The Far Side of The Stars

by David Drake

  He led them between the long tables to one of the several doors opening off the left sidewall. An older woman in the robes of an acolyte entered the refectory, bowed to the party, and went out through the opposite side on an errand of her own. The large room could seat hundreds, but only two tables at the far end appeared to be in use.

  "In fact, I'd like to hire a dream myself," the Count said, his voice needlessly loud with nervousness. "How much will it cost me?"

  The Prior, leaning against Daniel while Margarida hovered close to his other side, glanced at Klimov but continued his careful shuffle to the door. "We can discuss that at a later time, if you choose, your excellency," he said. "It will not be possible for us to accede to your request immediately, but perhaps in a few days. . . . If you wish to remain on New Delphi, that is."

  "Look, if you're concerned that I may not be able to pay your fees . . . ," the Count said on a note rising toward real anger.

  "Georgi!" snapped his wife. "They said nothing of the sort. And if they want to check our bona fides, well, that's only common sense, no more than you'd do yourself before entering a card game with strangers. Not so?"

  "It's nothing to do with yourself or your credit, Count Klimov," the Prior said calmly. "The Oracle isn't available to you or anyone else at present due to a matter of scientific concern. Since you're not in the Service, it might appear to be a matter of religious scruple. Either way, please accept my apologies."

  "Father, perhaps we can show our guests the library?" Margarida said. "It's really the only part of the monastery that's present in the material plane. All the rest is spiritual."

  She glanced at Daniel, then colored and looked at the floor of living rock. "I hope some day I'll be able to fully appreciate the marvelous spiritual world in which I'm permitted to live."

  "Of course, child," the Prior said as he shuffled up the corridor. "You're young, dear. Enlightenment requires time; and I fear, looking back on my own youth, that it may require age as well. When one is young, no matter how deeply he may believe in the truth of the spirit the body has a certain insistence which the spirit cannot deny."

  He looked at Daniel as they moved along together. "Perhaps you feel that also, Captain Leary?" he said.

  "I'm afraid I'm unfitted to discuss religion, sir," Daniel said with seeming nonchalance. "I wonder, is the door by which we entered the monastery the only entrance there is?"

  The Prior laughed. "Oh, goodness, no," he said. "How many entrances would you guess there were, Margarida?"

  She trilled a laugh also. "I know of thirty-seven," she said. "That's inside as well as outside the circle of the Tree. But the corridors run for scores of kilometers and we only use a fraction of them. In former times the Service was larger and there was also an extensive lay community on the northern rim."

  "There've often been groups and individual hermits living within the Tree," the Prior said, sounding somewhat apologetic. "Apart from our Service, that is. There are hand-dug wells from ages before we have record. A sufficiently dedicated person can raise his or her own crops by carrying buckets up to where there's light. I suspect there are some such people now, drawn by a less structured form of the same impulse that brought me and Margarida."

  He and Daniel led the group into a cavern. The corridors and refectory had been cut into the rock; the Tree formed only their ceilings and portions of the walls. It took Adele a moment to realize that this great room was entirely wood. Ages of humans, most of them barefoot acolytes, had worn the floor into troughs weaving toward the couch in the center.

  "This is it!" the Count said in an insistent tone. "This is where you dream!"

  "Yes," said the Prior. "After preparation that includes drinking an infusion brewed from the berries of the Tree, the querent sleeps here. The querent and the Tree become one during the night, and the querent rises with a full awareness—as full as a human mind can retain—of the questions he or she wanted answered."

  "Part of the preparation involves focusing your mind properly before going to sleep," Margarida said. She smiled broadly at Daniel. "There are stories of querents rising with a certain understanding of how they should rearrange their reception room—but nothing about the political situation facing the planet they rule."

  "I'd like to say that story was apocryphal," the Prior said with a faint smile. "It isn't, but that was an extreme example. We of the Service have been more careful in preparing the querents since that day, however."

  Adele stopped listening to the discussion among the others present. Her eyes had finally penetrated the opposite side of the huge room. She walked toward it, guided by the floor the way wild beasts follow the paths their ancestors' hooves have hammered into the soil.

  "Adele?" Daniel called. Then, insistently, "Adele."

  "The library's here, Daniel," she said. "I hadn't realized it was the same room as the incubation chamber."

  The imagery in Adele's database suggested the two functions were physically separate. That was untrue and close enough to being a lie that Adele felt her anger blaze. There probably wasn't a conscious intention to deceive, but the photographer hadn't shown a sufficient concern to encompass the truth either.

  The backs of a dozen consoles—all reasonably new and built either on Cinnabar or one of the advanced worlds of the Alliance—were set in a row so their blank backs formed crenellations between the stack area and the couch. Adele stepped between two of the machines and switched them on without thinking to ask permission. They came up promptly; she'd used virtually identical equipment in the past. A male acolyte working at the console on the far end glanced up, nodded, and returned to his display.

  The hardcopy books were shelved in ranks which ran back to the dim reaches farther than Adele could follow without borrowing goggles from a spacer. The pedestals had been shaped from the wood of the Tree, but the shelves and their supports were of structural plastic tinted to match the natural ruddy gray.

  The volumes were arranged by height and size; most had no spine title. Adele picked one at random, a Pre-Hiatus work on homiletics. It had been printed on Earth in the inconceivably distant past but at some point rebound in stiff, yellow-gray vellum. The book next to it was also very old, but it was printed—by letterpress!—in a script and language which she couldn't identify without the help of her handheld.

  She started to draw the little unit out of her pocket, then remembered her surroundings. She turned and found the eyes of everybody in the large room—except the acolyte at the console—focused on her.

  Adele's lips spread in a flat line that was as close to a smile as she could come when she was embarrassed. "Ah . . . ," she said. "I'm very sorry to have wandered off like this—"

  She hadn't moved far physically, but her mind and soul had been in a different universe. It was a better universe, in her opinion, but she knew there were other viewpoints on the matter.

  "—but, ah . . . this is a very interesting collection."

  The Prior smiled affectionately at her. "Would you care to stay in the monastery, mistress, while your vessel is on New Delphi?" he asked. "I understand that our life here wouldn't be attractive to many of those living in the wider universe, but I think you're an exception. You can eat with us and I'll find you a cell. If you like, that is."

  "Yes," said Adele. "I would like that very much. If . . . ?"

  She looked at Daniel, now standing between the Prior and Margarida. His expression was momentarily grave, but he sounded affectionately cheerful as he said, "Yes, of course, Mundy. There hasn't been a great deal to attract your interests on this voyage. I'm glad we've finally made a landfall with more to offer you than it does those of us with less intellectual tastes."

  Hogg snorted. "You can say that again," he said; but as he did so, he eyed Margarida sidelong.

  "Shall I bring some kit for the two of us from the vessel, mistress?" Tovera said. She didn't speak loudly, but when she wanted to be heard—as now—everybody in the big room heard her.

 
Most of them probably understood the implications of what she was saying: Adele would be well protected. The Prior did, given the knowing smile he offered as he nodded first to Adele, then to Tovera.

  "Yes, do that, Tovera," Adele said crisply. Then she turned back to the stacks, in part to avoid the eyes of the others. She'd never found it hard to sink into that better personal world in a library, after all.

  * * *

  The note in Daniel's pocket read:

  Beloved Daniel—

  I could withstand you, but I cannot withstand myself. There is an entrance two-thousand nine-hundred and twelve feet counterclockwise from the foot of your gangplank; it is known to no one living save myself and now you. If you come there at our midnight, I will be waiting.

  Please, beloved, destroy this note and never mention its contents whether you decide to come or stay. If anyone were to learn what I am doing, I would be expelled from the Service at the cost of my very soul. Please, if you are a gentleman—preserve the honor of one who has loved you from her first glimpse of your face.

  Margarida

  "Attention!" snapped Norton, the Tech 1 commanding the guards in the main hatch, when Daniel appeared from the companionway. She and two of her contingent hopped to their feet quickly, but the fourth—a Purser's clerk named Hilbride, dropped his sub-machine gun with a clatter more frightening than anything likely to come out of the darkness on this planet.

  "Carry on, Norton," Daniel said as Hilbride skidded the dropped gun twice across the deck plating without managing to get control of it.

  Daniel bent to pick the weapon up, clicking the safety on and handed it back. He'd burn a new asshole in whoever'd issued a gun to Hilbride without sufficiently explaining about the safety, but that was for the morning.

  Now he said pleasantly, "Keep it switched off till you have a reason to shoot, spacer. And Norton—you might make sure he understands that. I don't want one of you to accidentally blow me in half when I come back from my little walk."

  "God help me, sir!" Norton said, her face red and sweating. "Sir, it was my fault, but it won't happen again!"

  Daniel nodded, acknowledging the apology without suggesting that the business was closed. "I can't sleep, so I'm going to walk for a few hours," he said. "I have my recall plate—"

  He tapped his breast pocket, then his pistol holster.

  "—and in case I'm attacked by a ravenous bark mite, I have this."

  "Isn't Mr. Hogg going with you, sir?" Hilbride asked doubtfully. He held the sub-machine gun with the care worthy of a poisonous snake which had already bitten once.

  "Mr. Hogg is playing poker with the Count," Daniel said, smiling engagingly. He was breaking his own rules; he knew it and the guards knew it. But there was nobody present who'd stand up to the captain the way Hogg or Woetjans certainly would. "They're also drinking a bottle of what the Count calls Calvados and Hogg says is smooth applejack."

  Everybody chuckled. Daniel touched his fingers to his brow in a friendly salute, then strode down the boarding bridge into the night. He wasn't wearing his helmet, but he slid his light-amplifying goggles over his eyes. Starlight brought the whorled wonder of the Tree into sharp relief. Oracle or not, it was a remarkable plant and a unique habitat—not least for the humans burrowing into its fabric like so many adoring beetles.

  Grinning, Daniel began to whistle "Cruising Round Pleasaunce" and stopped in a moment's confusion. Margarida seemed a shy girl, even in the note she'd written. A song like that wasn't for the ears of a decent child like her.

  He grinned still broader. Perhaps in the morning he'd teach it to her. . . .

  Daniel kept his eyes on the Tree as he walked along its vast curve. He switched his goggles from light enhancement—which did a better job of showing the ground—to thermal imaging in order to pick up the higher body temperature of animal life.

  He'd allowed himself plenty of leeway before local midnight, so occasionally he paused to examine some creature crawling on the bark. None of them were bigger than his little fingernail. According to the database all native species were wingless and multi-legged, but when he cued the goggles to caret movement he caught a few swoops from branch to branch, even after he'd filtered out fluttering leaves. Imported species, he supposed; like the humans on New Delphi.

  He walked on more briskly. The wind among the gnarled branches formed a chorus as thin and cold as the stars singing.

  Machines could have measured the distance for Daniel, but he chose instead to pace it—a countryman's skill he'd learned, like so much else, from Hogg while he was growing up on Bantry. 2,912 feet would be just around the curve of the tree from the Princess Cecile. That was fortunate, because Daniel knew that the guards in the main hatch were watching him if only because they had nothing better to do.

  Margarida was an adult and anyway Lieutenant Daniel Leary wasn't her keeper, but though it wasn't his business to protect her honor, he would as a gentleman keep the bargain she'd offered: nobody would learn about the affair through Daniel's action or inadvertence. Instead of destroying the note, he'd hand it back so that she could be certain of its destruction.

  This should be. . . . Daniel glanced over his shoulder as though looking up at the Tree's overhanging mass, a thing he'd done several times since he left the ship. The Princess Cecile was out of direct sight, as he'd expected. In a niche at the juncture of two separate trunks of the Tree was an arched doorway. In daylight it would've been invisible, but thermal imaging showed the panel to be minusculely warmer than the mass of living wood into which it was set.

  Daniel removed the goggles and dropped them into a cargo pocket. He was wearing a utility uniform since anything else would've sent quite accurate rumors racing about the Sissie, but one didn't greet a potential lover looking like a creature peering up from the surface of a pond.

  He knocked softly on the panel. A bar whispered; then the door opened outward, catching on blown sand. Daniel quickly brushed the obstruction clear with the side of his boot.

  "Daniel?" a voice whispered from the darkness.

  Daniel stepped toward the blurred shadow in the doorway. "Ah, Margarida?" he said.

  She threw herself into his arms, whispering, "Beloved!" before crushing her lips against his. He embraced her, noting that her robe slid smoothly over flesh with no sign of undergarments.

  Margarida pulled her head back. "Come," she whispered, leading him inside and tugging the door to behind him. "There's a room here, nothing fancy but . . ."

  They walked together down the narrow corridor, Daniel's left arm around Margarida's waist while her right hand toyed at his hairline. She was very warm and soft enough that the side of her body molded perfectly to his.

  Something pricked at the back of Daniel's neck. An insect? he thought, frowning slightly.

  His legs gave way. He was conscious, but everything around him happened behind a wall of glass. Margarida tried to hold him upright, but his weight bore her down until the dozens of robed legs scurried to help her. Arms lifted Daniel carefully.

  The glass grew even thicker.

  CHAPTER 22

  Daniel was being carried; deep into the earth, he thought, but he wasn't sure whether he was confusing what was happening to his body with the slow trail his mind plowed down a slope of ice. He could see normally, but he was face down and couldn't turn his head for a view of anything but bare feet and the hems of robes.

  He heard sounds, but his brain couldn't seem to connect them with the words he used to know. Once he managed to move his lips to mumble, "Tell Adele. They'll be worried about me. . . ."

  The voices rose in volume; fingers touched his throat, then moved away. Another voice spoke reassuringly. Daniel kept going down.

  There were no glowstrips. The companions of the men carrying him held lanterns whose bright white light seemed out of place here in the bowels of the tree. Hard shadows capered across the featureless walls. The rock-cut stairs turned and turned about at landings which seemed far apart. Several t
imes Daniel felt the hands carrying him pass his weight off to others.

  Feet moved ahead of him; metal squealed. They passed an iron door into a chamber. Daniel couldn't guess how large it was, but the lanterns didn't illuminate its full extent.

  The air had a dry, vegetable odor. A long row of mummy-shaped bundles stood upright against a wall at right angles to the one in which the door was set. As Daniel's captors carried him past them, he suddenly realized that the bundles weren't balls of twine but rather tendrils twisting over and around themselves like those of a house plant in too small a pot. There were hundreds of the root clumps, perhaps more.

  Daniel's captors spoke among themselves. Hands lifted his shoulders and set his feet on the earthen floor again. His legs supported him, though he'd have toppled onto his face without the others keeping him balanced.

  Daniel could see his captors now, though the Prior was the only one he recognized. One of the robed figures moving at the edge of his vision might have been Margarida, but the light wasn't on her face. It puzzled him that he felt no emotion, but he supposed that was an effect of the drug that held his muscles catatonic.

  An acolyte pulled a coiled rootlet toward Daniel and wrapped it around his forehead. The room's back wall was plant material, a vast plane of root plunging toward water flowing in the depths of the earth. His scalp prickled where the tree touched him. Fluid beaded on his skin, but he didn't know whether it was his own blood or sap dripping from the Tree.

  Fingers reached into his breast pocket and came out with his recall plate. Instead of removing it, the acolyte bent Daniel's fingers around the plate so that he held it in both hands. Another man wound the tip of a second rootlet around Daniel's hands and wrists. The rootlet had a spongy tension, just enough to grip without either jerking free or pulling Daniel off his feet.

  The hands released him. Daniel remained where he stood, held in place by the Tree. He could feel hair-fine cilia penetrating his skin; the contact was warm but not unpleasant. He'd thought the Tree might suck him dry for its own nourishment, but now he realized that the rootlets' purpose was to inject traces of the Tree's serum into his bloodstream.