by Allen Steele
“Sa’Tong qo,” she said. “Please, go in…he’s waiting for you.”
They entered a large conference room, with an oval, oak-surfaced table dominating its center and high-backed armchairs placed around it. Bright morning sunlight streamed through floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows that looked out over the campus; in the distance to the west lay a range of low mountains.
At the far end of the table, a lone figure seated in an armchair gazed out the foothills of the Berkshires. At the sound of the door opening, he turned about in his chair. In his middle years, tall and slender, with long, dark hair becoming grey, he had a face that was both young and old at the same time.
For a moment, he said nothing, but simply gazed at the three people who’d just come in. Then he stood up and walked around the table. He wore a long, white robe, its front and sides embroidered with hjadd symbols. Its hood was pulled back; as the robed figure came closer, Jorge saw a tattoo on his forehead, between his eyebrows and just above the bridge of his nose. Resembling an upside-down pi, with one leg a little higher than the other, it was a hjadd symbol Jorge recognized from photos he’d seen countless times.
Ignoring both Jorge and Vargas, the man approached Inez. He regarded her for a second or two, as if studying the young woman who stood nervously before him, then a smile slowly appeared.
“Hello, Inez,” he said quietly. “I’m your father.”
There was a timeless instant in which it seemed as if neither Inez nor the chaaz’maha knew what to say or do.
By Gregorian reckoning, nineteen years had passed since Hawk Thompson had last seen his daughter, and then she’d been only a baby held in her mother’s arms the day he’d left for Earth. And she had no memory of him; indeed, she’d grown up believing that he was dead. They were practically strangers, separated not only by years but also light-years.
But then the chaaz’maha held open his arms to her, and with a soft cry Inez fell into them. Jorge felt something catch in his throat. Despite everything he and Inez had endured, the hardships and moments of terror, this single moment made it all worthwhile.
Deciding to give them some privacy, he started to turn away, but then he felt a hand on his arm. “You’re Jorge, right?” the chaaz’maha said. Jorge nodded, and he went on. “We’ve never met before, but…thank you. Thank you for bringing her back to me.”
Inez was still in her father’s arms, but beneath her tears there was a grateful smile on her face. “My pleasure, chaaz’maha,” Jorge said.
The chaaz’maha shook his head. “That’s my formal title. You’re my cousin…and among family, I prefer to be known as Hawk.”
Jorge swallowed. He wasn’t ready to be on a first-name basis with a legend. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, “but I’m afraid I’m going to have a hard time with that.”
“Well…whatever makes you comfortable.” The chaaz’maha grinned. “I couldn’t have been more surprised when I saw you and Inez in the vid Black sent us. Of all the people I expected to come from Coyote, you two were the very last I thought I’d see.”
Jorge was unable to keep the shocked expression from his face. “You knew someone was coming?” He turned to Vargas. “So that’s what you meant when you said there was a plan.”
Leaning against the back of the nearest armchair, Vargas folded his arms across his chest. “A lot had to do with my bringing someone from Coyote, yes. But as the chaaz’maha says, we didn’t think it would be either of you.” An offhand shrug. “Luck of the draw, I suppose.”
Jorge looked back at the chaaz’maha. “I can see how you’d know it was me when you saw the vid. I identified myself by my name and rank. But Inez…”
“All she had to do was say her first name.” The chaaz’maha gave his daughter a querulous look. “That is what you were trying to do, wasn’t it? Tell me who you were without tipping off Roland Black?”
Inez smiled as she wiped away her tears with one hand. “I figured that if I only said that my name was Inez and that I was from Coyote, you’d know who I was.”
Remembering the vid Black had made of him and Inez, and the way Inez had spoken to the cam, Jorge suddenly realized that Inez had been trying to pass a subtle message to her father. “Indeed, I did,” the chaaz’maha said. “Very clever…one look at you, and I knew exactly who you were.” Letting go of his daughter, he stepped back to admire her. “You’ve grown up quite a bit, but you look almost exactly like Melissa when she was your age.” He hesitated. “How is she, anyway?”
“She’s fine, Papa,” Inez replied, then her face paled. “I’m sorry…can I call you that?”
The chaaz’maha laughed out loud. “You can call me whatever you—”
“Wait just a minute.” Jorge shook his head. “Look, I don’t want to break this up, but…will someone please tell me exactly what’s going on here?”
Inez’s face darkened. “Jorge, don’t you think that can wait? My father and I—”
“No.” The chaaz’maha shook his head. “He’s right. There’s much you don’t know about how you came to be here, and why.” He gestured to the table. “Please sit down, all of you.”
Jorge settled into the nearest armchair, with Sergio beside him and Inez and the chaaz’maha across the table from them. Clasping his hands together, the chaaz’maha took a deep breath. “Perhaps it’s best that I start from the beginning,” he said. “For the last nineteen years, ever since Sergio rescued me and brought me to Earth, I’ve been working to restore stability to this place.” He glanced at Vargas. “I’ll assume that Sergio has already told you about the Terra Concorde and my role in it.”
“A little, yes.” Jorge glanced at the man sitting beside him. “But when he showed up on Coyote, he led us to believe that he hated you. That you’d set yourself up to be some sort of messiah, and…”
“Uh-huh.” Vargas nodded. “That I did…and I even believed it myself, or at least at the time.” He cocked his head toward the chaaz’maha. “The truth of the matter, though, is that I’ve been with him almost the entire time since he came through the starbridge. In fact, I was one of the first people he converted to Sa’Tong.”
Jorge stared at him. “But Melissa…Inez’s mother…when she scanned your mind during that first meeting we had with you, she found nothing of the kind. She said that everything you’d told us about the chaaz’maha was true.”
“And it was,” Vargas said. “Or at least so I was made to believe.”
“‘Made to…’?” Jorge shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
The chaaz’maha raised a hand. “We’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. Again, it’s best that we take this back to the beginning.” Jorge fell silent again, and he went on. “One of the first things the Terra Concorde accomplished was to persuade the remnants of the spacefaring superpowers…the Western Hemisphere Union, the European Alliance, and the Pacific Coalition…that it was in their best interests to shut down Starbridge Earth and start bringing its offworld colonists back home. Earth had been losing many of its best people to Coyote even before the Lee was destroyed. Even after Starbridge Coyote went down, the lunar and Mars colonies continued to drain the world’s resources. As things turned out, perhaps it was for the best that they no longer had hyperspace access to Coyote. It meant that people here had no choice but to confront their problems instead of trying to run away from them.”
Jorge gestured toward Vargas. “He told us that you had something to do with this. Or is that something else that wasn’t quite true?”
“No, Sergio is correct. The decision to shut down Starbridge Earth was made on my advice.” The chaaz’maha smiled slightly. “Your grandfather and I were on a diplomatic mission to find a solution to the refugee crisis. What I did after I got here was in keeping with that objective…it’s just that the solution wasn’t quite what he or I thought it would be. I expected that Starbridge Coyote would eventually be rebuilt…after all, you had hjadd technology at your disposal…but I didn’t want hyperspace travel between Eart
h and Coyote to resume until the situation here had been stabilized.”
“So that’s why we didn’t get any ships from here,” Inez said. “You could’ve reopened the starbridge at any time, but you chose not to.”
“That’s correct, yes.”
“The hjadd imposed a similar condition on us,” Jorge said. “For much the same reasons. We can travel to the other Talus homeworlds…just not our own.”
“Ah-ha.” The chaaz’maha slowly nodded. “That explains why no ships from Coyote ever came through the starbridge. Although it was shut down to outgoing spacecraft, the Terra Concorde decided to keep its gatehouse on standby, with its comps ready to admit any incoming ships. Nothing ever came through, though…and now we know why.”
“But the Terra Concorde forgot about the second starbridge in orbit around Eris…or did you?”
“No, we didn’t,” Vargas said. “And, unfortunately, neither did the Provisional Army.”
“Which brings us to the next part of the story.” The chaaz’maha settled back in his chair. “We’d known about Roland Black and his Provisional Army for quite a while…how he’d managed to put together a group with the intent of overthrowing the Terra Concorde and eventually reviving the United Republic of America. A lot of it was big talk, of course…the Terra Concorde was pretty well established by then, and the Provos were never much of a threat to us…but nonetheless they’d succeeded in taking control of Boston while stamping out all our attempts to restore democratic order to the city, and it wasn’t long before it became unsafe for me or anyone else from the TC to visit Beacon Hill.”
“Let me pick it up from there, please,” Vargas said, and the chaaz’maha agreed with a nod. “Besides being one of the chaaz’maha’s aides, I also serve as chief of the New England satrapy’s intelligence division. About a year or so ago, we learned that Black had devised a scheme to lure him to Boston…”
“He told us about that,” Jorge said. “Get their hands on a starbridge key and a freighter, then use them to send someone through the Eris starbridge back to Coyote, with the intent of getting someone to come to Boston to find the chaaz’maha.”
“That was the general idea, yes.” A wry smile from Vargas. “Of course, that meant they’d first have to find a qualified pilot who still had his hands on a starbridge key…”
“And that was you.”
“That was me, yes…because I deliberately planted myself in their way.” Vargas’s smile became a broad grin. “You see, they didn’t find me…I found them.”
“Sergio volunteered to allow the Provisional Army to learn that he was just the person they were looking for.” There was no similar expression on the chaaz’maha’s face as he gazed across the table at Vargas. “But it was an incredibly dangerous task. We’d already tried twice to plant an informant within Black’s organization, but we were unsuccessful. Black suspected that the Terra Concorde would attempt to infiltrate his group, so any outsider who tried to get in was always interrogated, sometimes even tortured.” He briefly closed his eyes, shook his head. “We lost two men that way. Black’s methods were brutal, and after our people broke under questioning, Black had them executed.”
Leaning forward in his chair, Vargas looked Jorge straight in the eye. “As it happens, the Terra Concorde had come to the conclusion that the time had come to make some sort of tentative contact with Coyote, if only to let the Federation know how things stood here. So we saw the Provisional Army plot as a way to accomplish two things at once.” He raised a finger. “First, send someone to Coyote with the objective of letting them know that the chaaz’maha was still alive, and perhaps even bring someone back to Earth so that they could see the progress we were making.” He raised another finger. “And second, take down Black and his people by turning their own scheme against them. Of course, that meant getting someone inside their organization. I decided that it would be me.”
“Why you?” Jorge asked.
“I had the starbridge key, of course, but also…” Vargas paused, let out his breath. “Look, the last time I’d tried to take a ship through hyperspace was the day the Lee was destroyed. You may understand this, but…well, I felt like I owed it to everyone on the Lee to be the one to try and reach Coyote.”
“So Sergio had an idea,” the chaaz’maha said. “He’d let himself be recruited by the Provisional Army, but this time in a way that Black wouldn’t be able to break him.”
“You were memory-blocked,” Inez said quietly.
“You said that before,” Jorge said, “but you didn’t explain what that means. What’s…?”
“A technique developed a long time ago by the Order of the Eye,” the chaaz’maha said. “Some of our members came from very difficult circumstances…abuse from friends or family, or things they’d once done themselves, continued to haunt them. Since it’s hard to share a telepathic rapport with someone who’s carrying that much pain, the Order learned how to install psychic barriers that would block their memories so that they’d simply forget those things. After some experimentation, we also discovered that it was possible to implant false impressions, so that when they did try to recollect the past, all they’d find were pleasant memories.”
“In other words, you’d brainwash them.”
The chaaz’maha shook his head. “No, not exactly. Their essential personalities would remain intact. The only real difference was that their memories would be deleted or even altered.” He glanced at Vargas. “The catch is, a person who undergoes memory blockage must want to do so. It can’t be done involuntarily…he or she has to be willing to undergo this kind of therapy.”
“The chaaz’maha had told me about this,” Vargas said, “so I asked him to do the same for me…only this time, he’d remove any memories of our friendship and instead implant hate and distrust of him. To be on the safe side, I also asked that he remove any awareness of the Terra Concorde, so that if the Provos asked me anything about them, I’d be in a position to deny knowledge of its existence.”
Jorge nodded. “Makes sense. If you were memory-blocked, you wouldn’t break under interrogation.”
“Uh-huh. That was the general idea.” A thin smile. “As it turned out, Black didn’t put me under the thumbscrews. He must have figured that, once I reached Coyote, my mind would probably be scanned by a member of the Order…the chaaz’maha had publicly spoken of them during his years here, so Black knew all about them…so he was careful to keep the Provisional Army at a safe distance. Everything was arranged for me through third-party contacts, without any direct involvement from him or the Provos.”
“So that’s why my mother didn’t pick up on any of this when she searched you,” Inez said. “You didn’t know about Black or the Provisional Army because they’d never spoken to you, and you weren’t aware of the Terra Concorde because your memories of it had been blocked.”
“Right.” Vargas grinned. “All I knew was that I loathed the chaaz’maha and that I was so desperate to get away from Earth that I was willing to steal a freighter. So I was carrying out Black’s scheme, all right…but I was also carrying out my own as well, and just didn’t know it.”
“There’s just one thing,” Jorge said. “Sawyer Lee told me that, when Melissa…um, searched you…she discovered a mental image of the flag of the United Republic of America.”
“That was my doing,” the chaaz’maha said. “I, too, figured that Sergio would be searched once he made it to Coyote. Since his mission…Black’s, that is…was to bring someone back here to find me, I didn’t want them arriving in Boston without any advance warning of who might be waiting for them. On the other hand, we didn’t know for certain whether Sergio would be making the trip alone or if one of the Provos would be with him, so the block would have to remain intact until he returned to Earth. So…”
“You placed a mental image of the URA flag in his mind as a subtle warning,” Jorge said, and the chaaz’maha nodded. “Very sneaky…and, yeah, it worked, all right.” Another thought occurred to hi
m, and he turned to Vargas again. “But then we got to Boston, and you suddenly disappeared…what was that all about?”
“I’d hoped that, once we were actually in Boston, we’d able to make contact with the Terra Concorde underground without the Provos finding us first. But in case that didn’t happen…that is, if I received any indication that we were in danger of being caught by them…my unconscious mind would snap the block, and I’d recall what I was really supposed to be doing.”
“I think I remember now,” Inez said. “You were very nervous when we were on the Charles River, and utterly insistent about going ashore as soon as we saw the first signs of life in the city.”
The chaaz’maha looked at her. “You’re telepathic?”
A slight smile as Inez shook her head. “Only empathic, Papa…something I inherited from you and Mama.” She paused, then added, “I was raised by the Order, but no, I haven’t joined them. I’ll explain it later.”
“Anyway”—Vargas politely coughed into his hand—“the block began to crumble once we reached the city. It hadn’t fallen yet, but…” He shrugged. “I just knew that I had a very strong urge to get to Beacon Hill and find someone who’d lead us to the chaaz’maha. When Sam took off, though…”
“That’s when the block collapsed,” the chaaz’maha said. “That was in keeping with what I’d planted in his mind. If Sergio received any visual indication that something was wrong once he reached Boston, he’d remember everything, then go find someone in the underground who, in turn, would get in touch with the New England satrapy.”
“I’m sorry, but…” Jorge was confused. “Look, I’ve been following you so far, but how could just seeing something break his memory block?”
The chaaz’maha smiled. “Maybe I could demonstrate. Would you allow me to place a memory block on you? Don’t worry. It’ll be harmless, and last only a minute or two.” Jorge hesitated, then slowly nodded. “Relax. Just look at me, and don’t try to resist.”