Infinite Day

by Chris Walley

  The dead.

  The room appeared to be utterly deserted apart from some multilegged service machines. Lezaroth saw and heard nothing that threatened him. It was bitterly cold—he could see his breath—but he resisted the temptation to put his hands in the pockets of his new dress uniform. Doubtless, I am watched.

  Glowing arrows on the floor led him between the massive platforms. As he walked on, his feet echoing in the vastness, he saw that some of the plinths were empty. Others bore carved inscriptions beneath the glass containers. Still other plinths were hung with dusty and faded emblems. At the base of all these structures could be seen tubes, and Lezaroth could hear the low hissing of fluids and the click of valves. A strange medical smell hung in the air, like that of a morgue after a battle. Here, decay and disinfectant battle it out.

  He realized that the chamber must stretch for many kilometers. How many dead are here? For how many thousands of years have the leaders of the noble houses been preserved here? Then for a brief moment, something of the old rebellious Lezaroth returned. And to what end?

  In an instant he saw a dark-clad figure standing before a particularly grand plinth.

  Is it the lord-emperor? He looked harder. The light here had some strange quality that seemed to blur things, and even with his collimated eyesight he found distinguishing details hard. He realized, with surprise, that it was a woman. She was tall and stiff-backed, and her head was uncovered so that her long dark hair flowed down over the shoulders of a long black dress.

  A woman? Here?

  As Lezaroth approached, the figure turned to him and he glimpsed, beneath neatly parted hair a pale oval face with blue eyes. The effect was of such delicate beauty that he was stunned. Like some of the Assembly women. Has D’Avanos somehow infiltrated here, too?

  “Who . . . who are you?” he asked, hearing confusion in his words.

  She laughed, not as soldiers laugh, but gently and musically. “Guess . . . ,” she said in a high tone that seemed to Lezaroth sweeter than anything that he had ever heard.

  Then she put an elegant finger to her mouth to urge silence and turned to look at the plinth.

  Who is she? Is this a trap?

  He saw her reach out and begin tracing words on the side of the plinth with a long white finger. He was going to say something when a shudder passed through her. The finger shortened and seemed to contract.

  Great Zahlman-Hoth, protect me!

  Her long hair rapidly shrank away, looking for all the worlds as if it had been reeled back into her head. The remaining tresses turned light brown, and chunks of skin peeled away. The figure that now stood before him was male, dark-suited, of medium height, and wearing black gloves.

  It was the lord-emperor.

  Lezaroth felt his heart thump with fear. He can change form! I have heard that steersmen can do such things—but a mortal man?

  He bent down on one knee. “My lord,” he said, his voice trembling, “I have come.”

  The lord-emperor peered at the side of the plinth. Then, without looking at Lezaroth, he spoke in a soft voice. “Whom did you see here, my margrave?”

  “My lord, I thought I saw a woman.”

  Only now did Nezhuala look at him. Lezaroth was struck by the contrast between the dark eyes and lips and the almost white face.

  There is a terrible blankness there, as though he has become a machine . . . or a puppet. Lezaroth stopped such thoughts. Who knew what powers the lord-emperor had? If he can change form, perhaps he can read minds.

  “As you did.” A faint cloud of vapor came from his mouth. That reassures me that what I see is flesh and blood, not some illusion.

  “Rise!” It was an order, and as Lezaroth obeyed, Nezhuala continued. “I have acquired powers. I can transport myself over vast distances, though it wearies me. But I can even appear as other forms. That woman, for instance.”

  Nezhuala paused, as if he was assailed by some profound emotion. “I knew her once. . . .” There was another long silence. “She has been dead long years. She died of a disease. She could have been cured. They would not let her. It changed my life.” The words had a quiet, sad emphasis.

  Lezaroth felt struck—almost perplexed—by this startling revelation of humanity. Not daring to comment, he simply gave a nod that he hoped conveyed understanding. Who had refused to let her be cured? And when?

  The lord-emperor shook his head, as if regretfully consigning the matter back to history, and then gestured at the plinth.

  “My margrave, this slab was prepared to receive the great prince Zhalatoc. You know the story, of course?” The tone was flat, almost conversational.

  “Yes, my lord. Your own grandfather. He died bravely in one of the early battles near Tellzanur. His body was . . . temporarily treated. It was due to be brought back here.”

  “Indeed so, and as his body was being returned, that ship was seized.” The Rahllman’s Star: he wants to avoid even naming it. “Now that ship—and his body—are gone.” Hurt tainted his voice.

  “My lord, I grieve with you.”

  “It was one element in a larger disaster, my margrave.”

  Lezaroth was silent, neither wishing to deny or admit guilt.

  “I do not pardon you, Margrave. I do not pardon. I do, however, grant you a stay of execution.” The voice was utterly devoid of passion.

  My death would mean nothing to him. “My Lord, your grace is great.”

  The voice snapped back like a whip’s crack. “Margrave, I do not believe in grace, either. I believe in power and victory. The alternative is death.”

  Lezaroth bowed to concur.

  The lord-emperor began speaking again, but this time there was no lash in the words. “The one I serve grows weary of being bound. His minions are abroad in their countless thousands. Already they work among the Assembly. But he himself wishes to be wholly unfettered.” The lord-emperor gazed around with a strangely detached gaze. “He will soon be free. And these noble dead will rise.”

  Feeling he had to say something, Lezaroth said, “My lord, I look forward to that day with anticipation.”

  The detached gaze turned to Lezaroth and became focused. “My margrave, the fleet sails in days.”

  “So I have heard, my lord.” Even if half of it will not be fully ready.

  “The incident that was Farholme has had some positive results. The Krallen are being modified with a new coating. It isn’t perfect, but it will do. Such an oversight will not happen again. Those who were responsible are no longer alive. I had them thrown to their own creatures on the slow-kill program. Some took thirty hours to die.” Again there was the terrible evenness of tone, and Lezaroth feared for his life.

  The lord-emperor wiped his gloves on each other in a curiously fastidious gesture. “The science team has also produced the first Nether-Realms communication transmitters. They will allow us to stay linked at a basic level as the fleet advances.”

  “Excellent, my lord. A much-needed innovation.” Indeed, if we are to attack the Assembly successfully we must be able to communicate across enormous distances.

  “They are prototypes—and unreliable—but they will allow me to stay in control of the fleet. But, my margrave, we must move swiftly. I see now that, although the Assembly’s scientific progress has been more leisurely than ours, it has been uninterrupted. We have been far bolder, but the advances of the Freeborn have all too often been reversed by war. Far too frequently, we have had to start all over again.”

  He turned to stare again at Lezaroth with eyes as cold as space. “We must therefore ensure that when we let the blow fall, it strikes deep to the heart. We must seize control of the Gates with all speed. To this end, I give you a new mission.”

  I am spared!

  “You failed, Margrave, in your first mission; if you fail in the second, I will kill you. As slowly as I can.”

  “My lord, if I fail, I will deserve your wrath.”

  The man nodded in evident agreement but for some moments said nothi
ng. Then the dark lips flexed. “I am giving you a ship, fifty men, and a thousand of the new Krallen. And I want you to have full medical sampling and tissue duplication before you go; if I need to repair you, I want to have the organs on hand.”

  Whole-body replication—normally reserved for the highest men of the most noble houses.

  “I am honored, my lord. And my task?”

  “A single target: D’Avanos. I am now convinced—as you are—that this . . . forester is indeed the great adversary. The Lord of the Assembly has raised up a warrior in these last days. As ever, he chooses weakness over strength; well, this time he may have gone too far. We need to ensure that this little man—this nothing—is destroyed. He is predictable. The Assembly were ever thus: dull, tidy people of limited imagination. Well, that will undo them. He will have returned to Farholme, and from there he will proceed to Bannermene in order to get back to the Assembly as fast as he can. Intercept him and capture him. And if you cannot capture him, destroy him utterly. I cannot risk his survival.”

  A finger was raised in warning. “And a ruling. In any fighting, spare the Gates. I need them all intact. We have lost one; we must lose no more.”

  “My lord, as you wish,” Lezaroth replied. He considered mentioning the fact that the Krallen pack on the Sacrifice might already have killed the crew but decided that wishful thinking was not to his master’s taste. He wants a corpse.

  Nothing was said for some moments. “Is this your first time here?” the lord-emperor asked without warning.

  Lezaroth marveled at the jump of topic. “Yes, my lord.”

  The dark lips opened in a smile. From the black, cavernous mouth came the hiss of his voice. “Here we challenge death. Here we resist the unending shadow.” He extended his gloved fingers and swung them around in an arc. “Here, my margrave, we have preserved the dead as best we can. Biologically we have cryogenically preserved them. Spiritually, we have had the powers bind the spirit to the body.”

  There was another pause. “They do not live, but yet they are not truly dead. Here, in this room, lie all the past heads of the House of Carenas for fifteen hundred years. Elsewhere on this world and on Nazhamal, thousands more slumber in death. They await their liberation. And, my margrave, when the realms are united, it will happen.”

  What are we talking about? “A return to life, my lord?”

  Nezhuala shook his head. “A liberation from their tombs. The dead will rise as they are.”

  Life but not life. Horrified but somehow unsurprised, Lezaroth warned himself not to show any expression. “I see, my lord,” he added in a quiet tone.

  The lord-emperor gazed around the chamber. “Before you go, my margrave, let me reveal to you what few know—and none speak of and live: The great prince was not, strictly speaking, my grandfather. These are not my real ancestors. I come . . . from other stock.”

  “Indeed, my lord,” Lezaroth said with a bow of his head to acknowledge that he had been granted a privilege. I have heard drunken, wary whispers that the lord-emperor usurped the throne of the House of Carenas. But I now have it confirmed.

  “I see myself as . . . adopted by them.” The bloodless face turned to Lezaroth. “But I have made promises to these who are my stepfamily that one day they will walk abroad again. Now go. It is to be hoped that when we meet again, Earth will lie before us and D’Avanos will be dead.”

  Lezaroth saluted, then bowed.

  “And remember: I have powers.”

  He saw the lord-emperor raise his right hand.

  Lezaroth, seized with a sudden desire to get out of this place, turned and walked away as swiftly as he could without showing disrespect.

  Nezhuala called out after him, “They wait for us to succeed, Margrave!”

  All of a sudden Lezaroth was aware of strange noises: low cracking sounds, faint taps, rustling.

  The lord-emperor gave a cracked guffaw of triumph. Out of the corner of his eye, Lezaroth saw something moving. Under their glass coverings, like slow, feeble insects, the dead were moving and twitching.

  The Sacrifice was five days out from Sarata before Betafor realized a problem existed. Although she would not have admitted it—it was too close to a human weakness—she too had been preoccupied with ensuring that the ship’s passage into Below-Space was trouble free. She had been simultaneously helping the inexperienced crew in every conceivable way, listening for any hint of pursuit on a hundred wavelengths, and ensuring that the thirty new passengers had cabins, beds, and food.

  A human being might have been struck by the inconsistency that, despite recently having sought the destruction of the crew, she was now working for their survival. No such thought came to Betafor. Merral and his friends had defied the odds so remarkably at the Blade that she didn’t need any serious analysis to support her decision that it was wiser to work with them than against them. For the moment, at least.

  Betafor had also had to battle requests from the humans to interview Kappaten. Her response had been inflexible. “I have assimilated all her data; what she knew, I know. She is now a subordinate Allenix. It is inappropriate to discuss anything other than current operational details with her.” There had been looks that she interpreted as those of puzzlement and frustration, but eventually the requests had subsided. Betafor was satisfied. Azeras would have demanded to interview her; but Azeras, thankfully, is dead.

  It wasn’t until the end of the fifth day, when only the two-person night watch occupied the bridge, that she had the leisure to run a full-spectrum scan of the entire ship, something that under normal circumstances she would have done before launch. An hour into the scan, she picked up anomalous signals within the aft hold. They were very low strength and in very short bursts, but she knew instantly what they were. In Container S16, the dozen Krallen were out of stasis and communicating with each other.

  Betafor immediately checked the status of the container and was relieved to find that it was still locked shut from the outside. If the Krallen were to be released, she would do it at a time of her choosing. Yet if the Krallen couldn’t get out, neither could she switch them back into the safe immobility of stasis. Only Merral and Laura had that authority, and they didn’t even know they were there. She pondered the matter and decided that, because that portion of the ship was so clearly out of bounds, she could leave them alone. When they got to Farholme, she would arrange for the crate to be destroyed in an accident of some sort. In the meantime, they could be ignored; they posed no real threat.

  So on the Sacrifice, time passed. Only the artificial raising and lowering of light levels announced a day’s arrival and departure. Merral felt that without this—and the deliberate anchor points of meals, worship meetings, and entertainment events—the time would have just smeared into an unbroken span of grayness.

  Merral soon realized that the mood on the ship was very different from what it had been on the outward journey. For one thing, there were twice as many people. And for another, the Sacrifice was so much larger that it was harder to find people on over a thousand meters of corridors spread over three levels. Fortunately, someone managed to get the diaries of the delegates back into full working order so that everybody could be contacted without too much trouble. Another change was the absence of the military training there had been on the outward journey. For better or worse—and Merral was unsure which it was—the Sacrifice was now a more civilian ship.

  The gray, purposeless phenomena of Below-Space were just as prevalent as they had been, but now their threat seemed muted; they brought with them much less sense of menace.

  As the first week passed and life slipped into a routine, Merral detected a growing feeling of relief on the ship that sometimes edged into an air of relaxation. Yet despite this, he found himself personally troubled. The presence of both Isabella and Anya seemed to be a constant reminder of his failings in the area of relationships. But deeper matters also troubled him.

  One day, Luke cornered him and steered him into an unused room full
of furniture. “Merral, what’s the problem?” Luke asked with concerned eyes.

  After some prevarication, Merral said, “I have questions, Luke. I’ll be honest.”

  “Such as?”

  Merral moved a finger through the dust on the desk he was leaning against. “Luke, we lost two men back there. Three, if you include Azeras. We needn’t have.”

  There was a patient, sympathetic look. “And whom do you blame for that?”

  “Well . . . the envoy could have prevented the deaths. Yes, I’m grateful that he appeared. Very grateful that he dealt with the enemy forces. But . . .” His voice tailed away.

  “But he could have stayed? Or gone with us to the end?”

  “Yes.” Merral nodded in the direction of the freezer room where the bodies were stored. “And those two would not have died.”

  “So, basically, you’re asking the oldest question. Why?”

  “Yes . . . I suppose so. Why, having saved us in one situation, did he not save us in another?”

  Luke stroked the pale gray scar on his cheek. “You are honest enough to realize that the he you refer to is God? The envoy is merely his servant.”

  “Yes. But what’s the answer?”

  Luke shrugged. “There are no easy answers. You could ask a similar sort of question at the very highest level. Why did God create the universe, knowing evil would occur? Why didn’t he redeem the cosmos as soon as evil entered? Why has he allowed thirteen thousand years to elapse since the triumph of the Cross?”

  Merral made no answer. Outside he could hear people walking by. Finally, he said softly, “Tell me why.”

  Luke sighed. “I can’t. In this life, we are given no real answer.”

  “And there are no hints of answers?”

  “Only the traditional ones. That we will know one day. That he does these things for his glory. I suppose that means that the darkness somehow enhances the light.”