The Fifth Quadrant

by C. J. Ryan

  “The history books say that you were the only leader at the time with the vision to see what was coming,” Gloria said.

  Mingus allowed himself a marginal smile. “The history books,” he said, “are wrong. As usual. There were others. Even as I sat here dithering on New Cambridge, Admiral Bryant was already pulling together the pieces of what would become the Second Fleet. That’s important for you to understand. For all my presumed vision and foresight, I was only viewing things from my own limited perspective. Here in Quadrant 4, things looked truly desperate. But there were three other Quadrants, you see. The Empire was never quite as fragile and vulnerable as it appeared to me. Others, with a broader vision—like Admiral Bryant—had a more comprehensive and realistic understanding of our position. But I could see no farther than Savoy. And what I saw was that Savoy was doomed.”

  Mingus shook his head sadly and sighed. He took another sip of whisky.

  “I couldn’t see it then, of course, but from the distance of half a century, it’s clear to me now that in August of 3163, I was in an advanced state of panic. I envisioned the swift and final destruction of Savoy, followed by an inexorable, irresistible attack on New Cambridge. In my mind, Savoy was already lost. Gone. All that mattered was to preserve New Cambridge. Savoy could not be saved, but New Cambridge might be, if we could husband what strength we had and do what was necessary for our defense.”

  Mingus looked at Gloria. His blue-gray eyes were misted and shining.

  “And so,” he said, “I didn’t send that final shipment of arms on to Savoy. I kept it here, for the defense of New Cambridge. I knowingly decided to sacrifice a hundred million lives on Savoy in order to save my own skin.”

  “No,” Gloria insisted. “You’re being too hard on yourself. You already said that you didn’t think Savoy could be saved, no matter what you did. Given what you knew and believed at the time, you did the right thing. The only thing possible.”

  “Wouldn’t it be nice to think so?” Mingus said. He poured himself some more whisky. He took another sip and so did Gloria.

  “Norman, you can’t—”

  Mingus raised his hand. “Hear me out, Gloria.”

  “All right, but I refuse to believe you panicked.”

  “Call it what you will. If you prefer, say simply that I tragically misjudged the situation. For when the Ch’gnth attack came, on September 8, those weapons were stored in an orbital warehouse above New Cambridge, when they should have been deployed on and around Savoy, where they might have done some good. We heard about the attack from a courier that got through a day later. I fully expected that Savoy would fall within a few days, a week at most. And if it had, I suppose my decision would have been fully justified. That single shipment of arms would not have changed the outcome of the battle. The Ch’gnth force was overwhelming, and would surely have prevailed in time. But time”—he shook his head sadly—“time was what mattered above all.

  “Savoy did not fall within a few days. Nor within a week, or even two. It held out for nearly three weeks. Three desperate, bloody, heroic weeks.” Mingus shook his head again. For a moment he seemed too overcome with emotion to continue. Gloria made a point of looking away as Mingus dabbed at his eyes.

  “Afterward,” Mingus went on, “we were able to reconstruct what had happened. To truly understand it, you need to know something about the tactics and weaponry that were employed at the time. In the initial wave of the attack, the Ch’gnth engaged and defeated Savoy’s orbital defenses. That was inevitable and nothing could have prevented it. They were just too strong, and Savoy was too weak—in space. But on the surface of the planet, Savoy possessed formidable defenses—and a will to fight that, even now, makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end when I think of it.”

  “Mine too,” said Gloria. “I remember learning about it in school when I was a little girl. My teacher cried when she told us about the defense of Savoy. We all did.”

  Mingus cleared his throat. “Savoy,” he said, “has a single major continent, and most of the population was concentrated around Savoy City, on the northern coast. The city was impervious to attack from orbit. The point defenses against space-borne or ballistic projectiles were simply too strong. The only way to get at the city was from the surface. The task facing the Ch’gnth was to establish a bridgehead on the surface, then launch terrain-following missiles aimed, ultimately, at the city. They made three landings. The first was repulsed. So was the second, after a pitched battle that lasted six days. But the third landing succeeded, and the Ch’gnth established a defensible perimeter in a weakly defended desert region, about two thousand kilometers southeast of the city.

  “From there, they were able to unleash their terrain-following missiles and literally blast their way forward, toward the city. I saw it from orbit a few months later, and you could see each crater, each blast zone, marching straight as an arrow aimed at the heart of the city. They’d launch a missile and detonate a plasma bomb perhaps twenty kilometers beyond their lines. There simply wasn’t time to defend against such an attack; by the time the defenders spotted the launch, the warhead had already exploded. One after another, day after day, more than a hundred of them. Until finally, nineteen days after their initial attack, they reached the city. And annihilated it.”

  Mingus closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair, and took a deep, slow breath. Then he went on. “By then, of course, they had already exterminated the outlying settlements. And on the nineteenth day, they killed every remaining human being on the planet.”

  “A hundred million of them,” Gloria said softly.

  “One hundred and three million, two hundred and seventy-nine thousand, four hundred and ninety-one,” Mingus said, “according to the 3160 census. Of course, by September of 3163, it would have been more. But for a round figure, I suppose one hundred million will do.”

  Mingus poured himself some more whisky and took a big swallow. Gloria sipped some more of her own drink.

  “Nineteen days to kill a planet,” Mingus said. “And on the twenty-first day, Admiral Bryant and the Second Fleet popped out of Yao Space, suicidally close to the planet, and blasted the Ch’gnth fleet to perdition. They speak of Salamis and Lepanto, Midway and Caliban Four, but really, there had never been anything quite like it. If the navigation had been off by a thousandth of one percent, they’d have smashed into the planet or missed it entirely. If the timing had been off by a tenth of a second, they could not have hit the Ch’gnth fleet. The Spirit must have been with us.” Mingus shook his head.

  He looked at Gloria. Tears were running down his cheeks. “Do you see now what I had done?” he asked her. “Do you understand the enormity of my crime?”

  “Norman—”

  “Two days!” Mingus shouted. “Two Spirit-forsaken days! That last shipment of arms, which I, in my vast wisdom, withheld because Savoy was already doomed and could not have been saved—can you tell me that it would not have made a difference? Can you tell me that it would not have given those poor, brave souls the time they needed? A hundred million people, who might have lived, died because of what I did! No, that’s wrong. A hundred and three million, two hundred and seventy-nine thousand, four hundred and ninety-one. I mustn’t shortchange them. They all counted. Every man, woman, and child. They all counted.”

  Mingus put a hand over his face and sat there, quietly sobbing. Gloria wiped tears from her own cheeks.

  “Norman,” she said, reaching for his hand, “you couldn’t have known.”

  “Well, I damned well should have known, shouldn’t I?” Mingus took a handkerchief out of the pocket of his robe and wiped his face. He cleared his throat and helped himself to more whisky.

  “Anyway,” he said, “the outcome of the Battle of Savoy left me in a rather embarrassing position. The weapons that might have saved Savoy, the weapons I had withheld, were sitting up there in those orbital warehouses. What was I to do with them? If what I had done ever came to light, I’d have been pilloried�
�lynched. As I should have been. I couldn’t just hand them over to Admiral Bryant and say, ‘Here, old boy, you might need these,’ now, could I? The survival of Savoy had become a moot issue, and all that mattered was the survival of Norman Mingus.”

  Mingus drank some more whisky. Gloria thought he was getting a little drunk; his words were slightly slurred and his face looked unnaturally red and puffy.

  “If I was to avoid disgrace, or worse, I had to dispose of those weapons. Fortunately, I happened to know a man who had the means to do that. His name was Whitney Bartholemew, and he was the neighborhood distributor for organized crime. The zamitat. I’d had dealings with him, of course—it’s unavoidable.”

  “I know what you mean,” Gloria said quietly. Mingus ignored her.

  “So I approached him and explained my situation. He was not unsympathetic, and offered to help me in my hour of need. I asked him what he desired in return. Money? Official protection? His for the asking! Only he didn’t ask for that. He wanted only one small, inconsequential thing in return for his assistance. He wanted my daughter.”

  Mingus turned to Gloria and offered her a self-deprecating smile. “Poetic, don’t you think? Downright Shakespearean. I was like Shylock, crying, ‘Oh, my daughter! Oh, my ducats!’ Only I was the borrower, not the lender, and life was extracting its pound of flesh from my very heart. I was properly shocked and offended, of course, like the good father I pretended to be. But I knew as soon as he asked what my answer would be.

  “Saffron was betrothed, at the time, to my friend and assistant, Cornell DuBray. I knew that Saffron would never understand, but that DuBray would, so I went to him. And like the master politician and bureaucrat I was, I proposed a plan that I knew would be acceptable to him. In return for my protection and patronage throughout his career at Dexta, he would break off his engagement to my daughter. And it would be done in such a way—as finely calculated as Admiral Bryant’s attack at Savoy—that Saffron would, with my subtle encouragement, be thrown directly into the waiting arms of Whitney Bartholemew. And that is precisely the way it happened. A masterpiece of creative plotting, if I do say so myself—some of my finest work. Saffron was never to know, of course. And in the meantime, Bartholemew disposed of the weapons. I never knew just how or where until you and Ms. Nash unraveled the mystery this past week.”

  Mingus allowed himself some more whisky. “All very neat and tidy, you must admit. Except for one thing. After they were married, for some petty reason or another, Bartholemew told Saffron what had happened. You can imagine how she reacted. No, I suppose you don’t have to imagine it. You already know. She hated me. And, whether intentionally or not, she passed that hatred on to her son, my grandson…with the tragic results you have seen. So you can add a few more to my score of one hundred and three million, two hundred and seventy-nine thousand, four hundred and ninety-one blighted lives—another two hundred from the terrorist attacks on Central. Plus two more.”

  Gloria squeezed his hand. She badly wanted to help him, to ease his pain, but she could think of nothing to say.

  “I tried to speak to Saffron after my grandson was arrested,” Mingus said. “But she wouldn’t speak to me. She probably never will again. As for Whitney, there is little I can do for him. It’s an Imperial matter, and the outcome of his trial is a foregone conclusion. They’ll execute him for what he did and tried to do. Perhaps, in his perversity, that will even make him happy. He’ll get to be a martyr.”

  Mingus sniffed and wiped away some more tears. “There is, perhaps, one thing I could do for him, and I briefly considered doing it. I could make a clean breast of it. Confess. Tell the Empire the truth about Savoy and my crimes.”

  “Norman, you can’t do that!”

  “Of course not. And I won’t. Just an idle fantasy. No, I shall continue as before, but with the additional burden of knowing the irreparable harm I have done to my own family.”

  He looked into Gloria’s eyes. “For fifty-four-and-a-half years, Gloria, not a single day has gone by when I have not thought of Savoy, when I have not felt the pain and guilt and remorse. I shall feel them to the end of my days.”

  “I’m so sorry, Norman,” she whispered.

  “Do you still want to run Dexta?” Mingus asked her. “Spirit willing, nothing like Savoy will ever happen to you. But if you truly seek that power, then it is all but guaranteed that something else will happen. Something uniquely yours, heartbreaking and inescapable. Having power means making decisions, Gloria, and because you are human, some of those decisions will be wrong—perhaps fatally so. And you will have to live with the consequences, with the responsibility for whatever tragedies are unleashed by your mistakes and frailties. With the best of intentions, I condemned a hundred million people, and because I was clever and selfish, I managed to evade the direct consequences of my actions. They fell, instead, on my family, and on total strangers. And yet, I know. I know. And you will, too.”

  “Oh, Norman,” Gloria said softly.

  Mingus managed to smile at her. “Thank you for listening to an old man’s lachrymose confession, Gloria. I needed to tell someone. I’m sorry to have burdened you with this knowledge, and yet, perhaps it will help you to make the decision that you face. I love you, Gloria…like a daughter. And if you truly were my daughter, I think I would tell you to forget about power and responsibility and simply to live a happy and carefree life. Go be a smiling, glamorous Empress, and avoid the kind of pain I have known. That is what I would wish for you.”

  “You want me to leave Dexta?”

  “I want you to be happy. And now, I find that I am very tired. Sweet dreams, Gloria.”

  “And to you, Norman.”

  He shook his head. “My dreams are never sweet,” he said.

  THE EMPEROR’S PERSONAL LASS ROSE FROM the grounds of the soccer stadium and into the air above Central. Gloria looked out of the windows, down at the sprawling city, and wondered what it would have looked like if Petra hadn’t saved it. It would have looked, she realized, like Savoy.

  Charles’s speech had closed out, at long last, the Quadrant Meeting. Bureaucrats by the hundreds would soon be crowding the port and Orbital Station, bound for their distant domains, where they would carry on the endless work of empire. And the ordinary people of New Cambridge would get on with their lives, secure in the embrace of a government that had protected them from the unsleeping evils of the galaxy. Under a handsome young Emperor who loved his subjects.

  “I hate making speeches like that,” Charles said. “I don’t mind the smaller, formal affairs so much, but these big, outdoor extravaganzas give me delusions of grandeur. I feel like Hitler at Nuremberg or Hazar at Golconda. I raise my arm and thousands cheer. I clear my throat, and thousands cheer. I could fart, and thousands would cheer.”

  “As long as it’s cheers and not jeers,” his cousin Larry said, “what are you complaining about?”

  “Point well-taken,” said the Emperor. “Still, the unreality and absurdity of it all bothers me. The Caesars used to have slaves who stood behind them, whispering, ‘Thou art mortal,’ or some such thing, just to keep their feet on the ground.” He turned to look at Gloria and added, “But I’ll have you to do that for me, won’t I?”

  Gloria smiled at him. “Maybe,” she said.

  “You’ve looked over the agreement my people prepared?”

  “Glanced at it,” Gloria said. “It looks pretty good, but I have some questions about a few of the specifics. We’ll talk about it later.”

  “As you wish.” Charles gave her a probing stare. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  Gloria shook her head. “I’m just tired,” she said. “And I have a lot on my mind.”

  “I’ll not press you, then.” Charles went forward to chat with the pilot, while Gloria gazed out the window at the glowering cliff face and the churning waters below.

  She had not slept at all last night following her meeting with Mingus. It had drained her emotionally and left her feeling ad
rift. To see Norman Mingus sobbing in grief and remorse was almost more than she could handle. And his final words of advice confused and unsettled her.

  Even though the agreement Charles had offered promised her real power, she knew that the accomplishments of an Empress could never measure up to what she might do—had already done—at Dexta. The real power, the life-and-death power, would remain with Charles, as it had to. The weight of responsibility would fall only lightly on the shoulders of an Empress, and perhaps she might be vouchsafed the happy and carefree life that Mingus wished for her.

  Poor Norman! She ached for him and wished that there were something she could do for him. She wondered how he had endured so much pain, for so long. Could she endure such a burden, or would it crush her?

  Back on Mynjhino, less than two years earlier, she had saved, perhaps, millions of lives. The pride and satisfaction she felt were beyond description. Yet, how would she have felt if it had gone the other way? What if she had made some fateful, fatal mistake, and instead of saving millions, had killed them? Could she have lived with the knowledge, the guilt, the way Mingus had?

  It hadn’t happened that way. But someday, it might. According to Mingus, it almost certainly would, because she was human, and because Dexta offered the kind of power that few humans had ever possessed. Perhaps humans shouldn’t have that much power. Maybe they should just turn the whole thing over to computers. The computers would probably make mistakes, too, but would they feel pain and guilt over it?

  The anguish of Norman Mingus frightened Gloria. If a strong and good man like Mingus could be so tragically wrong, and so haunted by it, who was she to think she could do better, or as well? Did she really even want to try?