The Far Side of The Stars

by David Drake

  He looked at those about him, his friends, his fellow humans—every soul of them, not only the Sissies and the Klimovs but also the robed acolytes. Their hands were wired and their expressions terrified, but they were Daniel's friends because their action had brought him to this exaltation. It was good he'd returned, though, because he had his duty.

  Count Klimov bent to massage his right calf while looking at the long line of root-wrapped mummies, the hundreds of Intercessors of previous generations. "Will we never find the Earth Diamond, then?" he said to his wife, his tone peevish with disappointment and the pain of his leg muscles. Which was nothing to what he'd be feeling after climbing back up those 815 steps, the pragmatically human part of Daniel's mind noted.

  "Your excellency?" Daniel said. Spacers were crowding about him; he looked through their legs to see the Klimovs ten feet away. "I'll give you the Earth Diamond for a price."

  The Count didn't hear him in the general bustle, and the surrounding Sissies didn't pay any attention to his words. Adele understood, though, and said sharply, "Back away from the captain! Give him room! Woetjans, give the captain room!"

  "Right, move your asses back!" Woetjans shouted, jerked into action by Adele's command. When Lamsoe didn't straighten quickly enough, she grabbed him by the back of neck like a puppy and deposited him an arm's length away.

  "Count Klimov!" Adele said. She didn't shout the way the bosun had, but nobody could ignore the note of aristocratic command in her crisp tones. "If you will come here, Captain Leary is offering to find the Earth Diamond for you."

  "What?" said Klimov. "What do you—?"

  He took an abrupt step toward Daniel. A muscle in Klimov's groin cramped; he toppled forward. Valentina grabbed her husband, but he would've hit the floor if Lamsoe—headed in the right direction because of Woetjans's shove—hadn't caught him.

  Daniel blinked. During the instant his eyes were closed, the universe flared back into his mind with almost the same crystalline glory as he'd felt when it and he and the Tree were one. He opened his eyes, smiling on those around him and reveling in life and existence.

  The recall plate had fallen to the floor when Daniel's hands opened; it lay between his legs. He picked it up and rubbed it between his palms. The physical connection with a familiar object was part of the process by which a human being became the Intercessor, the connection which translated between the Tree and each human querent.

  The Count was speaking, but his words were merely variations on, "What do you mean?" Daniel found it a wonder to hear sounds again instead of being the vibrations himself.

  "Count Klimov," he said; Klimov fell silent with his mouth open. "I need a vessel, your vessel. I'll trade you the Earth Diamond for the Princess Cecile, and I'll carry you and the Countess to Todos Santos. There you'll be able to take ship anywhere you wish. Back to Novy Sverdlovsk with your treasure, I would expect. Do you accept my offer?"

  "He bloody well—" Hogg started to say, but Adele touched his lips with her right index finger. Hogg gulped back the remainder of the threat and grimaced contritely, first to Adele and then to the Count himself.

  Klimov met Daniel's eyes. The smile appeared to bother him, but Daniel couldn't help it. Life in its profusion and in its detail was a wonderful thing, an entrancing thing.

  "Captain Leary," the Count said, formal and far more impressive than he'd generally been since Daniel met him. "You know that I paid three hundred thousand florins for the Princess Cecile. She is a fine ship, no doubt, but the Earth Diamond is unique. There are those who would pay twenty times as much for it; I would pay so much if I were able to do so. Why do you make this offer?"

  Klimov wasn't a fool. He knew there were hard men in the Sissie's crew and that a whispered order from Daniel Leary might be the last anybody heard of two nobles from Novy Sverdlovsk. Even so, he didn't flinch.

  In the recent past Daniel had known everything, been all things, and some memories of the things closest to his present life remained like dust-motes glinting in the sun. This was the man who'd faced down a peasant waving the bloody scythe with which he'd killed his wife and her lover bare moments before, he thought; and smiled more broadly.

  "There's no trick, your excellency," Daniel said. He thought he could stand up now; perhaps in a moment he'd try. "My nation, Cinnabar, has need of a ship. Whereas money . . ."

  He gurgled a laugh. "I've never needed more money than what it took to buy the next round of drinks or a lady's dinner," he said, noting the rueful agreement in Hogg's expression. "Besides, the Earth Diamond came from Novy Sverdlovsk; it should go back there."

  Count Klimov bowed stiffly at the waist, then straightened. "Captain Leary," he said, "I accept your offer. I will sign whatever documents you desire."

  He cleared his throat. "Now," he said. "When do you expect to fulfill your part of the bargain?"

  "Immediately," said Daniel. He tried to get up. He could visualize every muscle fiber, every nerve cell, but for a moment that conscious awareness replaced the reflexes that should've brought action. He laughed again as Hogg and Woetjans lifted him upright, worry carving deep clefts in their faces.

  "I'm all right," Daniel said. "I'm better than all right, but it's like being drunk, that's all."

  "I've bloody well seen you drunk, master," Hogg said grimly, holding Daniel's left arm over his shoulders as Woetjans supported the right. "You were never like this!"

  Daniel felt existence shrivel back down to a kernel in his mind; his body worked normally again. "I'm all right," he repeated, and to prove it he walked to the mummy closest to where the Acolytes had placed him. Hogg and Woetjans didn't let go, but they permitted his legs to carry his weight.

  Daniel opened his right hand. "Hogg," he said, facing the shrouded, desiccated corpse of the man who had been interface between the Tree and humanity during the previous six decades. "Your knife, if you please."

  Hogg snicked his blade open and slapped the hilt into Daniel's hand. He and Woetjans moved away. The scores of humans in the great chamber waited, only the whisper of their breath breaking the silence.

  Daniel inserted the point at the mummy's bulging midsection and drew it down in a swift curve; the keen steel ticked on the object beneath. The roots had dried when the Intercessor died; they were silk strong, but they didn't resist the edge.

  He stepped back and closed the knife. "Your excellency," he said to Count Klimov. "If you'll in reach there, I think you'll find the Earth Diamond. My predecessor in this place was John Tsetzes."

  "I never knew," the Prior whispered. He walked toward the mummy with the cautious determination of a very sick man. "We don't speak of the persons before they became Intercessor. The most recent elevation came before I joined the Service."

  Daniel closed the knife and returned it to Hogg. The Klimovs knelt together, reaching into the husk that he'd sliced open. The dead roots scrunched to the side as the Klimovs babbled prayers of thanksgiving. They brought the diamond into open air for the first time in sixty years, holding it in both their hands.

  Daniel remembered the blaze of white-hot suns; then he was back in a deep cavern, lighted by the Sissies' handlamps. The huge gem reflected and refracted the beams into a dazzle greater than the originals. Not only continents but the terrain features, rivers and lakes and mountain ranges, were etched on the globe's inner surface. They scattered the light into a thousand rainbows.

  "Your excellency," Daniel said, "I hope our bargain suits you; for I can tell you, it suits me and the RCN very well indeed!"

  * * *

  Adele heard the corvette's klaxon, its sound muffled through the living walls of the tree. Her commo helmet said in Mr. Chewning's voice, "Five to ship. We're about to clear sand out of the thrusters. Stay clear by fifty yards or you better be able to grow yourself a new hide. Five out."

  "You'll be gone before I'm elevated, Captain Leary," said the Prior, hunching slightly. Two husky male acolytes waited nearby to accompany him from the library and carry him down t
he long steps, just as Lamsoe and Claud had done earlier in the day. "Goodbye, then, and may good fortune attend your later endeavors as well."

  He held The Institutions in both hands. Adele had scanned it to provide both herself and the Service with copies of the text, but the Prior would take the codex itself with him.

  "Good day to you, sir," Daniel said, dipping his head in a cross between a nod and a bow. "I'm glad we could reach an accommodation that permits your Service to survive."

  Adele noted with silent wonder the way Daniel verbally drew a glove over his iron fist. The present Prior would become the next Intercessor, and the same thing would happen at his death, then henceforth till time or the Service ended.

  Daniel hadn't made an open threat when he addressed the Prior and his assembled acolytes, but they'd correctly understood what he meant when he said, "I will not permit the present situation to continue."

  Intercessors lived longer than ordinary humans; the Tree was a wise and abstemious master. Much the same comparison could be made of pet cats and their feral cousins, Adele supposed. Pets generally seemed to be content, too. . . .

  Most of the Sissies were aboard, making the ship ready for return to Todos Santos, but six armed spacers watched over Adele and Daniel so long as they were on the ground. From the guards' scowls and the way they held their weapons, they genuinely thought there might be trouble.

  Adele didn't—the Service was completely cowed. But she carried her pistol and Hogg and Tovera watched the entrances on opposite sides of the long room; just in case—and at least for Hogg, in hope.

  A waiting acolyte said harshly, "What happens to one man is of little account when balanced against the good of all humanity!"

  His partner tried to shush him, a look of fear on his face. "Andre, it's been decided," the Prior said tiredly.

  Adele looked at the acolyte. "Sir," she said, "you're welcome to make that choice regarding the worth of your own life. I wouldn't hesitate to make it regarding mine. But you will not make that choice for a friend of mine!"

  Daniel looked at her and smiled. "No, they won't," he said. He turned again to the Prior and repeated, "Good day."

  He strode toward the corridor leading most directly to the ship. Hogg and four of the guards walked with him.

  Adele ran a fingertip over the vellum cover of A Catalog of the Library of Barnard's World, sighed, and followed her friend—but slowly. The library of Barnard's World, supposedly the finest collection of Terran books extant since the asteroids blasted Earth and humanity into the Hiatus, had burned three hundred years ago.

  "Clear away, bitch!" one of Adele's escort snarled, brandishing his impeller. "Or take your chances on which end of this I use on you!"

  Adele raised her head, recalled from a reverie in which young Adele Mundy grew up to become Director of the Academic Collections on Bryce, revered for her knowledge and the quiet assurance of her demeanor. The novice who'd lured Daniel into the trap, Margarida, waited in the corridor.

  "Mistress?" the girl said to Adele. The right side of her head had been shaved so that the pressure cut from Tovera's sub-machine gun could be bandaged. "Might I walk with you?"

  "Didn't I tell you?" the Sissie shouted, lifting his gun for a butt-stroke.

  "Vincent!" Adele said. "If I wanted her dead, I'd have killed her!"

  She took a deep breath, because part of her did want the girl dead; so very much that her arm trembled with the effort of not drawing her pistol. Tovera smirked, amused to watch a conscience in action. Daniel wouldn't have to know. . . .

  "Yes, if you like," Adele said, her voice as calm as a pond in which a great carnivore waits. Did the girl think she was going to follow Daniel aboard the Princess Cecile? "To the boarding bridge and no farther."

  Margarida fell in step. Without looking toward Adele she said, "The Service is a renounced community. You're aware of that, I suppose?"

  "Yes," said Adele. "As soon as Daniel—"

  She cleared her throat, then resumed, "When Captain Leary said this would be our next landfall, I read the histories of New Delphi which I had available. Quite a considerable amount of information, actually; though they omitted a few salient points."

  "Yes," Margarida said, blushing a poisonous color in the yellow-green light. "Now that you're leaving, I'm sure you'll see to it that the accounts are corrected. There'll be riots against the Lay Service, I suppose."

  Adele looked at the woman in silence while one of the escorts unbarred the door to the outside. The wind curled in; tiny sand-grains gnawed Adele's face and hands.

  "We'll certainly see to it that the wider universe learns the full truth of your operations here, yes," she said as she and Margarida started across the ridged sand toward the ship. "And people being people, there'll likely be a degree of anger at an institution for moral uplift which turns out to have practiced human sacrifice. So yes to the second part of your question also."

  "It wasn't—" the girl said angrily, then blushed again and swallowed the remainder of her words. She was intelligent enough to realize that while Adele was being deliberately uncharitable, the description was within the bounds of truth.

  "We see things differently, I know that," Margarida said, squeezing her arms against her torso. "I shouldn't have brought it up, I'm sorry."

  She looked straight at Adele for the first time and went on, "Mistress, I wanted to ask you. . . ."

  She paused, eyed the male spacers close ahead of them, and blushed. Then she continued, "I sent a note to Captain Leary as a trick so we could, well, take him for elevation. You know that?"

  "To kidnap him," Adele said in a level voice. "Yes, I know that."

  And I've allowed you to live because that's what Daniel wants, she added silently. But don't push your luck.

  "Mistress," the girl blurted. "It was a trick. But I'm only twenty-three, I'm a woman. I haven't taken second orders yet, I'm still a novice, and I think . . . I think. . . ."

  Margarida swallowed; she'd begun to cry. "Mistress," she said, "the Service does great good, unique good. I saw that on my own world, Regis, but it's the same on hundreds of worlds. Only I'm not sure I'm strong enough to be what I want to be. Mistress, what should I do? I know that you understand!"

  Adele met her eyes, trying to compose a satisfactory answer; an answer that would satisfy either one of them.

  "Sister Margarida," she said. She'd only hesitated a few seconds, but the chasm between them seemed far wider than that. "You believe I've renounced the world—" the euphemism twitched Adele's lips in a cold smile "—as you wish to do. That's not the case. I didn't have to surrender something that I didn't have in the first place."

  The girl stared without comprehension. They might be speaking two different languages for all the communication they were effecting.

  "Sister," Adele said, "I wish I could help you. I can't. I don't have either your faith or your desires. You'll have to decide for yourself what you do with your life."

  She chuckled without humor. "That's true for all of us, of course."

  They'd reached the catwalk. Most of the Sissie's hatches were already closed, though the big port on the bridge remained open as well as the main hatch. The air had a burned smell, the residue of the recent trial of the plasma thrusters.

  Adele stopped and put a hand on Margarida's shoulder, turning her so they were facing one another for the first time since they met outside the library. The escorting spacers were already on the boarding bridge. They faced about with worried expressions.

  "Sister Margarida," Adele said more fiercely than she'd intended. "I can't tell you what to do, but I'll tell you what I did. Oh, not sex—that doesn't affect me, I told you that already; but the world in the larger sense does."

  She gestured back toward the Tree. "Your library is interesting," she went on. "There are many unusual holdings and perhaps a few that're unique; but I've worked in collections that're easily a hundred times more extensive. I love them, I love the environment, and I could be bac
k there now—but I'm not. I'm here in what's again an RCN warship with all that implies. I've killed many times, many scores of times since I put on this uniform—"

  Her right thumb and index finger pinched the mottled fabric of the opposite sleeve of her utility uniform.

  "—and I'll kill more people, I'm sure of it, until the day someone kills me as I'm also sure will happen. This is my choice, Sister, my choice: I chose the world!"

  Adele dropped the girl's arm and strode up the boarding bridge. She didn't look back until she was in the access compartment and the main hatch had started to close.

  Margarida was staring after her with a blank expression. Suddenly the girl turned on her heel and started back toward the Tree with determined strides.

  CHAPTER 25

  The Princess Cecile orbited Todos Santos, but so long as Adele had work to do she'd remained oblivious of the weightlessness. Now she set her console to complete the processing and looked over to the Klimovs in the bridge annex.

  The Count seemed irritated; Valentina had a withdrawn, half-sad expression. Previously they'd been coddled during landing procedures; this time they were left to their own devices; they were no longer owners of the ship on which they travelled. Daniel was negotiating with the port inspectors, while Adele dealt with her own self-appointed task.

  They don't really belong anywhere, Adele thought. Their wealth gains them entrée to most societies, but they aren't really of those societies. Everyone else aboard the Sissie is part of the same family.

  "Your excellencies?" Adele said, speaking across the ten feet of open space instead of using the intercom. The ship while orbiting wasn't silent, but its systems didn't make the cacophonous racket they would when under power. "I'm providing you with a list of the ships in San Juan Harbor with their values listed for tax purposes, the records of their captains where those are available, and the vessels' histories—again as available. The tax listings are relative, of course."

  "But I don't see . . . ?" Klimov said, still frowning but now in confusion rather than pique. "What is this you're telling us?"