Fever Season

by C. J. Cherryh

  Long ago Ito had decided that, if there had been sharrh, there must have been God. He wasn't sure either existed any more, but he had overseen enough regressions of the sort Michael Chamoun was now undergoing to know that there was… something.

  Something behind the pageantry and ritual. Something behind the crowd-control axioms and the customary reverence that allowed some men to rule over others. Something inherent in a social order that validated its tendency to make some men slaves, some masters; some rich, some poor. As something more than mindless chance decreed that one child was lame and blind from birth, and another hale and destined for high estate.

  Ito had sired an infirm child, and drowned it on the spot.

  His status among the College cardinals would have been undermined if he had not: such horrid karma could only be Retribution for crimes unexpiated, of a degree that a cardinal should not be subject to. Therefore, it had not happened. The wife and the child both died to make that fiction true.

  And now, before him, was the piece of trash to whom Vega had decided to marry Cassie. Sweet Cassie, who should have been Ito's wife, by rights. What was forty years, between great houses? The blood-tie was thin enough; the benefit should have been clear enough. And the cardinal needed a young wife of high estate right now, to replace the one he'd had to murder, because of her imperfect child.

  But before negotiations could be consummated, in came Chamoun, with Magruder backing him, and the deed was done in such a hurry that there was no time to object. No way.

  Ito began gently guiding the helpless psyche of Michael Chamoun down from its perch above its body. Down and down and down, into the body and into a previous time.

  Chamoun went rigid as Ito told him to raise his eyes from his feet and look around. Then the boy's face contorted, his hands came up to shield his eyes, and he screamed: "Sharrh! Captain, look out! Sharrh ship, six o'clock!"

  And he fainted. Keeled over before Ito could ask the first of many prying questions, designed to compromise and ensnare the young husband of the woman who should have been the cardinal's wife.

  Michael Chamoun was on the bridge of a ship, only his name wasn't Chamoun and the ship was like nothing he'd ever seen afloat on Merovin. It wasn't a yacht; it wasn't a riverboat; it wasn't a seagoing vessel.

  It was a spacegoing vessel, the memories that weren't Chamoun's were clear on that. On other things, too, though the body was damaged beyond repair, dying on that bridge amid the smoke and the sirens and the emergency lights blinking while panels of electronics shot sparks and other men who could still move screamed for breathing apparatus and emergency procedures.

  The lower half of his body's face was gone; the pain was a white blanket. The edges of his vision were dark and that dark was encroaching toward the center. As if looking through a telescope, he could still see, though. He could see clearly through a pinhole in the middle of his failing sight. He could see the stars!

  He saw them as Michael Chamoun had never seen them, clear and bright and oh so close. There were so many, and among them, the enemy sharrh. He could see those too, because he was staring close-up at a targeting array. He was lying on his stomach across a smoking control console as his blood shorted circuits beneath him.

  He had a vocabulary, in this body, that knew the names and purposes of all these things. It knew the crosshairs and the changing numbers below and beside certain moving stars, stars that maneuvered as no star should be able to. He knew his name was Michael, here, too—but everyone called him Mickey. He knew he was an electronics specialist in the Merovin Defense Force, and he knew that they were up against an enemy they weren't prepared to handle.

  He knew the patrol ship around him was dying, and that everybody on it—the men he'd shipped with, the friends who made up his extended family—was doomed. The sharrh weren't just a legend, then, one of his minds told the other.

  The sharrh weren't just an anomalous sea story, the mind of Mickey corrected the mind of Michael. The sharrh were very real and very near and very sure to win.

  There was nothing berthed on or near Merovin with the kind of firepower, let alone the numbers, to give the sharrh a run for their money. The mind of Mickey, fading, was full of sorrow for a job undone, and regret at not being able to protect what he so dearly loved—the colony below. The mind of Michael tried to tell the mind of Mickey that it was all right, not to grieve, that there'd be life left when this was over.

  The mind of Mickey mourned, But the sharrh will win. We can't fight them, not with these weapons.

  The mind of Michael consoled, But life will go on; civilization will survive—planetbound, but alive.

  The mind of Mickey didn't think there was any civilization worth mentioning without the stars. The mind of Mickey was a rover's mind, a soldier's mind, a mind that couldn't grasp what Michael was trying to tell it.

  So Michael lied to the mind of Mickey, saying that the Adventists would make mankind on Merovin ready for a second confrontation with the sharrh—and that this time, man would win. Lied even as, through Mickey's eyes, he saw the targeting array shiver with sharrh ships like pox popping out on a sick child's face—too many sharrh ships for the damaged display to handle. It went blank, and so did the mind of Mickey, wiping out the changing numbers and the unchanging stars.

  Michael Chamoun heard a voice groaning, and another voice speaking unintelligible words. And he heard another sound, like the rushing of air from a vessel—or from lungs. He heard the rending of metal and the rending of flesh. He heard a soul leave its body and other souls screaming their last breaths as a ship broke apart under them, leaving them abandoned in a sea they couldn't swim.

  Then there was just quiet, and the pinprick stars on a field of red, and one voice droning over and over, "Michael, come back. You hear only my voice. You respond only to me. I will count to three, and at the count of three, you will open your eyes ..."

  The voice had been saying that for ages, Michael realized, and tried not to listen. He wasn't Michael, he was Mickey, and Mickey was a dead sergeant in the Merovin Defense Force who wanted to sleep forever, who didn't want there to be an afterlife because he'd failed in life and helped lose everything dear to him: a war, a society, a freedom ... the stars.

  The stars were what Michael Chamoun first saw when his eyes snapped open as if Ito Tremaine Boregy had strings attached to his eyelids. The stars danced in his field of vision, nearly blocking out the soft suede boots of his Merovingian outfit, the boots Cassie had given him.

  Then he saw the boots and he could feel his hands on his knees, his fingers digging remorselessly into his own flesh. He could feel his heart pounding, very much alive. He could hear the thunder of his pulse in his ears. And he could hear Cardinal Ito telling him he wouldn't remember any of this.

  But he already did. He remembered everything. He looked up into the eyes of the parchment-faced Revenantist cardinal and said, "I was there. I was there in the first battle against the sharrh! I saw it! I was a part of it." Somehow, he got to his feet and his legs held.

  He took two steps, hands outstretched, toward the cardinal. Then he faltered and suddenly his arms went around the old, sepulchral monster and Michael Chamoun was sobbing unashamedly: "Thank you, Cardinal. Oh thank you, m'ser! You've given me more hope than I've ever had before—more strength, more ..." He broke off when he felt the old man stiffen.

  They backed away from one another. Chamoun, trying to hold his fear and awe and the strange joy welling up in him, tried again: "I never really believed in reincarnation, m'ser, but you've made a convert out of me! I'm so grateful. I've got to—"

  "You will do nothing," said the cardinal in a thundering whisper. "You will tell no one of what you think you remember. You don't remember anything, m'ser. You had an aberrant vision, nothing more. You're a foreigner. The drug was too strong for you. We use it to mold the hearts and minds of the gullible, to teach humility and obedience. We don't use it to reinforce specious hopes of confrontation with an apocryphal enemy. We
don't use it to reinforce Adventist rebels in their sinful work!" Ito's eyes were blazing, coal black in his lined white face. "Do you understand what I'm telling you, Adventist?"

  "Uh ... yes, m'ser. I'll keep what I learned to myself."

  "You didn't learn anything, you fool." Ito strode around to the other side of his desk in a flourish of velvet. From behind it, with both fists resting on it, the cardinal said forcefully, "This ritual is forbidden to the masses; it's not to be discussed with anyone, not even Vega Boregy. On pain of Retribution of the personal sort—overseen by me. What you thought you experienced had more to do with your expectations than reality. In your previous lives, Adventist slime, you were no doubt a stableboy, a petty thief, or a murderer. There was never any Merovin Defense Force, and if there had been, a soul as poor as yours could not have been among them. As likely you were the Angel with the Sword—the true Michael. Now get out of here, and come to your senses. Your lessons are suspended for one week as punishment. If, at the end of that week, I don't like your demeanor when you return here, they'll be suspended permanently. And we'll see how long your precious marriage lasts after a College cardinal has deemed you officially Irredeemable. Now, out!"

  Chamoun let the tirade roll over him, only half listening. His head danced with the images he'd encountered during the regression: with the vision of the patrol ship's bridge; with his memories of the stars and the culture he'd been a part of, which called the stars its own.

  It had to be real. It had to be true. He'd never have dreamed such a thing—never had in all his life. Ito was just angry because it was an Adventist past-life that Michael Chamoun had found himself living. A life that had ended abruptly, ended in darkness, but ended with honor.

  Chamoun never remembered slipping out the door of the cardinal's office, or through the College halls, or down the stairs.

  Then the cold wind came in off the canal and slapped him across the face, and he remembered the death of Mickey. Spinning toward the light. Nausea at the speed. But spinning toward the center of the universe, free among the stars. He didn't know where the Revenantist creed would take its adherents, but he'd learned something very precious: to him and his kind, eventually, were given the stars. His—or Mickey's—dying soul had sped toward a central point in the universe, past starfields and through comets' tails, as if drawn by a magnet. The Revenantists believed that if they lived righteously and died enough', they'd be reborn repeatedly, until they got it right. Then, having expiated all sins, they'd be reincarnated on some other human world, a world less blighted, a world that was not a prison.

  But Michael Chamoun now knew, in the depths of his heart, that the prison doors would open with his death. He'd be like Mickey, free among the stars. Mickey had been relieved when, after the ship shook apart under him, the pain shook apart too. And there had been the traveling.

  Unseeingly, Chamoun headed homeward, forgetting to take the long way, going around the Signeury on the inner side, where the bridge to the Justiciary was, thinking things through.

  There was life after death, and there was rebirth, not just the racial memory or wishful thinking that Ito had told him he'd experienced. Mickey was a part of him, or Michael could never have imagined the smell of burning insulation on melting wires, of overstressed circuitry, and the sound as the air rushed from the screaming, rent hull of the ship.…

  Mickey was a part of Michael, who was a part of the Adventists, who remembered their responsibility to the people of Merovin, who knew what Merovin needed to do before it was too late…

  Thump! "Hrrmph!"

  "M'sera Kalugin! I'm so sorry. I didn't see you. Lost in my thoughts.…" Desperately, Chamoun clamped his mouth shut. He'd walked straight into Tatiana Kalugin, and she wasn't alone. With her was Chance Magruder, and the Ambassador was frowning at him.

  "M'sera Secretary, I believe you met our newest Boregy, Michael Chamoun, at the Twenty-Fourth Eve—"

  "Your protegé, you mean, Chance," said the tall Kalugin woman with the canny eyes. "Yes, I recall him. Good evening, m'ser Chamoun. What had you so absorbed in your thoughts?"

  "What am I doing here, you mean?" Chamoun spoke without thinking. "I was at my catechism lesson. Cardinal Ito is teaching me, and he…" Ito had warned him not to tell.

  Chamoun looked desperately at Magruder and the dangerous tableau before him came into sharper focus, wiping away the memories of Mickey and the warm, exultant feeling that had buoyed him ever since he'd awakened from the trance. He made a motion with his right hand, a conference signal Magruder had taught him; then another that meant, 'I need help.'

  But Magruder didn't appear to notice. He stood in the whipping wind with a Merovingen cloak billowing around him so that he seemed twice mortal size. The dusk put shadows under his eyes and deepened the bars of flesh around his tight mouth. His colorless eyes measured Chamoun for a long moment as a gust whipped up and past.

  Tatiana grabbed her hair at the nape of her neck to keep it from blowing in her face and looked from Chamoun to Magruder, understanding that something was wrong here—or at least that something was keeping Magruder rooted to the spot.

  Then Chance said, "Have you heard, Mike, that Iosefs decreed a census? Tatiana and I have been trying to wrestle with the logistics of it all day."

  "I—yes, I've just heard."

  "So that's why I forgot about meeting you here," Chance said smoothly. And turned to Tatiana: "This young m'ser's up to his hips in Boregy intrigue, m'sera Secretary. And I've been paying too little attention to his problems, with which I've promised to help. Plus, we've got to get him his paperwork for the census... So if you'll excuse me—"

  Tatiana Kalugin scowled at Michael Chamoun. "You know, m'ser, you're stealing my favorite alien advisor. Don't keep him too long. Ambassador, our dinner can't be postponed. We've got to determine just how many teams we need to send out to convince the people to be counted in the census. Perhaps you can press the young m'ser into service—in my name, of course. Getting the aliens to register is, we think, most of what my father is interested in." Her humorless smile cut through the last of Chamoun's confusion.

  "Yes, m'sera Secretary, whatever you say. I'd be honored to help in any capacity. It ain't—it isn't any kind of imposition. All I'm doing is taking these lessons at the College—" He waved vaguely behind him.

  At that, mercifully, Tatiana chuckled. "Anything to get away from your Uncle Ito, eh? Well, Chance, see what you can make of this boy before dark. But I can't do without you tonight."

  Without another word, and without waiting for an answer from Magruder, Tatiana Kalugin swept by Michael Chamoun in a gale of cloak and perfume and female warmth and august will.

  Chamoun slumped, jamming his hands in his pockets, his eyes unable to meet Magruder's. But he had to ask: "Did I screw up bad?"

  "Not bad, Mike. Maybe good, who knows?" His hand clapped Chamoun on the shoulder roughly. "Come on, let's go to the Embassy. When we're on Nev Hettek soil, we can talk."

  A warning. The Nev Hettek soil to which Magruder referred was on the Spur at Government Center, among the militia's buildings, where if anyone decided a Nev Hetteker enclave was suddenly a security risk, that enclave could just as suddenly cease to exist.

  Chamoun had never been there. He hadn't exactly been Chance Magruder's confidant, the last months.

  He had a feeling, by the way Chance was eyeing him, that this was about to change.

  If it did, Chamoun would find some way to tell Magruder about Mondragon and Vega Boregy, about the messages he'd been running to Megary and the betrayal he'd been forced into. And about the regression he'd experienced under Cardinal Ito Tremaine Boregy's ministrations—about Mickey and the Merovin Defense Force. About seeing the unclouded stars.

  "Whatever you're not telling me," Magruder said after he'd listened to the young Sword prattle on about a revelation gained through regression into a previous life as a space patrol officer, "now's the time. Ito can't hurt you, unless you go against his direct order
and tell Vega about the cardinal trying to turn you into some kind of psychic zombie—and we might be able to use that against the College, later. C'mon, Mike—give. You've been avoiding me. Why?"

  "Avoiding you?" The young agent looked around at Magruder's fancy-assed office in the new embassy, full of ormolu furniture and paintings on linened walls. He shifted on the brocaded settee and Magruder saw a furtive look flash over his face.

  Chamoun was in worse trouble than you could get from eating deathangel and taking a mental trip at the hands of a psychwarring priest. Magruder could feel it.

  "M'ser—Chance, you've been hard to find and they've been watching me, and every time I tried to get near you— when I really needed you—you were sleeping in with that Kalugin woman, so I couldn't get to you. Didn't dare, what with the risks—" It came out in a rush that ended as suddenly as it had begun.

  "You bet," Magruder said easily, wandering to the mantle beside bookshelves that Tatiana had filled for him. "We've both been walking our own tightropes. Women are tough to run; you're finding that out." Whatever it is, Det-man, you spell it out or I'm going to start considering you part of the opposition. "How's yours?" He turned on his heel and faced the youth sitting on the whale-armed settee as if he might slide off.

  "My what? Oh, my... woman. Cassie's fine. It's not that."

  "And Rita Nikolaev, your secret love? Seen her since the incident?"

  "I—m'ser, did you… kill… Romanov?"

  So that's it. Well, here we go. "Nope. Said I would, I know. Somebody else beat me to it. That's what's bothering you? He turned up in the Grand, pretty decomposed, and that's all anybody knows about it—"