by Meridian
“Then, you pass into the biggest of the ancient, extinct caldera, Mt. Charon. Its sides are almost 8,000
meters high. Its floor is called ‘Where the Sun Will Never Shine.’ Such complete darkness that a shadow at midnight is a mere shade in comparison. It’s cold. The river water is still warm, but on either side of you is ice. You can’t see it, but you can still feel the chill of the ice.” Redfire paused, and he may have even shivered, despite the warm Meridian night. “I don’t think there is any more beautiful place in the galaxy, but the thought that one day, I might find an even more beautiful place, that’s why I joined the Odyssey Project.”
This was nothing Driver would have expected. Yet, perhaps, he thought, he should have.
“What about you?” Redfire asked. “Have you ever experienced a moment of perfect, transcendent beauty?”
“I don’t think Republic has any place to compare with the natural wonders of Sapphire.”
“I wasn’t asking about Republic,” Redfire spat. “Your planet is functional, not decorative. I want to know what you think is beautiful.”
“Why?”
Redfire took a sip of his tea, and swallowed it slowly before fixing Driver with a strong look. “I guess its because I’ve seen you pilot, I’ve seen you fight, and I’ve developed respect for you. You must know, we Sapphireans don’t always understand you Reps. You accept so much regimentation, so much control, unthinkable to us. Literally unthinkable. We have to remind ourselves that you possess souls, and it is the soul that recognizes beauty. If you tell me what beauty is to you, I’ll understand you.” Driver sighed. Beauty? he thought. Prudence is beautiful to me. The porcelain shine of her hull. The glint of light across her sensor panels. He knew he could never explain her beauty to Redfire. No one would but him would ever think of Prudence as he did. To the others, she was a mere utilitarian transport.
“Well?” Redfire prompted.
Driver looked toward the horizon. Just at the edge was a pale strip of gray-green light. He could not tell whether it was city glow, or light from beyond the horizon, or the first pale shades of dawn. “Do you know that in my lifetime, there have been only five sunrises over the City of Midlothian? I mean, the sun comes up each day for half the year, but usually the cloud cover is so thick, no one can see it actually …
rising.
“I never saw a sunrise until I went to the Academy. I was taking a trainer out, my first solo. It was a T-99-SP. A good ship. I left Republic and lay in a course for Archon. Basic gravitational slingshot acceleration exercise. I looped around Archon, it’s about twice the size of Republic, frozen water and methane, which we mine from its surface. I swung around the planet to nightside, aligning myself against the terminator. As I came into day side, I saw the sun shining through the clouds and the ice fields. The ice acted like a prism, splitting the light into colors. And I could see the clouds, the clouds reflected the colors and there were all sorts of blues and purples and oranges and reds and pinks.”
“The thing is, I can still picture that scene vividly in my mind, like I’d stared at it for hours, days, but after crossing the terminator, I couldn’t have been in position to see it for more than two or three seconds at the most before going back to the homeworld.”
Redfire smiled one of his strange, intense smiles. “I knew you had a soul, Driver.”
“Everyone has a soul. It’s been proven scientifically…”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Oh.”
“Ranking Matthew, have you ever undergone the Delphic Testing Series?”
“Nay, of course not.”
“Do you think you could be an overt precognitive?”
“Nay.” Driver crossed his arms in front of himself.
“Don’t be offended,” Redfire told him. “Most humans have a latent precognitive ability. In ancient times, it was called ‘Didja-View?’ We see flashes of events that we don’t recognize until the events are upon us. A few people have a more advanced state.”
“Would you stop…”
“Don’t be offended. If you have that ability… it’s like carrying a little bit of God in your head.” Driver said nothing.
Redfire said, “May I ask you something else?”
“What?”
“I know your father moved to Midlothian after his discharge from one of the Rehabilitation Settlements. He wasn’t there for very long, but I don’t know what he did. Those records were sealed.” Driver was quiet for a moment. “How much do you know about me?”
“You are probably the best pilot and maybe the best officer in service to Republic.” Redfire paused.
“But, a father with a rehabilitation record would limit your career options at the Ministries of Space and Defense.”
Driver found that the back of his head had started to ache. “My father worked for the Health Ministry Research and Development Laboratory in the City of Progress,” he said. “He was in charge of testing a new medical device. He … he says he misinterpreted some results and gave the device passing marks on some tests it shouldn’t have passed. The device was released. It had a design flaw. Some people died as a result. My father was sent to the Rehabilitation Settlement. After three years, he was judged rehabilitated, but he could never go back to City of Progress. So, he moved to Midlothian with my mother.”
“Are you trying to say your father went to prison because he said a product was safe and it wasn’t?”
“His negligence led to several deaths. That is the law.”
“He made a mistake. He didn’t intend to harm anyone. With laws like that, it’s amazing your planet every achieves anything.”
In the dim pre-dawn light, Driver’s eyes looked deeply into Redfire’s and he quietly asked him never to tell anyone about his father. Giving no assurances, Redfire changed the subject. “While you and Roebuck were sleeping, I monitored vocal communications from such groups of Merids as I could detect throughout the city. They are not a talkative group of people, but I think I have enough to attempt communication. All I need now is a test subject. I’ll need you to help me capture one so we can read his brain patterns.”
“Capture a Merid and submit him to a brain scan against his will?” Driver said incredulously. “I don’t recall reading that in any mission profile.”
“I revised the mission profile.”
“But the Merids already know our language.”
“Tactically, we have to speak theirs.” He stood. “Sensor interlink mode.” He linked his Spex to Driver’s display, scanning in infrared mode. “I am showing a lone Merid. He’s in an alley about 450 meters from here. We can grab him without a low possibility of resistance.”
“Right,” Driver acknowledged.
“Should we wake him?” Redfire asked, jerking his head to Roebuck.
Driver shook his head. “I don’t believe he would be much help.”
“Let’s go,” Redfire said.
Redfire led him across the slanted, broken cityscape, darkness staring at them from the empty sockets of crumbling windows. Infrared figures danced at the margin of his vision, like ghosts haunting this tumbledown cemetery that pretended to be a city. They soon came to an alley. Redfire pointed with a glove-over-the-head gesture. They peered down the alley, literally down, as it descended gently with the slope of the tower. They had two surprises.
The first was that the person in the alley was not like the Merids they had seen in the tower, it looked human, and female, as evidenced by what the one item of clothing she wore failed to conceal. The second surprise was the item of clothing itself – Halliburton’s jacket.
Redfire flew down the alley and pinned the girl in a flash. She screamed, and Redfire cut it off with a hand to her mouth and a cut to her abdomen that knocked the wind out of her. She was such a small, slight of a thing, that Driver thought Redfire might have broken her back. He pinched the back of her neck, sending a paralyzing electric shock that rendered the girl unconscious.
Driver armed his
pulse weapon but he didn’t detect any unfriendlies in the area. Maybe Redfire had cut her scream off quickly enough, but Driver had a strange intuition that nobody cared.
The sensors remembered the course back to their base camp and gave them directions. Redfire carried the girl inside and lay her down. “That went smoothly. Stand guard.” Driver stood by the entrance, covering him. “Right.”
Redfire examined Halliburton’s jacket. It had been cut in several places, but he saw no bloodstains. He opened the medical kit and attached two small sensors to the girl’s forehead.
Suddenly, the Meridian girl woke up and began screaming.
Roebuck leaped off the ground and flailed for his weapon. “Wh’appen! Wh’appen!” Redfire grabbed the girls flailing arms and pinned them behind her back.
“What is she saying?” Roebuck shouted. “Krishna, you’re scaring the slag out of her.”
“Shut up,” Redfire ordered. He pinched her face in his hand and forced the girl to meet his eyes. He held her face still, trying not to recoil against her rotten stinking breath. He had to connect to her mind. He focused his thoughts on conveying to her that she was not in physical danger and that he would release her when his questions had been answered.
Her screaming diminished, but Redfire did not know if he had succeeded in reaching the girl, or if she had merely run out of breath, She blatted something, and the Lingotron translated, feeding its interpretation directly into Redfire’s ear. “Eme… no … no hurt… gr’rg.”
“It’s beginning to get something,” Redfire reported. He pulled up a corner of the jacket. “Where… did …
you … get … this …”
Her eyes were still wide open in terror, but no longer uncomprehending. He repeated the question, concentrating hard.
Understanding registered. She answered him. “Veen mok sha.”
Redfire’s eyes, already wide with the adrenaline of the moment, washed over with horror.
“What did she say?” Roebuck asked.
“She said ‘meat market.’” Redfire answered tonelessly.
Roebuck gasped. He shook his head. None of his usual expressions of disgust and horror, and no combination that occurred to him at the moment, expressed his feelings better than simple blank minded, open-mouthed horror.
“How did you get this jacket?” Redfire persisted.
She smiled. Although young, her teeth were hideous; so twisted and rotting that the spots where they were missing were the most appealing areas of her mouth. She answered in the Meridian tongue and parted her jacket and thrust up her hips, displaying that part of the anatomy the madonnas back in Halifax called their “cashbox.”
“What?”
“The translation is pretty weak, but I have the impression she traded something for it and she is offering to trade us the same thing if we let her go.”
Roebuck averted his eyes. “Fragging no thank you.”
Driver called from the front of the alley. “Tyro Commander Redfire, we have a situation.” Redfire turned from the girl. “Watch her, Eddie,” he said. He stood up, passed Roebuck and moved toward the mouth of the alley.
“What’s up, Matthew,” Redfire said, seeming tired for the first time in the long mission, but Driver didn’t have to answer, Redfire could see for himself.
There were about a score of people closing on the alleyway; humans armed with clubs, pipes, and a few nasty Merid plasma guns. They heard a clicking noise behind them and looked up to see more people, surrounding them, training down on them with weapons from the top of the ruined wall.
chapter fifteen
Meridian – The Upper Levels of the Arcology
The Interfaces’ questioning continued relentlessly, most of it concerning the particulars of interstellar spaceflight – means of propulsion, hyperspatial navigation – interspersed with practical questions on the technological infrastructure of Sapphire and Republic; seemingly esoteric inquiries about the degree of integration between culture, environment, and technology on each world; and some questions that were downright non-sequiturs, such as whether the number of sexes in their societies was fixed or constant.
These were punctuated by direct challenges: “The ship that brought you is but one of many, contained within a larger ship that is now, approaching this planet. Is this data accurate?” After many hours of articulating technically accurate responses that answered the Regulators’
questions while providing no real information – a family gift that had well-served generations of Lear politicians – Tyro Commander Lear was finding it difficult to maintain the focus of her thoughts, and this had never happened to her before. “Affirmative,” she answered.
“Will you order your people to turn over the larger ship to the Regulators?” the interface asked, as though asking for a glass of water.
Lear was taken aback. “Why?”
“The Regulators require it.”
“I do not have the authority,” Lear said, “I have to answer to another whose rank is superior to mine, and he will be unwilling to surrender the ship.”
“He would resist us?”
“He will resist you at every turn.”
“Will you kill him and turn the ship over to us?”
Not much for diplomacy, these Regulators thought Lear. “I would…” she answered, and if she had looked at Partridge and Taurus in that moment, she would have seen their jaws drop open. “… if I thought that it were necessary.”
There was a pause and then that uncomfortable ruffling noise again. “Explain.” Lear stood, wearing a pleasant yet inscrutable expression with which she meant to convey inner self-assurance, but that unnerved Taurus and Partridge greatly.
“If I understand properly, the Regulators propose to use our ship to travel to other human colonies, taking over the central cybernetic intelligence systems of each world; a good and worthy plan, and noble of the Regulators to share the system that has brought lives of comfort and security to your people.
However, it isn’t necessary, or even efficient, to use ships to transport information through space. If the Regulators would permit, I believe I can present a better plan.” Lear moved before the assembly. Generation upon generation of Lears had served Republic in the Parliament, Assembly, Diet, Legislature, and Council; recent generations had gravitated toward the ministries, where there was less speech-making but more real power, but she trusted her heritage to carry her through.
“My people live on two worlds, divided by fifteen light days of space. We were abandoned, like your world. For many hundreds of years, we had no contact at all. Our worlds were divided, and we each had our own concerns to attend. My world needed to unify, much like yours. In the fullness of time, the necessity for communication with others of our kind arose again. It is why we built our ships to explore and reconquer this lost empire…”
Lear’s introductory comments went on for about half an hour. Jersey Partridge had attended countless sessions of Sapphire’s Governing Body, the ‘Thing,’ which met in the beautiful and spare Building of Governance in Corvallis. He remembered when he was eleven years old and had watched as the Chief Delegate from Hootch Grabr threatened the Chief Delegate from Nether Graceland that he would rip off his arm and beat him to death with it if he didn’t support a reauthorization of the Public Civility Act.
No Partridge had ever been chosen to serve in the Thing, but they perhaps held more influence than even the SupremesÄ. The Partridge family had built its fortune on the sole disadvantage of the Sapphirean system. No one was allowed to work in government for more than ten years, from Chief Supreme to lowly clerk. The randomocracy eliminated politics by preventing anyone from gaining or holding power for very long. This worked extremely well at eliminating the inertia, greed, power-mongering, privilege, arrogance, indifference, megalomania, corruption and so on that had plagued every other system of government humanity had ever devised. (Most systems, like Republic’s, sought only to manage those evils, only Lexington Keeler’s randomoc
racy had eliminated them.) Unfortunately, it also meant that each time the government was changed over, any wisdom and experience from the previous regime was also lost. Most agreed, this was a fair exchange.
Gilvaney Partridge and Sreenidhi Megawatt were not the first to hit on the idea that a consulting firm to advise each new crop of Delegates and adminicrats that came into Corvallis would be highly lucrative, but theirs was by far the most successful. Each new Thing would almost always allocate a part of the world budget for consulting fees. Crumbs by even the modest standards of Sapphirean government, but enough to afford the Partridges and the Megawatts lives of singular comfort and privilege.
Because of his upbringing, Partridge thought he had a grasp of the system on this planet. perhaps a better one than Lear. He had the idea that the Interfaces neither knew nor cared what the agenda of the Regulators was, so long as they kept their positions of authority over the rest of the population. What he had a tough time figuring out was how the rest of the population put up with it.
The Merids stared back at him, hundreds of dark, anthracite eyes set in identical pale and ovoid faces.
So little variation among them, they might have been clones. He wondered if they were. Genetic manipulation might produce a population that was easier to control.
Discreetly, he loosened the latch on a side compartment of his medical kit and, observing that not a single pair of eyes was trained his way, carefully withdrew a few small glass cylinders.
After an extended prologue, Lear came to the meat of her speech. “Ships are built to carry people, and equipment, but the Regulators exist as raw data…. energy and data. They can be transmitted.” The Interface interrupted. “I am instructed to inform you that this type of transmission is unacceptable. The data form of the Regulators is voluminous and complex. It requires precise reconstruction in the receptor system. Transmission inevitably entails data loss. As the distance of transmission increases, data loss increases exponentially. Any data loss is unacceptable.” Lear nodded. “You are correct. Conventional electromagentic signals degrade across distance.