Jordan arched one perfect eyebrow. “This kind of thing?”
Partridge blushed. “Fourteen year old boys being propositioned by three thousand year old men is one of those things that doesn’t happen on Sapphire,” he conceded. “It’s not one of the common adolescent traumas, but I think we can get him through this without too much help.”
“He’s been through so much already,” said Jordan.
“You bet, but he is a very strong boy, and strength is the key to getting through something like this. I think giving the old wretch a bloody nose was a good start.”
“I would have bloodied a lot more of him,” Jordan told him, downing the shot of space whiskey. “Get me alone in a room with him and I still would.”
Winter – Habi Zod – Guest Quarters
I am Oing. Oing is me. Oing is all. All is Oing.
Tactical TyroCommander Redfire sat cross-legged in the middle of his bed, bare-chested and clad only in pajama bottoms, deep in meditation, unable to sleep, unable to leave the planet until morning, unable to comfort Max, unable to enact further revenge on his assailant, and most of all, unable to pick apart and study the parts of the Aurelian ship now locked into a secure Pegasus cargo bay.
The “Oing Meditation” was an aspect of Sumacian custom. It as supposed to focus the mind and calm a soul distracted by violent thoughts, by strong emotion that interfered with duty. If Redfire could not sleep, he might as well focus himself for the effort that lay ahead.
His room was cold, deliberately so. He had left the window open and turned off the radiator. Part of the exercise was to create warmth in one’s self, to isolate one’s self against the rigors of the environment.
When the mind was free, the body was delicate, so the philosophy went.
He suddenly became aware of a presence in his room. He heard nothing, felt nothing, wrapped deeply in the folds of his own mind, but some other sense told him he was not alone. He opened his eyes and broke the trance.
The room was still dark. Nothing had been disturbed. He was alone.
Had he imagined it? Had he been dreaming?
He was quite certain he had not been.
Far outside, he saw the first hints of a pale light that would, within an hour or so, swell to a bright and cold sunrise. He rose from the bed.
Someone had been here. The afterimage of the intruder’s presence was strong. He felt it the way you feel the weight of a stare on your neck, or the breath of a stranger.
There was a candle on the table next to the door. He picked it up, lit it with a spark from his pulse-weapon, and stepped out into the hallway, determined to find however had disturbed his meditation.
A sunrise later, Keeler awakened in a large, opulent chamber, roused by a vigorous knocking at his chamber door. His nose told him the air in his room was chill, but he forced himself to peel away the blankets from over his head. “What… wait… don’t come in… I haven’t figured out where I am yet.”
“It’s Specialist Gotobed, Commander. You’re on the planet Winter, in a place called Habi Zod which is the estate of Lord Tyronius, our host.”
Keeler looked up at the high stone ceiling, that reached a peak at least seven meters over his head and was lined with gargoyles. “I dreamt I was at the summer cabin at Lake Mosquito Nursery. I was wondering when Aunt Sestina redecorated.”
The bed was enormous, very comfortable, and he felt almost lost at sea in it. The covers were made of various knits, fabrics, and patterns, ranging from rough as tree bark to softer than baby’s hair. The mattress was old, but had seldom been used. Somehow, it smelled like a snowfall in the heart of the deep woods.
“May I come in?”
“I’m not decent.”
“When are you ever?” The door swung open and Gotobed entered. She was wearing her uniform. She always looked so military in it. Fortunately, for her, it was a becoming look.
Keeler gathered one of the blankets (midway between the tree bark and baby hair range on the comfort scale) around him and sat up in the bed. He could not remember the last time a woman who had come into his bedchamber like this. “Did you bring me breakfast,” he growled.
“The others have eaten already. Lord Tyronius is about to give us a tour of the estate, and I was asked to see if you were in any condition to join us.”
“I will be after an evacuation, a shower, and some food.”
“You only have time for one. Choose wisely.”
“At my age, the choice is kind of made for me,” Keeler grumbled, making his way toward the side of the bed like a crash survivor crawling from some kind of wreckage. His dress uniform was hung on the back of a throne-sized chair at the side of his bed. “Do you mind?” Keeler said.
Gotobed turned around as Keeler reached for his pants, and then made his way to the hygiene chamber. “What did you say Tyronius was doing?”
“He is going to give us a tour of his estate. Some of the personnel from Anthropology Core requested it.
He expanded it to anyone who was interested.”
“Am I interested?”
“You are now.”
Memories began to surface. The Parliament Ball seemed more like something he had watched, a fiction-drama, then something in which he had actually participated. After Max and Jordan had gone, the party had not broken up. Rather, the Ancients of Winter (Keeler liked that better than Hibernians. It had a ring to it) had gossiped all the more animatedly.
Manchester had been something of an outcast, had never fitted in. A strange little man whom no one had ever liked, Keeler almost felt pity for him. Imagine being a wallflower for three thousand years.
He emerged from the hygiene pod and began assembling his shirt and jacket. “What I am interested in is getting alone in a room with someone who was alive during the Commonwealth Era, setting down my recorder and not stop asking questions until my voice is completely gone.”
“I think the entire crew shares in that wish, Commander.”
The remark stung him in just exactly the way another woman’s had very, very long ago. The last time he had known a woman with a mind and a tongue like that, he had married her.
“Imagine having lived long enough to see whole civilizations rise and fall.”
“Only they haven’t,” said Gotobed, once again being so excitingly insightful. “There has only been one civilization on this planet, and his neither risen nor fallen in all these centuries.”
“Za, which means no wars, no upheavals, no revolutions.”
“The cold probably has something to do with that,” Gotobed suggested. “Takes away the will to fight.”
Keeler rolled his eyes. “Who taught you that nonsense? Never mind, the point is, none of the events that usually destroy historical records happened here. Somewhere on this planet, there may still exist historical records of the original Commonwealth. Perhaps, they may even point us to Earth. And if not, there are a hundred thousand people here who were alive in that period. If each just remembers a few bits of information.”
He finished putting himself together. He had caught a quick look at his reflection in the hygiene pod’s looking glass. His hair, he knew, was as wild as weeds, but he didn’t think it mattered. “Shall we go.”
“They’re waiting.” Together, they entered a long, stone block hallway lit with square blocks of light set in the walls. Most of these had some kind of design at the front. There were doors set every four meters or so. He guessed these were other rooms. “This is like a hotel,” he muttered. “Did you sleep well.”
“That makes two personal questions.”
“Then, don’t answer it. I’d rather ask a different personal question, if that’s all right.”
“Use it wisely. Oh, what the shank do I care, use it any way you want.” Stop flirting with me, Keeler wanted to shout at her. He found something else to ask. “If you had not been assigned to the Odyssey Project, where would you be now.”
“How could I possibly know that?”
“Oka
y, where would you have wanted to be?”
“Commander of the Hyperion Moonbase.”
“Hm,” Keeler said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I figured you’d want to be in a position of authority, and I was thinking … cocktail waitress? Ah, but our host approaches. Good morning, dear lord.”
“Cocktail waitress?”
“Commander, you look well-rested.”
“The party appears to be in full swing,” Keeler answered.
“The Parliament Ball is not a party,” Lord Tyronius hissed in offense.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to rub you the wrong way, big guy. May I call you ‘Big Guy?’“
“No, you may not,” Tyronius sighed.
“Oh.”
“We already have a Lord Big Guy. It is clear you have many questions about our way of life, here.”
“More than a few, za.”
“I thought we would begin with a tour of my estate,” Tyronius offered. “My life and my lands are fairly typical of this world. It will be a beginning.”
It was going to be a large tour group. Lear was already there, looking fresh and pressed in her dress uniform, and was speaking to much the same group, minus Thunderhead and Churchwhite, that had greeted them on the previous day. There were a dozen others from the ship’s crew, mostly anthropologists.
“Where is Tactical TyroCommander Redfire?” Keeler asked Lear.
“He requested a shuttle back to Pegasus,” Lear explained. “Chloe is en route from Pegasus now and will transport him home.”
“He probably wanted to assess the tactical situation,” Keeler said absently.
“He said he wanted to check on Max,” Gotobed corrected.
Lear jumped on that statement like it was a loose coin. “… and I assure you, Lords and Ladies, that none of us considers the actions of one of your people to be reflective of the whole of your world.” Oskkokk sighed. “You mean the business with the boy? That? That was nothing. I am surprised anyone is making a deal of this at all.”
“Perhaps you should,” said Deacon Blackthorn. “This is a decadent world, after all.”
“I trust your period of somnolence was satisfactory?” Brigand asked.
“I slept well. Too well, and too long,” Keeler answered, wondering, a little perversely, how many layers of leather the Ancient had to strip off in order to sleep.
“How long is your sleep period?” Brigand asked. “Typically, I mean.”
“Four hours usually does it,” Keeler answered. “How much do you sleep?”
“A great deal,” Brigand answered. “It used to be said that those who slept too much wasted a third of their lives.” He sniffed. “How much is a third of eternity? What does it matter?”
“I think that’s enough egghead talk, boring my guests, the very idea. Let us started. Come this way,” said Tyronius, and he began walking toward the back of the great entrance hall. He led them through the enormous main hall, this time through the back way. “You’ve seen the house, I trust,” he barked at them.
“Yes, yes, of course you have. Don’t think I haven’t seen you sneaking out of the main ballroom to poke around in my chambers, or ‘getting lost,’ on the way back to your sleeping quarters.” He opened a great rear door, permitting a blast of chill wet air inside, and the blinding light of the sun glinting off the snowpack. “Now, let me show you the rest of the grounds.”
He walked into the snow. The crew of Pegasus put on dark eyeshades and shivered against the cold breath of Winter. Tyronius, throwing his cape dramatically over his shoulder, cut a dashing figure against the backdrop of mountains and the sea.
“I came to this rocky shore 2,400 years ago. It was at the time we were all moving away from our original landing sites. It was considered dangerously remote at the time, but that was what I wanted.
Since then, I have traveled over the entire surface of this planet, from the Glaciers of Polaris Extremis to the Fjords of Australis Extremis. From the frosty desert of the Dessicatation to the Ice Canyons of the Back of Beyond, where the wind picks up sounds from around the planet and they echo like voices and bells. I have never come to regret choosing to make my estate here, on the peninsula of Dancer’s Jetty.”
“How large is your estate?” Gotobed asked.
“I have demarcated an area of 264,000 hectares, and beyond it are open hunting lands, shared by myself and the adjacent estates. Every time someone set up a larger estate, I annexed another piece. No one was going to have a larger estate than Tyronius!”
“Have you ever fathomed why you all became immortal after settling on this planet?” Gotobed asked.
Blackthorn answered. “I devoted centuries of scientific inquiry to the question of our immortality. I have deduced that something enables our cells to reproduce without error ever creeping into the process.
Something else alters our metabolism. Something else keeps our bodies from degrading in any way. In my notes, I have centuries of observations and investigations on the magnetic field, the chemistry of the oceans and atmosphere, the climate, and the various energy fields that emanate from the planet. I have studied the interactions between all these things, but the mechanism by which our lives are prolonged, apparently infinitely, continues to elude me.”
“Oh, horsefeathers!” Tyronius exclaimed. “Scientific mumbo-jumbo. Do you really wish to know the secret to immortality, my dear?”
“Do you know what it is?”
“There is no other trick to being immortal except not dying,” he told Gotobed, a little angrily. “Being immortal doesn’t imbue you with wisdom, or nobility. It just gives you an absurdly long span of years to contemplate the futility of this existence.”
“What about this us?” Gotobed asked. “What effect will being here have on us?” Brigand, once again, flexed his muscles. He always did this as a preamble to speaking and it always made his leathers crunch together in a suggestive way. “You will probably not be here long enough for whatever has caused this phenomenon to act on your bodies. Even if it did, your physiology will eventually recover, once you have returned to space.”
“And you will, most certainly, be returning to space,” said Lord Oskkokk. “Tell me, Lord Tyronius, why are you so eager to give away our world’s secret.”
“Because I find our vanities have grown tedious, as has most of the companionship on this planet.
Some new blood would do us all good, I say.”
“You sound bitter,” said Keeler.
“Do I? Well, I must learn to watch my tongue. Perhaps, this is a good spot to begin an object lesson.” He had led them to the front of a massive structure of stone and timber. The wood was aged and utterly, utterly black. “I harvested these trees from a stand that grew on the lee side of that mountain,” Tyronius explained. “It took four hundred years for them to grow back, but I had time.” Seeing the wood, a question occurred to Keeler. “What about the other life forms on this planet?” he asked. “Trees, plants, animals, amoebas.”
“My observations suggest that native life forms also have extremely long life spans,” Blackthorn answered for him.
Tyronius added. “Nothing dies here, except by predation, consumption, starvation, or adversity.”
“What about the animals you brought with you?” Gotobed asked.
“Terran animals also had their life expectancies prolonged. However, they have not lasted as long as we have. They were almost all dead within a thousand years. They were also rendered infertile, as were we.”
“Infertile, but hardly impotent,” Tyronius chuckeld. “Oh, that’s a witty one. Behold, gentlemen … and ladies, my stables.”
He swung the door open, and behind it was a cavernous structure, where the air was warm, humid, and heavy with the smell of meat, fur, and manure.
Tyronius explained, again, in the expository narrator tone of voice. “We adapted native life forms to our needs. There were few species suitable to our domestication. There is a kind of
Tundra Oxen, a kind of caribou, a breed of seal with a very tasty flesh.”
“What’s a seal?” Keeler thought.
“The animals of this planet did however prove extremely resistant to domestication. So, for the first few centuries, we had to hunt them.”
When all were in, Tyronius closed the door behind him. He did not break the rhythm of his speech.
“Each predatory animal on this planet requires a minimum of 400 prey animals to sustain him. So, wildlife on this planet has a cycle. Predators increase in number until the population of prey animals is insufficient to support predators. The predators eat each other, and eventually starve. When the population of predators drops, the population of prey animals recovers, and the cycle begins again.
However, each time this happens, the surviving predators become smarter and fiercer, and the surviving prey becomes more difficult to hunt.”
Tyronius led them through a rather dark passageway, “We still hunt. It is one of the few diversions afforded us on this dreary little rock, but we have, by selectively breeding the weakest and most docile of the herds, domesticated a few breeds.”
He undid the rather ingenious mechanism that secured the large, heavy wooden door to the livestock vivarium. It was something one of them had come up with in the previous three thousand years, as simple as a latch or a lever, but more refined, balanced, and secure. “There, now, come and see.” In front of them was a vast space of stables, and even small pasturelands, contained in what had been a large crevasse, deep in the rocks. Some snow managed to drift downward, but it sublimated before hitting the Earth.
“This area is heated by geothermal vents, and maintains a temperature between 5 and ten degrees centigrade. The animals can graze on the plant-life, and on the hay, alfalfa and feed crops I grow in my greenhouses.”
There were some large hairy, milkbeast-like beasts moving slowly, and restively, on the patches of blue and green grass. Actually, the resemblance to milkbeasts was a stretch. These creatures had large, multi-segmented bodies, like giant mutant caterpillars. Their heads were huge and furry, equipped with insect-like pincers and tiny black eyes, four of them each, that peered out from under mops of shaggy, frost-gray hair, a pair at the front of their heads, and a pair at the rear.
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