by Dave Duncan
That was raw electricity. He was in grave danger of being frizzled like his parents. He stumbled at the thought and hastily put it out of his mind.
—Three minutes to impact.
Lungs busting in the awful air, he came to where Duty sprawled on the rocks, a fluttering bundle. She was conscious and knew him. The gale snatched away the words when she tried to speak.
He cogged her: I’ll carry you. Can you hang on?
—Yes, yes! My ankle…
Wasting no time in trying to be gentle, he hauled her up to her knees and dragged her over his shoulder in a position most undignified for a high priestess. Now he must get to his feet and battle the wind head on.
—Two minutes to impact. That man assisting Monody is believed to be the Ayne commissioner and cog-doc celebrity, Ratty Turnsole, whose appointment as giver she announced yesterday at Umbral.
Duty was no lightweight, even on Pock’s, and the two of them together doubled wind resistance. He rarely managed more than two or three steps before he had to drop to a crouch to avoid being blown clean off the stairs. The Querent whirled around him, their song a paean of triumph and joy. Back and forth the staircase wound across the higher side of the pillar; zigs were bad but zags worse.
—One minute to impact.
Then the wind hurled him flat, so he struck his face on a rock and cried out in pain. But the hurricane must mean that this was the top. There was nothing ahead but darkness. Duty was back in his head, a file image of her as the Mother incarnate, calm and regal with her two-tone hair in perfect order.
—My thanks and blessings on you, Ratty Turnsole. Live and die happy. Now help me up, please.
Even that was a struggle, but he staggered to his knees again and half-lifted, half-supported her as she raised herself to stand there momentarily, balancing on one foot, a tattered and bedraggled scarecrow raising her arms in supplication. At once the Goddess accepted her sacrifice. A wild gust lifted her from the rock and swept her away, far out over the crater. For a moment the cognition followed her down, dropping slowly in Pocosin gravity, turning over and over, then dwindling more swiftly, vanishing into the depths.
The wind caught Ratty too, and nearly tipped him over the brink. Head, shoulders, and half his chest went before his hands found purchase. The whole world was in his head together: Joy, Love, Wisdom, Bedel, Oxindole, Querents, the assembled multitude cheering and singing and weeping. No matter whether a miracle followed or not, the old woman had won her battle, had gone to her Goddess. Courage was the one virtue that all times and places applauded.
Was assisting suicide a crime on Pock’s?
—Eight. Eight what? Seconds? The crowd fell silent. Even the wind seemed to fade away, its work completed.
—Six. Ratty squirmed back from the terrifying edge. The lights had gone. The Querent had returned whence they came.
—Five. The faces vanished from his mind, all except Joy’s. They blew kisses to each other. They kissed. This might be farewell. Or they might linger and die horribly later.
—Four. He had never known seconds to go so fast.
—Three. There would have to be a miracle, wouldn’t there? After Duty’s feat of faith and courage? Brother Andre and his like would be praying, also.
—Two. The impact wouldn’t be the end. Quassia was too far from Ground Zero for the crowds to get a quick death. But the shock wave might topple Quoad and send its occupant hurtling down into the crater.
—One. There would be a fireball. Then a meteor storm, causing widespread fires. But then the secondary effects of—
—Impact, said the reporter.
* * *
—Minus One, he added uncertainly.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing!
—Minus two!
Ratty stared at Joy, her eyes wild with hope.
—Minus three!
No fireball.
It worked!
Screams of triumph and gladness swept over Quassia. People cheered. They embraced. They danced. The world was saved. The Goddess had granted Monody another miracle.
Then the sky exploded brighter than the sun, lighting the world like noon. The clouds boiled away. A disk of fire blazed above the western horizon—white, gold, orange, then red fading to black. Night rushed back.
Even the wind seemed to have stopped breathing. Ratty wondered if he had been struck blind, but no—just dazzled. His vision was coming back. The starry sky, Joy’s horrified face. Bedel… Love who was now Duty…
Joy said —What happened? Are we dead or not?
The sky lit up again as whole galaxies of stars began to fall.
Sixtrdy
Portolan had always been a wonderful tool for manipulating the media. Athena was ending her involvement in the Backet Mission in the way it had begun—with a party at Portolan. She was also planning to launch her election campaign. Every senior reporter on Ayne had turned up, more than fifty of them. They had been wined, dined, and recreated, and now they were slumped on comfortable chairs in a cabana on the beach, struggling to remain alert, critical, properly cynical, and reasonably objective.
Ratty’s recordings of the Backet Mission had been pouring out of his office in a torrent. Almost every inhabitant of Ayne must have caught at least some of them by now. Now Athena was releasing some her own, especially Solan’s courage in helping to rescue Braata from the flyer.
In the past twenty-four hours, Solan had become amphibious, because salt water compensated for gravity. At the moment he was a kilometer or so along the beach, riding a miniature donkey she had bought for him to use until his body adapted. A fall-off-able horse, he called it. Proser was keeping an eye on him. Proser was efficient at anything, and he and Solan had hit it off.
Braata’s rescue complete, she waited for questions. Not many reporters were as sharp as Ratty Turnsole had been, but a few came close. Like Wiln Wassaider, for example, a fat man who had a big enough reputation to claim a front row seat.
“That was the boy you had with you yesterday, Senator.”
“It was. Solan Skerryson. His mother passed away a few weeks ago, and his father, the man you just saw with the green cape, died the day before we left. Solan had no other family. Now, of course, he has no friends either and would be dead like all the rest, had I not brought him home with me. Proser and I plan to adopt him.”
“Is he to be poster boy for your campaign then?”
The dumber ones woke up. Athena laughed.
“You are getting ahead of me, Wiln. In a sense, yes. But I hope he can be left out personally. You cannot interview him because he is too young to have implants, and he speaks only Pocosin. He must be almost the last person left in the galaxy who speaks Pocosin. But I may involve him in a peripheral way. If you want to turn to discussing politics, I am ready to declare my candidacy for the office of president.”
No one objected.
“Very well. You all saw President Carabin’s statement on the Pock’s World geocide. He expressed deep sorrow.” She paused. Not an eye was blinking. “Well, I express bloody fury! I am outraged, appalled! STARS has just pulled off another monstrous crime to add to the grisly toll with which it has soiled human history. Jibba, Malacostraca, and now Pock’s—and these are only in or near our own sector. We know of a dozen others, all the way back to Earth Sector itself. I accuse Juleth Carabin of being STARS’s lackey, of being in STARS’s pocket. I seek election as his replacement. My platform is that Ayne and all other sector worlds must disband STARS, prosecute its leaders for murder on an astronomical scale, and take control of all space-faring activity.”
They were still with her. She pressed on.
“STARS will fight back, of course. It will fund my opponents with billions from its secret hoards. I expect all the usual dirty tricks that the Carabin clique had used in the past, raised to the tenth power. STARS will buy support from cog-drama stars, religious leaders, business figures. It will threaten violence. I will fight back! I will appeal over their heads to ordinary
voters and their sense of justice and moral right. STARS, Inc. must be stopped!”
Ratty’s former helper, the one called Jake, raised a hand, and she let him speak.
“We haven’t released all the records you brought back yet, senator.” He paused until the angry murmurs died down. “They will be shared with all of you before we publish them,” he said. “Right at the end, the alien made some drastic and frightening claims.”
This was going to be the worst of her problems. The opposition would use Umandral’s last speech to terrify the electorate with visions of men impregnated with baby cuckoos.
“You look like a healthy and strong young man, Jake,” she said. “You could rape most women, couldn’t you? If you wanted to?”
He smiled, seeing where her argument was going. “Probably.”
“Have you ever raped a woman? Do you plan to?”
“I haven’t and never will.”
“Umandral is a boy, but he is incredibly strong. When he was in jail, one of the guards deliberately tortured him with a writhe, for his own amusement. You don’t do that to people, either, do you, Jake? The guard was the Pock’s World heavyweight martial arts champion and weighed three times what Umandral does, but Umandral killed him with his bare hands. That doesn’t mean he does things like that without provocation, any more than you go around raping women! And do remember that he is only a boy and he was enjoying shocking us. Don’t let the opposition frighten you with bogeymen.”
Several voices spoke up and she chose to answer one that asked, “What opposition?”
“To start with, I believe I have identified the leader of STARS in this sector. I cannot prove his guilt yet, but I believe he can be unmasked.” She paused again, for this would be the most dramatic moment in her speech. “One of the members of the Backet Mission has yet to return. The moment he sets foot on Ayne, he will be subpoenaed as a material witness in a civil suit I am bringing against STARS, Inc. on behalf of two-thirds of a billion people whose right to life it has violated. Because the law requires a personal involvement, however slight, I have signed the complaint on behalf of the boy Solan Skerryson, currently in my care. The witness I seek, of course, is industrialist and financier Linn Lazuline.”
They all tried to speak at once. She chose Wiln.
“You are confident that Friend Lazuline will return?”
For the first time in her political career, Senator Fimble said, “Huh?” like an idiot.
He bunched his fat jowls in a smirk. “Word came in just an hour ago from Climatal 2 that the entanglement link between Pock’s Station and Pyrus 1 was broken at the expected time of impact. You said that Lazuline remained behind to watch the disaster. You told us then that you considered his interest ‘ghoulish.’”
“You saw…” She floundered. “The man named Glaum, who claimed to be STARS CEO on Pock’s World—you saw him assure Lazuline that the station would be a safe vantage point from which to watch the impact.”
“Perhaps it was. But already some experts are suggesting that the fireball from the impact broke the line-of-sight contact between the Pock’s and Pyrus systems. Ionized gas will do that. Maybe STARS miscalculated?”
Athena certainly had. Had Proser not been distracted by Solan, he would have caught that news flash and alerted her so she would not have made such a fool of herself. Her presidential ambitions might have fallen flat on their face coming out of the gate. Without an entanglement link, Linn would never be coming home, and without witnesses to the destruction of Pock’s, her lawsuit could not proceed. STARS would win again.
Without an entanglement link there would be no way of learning what had happened on Pock’s World, not for centuries and probably never, for who would spend the trillions needed to send a probe to a murdered world?
Sevundy
Ratty Turnsole was just starting to appreciate the astonishing extent of Monody’s realm of Abietin. Its hundred or so hectares contained lakes, rivers, geysers, and the sunny side of a volcano. Within it nestled innumerable buildings, from temples and palaces down to quaint little villages for the staff, almost all of which blended into a pleasing and uniform design. Monody had succeeded herself for ten thousand years, and, although she had paid tribute to changing fashions to some extent, her personal taste had always prevailed.
A few exceptions proved this rule, and one of them was the stupendous triumphal archway known as the Great West Gate. A gift from some devout but long-dead secular ruler, the Gate was a fantastic edifice of spires and pillars of gilt and mother-of-pearl in an ancient style known to its critics as Baroquemost. Even had the arch included a gate that could be shut, it would have served no practical purpose, because the boundary wall dividing town and palace was only a meter or so high. As Duty—the new Duty—herself admitted, it was a planetary landmark too hallowed to demolish and too earthquake resistant to do the decent thing and just fall down.
For formal conferences and audiences, attendees were required to enter Monody’s realm by the Great West Gate. They would disembark from their cars in the large city plaza outside. Under the arch they would be formally greeted; inside the grounds they would be sent on their way in another air car to wherever the ceremony was to be held. That was tradition. Protocol also required that senior dignitaries be welcomed to the palace by a Monody consort, an honor usually delegated to the most junior of those fortunate men.
That explained why Ratty Turnsole was wasting that fine Sevundy morning in a dull little cubicle at the base of the GWG. His chair was comfortable enough, he had an antique view screen to show him who was arriving, and his implants would advise him of names and proper forms of address. The new High Priestess had summoned the leaders of all the minor religions of Pock’s World to meet the Children’s ambassador, Ignitor. The result might be a stupendous dustup. On the other hand, the timing was promising. The previous Duty’s achievement in saving the world from destruction had given the Church of the Mother so much standing that other faiths were certain to keep their heads down for quite a while. Some of them might even be driven out of business.
It was a steaming hot day at the end of bright week, with the sun close to the western hills. Javel loomed huge in the east.
Ratty would have been thoroughly bored had his companion in this nonsense not been Young Friend Umandral. Duty had sent him along as well, officially to identify Ambassador Ignitor and unofficially so that each arriving delegate could have a prior look at this weird artificial creature. Ratty had been eager for a private chat with the cuckoo ever since that peculiar miracle. He had questions to ask.
Finding a chance to ask them was the problem. The delegates came thick and fast, and most of them wanted to tarry and question the alien. The Vajray na Lama wanted to know whether he was a higher or lower incarnation than a human—Umandral’s response had been predictable but fairly tactful. The President of the Church of Latest Saints wanted to discuss the cuckoo’s rank in the hierarchy of angels. With the help of a gang of aides, Ratty did his best to chivvy the holy visitors along. About fifteen minutes before the ambassador herself was due, there came a gap.
How many more?
—Only one, Consort. The representative of one of the Christian sects, Cardinal-Archbishop Phare.
He might sulk and not come. Ratty hustled Umandral into the hosts’ cubicle on the grounds of needing to wet a dry throat. He poured them each a glass of water, wondering whether his companion would need two, one for each throat.
He sank into the comfortable chair, quaffed half his own glass, and then went straight to the point.
“I have something to ask you about yesterday’s miracle.”
“Me?” The kid perched on a stool and tried to look innocent. “You should question your parthenogenetic bedmate about miracles, not me.”
“There have been two voluntary martyrdoms in this affair. I speak as a lifelong cynic and skeptic. Duty let herself be blown off a rock. You, according to you, allowed yourself to be captured by security forces who wo
uld certainly treat you as a laboratory specimen, to be tested to destruction. Both of you demonstrated astonishing faith in something.”
“This is true.” Umandral looked amused. He sipped water, his thick neck showed no adolescent lump moving as he swallowed. “But don’t tell your Joy, or Love, or whatever her name is now. She might try to enroll me in her cult.”
“I doubt that. Let’s go back to Malacostraca, then.”
“Malacostraca?”
“Yes, Malacostraca. Its star is in the Canaster Sector, but it used to have contact with the Ayne Sector through Pock’s. When it was infected by a brand of cuckoos called the Zombies, STARS sterilized the planet, or said it did. The stories differ, and STARS never explained. Pock’s was accepted as belonging to the Ayne Sector after that. Don’t play dumb. You’re too smart to do it believably.”
And hopefully young enough to be flattered.
“It isn’t easy,” Umandral agreed, nodding his oversized head. “Your standards of stupidity are low. The truth is that STARS tried to sterilize it. Malacostraca had four orbital stations, and STARS dropped them all, almost simultaneously. But Malacostraca is a much tougher world than Pock’s. The impacts did tremendous damage, both to the inhabitants and to the environment. The planet hasn’t recovered yet and won’t for another thousand years, but there is still life there, and civilization. A comfy billion or so people.”
“Humans or Zombies?”
The cuckoo smiled. “Children. Not exactly like me, because they are adapted to Malacostraca and I to Pock’s. They’re not like you at all.”
So that was the fate in store for Pock’s was it?
“That brings me back to—” Ratty said, “Oh damn! Here comes the opposition.” He was looking at the screen. His implant hadn’t reacted yet. He jumped up and strode out with the cuckoo at his heels. Aides and heralds came hurrying out a door opposite.