The Octagonal Raven

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Dymke and Deng were about the same — different locales, different enterprises, but both carrying on long-established family concerns. Anya St. Cyril was the only woman in the group, and had apparently created her own multinational operation, something dealing with fasteners of all classes.

  My eyes started to close, and I started in the chair, but forced myself to keep thinking.

  TanUy was another case; he was the descendent of a famous cultural psychologist. I remembered we’d studied some of his work … on the PIAT … at The College. It came back; the older TanUy had been one of the pioneers in establishing methodologies for accurately quantifying PIAT results — in short, for making the test useful and replicable, so to speak — and more than that, if Eldyn had been right.

  I’d have to check, but I began to wonder how many years ago the PST Trust had been established. I smiled to myself. That history might prove useful … if I could survive to use it.

  I sat in the compartment, thinking about the whole situation: special nanites in my system, norm resentment, the PIAT issue that had been on the news, some group of pre-selects wanting control over the main information nets and systems. A whole, up-to-now-near-silent, civil war was about to erupt within the Federal Union. Maybe the public would only see scattered riots, but there was definitely a power struggle, and it seemed to revolve around UniComm.

  The one thing that nagged at me was the alien connection. Eldyn had been brilliant. He’d been publicly recognized as stopping the pre-select plague. Could he have engineered it? I shook my head. There was little to go on, but what I’d heard, seen, and sensed told me that he hadn’t created it from scratch. His resentment at the way he’d been treated had been all too real. But … if the octagonal alien nanites/pathogens were real … why? Why would an ancient race spread them across the Galaxy?

  Were they just pre-programmed and self-replicating nanitic machines designed to act against certain cellular constructions? There had been several “plagues” of unknown origin … even before the pre-select plague. Had they been earlier manifestations? And the alien Gates … they’d been designed not to be detected from planetary systems. Were the distant or long-gone aliens just trying to keep competitors down? Then why hadn’t they just developed really lethal nanites? I shook my head.

  I didn’t have solid answers, and I was having trouble keeping my eyes open, and the only things I knew were that someone had created octagonal nanites, and that Eldyn had manipulated them into something selectively lethal.

  I jerked forward, realizing I’d almost fallen asleep in the chair — again.

  With that, I put away the folder and went through the narrow slider into the bedchamber, or bed closet, where I lay down. I definitely did not feel like an eagle, but like an exhausted, bedraggled, and bedeviled raven.

  I hadn’t thought to use the time on the induction tube to sleep, but my body wasn’t about to give me that much choice.

  * * *

  Chapter 53

  * * *

  We are but dark shadows wrapped around the thin sticks of others’ reputations and powers, physical strength meaningless in a world where all with power have equal strength and nanites to protect them. Being a shadow is not enough. Drifting through the years is not enough. Pretending to be important or powerful or wise is not, either.…

  As one old poet said, the chronicles of history are filled with cunning passages, winding ways that deceive all but the keenest of those who read them … if anyone truly can be said to read in these days. I have seen fearfully ancient Gates beyond the night skies, lost to those who once opened them. Neither fear nor courage saves anyone, nor any species … not when the most enduring of creatures vanish in but a fraction of the life of the shortest-lived of stars. Mere survival cannot be enough. Nor is power.

  My brother, my father, with their thousand deliberations, large and small, provide the stage on which all the world — actors all, if they wish — can project their images, edit their voices, disguise their beliefs. Through this stage they could control more wealth and power than most rulers in the devious lore of history. Yet what could be their weapons are images projected with energy, merged with song, and sound, and words that do not signify what they say. Hollow men … men stuffed with images captured forever, yet departed instantly from the minds and memories of those who watch.

  Can I change what is and has been? Can anyone? Will anyone notice? Or listen. Or understand? Or is any effort to do so mere vanity?

  Does it matter, given the alternatives?

  Personal Notes

  * * *

  Chapter 54

  Vallura

  * * *

  From Westi, I purchased an advance tube fare to Vallura, then walked down to the second platform and took a different tube to Nypa. From there I took a public glider to the station at Vallura. The driver probably thought I was crazy, but she didn’t say anything, even after she dropped me in the underground parking area next to my glider. I was risking something to get the glider, but I knew I needed it — and its features. So I watched carefully.

  The parking area at the Vallura station was strangely empty for an afternoon in mid-week, and I could hear voices echoing through the space — possibly from the square, although it was neither a weekend nor a holiday.

  I flicked on the belt repeater, used the distance systems check on the glider, despite the headache it created, because I didn’t want to get close to it without some assurance that things were normal. The return readings were reassuring, although I felt like squinting from the inputs, and I quickly turned off the power to the repeater.

  A faint sheen of dust covered the glider, dust that had not been recently disturbed. That, and the security system, reassured me somewhat as I looked over the glider.

  When I opened the canopy and door, the small box at my waist, the one Eldyn had given me, began to hum, and I could feel the heat building. I forced myself to wait until the humming subsided, using the time to fingerlink directly with the glider and recheck the systems. Maybe Eldyn’s system had deactivated the nanite-level trackers someone had dusted over the glider, and maybe they hadn’t, but they’d certainly let me know that someone was interested in where my glider might be.

  Again, I had only a general idea. It might be one of the five names Eldyn had given me. It might be Gerrat, wondering where I was … but Gerrat wouldn’t worry about that. He’d just call and ask me to be somewhere. So would Father, and I couldn’t see Elysa tracking me, and Eldyn … he was dead, and tracking clearly wasn’t his style, anyway.

  With a wry smile, I eased the glider out of the underground parking, slowly. Even through the closed canopy, I could hear voices — amplified voices as I reached ground level, and, on the square opposite the induction tube station was a crowd. The people gathered there spread from the open area near the monument to Norris, the first secretary director of the Federal Union, and under the trees.

  So far as I knew, it certainly wasn’t a holiday, and the damp and gray spring weather were not exactly conducive to picnicking.

  A few blood-red banners — without any writing — waved up and down in the still air. Mostly, the crowd looked quiet, but even inside the glider I could sense a faint humming that lent an impression of menace to the gathering. Then I heard a high and penetrating voice. I flicked on the external sensors — hoping they worked, since I couldn’t think of when I’d last used them — so that I could hear the speaker, a short man, with a brush mustache, probably a norm, who stood on a makeshift platform.

  “… Education and training are restricted to those who get high scores on tests. Pre-selection means high scores on tests. Pre-selection costs creds … and who has the creds?

  “The pre-selects!

  “If you want more creds than a minjob and aren’t a pre-select, how can you get creds? You can’t … unless you steal it somehow. All the snoops set by the pre-selects mean most thieves get caught, and what happens to them? They get brain-damped. Who doesn’t get brain-dam
ped?

  “The pre-selects!

  “You want a house that’s more than three closets? You don’t get one. Who does?

  “The pre-selects!

  “You want your kids to have the advantages? You can’t afford them, not unless you want to live like a pre-Collapse slave. Who can?

  “The pre-selects! …”

  What he said was true and false, both at the same time, but no one in the small square seemed to notice the false side. Every time he used the phrase “The pre-selects!” the crowd roared, and the red banners went up and down.

  Although most of the crowd happened to be watching the agitator on the wooden platform, three broad-shouldered men — two of them with mauls — stood on the edge of the walk that surrounded the square. They wore red armbands and scanned everything but the square.

  The balding norm with a maul caught sight of the glider first. His eyes widened, and he murmured something into his collar — or to the minicom probably clipped there. He must have had a link with the agitator speaking because the speaker turned and pointed toward the induction tube station.

  “There! You see … there’s one of them. A pre-select, right there in his glider. Laughing his head off at you.”

  I wasn’t laughing, but trying to turn the glider without making a fuss in order to slip away from the rising sense of anger coming from the small crowd. I suppose if I’d been really courageous, I would have confronted the agitator and his partial truths. Except to turn them … I would have had to lie worse than he had. Gerrat could have done that, but I couldn’t, and it was far too late for my words to have made any difference in that setting.

  Also, I was exhausted, and had a throbbing headache.

  The crowd surged in my direction.

  “Get him! He thinks he’s worth so many of us … just how many is he worth?” The agitator’s voice boomed over a speaker from somewhere. “He’s so sure of himself … so filled with himself. He doesn’t care what we think. All he wants is another slick way to take our creds, another bunch of unclued norms.…”

  The logic was abysmal, but the number of norms it appeared to be appealing to was considerable.

  As I turned the glider, I could see that, on the far end of the square, several gliders in the small glider pad adjoining the uniquery had been overturned, and the canopy of the most luxurious had been smashed in. The force it had taken to break the armaglass was not inconsiderable. The armaglass of the uniquery facing the square was also cracked, but not shattered, and I had a very good idea of what the men with the mauls had been doing.

  “See him run … that’s what they’re afraid of. They don’t want us united. They don’t want us to learn how strong we really are.…”

  Mob violence wasn’t strength, just unfocused destruction, but that didn’t matter to angry and frustrated people, and I was getting a far stronger conviction of just how many norms were both.

  As soon as I had the glider headed away from the square, I accelerated, hoping that the violence had been limited to the center of town. I could have turned it into a flitter, effectively, by cutting out the ground limiters, but the glider wasn’t licensed as a flitter, and the taxes and penalties for showing it was one would have been horrendous. I had no doubts that the CAs were monitoring the rally, or whatever it was, and I didn’t want to break any laws under those circumstances, not unless it became a question of survival, and it wasn’t. Not this time, anyway.

  Once I was a good klick south, I turned westward and began to make my way back toward the lower Hill and my house.

  The gliderways and walks were deserted, and I didn’t see a single person outside a dwelling or a structure for the entire three klicks of my roundabout route from the square to the bottom of the lower Hill.

  Even before I triggered the hangar door from the glider as I neared the house, I was checking the security systems. The house was untouched, or at least the systems were giving that impression.

  A quick physical inspection indicated that no one had been inside, or that they had left no tracks. Nor had anyone tampered with my comm systems and equipment, not in any obvious sense, but those who seemed after me certainly had the credits to hire those who wouldn’t leave tracks. From the study windows, I glanced past the empty bird feeder down into the valley toward the center of town, but I couldn’t see the crowd.

  Then I called Majora.

  Her sim flicked on, only to be replaced immediately by Majora herself. She wore a brownish singlesuit, and her eyes were red.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “I had a little fever last night, but it broke this morning. I never could get to Kharl.”

  I took a deep breath with her first words, then let it out as she finished. “You didn’t get some sort of formal invitation from my friend … the one you …?”

  “Daryn … I haven’t gotten a formal invitation in years.…” She stopped, and her mouth opened.

  “Don’t say it. Yes. He said he thought you’d be all right, but he wasn’t sure.” I looked at her. “I worried about you. Are you sure you’re all right? How are things going here? Or there, I mean.” The words rushed out.

  “It’s awful, Daryn. They had a riot near the tube station in Helnya last night. Helnya …” She shook her head, and I could see tears.

  “Someone in your family … the new plague?”

  She nodded. “Both Melanyi and her daughter.”

  “Your sister?” She’d never mentioned Melanyi much, probably because the two weren’t that close. Melanyi would have gotten along far better with Gerrat or Rhedya.

  “Syrah. She was only ten … only ten, Daryn. Just ten … and she and Melanyi just burned up. The medcenters … they’re packed, and no one can do anything, and the norms are rioting, and there aren’t enough CAs.”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can get there.”

  “You can’t … you mustn’t. I don’t want to lose you, too.”

  “You won’t. I’ll be there.” There didn’t seem to be much else I could do. The only person who’d halfway believe what I knew would be Kharl, and telling him wouldn’t take that long. But I had to do that. “I will.”

  “Please be careful.”

  “I will.” The fact that she didn’t try to dissuade me again told me I should be going there.

  Next, even though there were no messages in the gatekeeper from family, I needed to check on my parents, but as soon as I routed the connection, my mother’s sim came on.

  Hoping that someone was there, I spoke anyway. “This is Daryn. I just got back from a trip If anyone’s there …”

  Rhedya took the call. Like Majora, she was red-eyed. Unlike Majora, she was shaking, hollow-eyed and flushed. “Daryn … it’s terrible.…”

  I was afraid to ask. “What’s happened?”

  “What hasn’t? Gerrat … your mother … your father … I took the children to Kharl … like you said … but the others … it was too late.”

  “The pre-select … plague?” I finally stammered. My father … mother … Gerrat … I had tried to warn then, as I could … but if they were already infected, it had been too late even before I called and left messages. “All … of them?”

  “Your … mother … she’s over the worst. She’s weak, but talking. Gerrat … your father … it … was … so fast.…” She broke off and nodded, and I could see the trace of tears on her cheeks, dried tears, and I wondered if she had cried all she could.

  “How are the children?” I blurted.

  “They’ll be … all right, Kharl says.”

  “And you?”

  “… over the worst, I think” She swallowed.

  “Where’s mother?”

  “She’s at the Yunvil center. It’s the closest … but you can’t go. They’re closed to visitors … people everywhere … dying …” She shook her head hopelessly.

  “Are you alone? Besides the children?”

  “No.” I could see a figure in the background. “Haywar and Denyse and Fry
drik are here. They’d come to visit … you know … Frydrik was … is working for UniComm. It scarcely bothered … them.”

  “Gerrat had told me they were coming.” I suppressed a wince. I shouldn’t have mentioned his name.

  “Why … Gerrat … why not me …?”

  I didn’t answer that right away. How could I? My brother and father were dead. Children were dead and dying, bright intelligent children … innocent children. If somehow … if somehow I could have learned more sooner. Or been able to get to Nyhal. Had Elora known about his plans? Somehow, I didn’t think so, but how would I ever know? How could I ever know?

  “I don’t know. I didn’t even know this was happening until I was leaving to come back … and the news I saw in Byjin … it didn’t show how severe things were.” In a way, that was true, but I felt guilty for shading the truth even that much, even though I didn’t know what else I could have done.

  “What about you …?” she asked.

  “They think … whatever it was … I got an early dose of it several months ago, that time I collapsed at Kharl’s.” I hoped she didn’t ask me who “they” were. I was still exhausted, and stunned by learning of my Father’s and Gerrat’s deaths — definitely not thinking well.

  Rhedya’s words washed over me, and I wasn’t really grasping all of them.

  “… frightening … gone so quickly … and … afterwards … you don’t see them … cremating them all … using monoclones … and you’re alone … and people asking for authentications … all over the medcenter … doctors quiet … people sobbing … wonder how … how could it happen …”

  When I finally broke the connection, feeling that I’d failed miserably at trying to console and listen to Rhedya, I tried to get the Yunvil medcenter. All I got was a screen message, not even a sim.

  “The Yunvil medcenter is not accepting calls of a personal or business nature. Calls of a medical nature are being taken through the emergency code channels. If this is a medical emergency, and you need transportation, enter red two. If you need advice, enter amber three.… ”