bomb ticking. After Dove’s destruction Amy had turned Munin, her captain and purpose gone, back toward home. By the time the Service came to grips with what Thackery had to tell them, Munin was already flying deaf, its crew believing a lie.

  The lie could not endure. When Munin came out of the craze, Amy and the others would learn the truth—where he had been, what he had done, and that he was still alive. As inevitably as the sun must rise, someday the display would chime and a picture begin to form on the screen, a visage out of his past.

  She would speak, and her words would destroy him. Either she would still love him, thirty years out of sync and twenty-five light-years out of reach, and her love would cost him the tenuous peace he had made with what he had done. Or she would hate him, and her hate would cost him the fond memories of the only woman with whom he had ever shared more than grief.

  Thackery could not bear to face that day, that call, that accounting. So before it came, before it would come, he had taken a field assignment on Rena that he had no right to take and fled Earth in Fireside. Cocooned in the craze, he was safe from her, from the pain that could only come from connecting with her again.

  But waiting for him when he reached Rena was the news that Amy had found she could bear to face it even less than he. While Thackery was in the craze, running from her in selfish cowardice, Amy had guided Munin into port, then resigned her Service contract. And when no one and nothing had call or claim on her, she had gone off alone and quietly taken her life.

  Hearing that had cost Thackery more than peace or memories.

  He wondered at times why he had not followed her lead and ended the pain. He did not fear death, confident as he was that it meant nothing more than the end of life, that darkness and not judgment awaited him. The only answer he could find to the riddle was that continuing to live was a punishment he inflicted on himself in expiation of his guilt.

  Now Thackery shared the chair at his station with his own projection, the younger apparition poised in anticipation, the older submerged in dolor. Both gazed up at the bridge display, but only the ghost saw what appeared there. The images played on the real Thackery’s retinas but were rarely perceived by his mind.

  In that state, even the klaxonlike collision alarm did not quickly penetrate his consciousness. But when it did, he stirred in his seat and looked up at the screen hopefully, scanning for the reason for the alarm. He was not so far gone as to be beyond being rescued by novelty.

  He was not sure at first what he was seeing. The star field began to shift as, having waited as long as it could for guidance, Munin moved to save itself. But the alarm continued to sound, and the star field continued to shift, as though Munin’s efforts were somehow being negated. Puzzlement gave birth to curiosity, and curiosity reclaimed for the moment the better faculties of his mind. His brow furrowed, Thackery studied the image intently, until at last he focused not on the glowing points of light but on what lay between them. it was a growing sphere of darkness, a black destroyer rising from the shadows. Star after star winked out as the expanding edge of an emptiness more complete than space itself masked or swallowed them.

  Thackery knew what the black star meant. He had seen it once before, from the spindle, and knew that there was little time. Even so, he stood staring openmouthed for long seconds before he realized that he was looking at his own death and that despite everything—this, his greatest madness—he did not want to die.

  Moving slowly at first, his eyes riveted to the screen, he edged toward the climbway. When his hand brushed the cold metal of the railing, it seemed to galvanize him. Twisting away from the sight of the Mizari black star, he scrabbled down the rungs of the climbway until he reached the access door for the drive core. His mind was focused with a cold, crystal clarity it had not known for years.

  For a terrifying moment the access door resisted. Then it swung free, and he dived through the opening recklessly, tearing a long gouge along one forearm. He did not even pause to notice the pain or blood. A touch on the engineering board, and the shield plates for coils sixteen and seventeen slid into their recesses, revealing a complex of spiral tubing seething with energy.

  There was no time to do more than draw a deep breath and summon his will to live to the front of his consciousness. Reaching out with trembling arms, closing his eyes at the last instant, Thackery plunged his hands into the heart of the drive and seized hold of a whirlwind of fire.

  Once his hands closed on the flesh of the demon, there was no releasing his grasp. Every muscle knotted in agony, every cell crying protest, he fought against the onslaught of energies seeking to steal his will. He clung there, huddled in a ball, screaming a scream that was at once a protest against his life and a howl of defiance.

  His body was burning and he did not know whether from within or without. As his mind cried, Where is the crossing? Where is the end! the ship surrounding him dissolved into component atoms and vanished like a mist in sunlight. An instant later, oblivious to his fight for life and coherence, the universe of stars did the same.

  The Defense Intelligence Data Analysis Center (DIDAC) was a mausoleumlike crypt within the bowels
of Perimeter Command: one thousand locker-sized AI modules filling row upon row of floor-to-ceiling interface racks. Only the modules’ rectangular faceplates were visible, featureless and identical except for the identifying number embossed in the upper right corner.

  Quiet and dimly lit, DIDAC seemed to be a forgotten place, an electronic graveyard left over from some now completed task, an impression that cast the single data technician, moving quietly through the aisles with his cart of components and test gear, in the role of caretaker—or even undertaker.

  But that impression, however outwardly justified, was wrong. The appearance of the modules belied both their capabilities and importance, and the restful peace of the corridors was in sharp contrast to the furious activity within the racks. For each of the modules was in fact a keen and highly specialized electronic mind, busily sorting through its share of the incessant deluge of data being gathered by the Defense Intelligence Office.

  Operating under the dictum “You can never know too much or prepare too well,” the Office eagerly monitored the output from every active Kleine unit within the Boötes and Lynx Octants. Each separate source was assigned a separate DIDAC module. A few modules were dedicated to major facilities such as Lynx Center, and a larger number to the various deep-ships patrolling in or simply traveling through the region.

  But by far the majority of the modules were attending to the output of the eight hundred listening buoys that comprised the Shield. That was the task for which DIDAC had been built; all other functions merely reflected the Office’s determination to find use for the system’s consciously included reserve capacity.

  Oblivious to tedium, undaunted by detail, the modules patiently panned the binary stream in a quest to find that most valuable commodity, information, among the wealth of valueless data. Though they could not be said to possess consciousness, they did possess curiosity—an insatiable curiosity for the irregular, the anomalous, the unexpected, the unexplained.