Spheres of Influence-eARC

by Ryk E. Spoor

  DuQuesne snorted. “A lot of the Hyperions weren’t stable enough to keep their heads when they found out that the worlds they were in weren’t real. Herc just went catatonic, Gilbert went insane, Sherlock…” he trailed off, shook his head. “But for her, it was a lot worse. Take me, for instance: at base, I was an attempt to make an idealized hero from the works of one of the beloved founding fathers of science fiction. Wu may have retreated, but at least he knew he was an attempt to make a demigod real. Same for most of the others. Maria-Susanna found out that she didn’t even belong in the ‘universe’ she lived in—that she was some woman’s way of living out a fantasy vicariously.”

  She saw Simon blanch. “Kami…”

  The realization didn’t quite hit her that hard, but even so she felt a sudden terrible empathy; she imagined the moment of discovery, the realization that not only was everything around you a lie, but that you yourself were a lie within the lie, something that didn’t belong and never had. She shuddered because as swiftly as the ache of empathy came, it was replaced with the gut-level realization of the depth of mad fury that must have followed.

  “How horrid,” Simon murmured at last. “But you said she started to break with the discovery…”

  “…and she finished breaking when the man she’d been tailored for got himself killed heroically, defending his world just as anyone would have expected him to do, with head held high and a grin and “I don’t believe in no-win scenarios.” She was made for him. He was the literal reason for her existence, and unlike the rest of us—made to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—she wasn’t designed to cope with that kind of loss.” Ariane saw slow tears of understanding flowing down Wu Kung’s cheeks, soaking the delicate fur. “The first person she murdered was her own creator. The discovery of the Arena… I haven’t got any idea what it’s got going through her head, but I’m damn sure it’s nothing good.”

  “I can imagine a few possibilities, Marc,” Saul Maginot said grimly, “and every one of them looks worse than the last. Thank God we have you, at least, and Wu. But now I’m very worried about the other people you left in the Arena.”

  “So am I,” DuQuesne said, “but my first guess is that whatever she’s after isn’t going to be served by hurting anyone in the small group of humans already present. She’s going to have to learn the ropes. No, the main danger is the one she’s always presented: that she can convince just about anyone of just about anything and turn people against each other just as well as she used to hold people together.”

  The look of pained grief on Wu Kung’s face was enough to pierce her to the heart. “All right, Marc—I guess that just makes our departure that much more urgent. As one of the five top Hyperions…does that make her your equal?”

  “You’d better believe it. She’s basically my equal in every single way. I outmass her, and I’m a hell of a lot more sane than she is, but otherwise she can match me in any damn contest, for love, money, fun, or marbles.”

  “Holy Kami,” murmured Simon. “Well, I certainly got no indication of that. In that case, I concur with Ariane—we must prepare to leave immediately.”

  “Relax.” DuQuesne’s advice was at odds with the tension Ariane could sense. “She’s been gone long enough that if she planned to do something fast, she’s already done it. My real worry is figuring out what her angle is. Problem is that once she broke, she turned out to be blasted hard to predict; she’s not exactly rational any more, even though she’ll sound rational most of the time.”

  “This on top of these pointless political maneuverings…” Ariane snorted. “I—”

  But Saul and DuQuesne were shaking their heads. “You’d better not head down that road, Ariane,” DuQuesne said. “They’re not pointless, and they’re not just maneuverings.”

  Ariane bit back an instinctive protest. “No, you’re right. And I’ll admit I probably don’t even understand what’s going on there, not yet. Which brings us to the subject of the SSC ship, the Duta?”

  At Saul’s nod, she continued, “We already know we probably don’t agree with the way Naraj views the Arena, but that’s okay; I haven’t agreed with lots of people in my life. Still, we need some idea of what Mr. Naraj is going to really want to accomplish, and who he’s bringing with him. I’m guessing, Saul, that since she’s in charge of the Arena task group Michelle Ni Deng will be one of them. Do you or Marc have anything to say about them?”

  DuQuesne was silent for a few moments, absently stroking the jet-black beard that lent a somewhat diabolic cast to his features on occasion. “On Ni Deng, not so much,” he said finally. “She’s only been in the SSC inner circle for a few years. Naraj, he’s been around for donkey’s years. I already summarized for you back when we first left the SSC/CSF meeting what he’s like. He wants to run things, just like that guy in every club you’ve ever been in that feels everything, but everything, needs to be organized, and he’s finally got a chance to do it his way.”

  “I can’t imagine he’d be as petty as the people you describe, though,” Simon said.

  “Not petty, no…but that might be what you want to think of, except on a grander scale.”

  “A far grander scale, I’m afraid,” Saul said. “We began discussing this subject earlier, but that description—of the sort of person who likes running and organizing things, even things that don’t need running and organizing? That is Oscar Naraj. Oscar’s spent a great deal of time and energy to stay in the SSC, he’s got an eye in every department, and a lot of his appointees end up running the other subdepartments.”

  He smiled faintly. “Michelle Ni Deng was one of his appointees, five years back or so. And now she’s the head of Arena affairs. Obviously he did not and could not plan for this specific event…but he had planned for many years to find some useful event so that he would have one of his people in the right place. And the Arena’s a far bigger event than even Oscar Naraj could have imagined, and it changes everything.”

  Wu Kung nodded energetically. “Yes, yes! Ariane and DuQuesne, they told me about this wonderful Arena, and I thought about it all the way here, how it was so different from my world, and yours, the one we are in here, now. In the Arena and in my world, there is much of war, many conflicts. And many secrets, and people who are suffering injustices. And…” he looked frustrated for a moment, as though he knew he was onto something but didn’t quite know how to phrase it. Then the gold-furred face brightened. “…and, well, there’s real things to be fought over there. Here you have all become soft players of games, or simple daredevils,” he grinned at Ariane, “because you haven’t any need to fight over your next meal, or worry as to whether you can find a place to shelter from the rain, or get a cure for your sick child, or wonder when another warlord will ride his army through your city. Your magical nano-thingies, they mean there’s no reason for empire, as long as you keep the nosy people from being too nosy—that Anonymity law of yours.”

  Simon closed his eyes and sighed. “I believe he describes the situation all too clearly, Marc.”

  “Damn straight he does—even though we sure aren’t all softies here. There was a reason they called him the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, and it wasn’t just because he could kick the crap out of all the other so-called Sages, either. Yeah, Wu, you’ve got it, and that’s plain poison any way I look at it.”

  A simple insight, but obviously much easier for someone raised as was Wu Kung, outside of our society, Mio said.

  “We’d touched on this before,” Simon said, “but this description makes it clear just how much this changes the way humanity will interact—with the universe, and with itself.”

  “Just exactly right,” DuQuesne took up the thread. “Up until now, we thought we had it all figured out—we were safe, fat, and happy. But that ain’t so at all. The universe can threaten us now—and if we want a part of it, we can’t just manufacture it. We have to engage others, fight others, maybe bargain for it, maybe go to war over it.

  “And
that means that people who—up until now—had to be satisfied with politics little more important than playing a king’s advisor in a simgame now have something else: all the possibilities of power that used to dominate the Earth back in the days before the only limit on universal comfort was whether you could find yourself some dirt and a patch of sunshine, regular tidal waves, or wind power.”

  Ariane sighed. “So we’ll have to be on the lookout for actual political maneuverings inside our own faction? Are you saying they won’t realize how little we can afford that kind of thing?”

  ARIANE AUSTIN, I EXPECT FAR BETTER OF YOU THAN DENIAL OF REALITY! THINK, CHILD, THINK!

  She winced; it did not help that DuQuesne gave a cynical laugh in time with Mentor’s rebuke, and continued, “Ariane, I’ll bet any amount you like that this is one of the major problems just about any new Faction runs into, and it could be a real killer. We can’t be the first group to achieve the Arena after we’d reached this level of technology; I’d guess a lot of the prior Factions had.

  “I don’t think it’s coincidence that two of the top Factions—the only two which are composed of essentially one species—are from species that have some kind of collectivist background: the Molothos, who have some kind of biological impulse to unity, and of course the Blessed, who’re run by the Minds. Sure, there’s advantages in being open to letting lots of other people into your club, but even outside of the top Five there aren’t a huge number of single-species powerful factions, because those alien species aren’t any more unified-and-of-one-mind than we humans are, and they fragment once they get to the Arena.”

  Ariane glanced at Simon, and the hollow feeling in her gut echoed the concern she saw in his brilliant green eyes. “Which might all be well and good,” Simon said slowly, “in ordinary circumstances. The rules of the Arena essentially don’t permit you to lose your home Sphere in Challenge, so internal issues won’t deprive you of citizenship, and once you come to some sort of resolution you can pick up and go from there.”

  “But these aren’t ordinary circumstances,” said Ariane grimly. “We have one of the Great Factions essentially at war with us, and another that won’t mind at all taking us down about five notches. If we piss away too much time and energy with internal power plays, the Molothos are going to find our Sphere, occupy the Upper Sphere with a LOT of troops, and then…I don’t know, exactly, maybe begin building up some huge force to invade our actual system in normal space, but whatever they do next won’t be good. And then our Sphere is suddenly only about a quarter as useful—the Upper Sphere will have to be sealed, and we can bet those bastards will have the Straits blockaded.”

  She ran her hand through her hair distractedly. “Wonderful. Well…look, right now I think all we can do is try to keep an eye out for what kind of maneuvers our politically oriented friends might try, and hope that we can use our superior knowledge of the Arena to keep them from being more than a nuisance.”

  “Amen to that,” DuQuesne said emphatically. “Which is one of the main reasons I wanted to get Wu here.”

  Something in his tone—something almost…gleeful?—made her glance at DuQuesne sharply. “What? How’s he going to address political maneuvers?”

  “I’m going to be your bodyguard,” Wu Kung explained helpfully.

  “My…what?” The word was grotesque, an anachronism centuries dead except in simgames. With AISages and directed automated monitoring, it was difficult to threaten people and get away with it. She blinked and looked at Marc—trying to ignore Simon, whose face was so utterly blank that she just knew he was restraining an ungentlemanly guffaw at her shock. “Doctor DuQuesne,” she said, “I would like to talk with you. Privately.”

  She started towards the rear of Holy Grail, where there would be unoccupied space…and realized Sun Wu Kung was following her. “Wu—”

  “I can’t be a bodyguard if I’m not here.” Wu said bluntly.

  “A bodyguard against DuQuesne?” Now she heard Saul stifle a chortle, and Gabrielle’s hand was over her mouth; her AISage Vincent was unabashedly grinning like a man watching his favorite comedy.

  “Against whoever might want to hurt you. Just because DuQuesne assigned me doesn’t mean I’m ignoring him as a threat.”

  She goggled at him in entirely un-captainlike disbelief, then turned her stare towards DuQuesne, whose beard was not quite successfully concealing a smile. “Is he serious?”

  “Very serious indeed, Captain. Which is why I chose him for that.”

  It finally registered. “You mean that this is why you went all the way out there to wake him up? To be a bodyguard?”

  “Not the only reason,” DuQuesne clarified, “but a major reason, yes. And before you start telling me how little you need one, I want to point out that we were just discussing how part of the Bad Old Days is coming back in force, and how the Arena isn’t the safest place in the universe either. Right now, Captain, you are the single most important human being ever, and that in at least two ways.”

  I should know better than to argue with a Hyperion, but that’s never stopped me before. “Two ways?”

  “The obvious first reason is that you’re the head of the Faction of Humanity—or, let’s be more blunt, the ruler of all humanity as far as the Arena is concerned—for exactly as long as you’re alive, or until you deliberately give that position up.”

  Saul murmured something. “I had…wondered about certain aspects of your report. My God.”

  “Yeah, and I figured there wasn’t much point in hiding it from you any more. Sure as hell we can’t keep it hidden from them much longer. And I don’t think any of us need to ask Naraj and Ni Deng about their feelings on that subject; the idea that you, and you alone, are authorized to make major decisions for the entire human species? Ha! Oh, sure, they might not do anything about it directly, but believe you me, there’s probably a dozen others that, once they figure out the situation, might think it’s a real problem that could be cleared up with a strategically-placed suicide drone with a load of explosives. Perhaps even to assist Naraj or Ni Deng with plausible deniability. ‘Will no one rid me of this troublesome captain?’, so to speak.”

  “Wouldn’t the Arena—”

  “—know? Sure. And I don’t think it cares. Oh, I don’t think it’d accept a transfer of authority that was tortured out of you or blackmailed out of you, though I wouldn’t want to bet that a Shadeweaver couldn’t get away with his mind-woogie doing the same thing—if you hadn’t been so smart as to cut that off at the pass. But you can bet your bottom dollar that it’s not gonna give one tiny ram’s damn about something like assassination that’s purely ‘in the family.” How we run our politics is our business.”

  Much as she hated to admit it, he had a point. There might well be people willing to kill her over stuff like this. “You said in two ways…oh.”

  “Yeah. You’re also the first, and right now only, human with those weird powers the Shadeweavers and Initiate Guides have. They’re sealed away—for now—and you don’t know how to use them—yet—and that makes you a Problem for a lot of people, both here and back in the Arena.”

  “All right, maybe I do need a bodyguard. No offense, Marc, but…is he really that good?”

  The huge Hyperion burst out laughing, Saul following suit, as Wu looked down modestly. “Is he that good? Ariane…Captain…I’ll let him give you a demonstration sometime, maybe when we get back to the Arena, where I can be sure that the only spy looking over my shoulder is the Arena. But yeah. Better than that, even.”

  She glanced at Wu. “Wu, sorry about my…issues here. But it’s just hard for me to imagine that I’d need a bodyguard at all.”

  “I understand. But DuQuesne says you need one, so you do, and I’m going to do that job.”

  Fine. “Okay. BUT we will do this my way.” She made her face look hard and used her most forceful tone. As if any tone I use is likely to impress a Hyperion. “There will be times I have to speak to people privately, here and in the
Arena, and I will speak with them privately, which means without you present. And when I go to my private quarters they will remain my private quarters, whether you like it or not. And that goes for you AND Dr. Marc C. Hyperion Superman DuQuesne. Have I made myself clear?”

  For a second neither of them responded; to her surprise they were staring at her almost like two students being reprimanded, and Saul Maginot as well, his mouth half-open in shock. “Crystal-clear, Captain.” DuQuesne said finally, not a trace of his frequent sardonic humor present.

  “Very very clear, Captain Ariane! DuQuesne, she is scary like that! I like her!”

  Ariane found it very hard to keep from laughing, but she managed to keep her face straight—though it took heroic effort, and from the sound of things Gabrielle wasn’t finding it easy either. “Then in that case, Wu Kung, I need to talk to DuQuesne alone.” She turned towards the aft door, grabbing up Mentor’s case as she did so.

  “Yes, sir!…I mean, Ma’am…” Looking slightly confused at which term of address to use, Wu Kung backed off.

  DuQuesne followed her through the door.

  She giggled after it shut. “He’s awfully sweet, you know?”

  DuQuesne’s expression softened. “Yeah. Why do you think he was our heart, so to speak? Not the leader, not the smartest, but the one no one could really dislike.”

  “Hard to see him as so dangerous, then. But enough of that for now.” She sat back down, gesturing for DuQuesne to do the same; he settled in, somewhat warily, across from her. “Marc, I wanted to talk to you about a lot of things once we got back, but what just happened…changes things.”

  DuQuesne nodded. “Hyperion.”

  “Exactly.” She looked at him sympathetically. “I know—now more than I did—how hard it is to look at parts of that past, Marc. I know I can’t even begin to imagine what you really went through, probably not even what people like Saul went through. And I’d hoped that we could pretty much leave it at that, at going to find the survivors that could help us and—”