by Wren, M. K.
Woolf passed down a long corridor filled with House guards into an anteroom where his sleevesheath gun was duly noted by a detector, and after an examination with a montector and a personal search, which he insisted on, he was allowed to pass into Galinin’s room.
Futile, all futile, the guards and detectors and searches. Mathis was safe now, made safe by the shadow that hovered over him almost perceptibly: the shadow of death.
Only Dr. Marton Stel, Woolf’s personal physician, kept vigil by Galinin’s bed. Above the head of the bed, a biomonitor screen registered in ticking calligraphy the wavering signals of his living. His face was almost hidden. An ugly turban of bandages bound his head, angling down over the left temple; a respirator mask covered the lower half of his face, the sigh of the pump audible in the pendant quiet.
Woolf looked down at Galinin’s hands, motionless against the sheet. Broad, strong hands, more the hands of a craftsman than a statesman. On the right was the topaz Crest Ring of Daro Galinin, on the left the golden seal of the Chairmanship.
“Marton?”
Dr. Stel understood that unstated query. He turned away, staring bleakly at the monitor.
“He’s a man of courage, my lord; the will to live is there. Otherwise, I doubt he’d be alive now. If he were twenty years younger . . .”
“But he’s not.” How often had Mathis, in rueful annoyance, called himself an old man. Woolf had never believed it until now.
“No, my lord, and I . . . can’t offer any hope for him, short of a miracle.”
Stel seemed silenced by his own pronouncement, then he roused himself, a bitter hatred taking shape in his features that was stunning in someone so typically reserved and conscientiously detached in his demeanor.
“The man who did this—I wish to the God there was some way to make him pay for it with more than his life. That’s not enough!”
Woolf nodded, wondering how Stel would feel if he knew the real identity of the man who had done this. At least, the man who would pay for it with his life. Stel had brought Alexand into the world.
But he would never know. No one outside the Directorate would know. That was part of the pact.
Woolf went to the door without looking back.
“ ’Com me if . . . if there’s any change.”
5.
Alexand spent most of the hour between 08:00 and 09:00 at the window, watching morning come to Concordia in murky veils of rain. The city roused itself from the long night, not to full wakefulness, but, like an invalid, to pendant alertness, feeling out its aches and pains.
Ben’s voice sounded intermittently in his ear. Once it was Erica. Never Adrien. That was an act of mercy on her part, and he understood it, as she knew he would.
There was nothing new or unexpected in the reports, and finally he stopped listening to them except as a link with hope, an axis of assurance to keep his thoughts aligned.
The other axis was Rich.
Rich his brother, not his son.
Reach out to me, Rich, my linked-twin soul; reach out and give me your courage.
Fear was an alien entity taking possession of him, cell by cell. Already it occupied his heart and commanded the quickening beat of his pulse; it had seized the fragile network of his nervous system, distorting the signals of his senses. He couldn’t depend on his muscles to function as he ordered them, and he knew if he lowered his defenses for an instant, it would take up tenancy in his mind.
At 08:45 Alexand turned from the window, tucked his shirt under his waistband, fastened the cuffs and collar. Then the uniform jacket. He worked with little success at restoring a strand of braid loosened in his encounter with the Directorate guards. He had to concentrate on it; it was one of those small tasks his left hand was unaccustomed to, made all the more difficult by its wayward trembling. The front fasteners presented no problem, but the cloak was more difficult. It slipped off his left shoulder twice before he got it snapped in place.
At 08:50, Ben warned him that the SSB ’car had landed on the roof.
That was the last message he heard from the miniceiver. If the SSB found it, they’d wonder where it came from, and suspicion would fall inevitably on Dr. Cambry; no one else had been close enough to him. Cambry had also left a monitor in the room, but Alexand couldn’t risk searching for it, and he assumed it had a destruct mechanism.
The ear ’ceiver couldn’t be so equipped, however. Alexand went into the bathroom, where he removed it under the guise of washing his face and smoothing his hair with his fingers. His comfortable accommodations did not include a comb or anything that could conceivably serve as a weapon.
The ’ceiver went into the syntegrator with the disposable towel. The bottle of pills Cambry had left waited by the soft plasex cup. The pills were exactly what they seemed; oral analgesics. He knew that from Ben, and he’d already taken one this morning. Now he studied the pills through the transparent walls of the bottle. There were at least ten left. He filled the cup with water, then swallowed them all at once. Within half an hour, he would be very nearly unconscious, but that didn’t concern him. Within a few minutes, he could be unconscious in another sense. The TAB would be in effect.
He knew what he had to look forward to, and knew the pills were only capable of blunting pain, and would be effective only until the SSB psychocontrollers recognized their symptoms and administered a counterstimulant. Still, it might mean a few minutes’ delay, a few minutes’ relief. In an SSB interrogation room, minutes become important.
At 09:00 Alexand was again at the window, studying the exquisite patterns of raindrops on the glass, moving lenses transforming the cityscape into an abstraction of subtle grays. The thudding of booted heels was distant thunder.
His last thoughts would be of Adrien, but he willed himself not to think of her now. The rain; silent, silver streaks on transparency. Rain shaped this planet, made the seas, the cradle of life; rain had fallen here millions of years before he had been alive with eyes to see it, and rain would fall here millions of years after he was gone.
Three pairs of booted footsteps—no. At least four. Too many to be sure.
Soon. He was dizzy, mouth and throat parched, his eyes slipping out of focus unless he concentrated on it.
Soon. He wondered why he looked forward to the TAB. It wouldn’t reduce the fear, or the pain. But it would make them meaningless. Perhaps that was it. It would make him meaningless.
“Commander Alex Ransom?”
Rich . . . oh, Rich, reach out to me. . . .
Alexand turned. There were four men aligned just inside the door; black boots, black cloaks, black gloves, black helmets, black shadows where their faces might be. One of them spoke, reading from a vellam sheet.
“First Commander Alex Ransom, the Society of the Phoenix, you are under arrest, and, by decree of the Directorate of the Concord of Loyal Houses, condemned to execution in just punishment for the crimes of treason and the attempted assassination of the Lord Mathis Daro Galinin, Chairman of the Directorate. Said execution, by Directorate decree, will take place on this day, 15 Octov 3258, at 20:00 TST in the Plaza of the Concord in the city of Concordia.”
The man who stood staring in stark incredulity at the four shadow figures heard the words, each one sharply enunciated, solemnly spaced.
He heard every word, but understood only one of them.
Execution.
6.
At exactly noon, Bruno Hawkwood entered Master Jaid Garo’s interrogation room, which was relegated to the first level of the Estate Security wing, twenty meters underground. This was one part of the Badir Selasis Home Estate no visitor ever saw. And none who knew about it wanted to see it; it was not a place that was visited voluntarily.
In shape, the interrogation room was a half circle. Centered on the straight wall was a metallic disk two and a half meters in diame
ter, its perimeter bulked with inputs and outlets for a variety of instruments and mechanisms. On that disk, limbs spread to make a living X, the victims were mounted. Master Garo liked to call them “subjects,” but Hawkwood was impatient with euphemisms; he didn’t need them, and it surprised him that Garo did, until he realized his error. “Subjects” were exactly what they were to Garo.
Master Garo was not sadistic.
Hawkwood wouldn’t have tolerated that. The revelations made in this room were never appropriate for public consumption, and the man who heard them had to be worthy of trust. A sadist couldn’t be trusted, and his psychosis inevitably negated his efficiency.
Garo might be termed psychopathic in that he was incapable of empathy for other human beings, but that increased, rather than diminished, his efficiency. In fact, he might have written the definitive text on his art, if it weren’t so clandestinely practiced. He approached his work with methodical detachment, never losing sight of his purpose, always working through an ordered sequence of operations, which he graded on a numerical scale from one to twenty; he seldom found it necessary to go beyond ten. He made only three parts of the human anatomy sacrosanct: the ears, the mouth, and the eyes. The subject must be able to hear the questions asked him, and able to answer them. And he must be able to see.
Master Garo was ever sensitive to the psychological aspects of his work.
The eyes are windows to the imagination, he propounded, with no philosophic or poetic intent, and imagination augmented his persuasive processes as effectively as a nerve-sensitizing injection. That was why the curved wall of this room was lined with mirrors so his subjects might look out from the wheel and see themselves reflected a hundredfold at every stage of mutilation, from the initial threat operations, through the secondary pain infliction levels, to the permanent injury stages.
But Master Jaid Garo was faced here with ultimate failure.
The man now mounted on his wheel was impervious to his arts. Garo hadn’t believed that possible, nor had Selasis, when Hawkwood warned them of the futility of subjecting this man to Garo’s methods. The only hope of getting more information from him was through voluntary disclosure, and that might have been accomplished by playing on his mania.
But the Lord Selasis was not a patient man.
Hawkwood went to the control console where Garo sat in numbed bewilderment. He had reached, and passed, operation twenty.
The air was fetid with the sweat of fear, with urine, feces, and blood. Hawkwood looked up at Garo’s subject with cold disgust, not for the man himself, but for the shortsightedness that had put him there.
His hair seemed a startling orange flame under the penetrating lights. There was a spiderish aspect about him, limbs splayed, stretched beyond the tolerance of the joints, swollen with blood. A web of tubes, wires, clamps, probes, and automated appendages radiated inward from the edge of the wheel to adhere to the acid-blistered, blood-scaled body or obtrude into its every orifice.
Unnatural, unmanned, unhuman, this slab of flesh was only living because of the paradoxically sustaining functions of some of those mechanical appendages. A delicate balance, and Garo couldn’t maintain it much longer.
Hawkwood asked softly, “Well, Garo?”
“He . . . the man is—it’s incredible!”
“You haven’t worked with Phoenix conditioning before.”
“But the man’s insane. Conditioning shouldn’t hold—listen. Just listen to this!”
He turned up the audio pickup. The man’s voice was too weak for the words to be audible without amplification, and even with it they were barely intelligible, garbled in red froth, disrupted by heaving muscular spasms, his body’s revolt against what was happening within it.
“I am . . . the Llllord . . . Predis Uh . . . Uh . . . Ussshhh . . . Pela—Peladeeeeen. . . . I am firsssst born . . . of—of—of Lorrrr . . .Elor Pel-Pelah—ah . . .ah . . . AH—”
Garo switched off the audio, and the broken sounds could be heard only as a hiccoughing mumbling.
“That’s all! Six hours, and that’s all he ever said. I can’t— there’s nothing more I can do.”
“There was never anything you could do. Kill him.”
“But I have no orders from Lord . . .” He stopped and, when Hawkwood turned on him, went pale.
“Master Garo, I am still Chief of Security. You take your orders from me. I take mine from Lord Selasis.” So, the word was already out, filtering down through the ranks.
Hawkwood reached for the red lethal-shock button.
“The order is mine, Garo. The deed is mine.”
The man’s body bucked and beat against the wheel, then hung limp. The chamber was silent except for an incessant dripping sound.
“Garo, call the disposal squad, then you may go.”
Garo sighed out his relief and snapped a curt order into the intercom, then rose stiffly.
“Uh . . . good day, Master Hawkwood.”
Hawkwood nodded. He didn’t turn to see him go, nor did he move when the four Bond mutes came in. They eyed him warily, but when he showed no interest in them, went on with their work, communicating with each other with hand signals.
It wasn’t Hawkwood’s custom to watch this culmination of the interrogation process, yet he felt a certain obligation to this man, and he noted with satisfaction that the Bonds showed a vestige of the respect for the dead their religion taught them as they disengaged the body from the web-work of the wheel.
Perhaps the man had been a Lord’s son. He had certainly been mad, and that was a key Sign.
Hark to the voices of madness, for they may be the chosen vessels of the Word of the All-God.
This man was a signpost.
Orin Selasis, being both self-indulgent and self-blinded, had only seen him as a tool, one he carelessly destroyed in his impatience, but Bruno Hawkwood looked beyond the utility of the man and found the signpost.
They called him the Master of Shadows; he knew that. He also knew, now, that he’d only been his Lord’s shadow, following blindly as he led down a False Path into Chaos. But a junction had been reached. He and his Lord would no longer walk the same path, and this man, whose broken body the mutes were lowering onto a sheet of black plasex, had been a signpost and a catalyst. He had set in motion the sequence of events that led Bruno Hawkwood inevitably to the Prime Sign.
Adrien Eliseer was alive.
Orin Selasis regarded that as an unforgivable failure on Hawkwood’s part; nothing more. He didn’t consider the chain of occurrence linking this man with that revelation.
Hawkwood wasn’t a Reader, but sometimes the gift of Sight is fleetingly bestowed even on the Unsighted.
Selasis would never, if this man hadn’t in his madness come to him, have ordered the assassination of Mathis Galinin. The result of that, Selasis only regarded as another unforgivable failure, giving no thought to the fact that Hawkwood had failed because of a turn of Destiny he couldn’t have foreseen: Galinin had chosen to sit by the windowall, not at the desk.
There was a purpose to that as there was to all things.
If the assassination attempt hadn’t failed, Selasis wouldn’t have found the imagraph, face down on the floor, snatched from Galinin’s hand and thrust into his by the invisible hand of Fate.
Adrien Eliseer had not been meant to die by Bruno Hawkwood’s hand, and with his new Sight, he read a corollary in the two infants pictured in her arms. Her husband, her Promised by blessed vow, was not meant to die. To attempt his death would be to knowingly follow a False Path.
Orin Selasis wouldn’t be turned from that Path, but his shadow might escape now to seek a True Path.
Escape was an appropriate term.
Hawkwood knew himself to be a condemned man. Perhaps that was another reason he stayed for the shrouding of this man’s body.
He stood condemned for the two failures Selasis couldn’t accept as Written, and he was alive now only because Galinin was still alive. At the first hint of his recovery, another assassination attempt must be made, and Selasis preferred to limit the risks of revelation by entrusting the second attempt to the same man who had made the first. Thus he let Hawkwood live. But it was only a temporary stay of execution. Hawkwood knew that as he knew this day was inevitable. He expected it and had prepared for it.
Ten years ago, when he married Margreta, he had experienced what Selasis would derisively call a religious ecstasy; a vision. Hawkwood called it an Insight. Now, in a remote mountain valley in Newzelland, a house had been built on a Concord land grant. The owners were established as a University professor nearing retirement and his fair young wife. The gardens and pastures were tended by two Bond couples whose silence and service were guaranteed by gratitude and an awareness of their fate should they try to leave the retreat. They had been condemned to death and were presently on the runaway lists. And they knew Margreta and loved her as sick, needy, and frightened creatures inevitably did, sensing instinctively that she loved them.
That capacity for love seemed innate in her. Who else would see the need in a man like Bruno Hawkwood and answer it with love?
Two of the mutes carried out the shrouded body; they seemed to find it a heavy burden. The other two, with vacmops and antisep sprays, began the cleaning up, and Hawkwood wondered why the odor of blood seemed as hard to eradicate as the substance itself.
He turned and left the room, closing the door behind him. As he rode the pedway down the corridor, he was thinking of Margreta and conscious of the time. At 12:30 she would be calling on a private frequency, and he could only take that call in his office, which he had over the years made a sanctuary, an electronic fortress.
Galinin still lived, and thus Bruno Hawkwood still lived, and in the chain of occurrence, Margreta lived. Two hours ago she had left the Estate bound for the University Hospital, a commonplace errand since her surgery, which would attract neither Selasis’s attention, nor that of the secret guards who always watched her. But she wouldn’t return to the Estate. There were means of evading even the closest surveillance. Margreta should at this time be safely resting at the farm retreat.