A Dark and Hungry God Arises

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  “Or maybe she’s immune.”

  “Immune?” The Bill kept his tone low, but his voice cracked like a lash.

  Inspired by urgency, Davies replied, “The Amnion design mutagens. Why can’t”—he searched Morn’s memories for names—“Intertech or some other UMC research facility design antimutagens?” Hurrying so that he wouldn’t have time to falter, he finished, “Maybe that’s what Nick was going to offer you. Before he was distracted.”

  The Bill stared at Davies with his mouth open. Past his teeth and tongue, his throat gaped like a hole—a gap into darkness. When he closed his jaws, he had to swallow twice before he could murmur, “This is chaff, starshine. He’s inventing it.”

  Color flushed the woman’s cheeks; her eyes were wide with surprise. “But it makes a certain kind of sense.”

  The Bill swung around to face her. “What sense?”

  “Suppose it’s true,” she replied without taking her gaze off Davies. “Suppose Succorso and Hyland are working together. For the UMCP. Against us.” Her voice was vibrant with implications. “And they have some type of antimutagen. That’s the bait, the trade—that’s what they offered the Amnion. They went to Enablement to make a deal. Using her pregnancy as an excuse. Then they came here. With a retinue of defensives.

  “The whole point is to destroy us—destroy Billingate. The Amnion want the antimutagen. Succorso and Hyland offered to trade it for our destruction. But the Amnion can’t just come here and blast us. That would ruin their credibility with every illegal in human space—it would set them back decades, maybe centuries. They need an excuse.”

  Davies stared back at her as if he were stunned by what he’d started; but he didn’t interrupt.

  “So the deal,” she went on, “is that Succorso would offer you the antimutagen. Then, after he had time to get away, the Amnion would fry Thanatos Minor. And Succorso would spread the story that you were dealing antimutagens—that the Amnion destroyed Billingate to stifle the secret. A lie like that might pacify the rest of the illegals enough to keep them in business.

  “What went wrong is that Succorso changed his mind when he saw me. Suddenly revenge was more important than the cops. So he didn’t offer you the antimutagen. He’s got other ideas now. But the Amnion aren’t going to take that lying down. They sent Marc Vestabule to Captain’s Fancy to demand Hyland as a hostage—a way to guarantee Succorso keeps his part of the deal. She’s safe as long as he doesn’t renege.”

  In silence Davies pleaded with the Bill to believe her. He wanted to believe her himself.

  “It still doesn’t—” the Bill protested.

  “Listen!” the woman insisted. “It does make sense. Politicians think the same way you do. The fastest way to get rich is to work the middle between enemies. But that’s less effective if the enemies are actually fighting. To really get rich you need the conflict—and you need peace. You need the kind of peace that preserves the conflict. What Succorso and Hyland are doing gives both sides something they want. The cops get rid of us—the Amnion get the antimutagen. Which makes a war less likely in the short term, and makes both sides stronger over the long haul. If you were in Holt Fasner’s position, you might do the same thing.”

  The Bill couldn’t contain himself. Like an angry child, he shouted, “But we don’t have any reason to think it’s true! Just because a scared brat with an imprinted mind says it doesn’t make it a fact! For all we know, he’s inventing the whole thing. He’s probably just trying to frighten us because he figures the more frightened we are, the longer we’ll hold him, and while we hold him he’s safe!”

  “Then tell me something.” Now the woman faced the Bill. Neither of them paid any attention to Davies. Holding her companion’s gaze hard, she asked, “What’s Succorso doing with Thermopyle and Taverner? Plotting something, obviously—but what? Why? Com-Mine only caught Thermopyle because Succorso set him up. What have they got to talk about?”

  “No.” The Bill shook his long head unsteadily. “You tell me.”

  Her gaze sharpened. “Didn’t you hear them? What happened to all your bugeyes—your wires? What good are they, if they can’t pick it up when something important happens?”

  The Bill shrugged as if he were slightly embarrassed. “They were in a public bar. Not by coincidence, I’m sure. There was a lot of background noise. And Captain Angus took offense at the nearest wire. He chased her away. Also not by chance, I’m sure—although I have no idea how he identified her—because Captain Nick later singled her out for one of his notorious seductions, and by that time he knew enough about her to disable her transmitter.

  “Then the bugeyes in the bar developed a fault. So far that looks like a coincidence.”

  If the woman was surprised, she didn’t show it. “What did he want her for?”

  The twisting of the Bill’s mouth suggested distaste. “Sex, of course. And he wanted to scare her, apparently so she would tell him where his merchandise is being held. As far as I can discover, that was his only reason for disabling her transmitter—to scare her. Otherwise he wouldn’t have left her alive to tell me what happened.”

  “All right.” The woman nodded sharply. “Then it does fit.

  “Seducing and disabling your wire is just a distraction. He did it to confuse you. I think what he really wants Thermopyle and Taverner for is to help him against me.

  “Right now, his position is too weak. The antimutagen is his only lever. He’s hanging on to it—risking his deal with the Amnion—because it’s all he has. But if he can persuade or possibly trick Thermopyle into helping him, he’ll have an ally. Then he can go ahead with his original plans and still have a chance at revenge.”

  The Bill met her gaze for a moment longer.

  Slowly they turned together to face Davies again.

  “Well?” the Bill asked, nearly whispering. “You started this. What do you make of the fact that Captain Nick has been seen drinking on the cruise with your father?”

  Davies could hardly speak. Nick Succorso had turned his mother over to the Amnion for reasons which had nothing to do with antimutagens. The loss of her made him feel orphaned, maimed. And the reaction to his lie was dramatic—so dramatic that it stunned him. The first couple of times the Bill and his companion mentioned Angus Thermopyle’s name, it made no impression on him. As far as he was concerned, his father was unreal: an abstract concept; a man who may never have existed.

  But as they repeated Angus’ name and turned toward him, he began to hear what they’d said. Captain Angus Thermopyle was here. With a man called Taverner.

  Apparently out of nowhere, Davies’ father arrived just when his mother was lost.

  His heart jumped as if the two events were connected.

  Angus was fatal, of course. Morn had implied as much. And Nick had called him a pirate and a butcher and a petty thief. He was the kind of man Morn—and Davies with her—had dedicated her life against.

  But he was still Davies’ father.

  His arrival now meant something.

  Davies couldn’t afford to ignore the Bill’s demand—or betray what he thought and felt. With an effort, he crushed down his distress. Almost meeting the Bill’s gaze, he breathed, “I didn’t know my father was here. I thought he was in lockup on Com-Mine. I wasn’t sure he was still alive.”

  “That,” the Bill rasped, “doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Yes, it does.” Davies let himself sound truculent. “I’ve never met my father. I can’t remember him. How should I know what he and Captain Succorso are doing together?” But he didn’t stop there. The Bill’s companion had given him the hint he needed. More bitterly by the moment, he continued, “Maybe it’s what she said. Maybe Succorso is using him to plant the story that you’ve got an antimutagen for sale.”

  Like a kid experimenting with profanity, the Bill retorted loudly, “Damnation! Damn both of you! You’re making me dizzy. How many conspiracies and plots do you think you can find in situations you know nothing about? Y
ou”—he jerked his long head at his companion—“are pinning everything on what you hear from a scared, force-grown child who probably isn’t even sane. And you”—he poked a finger at Davies—“admit you’ve got holes in your head where you should have facts. You want me to believe you can’t remember anything Morn Hyland knew or saw between Starmaster’s destruction and your own birth a few days ago, and at the same time you want me to take you seriously while you speculate about things you can’t remember.

  “This isn’t an interrogation. It’s a farce.”

  Davies blinked as if he were on the verge of tears. The woman didn’t reply.

  In a whirl of joints and limbs, the Bill turned back to her. “I’m leaving this with you,” he said through his teeth. “We agree Captain Nick is dangerous. And we agree he wants to get even with you. So you’re at risk here at least as much as I am. It’s your job to learn the truth.

  “Torture him”—the Bill indicated Davies—“if you want to. The Amnion will accept damaged merchandise, even if Captain Nick won’t. As long as he’s human, they won’t worry about the details. Or capture a few people from Captain’s Fancy and torture them. I don’t care how you do it. Just find out the truth.

  “Come talk to me when you’ve got something we can count on.”

  Without waiting for an answer, the Bill left the cell.

  The woman fixed her attention on Davies again. Her hand rested lightly on the handle of her stun-prod.

  He glowered back at her, as belligerent as his father.

  As she regarded him gravely she said in a contralto murmur, “You may be wondering why Captain Succorso wants to ‘get even’ with me. It’s simple, really. I gave him those scars. But when I see you glaring like that, I can’t help thinking that if he’d ever looked at me the same way I wouldn’t have cut him. I would have killed him where he stood.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I figure out how to get the truth out of you.”

  She left Davies alone.

  The door closed behind her. He heard it lock.

  The monitors watched him as if his interrogation were still going on.

  Sick at heart, and determined to reveal nothing, he stretched out on the cot, covered his eyes, and pretended to rest.

  ANCILLARY DOCUMENTATION

  GOVERNING COUNCIL FOR

  EARTH AND SPACE

  n some ways, the Governing Council for Earth and Space was a haphazard organization. No one designed it: it simply grew over time. And as it grew it suffered mutations and grafts, like a burdock which a group of biogeneticists had arbitrarily selected for an experiment in whether weeds could be made to bear apples.

  Like most haphazard organizations, the GCES was protective of its position. In reaction to the fact that there was nothing organic or inevitable about its form—or indeed about its actual existence—the Council took itself extremely seriously. Its Members debated policy, passed legislation, imposed charters, and reviewed jurisprudence as if they had the authority of their entire species behind them; as if the survival and integrity of humankind were in their care.

  As a bureaucratic entity, the GCES was blind to the realities of both history and politics.

  The reality of history was that the Council came into being as a reaction to rather than as a control for events. It was a fact long since forgotten by most GCES Members that their political body began as a minor subdivision of another governmental entity.

  During the period of Earth’s history in which commercial enterprises and quasi-commercial conglomerates began to put research facilities and industrial platforms into space, most of the planet’s sovereign nations slowly came to recognize the need for an agency to coordinate launches, trajectories, and orbits—to ensure, for example, that corporations such as SMI and SpaceLab Inc. didn’t build stations which would interfere with each other’s activities, or which might—at worst—collide someday. The original Agency was constituted as nothing more than a clearinghouse for launch-and-orbit-related information; as a means for avoiding disasters.

  In a short time, however, it naturally took on a corollary function: it became a mechanism for processing disputes. Its advisory papers and proposed protocols accreted until they had the force of law. This development was considered beneficial because it permitted conflicts to be resolved without the unwieldy expedient of involving Earth’s vast array of sovereign governments. From that small seed, the eventual weed sprouted.

  As the competition for Earth’s last great resource—space—grew more and more desperate, the Agency came to be seen as increasingly vital: sometimes as a means to gain advantage; more commonly as a means to prevent the opposition from gaining advantage. There began what might be called the hybridizing process. Sovereign nations and commercial enterprises alike began to insist on “representation”: they wished to have their own people assigned to the Agency so that their interests would be protected.

  This was predictable, even though it was not foreseen when the original entity was created. Because space was a political as well as physical vacuum, chaos threatened to render the Agency useless as nations and corporations clamored to seat their representatives.

  The danger was averted, however, when the Agency itself was conceded the right to choose whom it would represent, which interests and organizations were empowered to supply it with members. An eminently sensible solution in many ways, this development nevertheless had the effect of making the Agency much more powerful—as well as considerably larger—than the bureaucracy of which it was technically a subdivision. Soon, therefore, the Agency—now called the Governing Council for Space—succeeded at rechartering itself as a separate, independent organism.

  Still the pattern of responding to events rather than anticipating them held sway. Space was Earth’s only effective future. Even before the development of the gap drive, with its concomitant influx of resources and opportunities, and certainly before contact with the Amnion, with its strange admixture of wealth and peril, Earth had no hope which did not derive from space. And the GCS was responsible for space. Therefore the GCS was also responsible for Earth.

  Predictably—and yet almost accidentally—the Council found itself unable to meet its responsibilities unless it expanded its function to include overseeing the conduct of its constituent nations and corporations on Earth as well as in space.

  By this time, Earth was in no position to protest the shift of authority from individual sovereign nations to the Council. Rationalizing their dependency on space, Earth’s governments elected to view the shift of authority as a change in semantics, not in substance. Where did the Council’s Members come from? From Earth, of course; perhaps by way of one station or another, but always from Earth. Therefore Earth’s nations had suffered no fundamental loss of primacy. Their leaders were simply called Members rather than presidents or dictators; the only real difference was that they exercised their powers in a wider arena.

  As a practical matter, however, relatively few of Earth’s nations and corporations were literally represented on the Council. Their numbers would have been too large to be effective. For that reason, the Council spawned its own subdivisions, on Earth as well as in space. Earth’s nations were somewhat artificially combined to form six distinct bodies: the United Western Bloc, the Eastern Union, the Pacific Rim Conglomerate, the Combined Asian Islands and Peninsulas, Continental Africa, and one quaintly named Old Europe. In contrast, each space station outside Earth’s solar system represented itself: Valdor Industrial, Sagittarius Unlimited, Com-Mine, Terminus, Betelgeuse Primary, SpaceLab Annexe, New Outreach, Aleph Green, and Orion’s Reach. However, in recognition of Earth’s vastly greater population, each of the planet’s six units was authorized to supply the Council with two Members; the stations seated only one apiece.

  By accretion rather than by public choice or policy, the Council became the Governing Council for Earth and Space.

  The reality of politics was that the Council had been invested with authority solely and squarely on
the assumption that this authority would never be effective. The corporate leaders who precipitated the inception and encouraged the growth of the Council did so to secure their own enterprises, not to impose restrictions on themselves.

  Consider the position of a man like Holt Fasner, in the days when SMI was young, and Earth was dying of its complex self-strangulation. Unless he were gifted with prescience, he could hardly have forecast the development of the gap drive—or the discovery of the Amnion. On the other hand, he could easily have grasped that Earth represented the single biggest obstacle to his own future, the single biggest threat to his company’s growth.

  Driven by planetary hungers, Earth would suck dry any development or discovery which occurred on a scale smaller than interstellar travel or alien species. And the prejudices and constraints of Earth-bound thinking—genophobia, for instance—would work to block any researcher, or any corporation, from developments or discoveries large enough to outsize Earth’s hungers.

  From the first, men like Holt Fasner understood the need to separate space from Earth’s control.

  This goal they achieved by mutating and grafting the original Agency until it became the GCES. At every stage in the process, they supplied the ideas—as well as the votes—which enabled the Council to take charge of Earth, rather than allowing Earth to retain authority over space.

  On the other hand, men like Holt Fasner had no intention of simply replacing one set of governmental obstacles with another. The power which had been gradually accreted to the GCES would become a threat rather than a benefit if it were allowed to exercise itself unchecked. Precisely because the Council solved so many problems for men like Holt Fasner, it was dangerous to them.

  Therefore the number of Members had to be kept small, manageable. And it was necessary to own a significant proportion of the “votes”: it was necessary to guarantee that enough Members would speak for the men they truly represented, rather than for the people who elected them. In some cases, this necessity was easily satisfied. For example, since Com-Mine Station belonged to the United Mining Companies, the Member for Com-Mine Station naturally defended the UMC’s interests. In other cases, pressure was required. And in still other cases, the “votes” had to be frankly purchased.