by Janet Morris
Running his palm down across his face so that his lower lip kissed his chin, he sought his chair. It seemed useless, tawdry, foolish, sometimes, to rail and scheme and strive in a universe empty even of censure, let alone approbation. But Parma knew the ennui would pass back whence it had come, into the realm of emotion, leaving him strong enough to draw his load once again. Already, he could feel the comforting weight of his collar, the smooth roundness of well-worn traces on his either side. What else is there, but to draw the heaviest burden one can manage, and draw it with pride?
When Parma did not come down for dinner, Ashera cursed his name. When he appeared not among the celebrants toasting a victory assured by the Kerrion data pool and independent sources alike, she shrugged and told their guests that he was working upon his acceptance speech, and might be at it the night long.
But when midnight’s tinkle rang through the tower, she pulled a steward aside and grudgingly dictated an apology and a reminder that the consul general had guests, to be delivered to Parma in person straightaway.
A time later the man returned saying that the security modes in the consul general’s office were activated, unbreachable, that he had spoken loudly at the door but received no reply.
“Vindictive old fool,” Ashera murmured, after she had dismissed the steward.
“Pardon, madam,” said Baldy, come up behind her, bleary-eyed with a drink in hand, “but I must speak to your husband. It is a matter of some urgency.”
“I would like to speak with him myself, Guildmaster Baldwin, and I am sure my reasons are equally as urgent as yours. However, he is up there sulking with all his privileges invoked. I am not going up there to plead at his door. So, unless he grows up very suddenly—which he has not had the good grace to do in all the years I have known him—you and I are both going to have to wait until His Pomposity sees fit to come down among the people.”
Turning on her heel in a swirl of cream chiffon, she glided away.
Baldy, staring after, felt a many-legged suspicion mount his spine. But then, he had been feeling them daily, waiting for the axe to fall. He was near surrender. Better that than enduring another day of waiting. “Sponge knows, tomorrow’s as good as today,” he told himself aloud, and finished silently that if what his pilots were whispering to each other was the truth, tomorrow might be very different from any day he had known before.
It was very different, but not for the reason Baldy thought.
Things became different for Ashera sooner than for everyone else.
When she had seen out the last guest, she went up to Parma’s office. Alone in the hall, she defeated the security-lock with a word.
Slipping within, she reinstated it, tiptoeing across the antechamber and into his softly lit inner sanctum, not wanting to wake him until she stood by his very ear.
As she had suspected, he was slumped over his desk, insensible. Tomorrow they would all bear the brunt of his aching back’s effect on his temper.
She leaned down close, her lips almost against his ear, so that she could see the bristly hairs growing out of it: “It’s safe to wake up now, old toad. They’re all gone and you’re Consul General for another term. I’ve heard your cousin’s already conceded. Parma . . . Parma!”
Then she touched, shook, slapped him. She felt the cold, limpflesh of him. She pushed him back in his chair and thrust her ear against his chest. She searched for his pulse. She moaned like an animal with a death-wound, but she did not hear herself. She begged him not to die, repeatedly, as she pounded frantically on his chest. She opened his mouth. He might be just unconscious: his tongue and lips and gums were bluish. She fit her lips to his unsensing ones, trying to resuscitate him. The spittle she sucked into her mouth was chilly. She sat back, straddling him, cold and empty as the corpse whose eyes were closed. In death he was more camel-like than ever, and still she could not cry. She lay her cheek against his and spewed out apologies, words of love, entreaties as if he could still hear her.
The pressure of her weight on his stomach caused the air and water yet within him to evacuate his flesh.
Then she knew it was true, that she was without him, that he would never look up from under his black brows, scolding, teasing, that those rubbery lips would never mock her, never purse and give in again.
Lords, why did I blame him? Why did I fight with him? Parma, why did you leave me? I love you. I love you. What am I going to do?
This time, as for all the time intervening until she should follow him, he had for her no answer.
It was that horror, plus the vacant face which had only hours ago been flushed with argument and was now so still and pale, that made her thumb up “run slate.”
Then she wept, pitifully, as his victory speech complete with smiling limpid eyes and pleasure-dimpled mouth played back on the desktop screen.
“Yes,” she sobbed. “Yes, no one can take it away from you. But, oh, Parma, Parma, who can take your place?”
The answer to that, too, was slated into the record, Ashera found when she had gathered her wits enough to look for it.
Having found it, rocking back and forth and moaning softly without knowing that she did, she came to a decision:
She erased any record of her having entered the room. She set up a program that would patch the victory speech into Draconis Central and broadcast it at the proper moment.
Then she stumbled off to his washroom and drew herself a hot bath, mumbling over and over: “Nothing will be lost!”
Chapter Seventeen
Chaeron Ptolemy Kerrion woke from evil dreaming among a half-dozen snoring sleepers in a cold sweat with tears running down his cheeks. It took him a moment to remember that he was in Marada’s Hassid, coursing through sponge toward space-end. The room in which he had expected to awake became Hassid’s cabin with a stately wheeling of orientation that did nothing to lessen his distress, but chased the particulars of the dream from his mind. Something about Ashera and Parma. . . . What, exactly, had made him cry he could not recall. Yet still he felt weepy, infinitely saddened, morose and so transient in his flesh that he kissed himself upon the shoulder.
Chagrined at what he had done, discomfited that he could be so upset as to have done it and not realized until his lips touched his clammy skin, he threw back the cover and half-bolted for the washroom, treading hastily among the cots.
Laving his face in icy water, he wondered how he could cry in his sleep and yet not understand why he was crying. He did not think that he was out of touch with himself. Could something about this situation be bothering him more than he had realized? He was aware of the dangers of suppressing emotion, and he had long been a student of dreams. If someone had been there to ask him which bothered him more, the weeping or the forgetting why he wept, he could not have told which was worse.
What, then, was the matter with him? He stared at his stubbly, water-beaded face searchingly. At least he could not trace the tears. What are you doing, old son?
In a meditative pause, he waited for an answer from inside himself. None was forthcoming. Did he have qualms about this space-end engagement? It had promised to be a debacle. As far as he knew, the prospect rather excited him. He was aware of some small regrets, having to do with Shebat (she, too, was in the dream) and the state of his relationship to his brother, the worst of those being that he regretted helping Marada while wishing he did not. But on the whole he had thought his situation well-conceived, certainly resolved on the internal plane. He had been looking for problems on the external, only, never glimpsing those within.
Everyone else had doubts and fears and objections to his punitive expedition. It followed, he told himself harshly, that he would have shelved his own while striving to eradicate everyone else’s, so that he could appear certain, thereby inspiring trust, if not wholehearted agreement. . . . Still, he did not like to think that he had fooled himself; he was the only friend he had.
He spit out an un-Kerrion oath contracted from overly close contact with flame
rs, and turned his back on the image in the mirror, his fists curled around the lip of the sink at either side of his buttocks. He leaned there, naked, a long time. Then, unwilling to even try to go back to sleep, he headed slowly for his closet to dress. Perhaps he would talk to Marada, and get things straight before a misunderstanding metamorphosed into an irrevocable, open break.
He found Marada awake at Hassid’s master console. “This is where I left you six hours ago. We were both going to get some sleep.”
“I don’t like using a relief pilot. I slept here. Hassid’s touchy.”
“You should have told me. We could use the bed.”
“We? This is my ship; that’s my bed. We’ve got four ships behind us, all with strange pilots. The lead ship should not be in any way compromised.”
“You’ve got to sleep.”
“This brotherly concern is making me nervous.” Marada twisted in his couch. “Have you decided to ‘replace’ me while I sleep?” he queried softly, scratching in his beard. “Because if you have, I must remind you; cube arbitration cannot be halted once it is begun.” He gestured sharply with his head toward the console, where the arbitrational cube rested, patched in to Hassid’s board.
“And I must remind you that I am in command of this expedition and am exercising that command as I see fit. That you and I do not agree on the amount of force to be expended does not alter the fact that it is in pursuit of your child we have come here.”
“And if the ‘force expended’ eradicates the object of pursuit? If my son dies of your overzealousness, I will not hesitate to prosecute you! The legalities of all this are questionable. Everything since you altered Parma’s strategy is on your own head.”
“Sometimes I think that is exactly what you want. Is it? Are you really after the eradication of your error? I have heard your child is flawed. . . . Hear me, Marada: I will give you an option. Forget your son. Withdraw the cruisers. Slink back to Draconis and let the pilots’ guild hold us all up for ransom. I lay it in your lap.” Chaeron let his eyes flicker where Marada’s jaw had so recently indicated. “Feed that to your mechanized Solomon and see what color it turns!”
“Clever. I cannot indict you without implicating myself, eh? Well, no good. When this is over, I’m personally going to count the dead and lay their right hands on your altar.”
“What?” Chaeron, sawing on the reins of his temper, reminded himself one more countless time that his brother Marada was irretrievably mad.
“Ancient custom, bringing the right hands of enemies slain in battle back to put before the king. . . .” Marada squinted at Chaeron, trying to see beneath the severe beauty his brother wore like a mirrored mask that threw back reflected light, hiding any illumination coming out from within. He sighed, tsk’d mournfully. “Never mind, little brother, just go your despotic way for the nonce.”
“Then you are not so repelled by this as to want to call it off!”
“Chaeron, you fool . . . we are in sponge, and must continue through. We have to come out at space-end. We’re too close now to change course. The die is cast, as they say. I’m sure the Jesters are kicking up their heels in glee.” He paused, looked long and questioningly at Chaeron, who only snorted derisively.
“Sponge, I could strangle you at times. . . .”
“Slate,” murmured his younger brother.
“Yes, then, I am anxious to reclaim my son. Would not you be, likewise?”
“Not when that’s just what Valery wants us to do.”
“But you agreed with me, then.”
“Until I found out you wanted to tool in there and very politely ask for it—sorry— him back. Has he got a name, this son of yours?”
“Parma.”
“How sentimental.”
Marada surveyed Chaeron through slitted eyes, slowly shaking his head. “If you will get out of here now, you may save yourself excess grief later on.”
“I cannot do that. I am commander. You, after all, are my second and my pilot.”
“As pilot, I can demand it. Things are too crowded in here.”
“Things are more crowded everywhere else but here.”
“Are you still insistent on coming out of sponge firing?”
“I certainly am. Even your friend Hassid thinks the probability of our being met by a welcoming committee to be ninety-nine-to-five-nines.” Chaeron eased himself down into the copilot’s couch on Marada’s right. “I’d like to be able to give the ‘ready’ order myself, since I seem to be taking all the responsibility.”
Marada grunted, without moving a muscle caused a dozen lights to light on the console before Chaeron. “There you are. You can speak your order, or punch it in by depressing the large, red-blinking oblong. Negative hydrogen ion beams, full power, medium spread, total destruction in one second, paralysis of all systems in one tenth of that. Just like Shechem.”
“Thank you,” said Chaeron with a winning smile.
Marada shivered visibly and turned his face away.
A time later, his voice wafted over the couch’s headrest, soft and tired and tinged with hopelessness:
“These cruisers that you intend to demolish—they are ours, you must recall.”
“They were ours,” corrected Chaeron. “Why all these arguments now, when it is, as you have said yourself, too late to turn back?”
“These arguments, as you call them, are over the overt destruction of life, human and cruiser.”
“Cruiser! Lords, Marada, not that again. You are the one who insisted on going after Valery.”
Then Marada did turn around in his seat, his eyes sparkling fiercely. “I was content to come alone. I was intending on coming alone. You have no need of Hassid with all of Shechem’s vanquished fleet at your disposal, as I have no need of such gargantuan firepower behind me. As a matter of fact, if you had not pulled rank on me and insisted on this armed incursion, I would have a better chance of getting my son back, which, if you have forgotten, is the putative purpose of this trip.”
“You would have no chance of getting your son back, or getting yourself back.”
“That should not bother you. In fact, if something happens to Hassid and myself, you will be measurably better off, and perhaps even free from what now seems certain prosecution for your crimes.”
“Ah, but I would be short a brother.”
Marada laughed, a short harsh bark.
“And I would have to go home and tell Parma I let something happen to you, his pet and his pride. He would have my butt for dinner should I return without you.”
“Well, then,” suggested Marada, “you had better start marinating it. You’re right: there’s a welcoming committee waiting for us.”
And he punched up a visual display of dizzying complexity, black-banded and effulgent, in which Chaeron’s untrained eye could make out nothing even vaguely resembling a cruiser.
“Get ready,” Marada warned.
But Chaeron was already leaning forward, his finger wavering, atremble, above the inch-long, red-lit oblong which would free death to leap invisibly from every turret on every cruiser in their party as they came out of sponge.
To the Hassid, leading point out of sponge, the differences between the waiting cruisers ahead were easier to espy than those between the two outboards arguing within. Each cruiser left disparate, patterned tracks of infrared, lingering ghost images as individual as their “voices” or the sleek, cadent “faces” they presented in the “now.” Oh yes, each cruiser’s image was unlike any other’s. It was a simple thing for her to discern, at Marada’s bidding, the identities of the ships lying in wait beyond the event horizon that spilled into normal space. She could yet see their wakes upon the tide of space, compacted and blue-shifted so that she saw not a simple circle of view, but a wide-angle vista including moments in the recent “past.”
Having named each cruiser awaiting them and pinpointed their positions for Marada, she stayed alert to further orders, pondering the argument still flashing in both o
utboards’ infrared auras, red and gold and green swathes around the brothers’ forms.
Though one was her pilot and the other his sibling enemy, though they were as different as space from sponge, it was their sameness that confounded her, had been the object of her meditation the entire time they had been together on board. The emotion that spat between them was endlessly fascinating to her. The brother Chaeron’s presence, so similar yet as different as one unlike parent’s genes could assure, made Marada somehow different also.
It was the seat of that anomaly in her beloved outboard she sought in the interaction between the pair. She still had not found it when two moments of real-time obtruded.
The first of those she had expected: Marada, unable to subvert Chaeron’s purpose directly, subvocally ordered her to send a warning screaming out to the other cruisers lying in wait beyond the portal out of sponge.
The second she had not expected: at the edge of her sensing, the cruiser Marada rode at space-anchor.
Shebat Alexandra Kerrion bent low over David Spry. Softa’s skin was pale, ghttering with sweat. Moving him into Marada and using the control couch for his life-support had been the cruiser’s idea.
She had been surprised when the space-enders granted her request. But then, things had changed since Valery’s arrival. She knew that some of that change was due to the miracle she had performed upon the child, but she knew also that Valery Stang was as nearly in control as it seemed anyone might ever be of the space-enders. And Valery “needed” the cruisers Bucephalus and Marada, so he said. More, he “needed” Julian and Shebat.
What use he thought to make of a ship as badly off as Bucephalus or a boy as confused as Julian, even Marada’s intelligence had not been able to determine.
Marada had, however, determined a number of other things, based upon his conversation with Valery’s Danae, things about whatever had occurred in Shechem. Things about the Labayas and the Kerrions alike.