Template: A Novel of the Archonate

by Matthew Hughes

  “Good,” said the captain, “because there is one other element that makes the idea of our partnership attractive.”

  Conn waited to hear it.

  “The way you added an ethical condition to your bargain with my lord Vullamir. It bespeaks a moral depth that is unusual in a Thraisian.”

  The captain’s choice of words, coupled with the images of Jenore still fresh in Conn’s mind, caused a pang of emotion to pass through the younger man’s being. “I am coming to see myself as only an accidental Thraisian,” he said.

  When he left the captain a crewman led Conn along another passageway to a small cabin with walls of painted metal and utilitarian furbishings. His belongings had been moved to his new quarters and stowed while he had been in discussion with Erkatchian. A meal waited for him on a warming tray. He supposed that it was the plainer fare that the crew ate rather than the overwrought delicacies that were served to the owner and his guests, and found it suited his palate well enough. When he had eaten he placed the tray outside his door and reposed himself on the narrow bunk to consider what he had come to and where it might lead him.

  ...a moral depth that is unusual in a Thraisian, the captain had said. The first time he had been called “unusual” – by Jenore Mordene – he had bridled as if the term had been meant to insult. He had thought himself typical of his world, albeit his view of things had been constrained by his status as an indentured house player, however much he had been favored by his indentor. Then had come his first encounters with other world views, those of the disparate company on the Dan: Jenore’s peculiar definition of “good,” the pride of the pastoralist Ren Farbuck, the overweening lust of the Immersionist lord, the gluttonous appetite for experience of the Divorgians. He had thought them all addle-pates, persons who had been denied the perfected simplicity of Transactualism and had been forced to build for themselves airy castles of supposition and superstition in which to live out their confused lives.

  Now he was no longer so sanguine. He had to face the fact that Thrais was an anomaly among the Ten Thousand Worlds, one slightly off-key note in the great symphony of philosophies and perspectives that had flowered along with the human settlement of The Spray. And the farther Conn Labro roamed from the getters and spenders of Bay City, the more he encountered systems based on entirely different principles, systems that nonetheless had worked very well for their adherents through millennia.

  Perhaps it is because I am not bred to Transactualism, he thought as he lay on the bunk’s rough cover and regarded the blank page that was the gray painted ceiling. I am not, after all, a true Thraisian. I was merely brought there to be raised as one. That led back to the central mystery of his existence: who was he? Whose was he? Was he stolen from a family? If so, why? Had he come to Thrais, as the ship’s doctor on the Grayling had indicated, in the womb of his mother? Then where was she, and why had he not known her?

  Between Conn and the answers to these questions rose the specter of Hallis Tharp, who could have answered all of Conn’s wonderings but had instead departed with all his motivations to a place where Conn could not follow. And now, for the first time, he thought about the old man who had been a regular presence in his life for as long as he could remember, and apparently, even longer than that.

  As he dwelt on the matter of Hallis Tharp he felt a stirring, the first inner rumblings of anger and automatically invoked the technique that dissipated the emotion. With the exercise came an echo of Tharp’s dry and quiet voice – Never let yourself become angry; he who loses his temper loses all – and Conn used the sound of the voice in his head to reach for a fuller memory. But the image that came was clouded, diffuse. Instead of the clarity that usually infused his memories, a product of his player’s intensive training in observation and recall, all he could recover from a thousand sessions with Hallis Tharp – two hours across the paduay board every Firstday for more than twenty years – was merely an impression of their encounters.

  The realization sent a shock through him. That was not right, Conn knew. He sought for memories, found that he could remember individual paduay matches, the positions of pieces, the turning points on which the flow of play had hinged, the outcomes. But where the rest of it should have stood in his finely tuned memory – words exchanged, facial expressions noted – there was only a vagueness. And now, as he sought to bring detail out of the fog, he felt a nagging inclination to think of something else. It was as if some part of his own mind had been instructed to watch for the emergence of this line of thought and to deflect it into other.

  That realization brought back the anger. Again the automatic response arose, but this time Conn consciously held back from the Lho-tso mantra that calmed the mind. He let the anger rise inside him – he had a mental image of boiling magma filling a volcanic chamber, himself a bubble on its rising surface – and watched as it surged up red and hot in the core of his being. Again, Tharp’s voice came, urging restraint, but he tuned it out.

  He sensed that the anger was a pry that could break the seal behind which stood the knowledge of what had really happened on all those Firstday mornings. There was clearly something Hallis Tharp had not wanted him to remember, had used some technique of mental editing to keep it from Conn’s memory. He pushed at the vagueness in his mind, focusing the anger, letting it become a fiery joy that he shaped and drove into the fog.

  And the mists parted. He saw Hallis Tharp, not across the paduay board but seated beside him on the divan on the other side of the paying chamber. The man was not so old, in his prime years. And he was big. Conn realized that he was seeing through the eyes of a very young Conn Labro.

  His gaze was drawn to Tharp’s upraised palm, at its center a disk that spun and swirled and scintillated with flashing colored lines, constantly drawing into a central point, like water rushing into a pinhole drain. He heard the man’s voice, younger and firmer: You will learn and practice. You will become the best player you can be. You need never fear, never worry. But you must not give in to anger. Whenever you feel that you are about to become angry you will perform this exercise... And Conn heard Hallis Tharp’s voice intone the Lho-tso chant, then heard his own child’s voice repeating the syllables.

  The anger was rising toward rage, but Conn held it in check, focusing it as he had learned to focus so many other aspects of the mind. It became a tool and with it he tore at the shrouds that concealed his memories and stripped away the conditioning, searching for answers to the questions that now defined his existence, questions that had never occurred to him through all his life. He found at least the why behind that mystery: the image of Hallis Tharp’s face, the sound of Hallis Tharp’s voice telling him, Lock your mind onto the task ahead of you, banish idle thoughts. The past is not your concern, nor the future. Just do to the best of your ability the work that comes to you.

  Conn found that he had sat up without registering the movement. His teeth ground against each other, his hands had clenched into fists. He could feel the tendons standing out in his neck, a vibration in his limbs and the muscles of his back. This is how it feels to be angry, he thought. And it feels good. There was a seductive heat to the emotion, a sense of direction, as if he was being carried along on a stream of fire toward some apocalyptic revelation.

  But with that sense of impending collision came a warning from his own mind – not cast in Tharp’s tones but in his own inner voice – that this was not the moment to let himself go. This force must have a target and must be aimed, else it would become a weapon that would turn in the wielder’s hand. He deliberately relaxed his tense and aching muscles, controlled his breathing, spoke the Lho-tso mantra. And felt the rage seep back into its reservoir.

  Its cessation left him cool and calm within, paradoxically full of the same empty stillness that had always been the inner Conn Labro. But now, for the first time in his life, he weighed the lightness of his being and thought, Should I not be more than this? Something has been denied me. Or taken from me. And once again he had t
o put down the rising heat.

  Hallis Tharp had posed three questions. He now knew that answer to the second and third: he came from Forlor and it was to Forlor that he was going. The answer to the third question – what are you? – would be answered there. Of that he was sure.

  A buzzer sounded in the corridor. The Martichor was approaching the whimsy that would spin them within reach of his home world. A medicinal sac popped out of the dispenser at the head of Conn’s bunk. He took it in his hand, lay back and squeezed.

  The Spray was an archipelago of light behind them, the Back of Beyond a swath of darkness in every other direction, broken only occasionally by smudges of distant galaxies and the few lonely stars that lay out here like lost sparks that had whirled too far from a campfire. Even those sources of light were missing in the view directly ahead of the Martichor, which was obscured by an immense cloud of interstellar gas into which the yacht was hurtling at a so great a speed that the ship’s passage through the thinly disseminated molecules of hydrogen caused a faint whisper of sound to be transmitted through the hull.

  Conn regarded the great emptiness from the observation port one deck below the space yacht’s bridge. A wider view could be had from the panoramic window in the bow, but that was in passenger country and Conn and Erkatchian had agreed that it would be less complicated if the young man avoided contact with the owner and his coterie. Conn did not mind; he preferred his own company to Vullamir’s or that of the servants assigned to him. And the yacht’s captain made an agreeable traveling companion when duty did not occupy him. He told tales of the Ten Thousand Worlds, especially of the port cities, and particularly the parts of those cities where spacers went in search of diversions and novelties.

  Erkatchian had not heard the wind shrieking through the red rock spires it had carved in the heart of the continent-wide desert known as the Swelter on the world called Anvil; but near the planet’s sole spaceport was the Blue Egg Cafe, home to a remarkable female contortionist who could connect parts of her body in a manner that dispensed with the normal restraints of anatomy.

  He had not dived beneath the lethargic waves of the tideless ocean on moonless Vermoul to observe the mating rituals of the gravix, a semi-sapient species that came in five sexes, only three of which were involved in conception – the fourth handled the lengthy gestation and the exact role of the fifth had led to beard-pulling debates at conclaves of exobiologists. But the captain could testify to the potency of the spirituous liquor called rack which the locals brewed from pods that washed up on the seashore after seasonal storms. “A fellow jostled my elbow and I spilled a gill or so on the bar’s wooden floor,” Erkatchian related. “The flunky came to wipe it up and when he was done his gray string mop was bleached as white as virgin snow.”

  At the captain’s urging, Conn told tales from his life at Ovam Horder’s house: memorable fights, particularly successful stratagems and ruses, occasions of surprise or satisfaction. The spacer proved as good a listener as a talespinner. “Each is a necessary attribute among those of us who ply the wefts and warps between the stars,” he told Conn, “for not all ships move as briskly as a first-class yacht and we can spend many long days penned together in close quarters. It’s the stories that lubricate the air between us and keep spacefaring folk from rubbing each other raw.”

  Conn soon noticed the great difference in their lives. Erkatchian had spread his experiences across the width of The Spray, but without depth. Conn had passed his years on one world, indeed in one building, but he had plumbed the nature of conflict to a degree that few could match. On their third day of motion through the gas cloud that screened Forlor from the sight of The Spray and all the rest of creation, he voiced the comparison.

  “Your particular skill may come in handy,” said Erkatchian. “I’ve been thinking about what to do in regard to Magratte.”

  “I have said I will demand him as part of the price.”

  “The price was settled before we left Olkney spaceport.”

  “Then we will have to reopen negotiations, in light of a material change in conditions.” It was not an unheard of situation in Transactualism, provided both parties were willing to alter a contract.

  “My lord Vullamir would find that a novel proposal,” Erkatchian said, in a tone and with a look that said novelty was not a prized quality among the aristocracy. “Even if it weren’t, my lord Vullamir did not bring his intercessor with him, nor did you bring yours.”

  It was not a factor Conn had considered. “He is incapable of simple bargaining?”

  “He would be incapable of defining the concept,” the captain said, “assuming one could somehow induce him to make the attempt. He is a grand high panjandrum of Old Earth’s first-tier aristocracy and as such he is blissfully unaware of any but his peers and near equals.”

  “Then how do I remove Magratte from under his protection?”

  Erkatchian tapped the side of his nose. Conn had not seen the gesture before but he took it to mean that the spacer had high confidence in his own savvy.

  “That means you know of a way?”

  The captain repeated the gesture. “It does.”

  At the heart of the immense cloud was a rift and in that rift was a small white star circled by a single great sphere of condensed gas and a number of planets made of more solid stuff. One of these latter, second from the star, had air and water and rudimentary vegetation, according to the Martichor’s percepts. It was small, an old world with but a single continent that took up most of the northern hemisphere, a mostly flat expanse of land bounded all about by a sluggish gray ocean that wanly reflected the sun’s parsimonious light.

  The yacht dissipated speed and looped in to orbit the planet. Erkatchian ordered a more detail scan which revealed that the few varieties of grass, trees and shrubs were all imported from Loney, a tranquil planet far down The Spray chiefly notable for its innocuous lifeforms. “Whatever was here to begin with, if there ever was anything,” the captain said, “was scoured clean away and replanted with little more than stage setting.”

  The continent had one prominent feature: near its southern edge was a tall hill that fell just short of being a mountain. Its top was capped by a fanciful expanse of domes, blocks, minarets and high-arching bridges, all in white and black, and its lower slopes abruptly became sheer vertical cliffs innocent of cleft, fissure or any handhold that would have made scaling them even remotely feasible. “The whole structure is surely as artificially contrived as the imported greenery,” Conn said as the Martichor prepared to descend to the great building’s illuminated landing area.

  The yacht touched down gently at the junction of two intersecting white lines set in a circle of black, just as the sun was sinking below the horizon. As the ship’s full weight settled onto the rock the tops of two overlooking towers split open to reveal formidable ison-cannon already rotating to cover the ship. The Martichor’s integrator reported that it was receiving a communication.

  “Let us hear it,” said Erkatchian.

  “If you are Conn Labro,” said a voice Conn recognized as a younger version of Hallis Tharp’s, “you will have thirty minims in which to sing the beginning of the second verse of the old song I often used to sing while I was considering a complex move in paduay. If you are not Conn Labro, please depart before the automatic defenses activate.” The message was repeated then the voice began to count down from thirty.

  “Do you know the song?” Erkatchian said.

  “Yes.” Now he could not think about it without calling up a mental image of Jenore Mordene dancing to its sad melody. A pang of sadness went through him, surprising him by its sharp edge.

  The spacer interrupted his reverie. “Then sing it before he runs out of numbers.”

  Conn sang. “But if you come when all the flowers are dying, and I am dead, as dead I well may be.”

  The ison-cannon withdrew back into the spires and an integrator’s voice said, “Please follow the indicators.”

  “I’m
glad we brought you,” said Erkatchian as the bridge screen showed two parallel rows of lumens leading from the landing area toward the complex of domes and towers. “Shall we go take a look?”

  “What about Vullamir?” Conn said.

  “It’s the Hour of Retrospective Aspersion. He will be fully occupied in cursing the enemies of his ancestors. The activity involves robust and forceful gestures.”

  “Have the maledictions any practical effect?”

  “I haven’t considered the question. But the exercise seems to agree with him.”

  They opened the yacht’s mid port and descended to the rock. The air was cold and damp, tinged by a sour odor born on a north wind. They turned their backs to it and followed the lighted path.

  Conn wondered aloud if the place had seasons. Erkatchian replied that the world’s axial tilt was scant, but that they were experiencing what degree of summer Forlor could muster. “But I doubt that the Flagit brothers came here for the weather,” he said. “Clearly, it was privacy they prized.”

  Conn looked up at the darkening sky. Though the atmosphere was clear no stars were appearing; the gas cloud obscured the heavens completely. Nor was there a moon. “And darkness,” he said.

  Their way brought them to a long flight of broad steps, in alternate courses of white and black stone. They mounted, assisted from behind by gusts of the cold rancid wind, and came at last to a wide flagstoned terrace, again checkered in black and white. “Just as clearly, the Flagits did not lean toward great subtlety of decor,” Erkatchian said, looking across the wide promenade at a pair of oversized doors, one white, the other black, set in the high and windowless wall of a square building built of more black and white, though this time the alternating monochrome blocks were arranged in chevrons.

  There was no who’s-there beside the doors, but the portal swung soundlessly open as they reached it. Beyond was uninviting blackness, yet Conn did not hesitate to enter. As he crossed the threshold, lumens set high on the building’s inner walls activated, throwing a stark light on the place’s interior.