The Far Side of The Stars

by David Drake

  The acolytes linked hands. The Prior murmured a prayer; the others responded by rote, their voices a sibilant echo in the great room. They walked out of Daniel's line of sight, returning to the long stairwell upward. The door closed with a clang, shutting off the beams of their lanterns.

  In the cavern's unrelieved darkness, Daniel's mind began to shine with the light of all the universe.

  * * *

  Four spacers with sub-machine guns surrounded Adele at the console she'd taken for her own. They were angry and frustrated, as dangerous as live grenades. If they had a target or even the hint of a target, they'd blast it without the least compunction.

  Adele knew exactly how they felt.

  Nearby in the stacks an acolyte was making handwritten excerpts from a gardening book printed on Blaise a hundred and thirty years ago. Adele didn't know why or really care, but she'd checked to make sure of what the fellow was doing just in case it would help find Daniel.

  It didn't, of course. Nothing thus far had helped. Possibly nothing would.

  Woetjans and a group of spacers had gone off to the northern arc of the Tree. She and five of the others marched into the library looking tired, scruffy, and very angry.

  "Nothing, ma'am!" the bosun snarled. "The Countess ferried forty of us in the aircar up the coordinates you give us, and we hiked back. We checked every nook and cranny on the map. There's no sign of the Captain and no sign of anydamnbody in the past hundred years."

  They were treating Adele as though she were in charge now that Daniel was gone. As a result she was in charge. She wasn't sure she was a good choice for the task of locating Daniel, but she couldn't think of anyone better at the moment.

  A squad of acolytes with static brooms entered from the corridor to sweep the large chamber. Adele grimaced at the use of charged pickups around the consoles, but if they were properly grounded there wouldn't be a problem. Windblown dust got everywhere in the complex, especially with so many angry Sissies stamping in and out paying scant attention to whether or not they were closing the outside doors.

  "No sign?" Adele said, glancing around to see if the Prior was visible. No, not from where she sat at least. "Yesterday we were told that there were still hermits—"

  One of the sweepers was the girl who'd accompanied the Prior yesterday. "Mistress!" Adele called. "Sister Margarida. Will you come here, please?"

  Woetjans and two of the spacers guarding Adele—which Tovera, also present, had fortunately chosen to take as a joke rather than an insult—stepped toward the girl with one hand open to grab her and a weapon ready in the other in case she gave them an excuse to shoot. Instead the novice dropped her broom and came to Adele with her empty hands raised. One of the guards would've seized her arm anyway if Woetjans hadn't growled, "Don't be a bloody fool, Platt—she's coming."

  "Mistress?" Margarida said. Her eyes were frank and open. There was a degree of reserve as well, but the girl would have to be an imbecile not to know how very dangerous the situation was for her and all her fellows until Daniel was found.

  "Yesterday you said that there were hermits living here apart from your community, did you not?" Adele said. She didn't raise her voice, but nobody looking at her would've been in doubt that she was angry.

  "The Prior said that, mistress," Margarida said. "He may be right, but during my year in the Service I've wandered quite some distance in the Tree, farther than most acolytes do. I haven't seen individual hermits. Though they may have been hiding from me."

  She offered a cautious smile. "The Prior is very old," she said. "Sometimes I think he remembers things from when he was young better than he does more recent events."

  "I see," Adele said. She didn't trust the girl, but she was uncomfortably aware that her opinion might have been swayed by the fact that the novice had seemed to find Daniel attractive. "You may go back to your duties. Thank you for your help."

  Margarida offered a bow, then picked up her broom and resumed cleaning. Several spacers glowered at her with expressions suggesting that they'd like to burn her alive. That wouldn't bring Daniel back, but it'd be a way of letting out frustration.

  Adele returned to her display. She knew Woetjans was waiting for orders, but she had nothing to offer at the moment.

  Adele had found seventeen maps in the monastery's database; she'd relayed them to the spacers making the physical search for Daniel. One of the maps, drawn a hundred and fifty standard years previous, purported to show all human habitations, past or present, within the Tree.

  Woetjans' team had been searching the most distant, a warren burrowed into the northern edge of the Tree by a religious order not long after the Hiatus. The group only survived a generation or so, in contrast to the Service which the oracle had supported well into its third millennium by now.

  None of the searches had found any sign of Daniel; and for the moment, Adele had run out of new places to look.

  "Mistress?" prodded Woetjans in a desperate voice. "What do we do? He can't just have vanished into thin air."

  "The books, the hardcopy here . . . ," Adele said, splaying the fingers of her left hand toward the extensive stack area. "Some of them contain descriptions of the Tree. I'm searching them in hope that there'll be something that isn't in the electronic files."

  She paused and rubbed her eyes. "Nothing in the database is pre-Hiatus," she said, "though some of it is very old. Perhaps the books will tell me something, but I haven't found it yet."

  Volumes she'd plucked from the stacks littered the floor beside and behind her. She hadn't bothered to reshelve them; the acolytes could do that after the Princess Cecile lifted from New Delphi. There were a hundred and thirty thousand books in the collection, according to the index. Most could easily be eliminated, but even so Adele had barely scratched the surface of the volumes that might possibly help.

  Hilbride, one of the spacers who'd arrived with Woetjans, squatted for a closer look at the books Adele had gathered. He seemed to feel a personal involvement in Daniel's disappearance because he'd been one of the last people to talk with him when he left the ship.

  "Mistress?" he said. Adele had always found him one of the more literate Sissies. "How do you tell what books are where? They're not shelved in any order that I can see."

  "No," Adele agreed, "only by height and thickness. But they're indexed—"

  She gestured to the console she was using.

  "—here, with the location." She focused on the next title her search program had highlighted. "The Adventures of Captain Devereaux," she quoted. " 'An account of forty years of voyages as spacer and captain. Printed on Arslan in the tenth year of the third indiction of President Bella Gruen.' "

  She closed her eyes for a moment to bring information into high mental relief. "That'd be roughly twenty-seven hundred years ago. According to the database, Devereaux once touched on New Delphi. Perhaps he'll say something interesting in his book, which is item thirty-one on the uppermost shelf of stack three-fourteen."

  Adele grinned wryly at Hilbride. "If you'll go fetch it, we'll learn."

  Hilbride glanced at a stack to see where the numbers were—at the top on either end—and started off, holding his sub-machine gun in both hands instead of carrying it slung. Woetjans looked even angrier than she had been. It struck Adele that if she'd given the bosun the command she gave Hilbride, Woetjans would have needed help to execute it.

  The Prior entered the chamber on the arm of a young male acolyte. With him were the Klimovs and six spacers who'd been part of the the Princess Cecile's anchor watch.

  "What in bloody blue blazes are they doing here?" Woetjans growled. She started toward the newcomers. "If they think we're going to lift ship before we find the captain, they can bloody well think again!"

  Adele got up and followed, in part to prevent the bosun from doing something they'd all regret. The Klimovs owned the Princess Cecile, and the courts of Cinnabar had a short way with mutineers—however sympathetic the judge might be to the cause of the cri
me.

  "Mistress Mundy!" the Count called cheerfully. "The Prior here tells me that I'll be able to question the oracle after all! They're going to prepare me now, and tomorrow I'll know where the Earth Diamond is!"

  He gestured to the couch. The touch of thousands of querents over millennia had blackened patches of the smooth wooden curves.

  "Not without guards, you won't," Woetjans said. As soon as she knew that the Klimovs weren't going to demand something she didn't want to do, they returned to being "us" as opposed to "them," which was everybody on New Delphi who hadn't arrived aboard the Princess Cecile.

  "Generally the querent is the only person in the room during incubation," the Prior said to Woetjans and Adele, "but we can screen the couch if you'd like. The querent should have a degree of privacy, but there's no need for anything that would interfere with your safety or continued work in the library."

  "You got that right," Woetjans muttered, but even she seemed mollified.

  "We're going to my study to begin the preparation, just down the corridor," the Prior said. He nodded to the guards. "These members of your crew are of course welcome."

  "Yes, go ahead," Adele said because the spacers expected her to say something. She bowed to Klimov, hoping to wipe away the frown that'd appeared when he realized how completely his authority had been usurped in this crisis. "Good luck to you, your excellency."

  The Prior, Klimov, and the train of guards shuffled toward a side door. Hilbride waited by the console, holding a rebound octavo volume in one hand and his gun in the other; he looked like a bizarre heraldic figure. Adele turned to him, then realized the Klimovna hadn't gone off with her husband.

  "Mistress?" Adele said.

  "Is there anything I can do to help you, Adele?" the Klimovna said.

  Adele stared at her, considering the question. At last she said, "Thank you, Valentina, but I don't believe there's anything you can do. I appreciate the thought."

  The Klimovna cleared her throat. "I wonder, Adele; do you believe in the power of prayer?"

  Adele blinked. "No," she said. "No, I do not."

  "Then perhaps I will pray," Valentina said with a sad smile. "So as not to duplicate someone else's effort, you see."

  She turned and started back toward the door she'd entered by. The guards who'd accompanied her from the Princess Cecile had gone off with the Count and the Prior.

  Woetjans stared at her back, then said, "Lamsoe and Griggs—tag along with her. It just might be she's got the best idea yet, so I'm damned if I want anything to happen to her."

  Adele walked to the console and silently took the book from Hilbride; she'd set him to fetch further volumes while she searched this one for anything useful.

  In her heart, she was glad for what Woetjans had said. She'd thought the same thing, but she was too much of a stiff-necked rationalist to say it.

  CHAPTER 23

  There was a man named Daniel Leary. The Tree was aware of him as it was aware of all the many billions of his species on many thousands of worlds.

  The Tree knew.

  Gas expanded and coalesced, forming suns and planets. The Tree was present because the mind of the Tree was omnipresent.

  Slime formed in the warm seas of Earth and of innumerable other planets. It lived for a time, but as it started to spread vulcanism burned it back into its constituent elements. Life arose again, and this time a rain of cometary debris scoured the world clean. A third time, a fourth time, disaster following disaster; but eventually on Earth and many other worlds life survived. It covered the surface, then stepped across the reaches of space to other suitable environments.

  Occasionally life form met life form. Interspecies conflict was rare because the needs and desires of alien races differed too greatly. Within species, however, rapid expansion gave opportunities for terrible wars and sometimes extinction when the extremities rebounded against themselves and the center.

  Humanity avoided final oblivion, but by no more than a razor's edge. The thousand-year Hiatus from star travel could easily have become the eternal eclipse of the human race.

  The Tree knew all things, but it cared about nothing.

  Human fleets sailed between stars, threading in and out through the bubbles of the Matrix but returning to the sidereal universe except when catastrophe overtook them. The man named Daniel Leary had a feel for the Matrix, its currents and its pressures; but the Tree was the Matrix and all other existence, then and now and tomorrow.

  On the planet men called New Delphi humans searched and struggled, their minds seething with anger and despair. The man named Daniel Leary felt their pain and would have washed it away had he been able to; but Daniel Leary no longer existed save as an idea in the Tree's awareness, the equivalent of the warmth of sun on leaves or the wind's eternal pressure on the multi-stemmed trunk.

  A human asked a question; and the Tree knew. . . .

  * * *

  Adele awoke, momentarily angry that she'd been asleep. She jerked upright, rousing the spacers guarding her to full alertness. The watch had changed while she slept, but Hilbride slept curled on the floor at her feet.

  The high-intensity lights in the stacks switched themselves on when a human being walked near, but they were all off now. Adele had been slumped over the console she was using, blurring the screen because her head lay over some of the holographic projectors.

  Grimacing at her own weakness, she looked around. Tovera nodded with the slight smile she generally wore; the expression had as little humor in it as the similar curve of a cobra's lipless mouth. "Good morning, mistress," she said. "It's oh-six-fourteen by the ship's time."

  "Have you gotten any sleep?" Adele said.

  Tovera shrugged, her smile minusculely broader. "Enough," she replied; which didn't answer the question Adele asked but was responsive nonetheless. "I can function."

  Tovera could function in any condition short of death, Adele presumed; and whatever killed her, as something doubtless would one day, had better not count her out for the sixty seconds or so a human brain retained enough oxygen to function.

  Adele stood, noting the enormous clutter of books blocking access to several of the nearer consoles. An acolyte—the same man she'd noticed before—sat at the far end of the rank; he felt her eyes on him and turned to nod, then resumed his work.

  Good God but she'd made a mess! And she wasn't any closer to finding Daniel than she'd been at the beginning of the night. Well, she wasn't dead yet, either.

  Woetjans rose; she'd been sitting on a stack of books down the aisle. Adele winced when she saw the bosun's choice of a seat, but she didn't comment.

  "Mistress," Woetjans said with a nod. The big woman looked a decade older than she had when the Princess Cecile landed. "I've been wondering what we do if, you know, he doesn't turn up."

  The guards watched Adele in intent silence. Hilbride had awakened; he was poised to get up from the floor, but he didn't move while he waited for her answer.

  "You go on, bosun," Adele said crisply. "As your duty requires. As you know."

  But that didn't answer what Signals Officer Mundy would do. Adele wasn't sure of that answer herself. It was unlikely that her presence on New Delphi over the next years or decades would locate Daniel; but perhaps it would make a difference . . . and perhaps that was the decision she'd make.

  For now, though, there were more volumes to examine, at least a thousand of them. She looked at the jumble of books she'd been through—carefully enough? Had a crucial paragraph escaped in her haste and fatigue?—and thought of the many-times greater task still ahead. She sighed, stretched, and prepared to return to it.

  The Prior entered the chamber accompanied by Valentina, half a dozen acolytes, and a pair of spacers. They walked toward the couch, hidden behind drapes made by hanging gray robes from a frame of plastic piping. The spacers guarding Count Klimov watched with grim expressions.

  "Let's join them," Adele said. There were grunts of pleased agreement from the Sissies abo
ut her. An oracle was a novelty in itself. Even if they were convinced of the need to stand guard the way they'd been doing, it was numbingly boring work.

  Adele had another reason for her decision. If the Count had gotten the answer to his question, he'd probably want to leave New Delphi immediately. She needed to be present to represent the Sissies, and to represent herself.

  The Prior was waiting; the girl Margarida supported his arm. He bowed to Adele, then pulled open the screen with his free hand; other acolytes set to removing the structure completely. Valentina walked to where her husband lay, sleeping with his mouth part open. Adele could hear the Count snoring softly.

  "Speak quietly," the Prior directed her. "You can touch him, but do so gently."

  "Georgi?" Valentina said. She bent over the couch and took the Count's hands in hers, chafing them lightly. "Wake up, dear one. It's morning."

  The Count opened his eyes. He started to lift his torso. His wife put her arm around him to help, but he seemed fit enough.

  "I dreamed," he said in a tone of bright wonder. "I remember. The Institutions, Book Ten, Caput Three. But I don't know what it means."

  "It's a book citation," Adele said. She stepped back to the console; she'd downloaded the index files to her handheld, but at the moment it was simpler to use the console already displaying the data rather than sitting on the floor with the little unit on her lap.

  She scrolled, searched, and repeated the search. Twelve hits, titles including the word Institutions, and none of them likely to have any bearing on the Earth Diamond.

  She looked at the Prior; he'd almost fallen when the Count spoke. Margarida was supporting his whole weight with an expression of terror.

  "Sir," Adele said. "Where are The Institutions shelved?"

  Her voice wasn't loud, no louder than the snick of the folding knife opening in Hogg's hand. He'd come in a moment ago, haggard from a day and night of searching on his own. Windblown grit clung to his hair and clothing.