Barsk

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  “The Yak is Bish? I still don’t understand how he got on the ship.”

  “Don’t worry about it, his power has been broken. He’ll be busy starting his life over again. When you have a moment, put in a call to Senator Welv and I’ll discuss with her where to drop him off. I have an idea, but Bish is not going to be happy.”

  “So the horrible thing is done? It won’t keep happening?” Pizlo clutched at Jorl again.

  “You both remember locking him away? Well, that’s a sure sign that his nefshons are working again just like everyone else’s. They’ve just been … reset.”

  All of Pizlo’s tension melted away and he slid down, sitting in Jorl’s lap. He pressed the tip of his trunk into Jorl’s hand. “This is yours now.”

  Jorl took the ring. It just barely fit on his littlest finger.

  Druz gasped. “Oh! I didn’t realize … you’re Senator Jorl. Forgive me, the confusion, I—”

  “It’s okay. I’m, uh, the new member of the Committee of Information.”

  The Sloth nodded vigorously. “Of course. That would make sense. This ship serves the Committee. I’m to be your new personal assistant then, yes?”

  “Um…”

  “Say, ‘yes,’ Jorl.” Pizlo squirmed and reached up to curl a fold of Druz’s clothes with his trunk. “She’s really nice. She talks to me. She’s my friend.”

  “We’ll discuss it. I’ll come up with something. I’ve disrupted your life enough already. But … the Ailuros? Are they part of your ship’s crew as well?”

  “No, they were brought to the station by Urs-Major Krasnoi. Though, I can’t recall why now. I would expect they’d get reassigned as soon as the regular station personnel return. Your ship is well-appointed and automated. I’m the only crew. Is there somewhere you want to go?”

  “Home,” said Jorl. “More than anything else, I just want to go home. But there are a few things I need to do first, and a stop we need to make.” He glanced at the guards. “Are they going to stop me if I try to leave this room? Or if I need to go to another part of the station?”

  The Brady smiled. “Sir, I will have a word with them. They were also a bit confused when the little prince and I first arrived. Once they understand who you are, I assure you everything will be fine.”

  “That’s good. Could you see to that now, while I have a word with Pizlo?”

  Druz waved one of the Pandas over to her as she walked to the other. Soon the three were conversing in hushed tones, and the occasional furtive glance back at Jorl.

  Meanwhile, he set Pizlo on the ground and wrapped his trunk around the boy’s ear, grinning. “Little prince?”

  Pizlo blushed. “It’s just something she calls me. I don’t know why. It’s stupid but … Jorl, she talks to me. There’s a whole new person who talks to me!”

  “I noticed that. I’m just sorry you had to go through all of this to find one. Are you ready to go home, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. But I need your help with something. Remember that place that wasn’t on the map? Do you think you could help your new friend to find it and take us there?”

  “I get to fly a space ship?!”

  “No … you get to help with navigation. Which, um, is even better. Otherwise the ship would just be flying without a destination. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Jorl stood up, and as he did the pair of guards rushed to flank him. He looked over at Druz. “You said it would all be fine. This doesn’t look fine.”

  “If it please the senator, they would like to serve as your security detail until such time as you are ready to leave the station.”

  “Bother. Well, no, that’s fine. I need a guide around here anyway.”

  * * *

  WITH what struck him as a fair degree of reluctance, Jorl’s pair of Pandas led him to the suite of rooms that had been assigned to the Lutr telepath. They opened the room and, at his command, remained outside. He deliberately closed the door after entering and passed through the outer room. As he stepped into the bed chamber, gravity vanished and he flailed a moment before wrapping his trunk around a wall hook. He anchored himself, oriented his body so that his feet pointed at the floor, and at last surveyed the room. The Otter lay lightly belted and sprawled across a sleeping platform bolted to the floor at one end of the room.

  “Are you still here? Still inside her?”

  The Otter opened her eyes and showed him a weary smile. “I wondered if I would see you again. Prophecy only takes one so far, and even with the threat to his son I wasn’t sure I could depend upon your friend to take the drug once he’d re-created it.”

  “He didn’t. He left the decision to me, such as it was. That’s all the choice you left him to pass on, Margda. Dead all these years and you’re still controlling lives. This Lutr’s for the past however many days, and mine … how many years now has my entire existence been dictated by your machinations?”

  He shifted his grip on the wall hook from his trunk to his hand and back again. It wasn’t even remotely like pacing, but it was the closet bit of rhythmic movement the room’s null-gravity permitted. He fanned his left ear and glared at the recumbent figure inhabited by the centuries-dead woman who had shaped his life.

  “Quit complaining, Boy. You’ve won, or you wouldn’t be here. The drug worked. You defeated that Bos bastard who would have destroyed us all. And if I’m not mistaken, that’s a senatorial sigil on your hand. Huh. I certainly hadn’t foreseen that.”

  “You remember Bish?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because he’s gone. Stripped from the memory of every living person, except for a child who remembers him from visions, and me because I’m the one who destroyed him.”

  “Ah. Arlo described that possibility. I confess, I didn’t believe him, but then his understanding of the science of nefshons had advanced far beyond my own work.”

  “He didn’t tell me. Barely a hint. I’d never imagined something so wrong. I removed a man from the universe. His entire life is gone.”

  “You did what you had to do.”

  “I didn’t. It wasn’t a choice. It just … happened.”

  “And you’re complaining? You saved our entire world.”

  He shook his head, both ears fanning as his anxiety climbed. “I never asked for this. I’m not suited to it. Why didn’t your visions tell you that? I’m a historian; I write about the people who shape events, I don’t do the shaping!”

  Margda laughed. She rose from her bed and flew toward him, more fluidly than any Fant might move, but with only half the innate grace that an Otter possessed. Jorl stood still as she reached out and ran the fingers of one hand over his cheek. “Poor dear, forced to take some responsibility for a change? Did I not say that prophecy only takes us so far? It’s not foolproof, Boy. At best, it’s porous. In my life I rarely saw closure. More typically I had glimpses of fine details and had to work out the connections between them. I saw a crisis, but not the precise nature of it. I saw the critical value of your friend’s discovery, but not what it did or how. I saw a Lox with the potential to be in the right place at the right time.”

  “Is that what Bish’s precognitivists saw, too?”

  “In all likelihood. The real difference though was that I had a motivation they lacked. I gave destiny a push to make it happen. You study history, so stop your pathetic whining. You know better than most that destiny happens to us, it is never something we call forth.”

  “I used to think that. But you controlled others’ fates. The choices you made have manipulated me, and Arlo, and the telepath whose mind and body you’ve stolen. How many others? By what right have you imposed your will on us?”

  “By the most basic of rights, Jorl. Because I can. Prophecy is first and foremost a self-serving gift. I used mine to gain power, but not just for me. What I have done has preserved Barsk for generations. And with your help I have obtained a closure in death that I knew I would never possess in life. Can you truly
find fault in that?”

  “Yes, I can. You just admitted that your sight wasn’t complete. You don’t know what might have happened if you’d done nothing. How much of what you feared actually came about because you inadvertently set it in motion? You created the Speaker’s Edict. You helped craft the Compact that Bish and others in the Alliance would come to resent. You created the aleph which empowered Arlo’s drug. And you didn’t do any of these things because they were necessarily good unto themselves, but because you saw them as means to shape events to serve your own ends. The entire legacy of the Matriarch is the exploitation of others like pieces in some great game.”

  She laughed in his face. “You can see it that way if you like. The weak usually do, if they see it at all. But you disappoint me. Despite your study of history, you fail to understand power. It’s obvious you never will.”

  Margda turned from him then, her feet not quite touching the floor as she carefully crossed to the middle of the room and let a hand hover just above the surface of the large globule of water floating there.

  “There’s really only one choice you ever have to make in any act of creation. Will you be the instrument or the artist? If you’re only now coming to realize that you’ve been a tool all your life, there’s no one to blame for it but yourself. If you don’t like that state of affairs, then act! Impose your will upon the world and walk your own path. If you don’t, you’ll just end up being a token in someone else’s game; you’ll continue to be used as they see fit. That’s how the universe works. You don’t have to like it, but you’d do well to get used to it.”

  He shoved himself from the wall, relying in part on old reflexes from emergency drills and mind-numbing training from his days in the Patrol. He rotated in mid-air and he struck the far wall feet first, bending at the knee to absorb the impact and launch himself along a new vector. Arms and trunk reaching out in front of him, he passed through the room’s watery sphere. As he emerged through the far side, his momentum carried him into the Otter, tackling her, and eventually pinning her against the floor where he grabbed at an edge of the bedclothes to prevent any further rebounding.

  “No, maybe that’s the way the world looks once you’ve already decided to take your path. Or maybe it’s just you’re so jaded, or you’ve bought into your own delusions. I don’t know which, and I don’t care. Those aren’t the only choices: use or be used. There is more than being tyrant or servant. I reject both options and I reject you. You’ve been dead for centuries, Margda, it’s about time you accepted that.”

  Jorl closed his eyes, not bothering to invoke any ritual or to summon up a mindscape. He saw the concentration of Margda’s nefshons that had embedded themselves throughout the golden fabric that were the living particles of the telepath Lirlowil. What he had done before, out of fear and without limit, he now did with careful and delicate control. Instead of calling the nefshons of the Matriarch to him as he might in an ordinary summoning, he drew them exclusively from the Otter. He began with those particles that she had originally summoned herself when she broke the first rule of the Edict, and then took away all the others that represented her memories of the experiences that had followed. And yet still they clung together, some after effect of the imprint Margda had forced, or possibly just some lingering effort she’d set in motion with the last of her usurped telepathy.

  Jorl would have none of it. He imposed his will on the particles, giving each its own direction and push, and forced their diffusion. As simply as that, the Matriarch was gone.

  “Pool of my birth, isn’t it enough I’m being forced to study and summon you ugly people, do I have to wake up to find one in my bed as well?”

  Jorl opened his eyes and found himself face to face with the Lutr. She bore an expression that was equal parts disgust and annoyance, but otherwise showed only exhaustion to indicate she had ever been possessed by the long-dead Matriarch.

  He glanced over his shoulder to get his bearings, and then shoved himself in the direction of the entrance to the outer room.

  “My apologies. This was just a, uh, professional visit. One Speaker to another.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s not important. I came to tell you that your work here is done.”

  The look on her face brightened with an expression of hope. “I get to go home?”

  Jorl smiled. “Unless you can think of a better place to be.”

  * * *

  AFTER finishing with the Lutr, Jorl paid a visit on the Bos. Bish had exhausted himself shouting commands into a comm system that ignored him, issuing ineffective orders to the Ailuros guards that had brought him a meal, and in general ranting. When the Pandas had opened the door to allow Jorl to enter, Bish had pulled himself together and treated him to a haughty glare, but there was little strength to it.

  “I hadn’t intended to do it, but I’m not making any excuses. I can’t even say I did it in self-defense. It’s my fault, and it’s something we’ll both have to live with.”

  “What are you yammering about?” said the Yak.

  “You’ve been forgotten. No one remembers you, or anything you did, any connections you made, any interactions they had with you. Any relationships. You have all your own memories still, all your talent and skill, but any effect you had on any other person has been lost.”

  “Utter nonsense. Even if what you say is true, there are records. I’ve written legislation, struck down laws, the senate may not remember me, but I can point to what I’ve done and it will come back to them.”

  “Memory doesn’t work that way. If you marched in with an annotated history of all your accomplishments it would only confuse the memories they’re already trying to resolve. Which is why I’m not taking you back to Dawn.”

  “Why don’t you just say it. You’ve come to kill me.”

  Jorl fanned his ears, embarrassment coloring his face. “I’m not a murderer, despite having killed your past. I’m taking you where you’ll be no threat to Barsk but can have a chance to build a new future.”

  “Why would I want a new future when I’m not done with the one I’ve planned? Even if no one else remembers me, I still recall all of them. I know the strengths and weaknesses of powerful people on a hundred planets. It doesn’t matter where in the Alliance you drop me, I’ll maneuver myself into a position to come after you in time.”

  “I thought of that. If anything, armed with that kind of knowledge, you’re more dangerous to those people because they won’t have a clue. Which is why I’m not taking you to any world in the Alliance. On the other hand, there are independent colonies at the farthest edges of Alliance space where your spirit and strength might do some good. It’s a long trip, and you’ll be kept in this cabin as a prisoner until the ship arrives, but at least you’ll have a chance to make a new start.”

  The Yak scowled. “And if I choose not to?”

  Jorl shrugged. “As far as anyone remembers, you’re no longer a citizen of the Alliance. No one cares what you do any more. Least of all me.”

  * * *

  AFTER finishing with the former senator, Jorl left his Ailuros escort outside the door to the station’s mess. He seated himself before the massive window wall and gazed out upon the planet below. He’d promised T’Minah and the rest of the committee to keep their secret, and he had one more chore ahead if he meant to be his word. He spun the surrounding setting in his mind and with a simple thought caused his new human friend’s nefshons to gather again.

  “Hello, Jorl. That was … interesting. This is a new summoning, yes? I can recognize the beginning of a new cycle. It’s not quite instantaneous to me, but the sensation isn’t one of time passing. I can’t quite explain it.”

  “There’s no need. It’s actually well documented.”

  Dr. Castleman’s smile lit up her face. “To your time, maybe. I’m still grappling with the implications of the science you’ve built based on nefshon particles.”

  “That’s part of why I’ve summone
d you again. I was only able to speak to you at all because a special gift allowed me to bring together your nefshons despite their vast dispersal. But because I’ve done that, any other Speaker who knew of you could summon you now.”

  “So I can expect more of these chats? With other raised mammals?”

  “I’m afraid not. You heard the history of our shame. I think the committee is correct; there’s nothing to be gained by that knowledge getting out. Which means other Speakers must not summon you.”

  “But you told Bish you had a failsafe. Won’t the other Speakers you told about me make the attempt? Even if you follow up with each of them and assure them it’s not necessary, surely some will try.”

  Jorl nodded. “You’re right. Curiosity is a universal trait. There’s no way I can prevent them from trying; I have to attack the problem from the other end and prevent them from succeeding.”

  “I don’t understand, what will you—”

  “This isn’t ‘goodbye,’ Dr. Castleman. I’ve managed the trick once, I can do it again. But it’s important to be sure no one else can.”

  Without another word, Jorl filled the mental space around him with a hundred versions of himself. Then, as he had done with the Matriarch’s nefshons, the multitude of him focused on dispersing the particles that defined Chieko Castleman and scattered them farther and wider than any other Speaker could hope to summon back together, even with a lifetime of effort.

  Jorl let his duplicates fade and brought his attention back to the real world. He took a final glance at his cloud-covered home before turning to leave. The pair of Ailuros snapped into position as he exited the mess. He’d only been on the job a short while, but he already knew he was not going to like his new role as a senator.

  * * *

  UNLIKE the Resolute Purpose, Bish’s ship had only a single hold that doubled as a bay. It had been turned into a pantry and stocked with sufficient cases of food and drink to allow the senator to travel for years if necessary. At Jorl’s request, Druz had the Pandas move those goods into the warehouse where less than a day before they had stowed everything that had been removed from the polar base. Then, in turn, they moved some of that onto the senator’s ship, including the boat borrowed from the Provost. When the swapping back and forth had been completed, the ship detached from the orbital station and dropped.