by Bill Adams
Interesting; he really didn’t know. Summerisle had known about gyal-was, but instead of maintaining perfect security by visiting the Pretender in a gyal-wa, he’d come barefaced. He hadn’t wanted the Pretender to know about them. Why?
The Pretender walked slowly to the head of the table and took his seat. The room remained distorted, my stomach uneasy.
“It’s been a long time since I really doubted you, Chris. But do you remember Arn—one of my Hard Men?”
I turned to Foyle. “Wasn’t he your most useful snitch against Malatesta?”
“Yes,” the Pretender said. “Foyle was seen picking Arn’s brains a number of times, and Lew warned him off. We were all fooled.”
“Fooled?” Foyle asked.
“Arn must have been Van Damm’s spy. He was on guard duty in the palace the night of the false alarms. And he packed up and disappeared on the day of the play. He’s the only person who could have engineered both the attempt on the Shy Lock and Van Damm’s escape—not the moron he appeared to be. I can guess, Foyle, but what did he tell you about Lew’s military plans?”
She only had to tell the truth—it had worked for her so far—yet my guts were clenched until she spoke: “A raid on Scandia, with you going along. To overthrow the governor there, the first of a series of popular revolts against the Column.”
“And he made it sound like a bad thing, didn’t he? Something that would get me caught?”
“He did. And I still think—”
“Thank you, it fits. He couldn’t hope you’d warn the Column, Kanalist that you are, but he knew you were sleeping with Chris here, and that Chris might have enough influence with me to break it up. Of course, from the Column’s standpoint it would have been smarter to set up a trap on Scandia instead, but he and Van Damm had probably been told to concentrate on the Shy Lock. Not on me—not on the drunken figurehead.” He took a sip of his coffee, then favored us both with a warm smile. “Cheer up, you two conspirators. Everything has gone according to plan. The top floor of my entryway was just a decoy, no Shy Lock there, and Arn didn’t even get to see that much. As for the Scandia raid, I always expected an attempt to scotch it. But I wasn’t sure it would come from the Tribunal. Now I know.”
He removed something from a teak sideboard next to him, but I couldn’t see it until he stood and came over to me. It was a steak knife, razor-sharp.
“Unfortunately, I don’t always see eye to eye with the backers of the Revolution. My alcoholic whoremonger act had to be half-true to serve its purpose, and there was a time when I thought they might find…a double, a replacement for me. At first, right after your audition, Chris, I wondered if you were their choice. I couldn’t believe they’d place you under my eye like that if you were, but I never felt secure with you until after the Maelstrom. That would have been a perfect opportunity for the Doge to put us both in the hospital, announce Chris Sly dead, and have you emerge with my face. I know that sounds insane, but…well, you’ve heard of biosculpture, plastic surgery. We’re much alike.”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t replace me; you saved my life. Arturo was a good man, but he was their man, all the same. He couldn’t simply be my friend. Everyone needs at least one true friend, Chris.”
He didn’t just hand me the knife; he closed my fingers around it and grasped my wrist. I didn’t know what he was up to, but stood to meet it. He raised my hand until the knife was pressed to the pale blue artery in his throat.
“I have to know now, Chris. Last chance. If you’re not on my side—if you’ve been sent to stop me, or to stop Kanalism from overthrowing the Column—this is the last chance you’ll get. Eighteen hundred years since Byron’s day, and there’s still no defense against cold steel at this range; you know this isn’t a trick. If you’re ever going to do it, do it now.”
I could have killed him, yes, but it was still a trick—a dramatist’s. It got my sympathy, and I shook my head, wondering if I still had to talk him out of this Scandia craziness; he didn’t seem to think the raid was off even yet.
And when he took the knife back, I grabbed his wrist in turn, and pulled the blade to my own throat. Its little teeth prickled a protest against all melodrama as I said my lines:
“Now you. If you still have any suspicions about me or Foyle, whom I trust with my life, end it now. I don’t want to be doubted or doped again. Is that clear?”
He locked eyes with me, as though genuinely considering it—more acting, though not necessarily fraudulent, from a man of the theater—then smiled and let the steak knife clatter to the table. I released his wrist.
It was partly the way the knife bounced, unable to hit flat, and partly the clearheadedness that had come to me with the kiss of the blade. But I suddenly knew that the table and ceiling really were curved, and that my queasiness was no longer due to the drugs, but to low gravity.
“We’re not in the Doge’s palace anymore, are we?”
That caught both the Pretender and Foyle by surprise, and I went on before they could laugh at me again. “We’re in space. Must be a pretty big vessel to take this much spin—nearly half a g, isn’t it?”
“One of many luxuries,” he said. “We’re in Lord West’s yacht, the Raven. You’ve been unconscious for more than a night, Chris. We’ve already sunplunged to our target system, with my special-training team of Hard Men for a crew. You see, the ship Van Damm hijacked was just a decoy—this is the one I always planned to take. That’s why the raid had to be tonight. Captain Marius is on the bridge, if not quite in command; let’s join him.”
He put down his coffee and led us through the door—or call it a “hatch,” though it was rectangular and wooden. Foyle and I exchanged worried glances on the way out, but at least I managed to sneak the gyal-wa dish back into my jacket pocket.
“Are Lady West and Julia aboard?” I asked as we walked along a tubular metal corridor toward an elevator.
“Yes. Knocking you all out made it easier to slip you past the Doge in caterer’s baskets during the celebration.”
“So the Doge isn’t in on this. And do you have Lord West’s permission to use his yacht as a warship?”
“There is no Lord West, Chris, and never has been. Just an animated hologram of an old man that Julia used to see through a distorter screen when she was a little girl. Part of the big lie behind our glorious revolution.” We entered the elevator. Judging by the control buttons, we had entered from R—for Rim?—Deck. The press of a button sent us slowly “up” toward the center of the ship; we also felt an illusory but unpleasant sideways slide as we matched the lower spin velocity of Two Deck. But the Pretender kept talking; he seemed to want me to know everything now.
“The original House of West died out almost a half-century ago. Their immense fortune passed to a man with no relatives of his own—a fugitive who blackmailed the executors into forging certificates of adoption. He created the legend of an ancient reactionary recluse. It left him free to create other identities, build a network, forge a machine.”
“And he’s the mystery man behind the revolution?” Foyle was the one who asked—I was too busy retouching my picture of things.
The Pretender grinned. “He’s the mystery man behind all things, the Prime Mover Unmoved. You know him as the Consultant.”
Perhaps we looked insufficiently surprised. “I know it’s hard to believe,” he went on. “But the great deception has begun to fray at the edges. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors that Domina is the Consultant’s mistress. And in fact—”
“She’s his wife,” I said, tasting the idea. Hardly different from what I’d thought, but under my old theory, there had been a separate person to father Julia and hold Domina’s ultimate loyalty. Now I had to believe that Summerisle was her true love, and that it was Summerisle she’d wept over betraying, in bed with me.
“Hard to accept?” the Pretender asked, righter than he knew. The elevator’s slow motion came to a complete halt and the door opened. �
��It’s like the delusion of a madman, isn’t it?—that the dictator of the human sphere should be running the revolution. But I’m not crazy, Chris. I can prove what I’m saying.”
We followed him along another corridor, going slowly and using handholds in the unfamiliar low g.
“Citizen Foyle says that Arturo told you about the Shy Lock, Chris. At least, as much as he knew. What was that?”
Change of subject? But I replied: “I know it’s a barrier that lets only friendly sunplungers pass. Your asteroid defenses can check out commercial vessels while their instruments are still disoriented from the plunge in. Military and Tribunal ships are made to higher standards, plunges don’t disorient them—but they can’t get through. That’s the mystery.”
The Pretender nodded. “Our Venezian trading consulates distribute colorful devices that employ an ancient alien technology. According to the story, these Censers read the organo-minds of p-space drives and implant or withhold a password. Without the telepathic password, ships can’t pass the Shy Lock barrier I radiate from somewhere on Venezia. So they say.
“It’s a hoax, Chris. A magic trick.
“The Censers are highly sophisticated toys. They use energy fields the way a magician uses mirrors, to create the impression of relationships that couldn’t really exist—and the fields collapse as soon as you try to examine them. They don’t really do anything. But the Column’s top physicists remain ‘divided’ on their capabilities because some of them have been bribed by the Consultant to keep the navy looking in the wrong direction. And who but the Consultant could safely do that?”
We stopped in front of a hatch that was marked BRIDGE. Perhaps the Pretender wanted to keep part of our conversation from the people inside. He stood with his back to the turn-lock as he continued:
“And I am not radiating a barrier from Venezia or anywhere else. There is only the ring of asteroid defense bases itself. See, when you put enough heavy asteroids into the right sequence of orbits around a sun, you set up a tiny wave form in the sun’s gravitational profile. The average p-space drive can still match space gradients with Venezia’s sun because the difference created by the ripple is smaller than the drive’s margin of error. But navy-standard drives are more discriminating: the instant they detect that ripple, they reject the match, shut down the drive, and report back false reasons for their failure. It’s been built into them, Chris. The real barrier is a secret order deliberately built into every Column warship made in the last twenty-five years. The patent for the drives is classified; the production is automated. Only a dozen people ever had to know, but no one except the man at the top could have blackmailed, bribed, or terrorized those dozen into going along with it. The Consultant again. A little more believable now?”
“So the Consultant planned this from the beginning of his reign,” Foyle said after a moment’s thought. “First he had to get the drives redesigned, then he had to wait for the older generation of navy ships to fall out of use.”
“That’s one of his excuses for delaying action against the Column so long, yes.”
“And he needed a Larkspur front man,” I said. “Someone who could plausibly claim to have the alien technology of the ancient Kanalists. That made the Censers more credible. Your youth helps, too. You’ve just arrived on the scene, while the Column has been using the crippled space-drives for a generation.”
“And don’t forget my popular appeal,” the Pretender said dryly. “I’m useful to the Consultant, all right. But aren’t you wondering what he is to me?”
“You don’t…believe in what he’s doing?” Foyle said.
I was silent; he didn’t need prompting.
“One morning a few years ago, I…woke up in this universe. Shattered. Most of my memory gone, and all mixed up with dreams and fantasies. I told people who I was, and wound up in an insane asylum on a fringe world. After a while, I realized I might really be insane; someone other than Evan Larkspur, and insane. But the Consultant’s agents found me, tutored me in the details of my own history, gave me back my life. I learned enough about the Column to hate it, and then I was taken to see the Consultant himself.
“He’s a…very impressive character. He has a whole planet to himself; his castle is the only building. Does that sound mentally healthy to you? Of course, it does mean he can do without an army of bodyguards. Have you ever heard of Niflheim? It’s the example they always give of a star that is ‘naturally’ inaccessible to sunplunging—‘too unstable,’ they say. Well, Niflheim has a planet named Hel—terraformed by aliens very like us a million years before there were humans on Terra—and that’s where the Consultant lives. He’s guarded by a variation on the Shy Lock, a gravity ripple large enough to keep even commercial p-drives from meshing gradients. Only his private fleet can come and go. The secrecy is total: his own daughter always thought she was visiting her father in the far north of Belle-Isle, where so many rich families keep retreats. But the Consultant revealed the secret to me.
“And he told me a story—a wild and fantastic story that may be partly true—to explain why, with all his power, he hasn’t been able to move against the Column until now. And at first I was content to play the role he assigned to me.
“But the role has been too educational. I’ve learned what it’s like to be the center of the universe, how corrupting it is. And I’m just a celebrity, when all is said and done, a foothill among the famous; he is the Consultant, the dictator of the human universe. Who can be trusted with that power, Chris?”
“But once the Shy Lock barriers are up—” I began.
“The Column will collapse, yes, because the navy doesn’t know the secret. But the Consultant knows the secret. All the worlds will still be vulnerable to him and any fleet he puts together. I think that’s what took him forty years—to set up a way of cutting out the great families who plot against him, their Column and Tribunal, without giving up one whit of his own power. I know the temptations of fame as you cannot, because I’ve lived it. And I know him—I know him of old.”
“You know who he—was?” Foyle asked. And I finally realized her questions weren’t pointless, that she was covering up, as I should have been, how much of his story we already knew.
The Pretender smiled, turned the vault-style lock at his back, and ushered us onto the bridge of the Raven.
Aside from some wood paneling, it was the bridge of any ship you ever saw: no overhead light, but many local ones; instrument panels and crash seats for their operators, all curved around a central holo tank. The image of an asteroid floated in the tank, shiny with armaments and hazy with defense screens.
I dimly recognized the three Hard Men who sat in the essential command chairs, though not by name. They looked sharper and smarter than I’d ever seen them before; war suits a soldier. They didn’t snap to attention for the Pretender, but they aimed smiles and sketchy salutes in his direction, and the officer of the deck—or at least the one in the highest seat—asked if he wanted a report.
“Any defense activity?” the Pretender asked.
“Nothing we can detect, Boss,” the OOD said.
“Then wait a moment.”
The only other occupant of the bridge was Captain Marius, a prisoner, securely tied into a crash seat beyond kicking distance of any panel. He looked up at me with glittering eyes. But the Pretender drew Foyle and me back into a discreet huddle near the hatch. A sick certainty was settling on me like cold rain.
“Yes, I know who the Consultant is and was,” he said. “And if I told you, you’d think I was truly insane. He’s an old Kanalist, for one thing—the great dictator is a Kanalist Master. But so am I. And I’m telling you that the Kanalist dream of human freedom depends on putting an end to him. Not just killing him. I’ve been in his presence a half-dozen times, could have killed him easily. But he has formidable associates who share his goals. It’s necessary to seize control of his fortress…all his secrets…the sources of his power.”
My certainty had hardened
to ice. “We’re not headed to Scandia, are we?”
“No. That whole operation was a decoy. I needed to build a strike force of my own, right under the noses of the Doge and the Consultant. Recruiting Hard Men as bodyguards was a start. Then Malatesta attached himself to me. He was a plant; he works for a cabal called the Few—old enemies of the Consultant. Perfect. I let him think he was using me, while I used him to assemble and train a team. I pretended to be just toying with the idea of the Scandia raid, always willing to be talked out of it by Arturo. And I was careful to establish a poorly guarded ship that the Doge and Arturo and my other handlers knew they could steal if I ever looked too close to taking real action. But they didn’t know the action I intended to take. It’s funny. A team of two dozen mercenaries was always too small for a coup on Scandia. But it’s more than large enough to storm Hel.”
“The Consultant must have guards,” Foyle said.
“What for? If the Tribunal or the Few knew about Hel and how to get at it, they’d sterilize the whole planet from space. He has some servants and robots, that’s all. Remember, I’ve been there. I know exactly what I’m doing.”
He looked thoughtfully across the chamber at Captain Marius.
“I did wonder what would happen when we first sunplunged in. Niflheim’s Shy Lock employs even more asteroid bases than we have around Venezia’s star. It was always possible that Captain Marius would have to radio some password or meet some other test—just in case. But the signal exchange at the sun was automatic. Almost too easy. There’s another set of satellites around Hel itself. Maybe that’s when we’ll need the captain. But as long as we have the Consultant’s wife and daughter…”
“About those satellites, Boss,” the OOD said, a polite but firm interruption. “There are a couple of different approaches we could take. I’d like to run them past you.”
The Pretender excused himself, asked one of the other helmsmen to show us some holograms of Hel’s surface, and stepped aside with the OOD.