Infinite Day

by Chris Walley

  He moved in more cautiously than he had on the ship. He was able to make his form somehow smaller and tighter and yet more transparent. He edged against walls, moving past people and gratified to find that although he glimpsed turned heads and puzzled faces, he was not challenged. They barely sense me.

  Almost overpowered once more by the onslaught of words and feelings, he moved along corridors of cool, pale brown stone and past armed guards. Again he saw them move nervously, but he knew he was unseen. The doors were open, and he slipped through them until at last he found a room with a great wooden table around which men and women sat and debated. A conference! Undetected, he moved up to a stone ledge high in a corner. Like a bird on a cliff.

  Now he began to adjust to his surroundings, feeling the cool temperature, sensing the fresh air, and above all, hearing the words. There are those here of the high stewards and the Assembly Defense Force; I am in their midst, and all their defenses are open before me.

  He began to listen. Then with a stab of horror he became aware of something approaching—something that shook his very being with its overwhelming age, its tremendous power, and above all, that awesome moral purity that is called holiness.

  Nezhuala felt himself tremble. I am outmatched.

  In an instant he was dazzled as if a light of intolerable brilliance had broken in on his consciousness. Within the light was a being in human form striding toward him, dressed in armor and bearing high a gleaming, golden sword. The room filled with a light that choked and dazzled.

  An angel of the Lord! I cannot stand against him.

  Nezhuala turned and, now careless of the form he bore, took flight, flinging the doors wide as he fled. Bruised, shaken, and tired, he withdrew himself back to the Dominion with all the speed he could.

  For a long time, Nezhuala sat on his throne, pressed against the back of the seat, aware of the sweat seeping into his robes, staring into emptiness and recovering his strength.

  I have failed. The thought was bitter. I had hoped to overhear plans, but I heard only snatches of debate.

  He suddenly saw that his voyage had not been fruitless. He had seen much: the Assembly was indeed prepared, and that was a cruel blow. There must have been fifty ships around Earth. Somehow they knew of his existence, and somehow they were preparing defenses, however feeble, against his own.

  He replayed in his mind the snatches of conversation that he had picked up in the few moments he had been able to listen to the conference. As he did, he saw again the faces around the long wooden table and realized that he had sensed something very important.

  They had been arguing with each other! And he had felt emotions of annoyance and irritation! Instead of a seamless, terrible unity that he had expected and feared, he had found an Assembly divided.

  Militarily, their strength grows. But elsewhere, at their heart, they are already divided. And that is where it really counts.

  12

  Even in the dreary grayness of Below-Space, time passed, and on all three ships—Merral’s Star, Lezaroth’s Comet, and Clemant’s Dove—the days slipped into weeks. And although on each vessel all the passengers and crew were affected to varying degrees by the strange and unnerving extra-physical manifestations, the ships continued to make unrelenting progress on their voyages between the worlds.

  On the Star, as the journey’s midpoint came and passed, Merral found that life had become a routine as drab as the lighting. It is as if we never did, nor will do, anything else. Yet the routine worked; everyone had defined tasks and did them. Every day, Merral went to worship, made a host of minor decisions, trained with weapons, practiced his Saratan, exercised, and spent some time talking at length with the crew or the soldiers. For him—as the others—the high point of the day was the evening program of music, drama, and film, and the low point, the perpetual intrusion of ghost slugs and other manifestations that were, by turn, irritating or alarming.

  Merral continued to spend some of his spare time with the castle tree. Despite the grayness of the simulation, he found it increasingly attractive. He never forgot that what he saw was utterly artificial, yet he found it some sort of living world where plants grew, insects took wing, and animals crawled. Here, unlike inside the steel gray walls of the ship, there was life, with seasons and trees that blossomed and seeded. Merral, who found himself grappling with the age-old paradox of space travel that in the infinity of space the greatest pressure comes from claustrophobia, also found in his simulation a release from the confining walls.

  One day, as he put the castle tree egg back in the drawer of his cupboard, he noticed that his cedar cone had opened up. He carefully lifted it out, turned it upside-down on a piece of paper, then tapped it several times. A dozen or more thin seeds, each barely big enough to cover the nail of his smallest finger, slipped out. Tenderly, he folded the paper into an envelope to hold the seeds and put them safely away. They remind me of a life that is long gone. Will it ever return?

  As their destination loomed and Merral’s Saratan improved, he practiced dialogues with Azeras, and in the spontaneous question-and-answer sessions he found he was able to converse fluently. Yet his fluency was within strict limits. When he tried to run through a day of what he now called his “old life” and imagine how he could talk in Saratan about trees or music or friendship, he found he did not have the vocabulary. He wondered whether any existed in Saratan.

  But his progress was praised by Azeras, and after one session the man gave him a wolfish grin. “Good! You are beginning to think like a Dominion captain.”

  The thought did not entirely please Merral. I hope I can take off my role as easily as I put it on.

  Midway through the voyage, Anya came to him privately. “Merral, it won’t have escaped your notice that I’ve been doing a lot of training with the snipers. When it comes to a fight I don’t really want to sit around. I want to be on their team.”

  Merral stared at her. “You have a task helping Abilana with surgery. Helping supervise the robo-surgeons.”

  “But others can do that too. And I can still nurse when I come back.”

  “Assuming you aren’t a casualty yourself.”

  “But I want to fight.”

  Merral heard himself sigh. Why don’t I want her to fight? Because I care for her or because I don’t think it’s right for her?

  “Anya, that’s understandable. But is it what you are supposed to do?”

  She gave him a look that was close to a glare. “It’s what I think I have to do. I just wanted to ask your permission.”

  “In theory, I have no objection, as long as you don’t get yourself killed. But I need to talk to the soldiers.”

  Sometime later, Merral caught up with Helena and told her that Anya was interested in joining her group.

  Helena looked hard at him. “Boss, I don’t know.” She had taken to calling Merral “Boss,” and although Merral wasn’t enthusiastic about it, he couldn’t bring himself to correct her.

  “Why not?”

  “I know she’s wanting to get involved, but I think she’s trying to prove something. That’s not the best basis to join a fighting unit.”

  “Is that a refusal?”

  “Hmm. Boss, we’re building a team of people who can rely on each other under the very worst circumstances. And I’m just not convinced that Anya’s ability is proven. Sorry. But if you want me to take her on . . .”

  “I would like that.”

  The heavy pause that followed said much. “Okay, Boss. But she gets no favoritism.”

  “Thanks.”

  Troubled by the matter, Merral mentioned it to Luke in his office. The chaplain frowned. “And Helena agreed to take her?”

  “Yes. You don’t think she should have?”

  Luke leaned toward him. “Are you happy with your decision to put her on the sniper team?”

  “Well . . . ,” Merral began and, hearing the hesitation in his voice, stopped.

  The chaplain shook a finger in warning. “L
et me be blunt, Merral. I don’t think you should have ordered Helena to take her.”

  “Why not?”

  Luke seemed to think for some time before answering. “I feel Anya is driven by what her sister did. I didn’t know Perena well, but she and Anya are very different people. And courage is an odder thing than we imagine.”

  “I can imagine that. I just didn’t want to refuse her.”

  Luke shook his head. “Well, it’s too late now to pull her from the team. We must just pray it works out.”

  Merral made a point of talking daily to Betafor and treating her as one of the team. He analyzed his action as, in part, politeness, but also a mechanism to try to bond her in with everyone else.

  One day he was on the bridge with Lloyd when, on impulse, he said, “Betafor, you seem to spend a lot of time on your own. Are you okay?”

  Her response was almost shrill. “Commander, you are making the same mistake again. You are seeing me in human terms. As an Allenix, I am self-sufficient; I do not need you or any other member of the crew.”

  “What about other Allenix?”

  “They would be largely irrelevant. We might trade data, but we are individuals. We exist on our own.”

  Behind her, he saw Lloyd raise a pale eyebrow as if to say, “I told you so.”

  Vero seemed to spend every spare moment examining data.

  “You look like you are drowning in information,” Merral said, trying to analyze the growing concern he felt for his friend.

  Vero looked at the pile of notebooks and the three separate computer screens around him. “A valid observation, my friend, I am—shall I say, preoccupied?”

  “Is it worthwhile?”

  “‘Is it worthwhile?’” Vero repeated the words as if the question was outrageous. “Yes. Because knowledge is power. Because if you can understand where someone has come from, you can predict where they want to go. Maybe.” He rubbed eyes that Merral thought in normal light would be red. “That’s why I—we—need all these data sources.”

  “What have we got so far?”

  “I now feel I have something of a more complete history of the Rebellion of Jannafy.”

  “Our histories surely didn’t lie?”

  “No. But they were overhasty in deciding that the Rebellion had ended. There was an unseemly eagerness to sweep the whole matter under the carpet and get on with rebuilding the Assembly. That is why the sentinels were founded.”

  “I thought your Moshe Adlen set up the sentinels against the return of all evil. Not specifically against the forces of Jannafy’s Rebellion.”

  “As did I. But I am now coming to the view that he b-believed something had survived. Do you know he consulted with Below-Space theorists for the rest of his life? I have found no records of what they talked about, but it seems significant.” He tapped his long fingers on the table, and when he continued he seemed to be speaking to himself. “I have been reading again the document we call “Adlen’s Testament.” It’s the last thing he wrote—in 2168, the year of his death. By then the War of the Rebellion was a distant memory. It’s a long letter, in which he asked that the original be preserved in perpetuity. There’s something odd in it. But I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “Interesting, but more pressingly, does all this—” Merral gestured at the screen—“help you understand Nezhuala? There is a vast time gap between Jannafy and him.”

  “Y-yes. Many of the distinctives of the Dominion that we are coming to recognize are present in Jannafy’s thinking. The relentless drive—whatever the cost—for advancement in technology, whether it be genetics, space travel, artificial intelligence . . . The fear of death and the attempts to fight mortality. The open spirituality with its pursuit of the quest rather than the acceptance of certainty. All are there with him and the idea of the ‘Free Peoples,’ who later became the Freeborn.”

  “And what can you give me to help us?”

  Vero stared at the screen for a moment. “My friend, as I look at the Dominion, I see logic at work, but I find that it is subservient to fear and hate. Those two emotions rule. A potent brew.”

  “Fear and hate?”

  “Yes, they are linked. Fear and hate feed on each other, don’t they?”

  “We fear, and so we hate.”

  “Yes. But it is more than that. Hate can only be countered by forgiveness. And fear is a poor soil for forgiveness.”

  A brief silence followed.

  “A last question: do you now have more sympathy for Jannafy?”

  “Sympathy?” echoed Vero. There was a long, drawn-out pause. “No. Understanding, my friend. But not sympathy.”

  Then, after some conversation on more trivial matters, Merral left Vero to his studies. But as he walked along the corridors toward the bridge, Merral found himself troubled. Vero’s pursuit of knowledge is harmless, isn’t it? Is it conceivable that understanding might turn into something more?

  Increasingly though, Merral felt a dark mood settle on people. Azeras maintained his gloomy frame of mind and seemed to be so preoccupied with his own thoughts that, as someone put it, he was “present in body but absent in mind.” Even Luke seemed to become openly gloomy and talked about “the winter of the soul.”

  Merral began to long for an end to their journey. We need to see daybreak; we need to act. We look like ghosts, and if this lasts much longer we may indeed be ghosts of all we once were.

  On the Dove of Dawn, former Advisor Clemant was also finding travel in Below-Space problematic. His concerns increasingly centered on the prebendant. Delastro definitely seemed to have been invigorated by Below-Space, and his twice-daily addresses now stormed and raged against sin and the Dominion with extraordinary energy and venom.

  During one sermon, Clemant risked glancing around and saw intent gazes and nodding heads. It’s not the man’s energy that worries me; it’s the way he is making disciples. Indeed, so complete was the dedication of many of the men to the prebendant that Clemant was obliged to show wholehearted support lest they turn against him.

  His concern for his own security meant that the fate of Captain Huang-Li was not as pressing as it might have been. She showed no signs of relenting in her opposition and had even ceased attending the prebendant’s evening talks. Clemant had been struck by how Delastro had been apparently untroubled by this. In public at least, Delastro seemed careful to express his appreciation of the captain and her right to dissent. What he said in private Clemant no longer knew, because he had given up secretly observing the prebendant. I don’t want to know what he is planning; ignorance is innocence. And in keeping with that maxim, Clemant deleted his records of what he had overheard. Once or twice, the uncomfortable irony struck him that, after a lifetime of gathering facts, he was now in the position of hiding them.

  Deleting the records had a positive effect in that Clemant now found that he was able to persuade himself that he must have misunderstood Delastro’s rhetoric and the captain was therefore in no danger. Yet if he was convinced no threat existed to the captain, he was increasingly convinced that she posed a threat to him. The document on her computer now entitled “What really happened on Farholme,” seemed to grow daily.

  Soon their emergence at Bannermene was just days away, and Clemant recognized that he had no idea what to do about this document. Perhaps, like these wretched manifestations, it will just vanish in the daybreak.

  In contrast to both Merral and Clemant, Lezaroth was in better spirits than when he had started the voyage. The captain surfaced three times to check their course; each time the measurements were satisfactory and within hours they were back in the Nether-Realms and on their way.

  A week before the Comet was due to enter Standard-Space near Gerazon-Far, Lezaroth found himself reviewing the situation with Isabella. On balance, he felt he had made good progress with her. He was pleasantly surprised how easily she had responded to his manipulation and indirect questions. The secret is this: I have let her think that she is in charge and that she is
manipulating me. An example had been her questions about the social life in the Dominion and his lack of a woman. Here, his feigned embarrassment had made her think she had bested him, and in the resulting overconfidence she had revealed more about Merral. Indeed, the more he had persuaded her that she was the one doing the manipulating, the more she had revealed.

  He was particularly proud of his masterstroke in privately interviewing the other delegates. In almost every case, he had asked them to collaborate with him in some way, often over a petty matter. And when they all refused, he insinuated that “some people” among them were being more helpful. Inevitably the conclusion was drawn that it was Isabella who was collaborating with him. The result was that she became even more ostracized—and that increasing isolation drew her closer to him.

  He felt that he had actually rather enjoyed this mental seduction. Nether-Realm voyages were always dull, but playing with her had brightened this one. He smiled as he remembered some of their conversations.

  “Commander, they don’t seem to like me anymore,” she had said.

  “I’m truly sorry. It’s a bit unfair after all you’ve done for them. Do you know what I think?”

  “What?”

  “I think they realize, deep down, that you have come to terms with the new world better than they have. Things have changed, Isabella, for us all. They can’t see it, and they know that you can.”

  “It’s jealousy then?”

  “In a word, yes.”

  And what, he asked himself, had she told him about D’Avanos? Not as much as she could have, but more than she realized. Lezaroth was impressed by the fact that, although she was clearly embittered with the man, in some areas she had manifestly refused to reveal any information. But despite her refusal, over the thirty or so meetings they’d had, she had let slip a lot. He had learned of their close relationship and that someone else had got in. He had no interest in that; what was more relevant was that D’Avanos’s skills as a warrior really did appear to come from nowhere. At one time, Lezaroth had toyed with the idea that this man might have had a great interest in the wars of the past and that this knowledge of military history had, fortuitously, served him well in real events. Yet after talking to Isabella, he knew this was plainly not the case. The man had been a forester, loved his job, and—other than having some prowess on the sports field and an ability to manage men—had shown little promise. His rise to leadership in battle was striking and could not easily be understood apart from an extraordinary fluke or some manipulation by the powers opposed to the lord-emperor. Lezaroth now had no doubt that D’Avanos was the great adversary of legend. But proving it to the lord-emperor was not going to be easy.