Endgame

by C. J. Cherryh

  Like her mama, same old cap, same—

  Retribution'd died of fever. Altair was Jones. Altair who'd banged her nose with the pole and broke it, poor kid, trying to handle that skip alone after her mama died. Wouldn't take no help—wouldn't sell that boat, wouldn't take any man—and there was a damn lot who'd tried.

  "What did she say?" Mondragon asked. "Min. Min, a whole damn barrel of whiskey on it, she came by the embassy. Two nights ago. Did she get back?"

  Min shook her head, trying to think. "Went out of Moghi's, I seen 'er, seen her go uptown. ..."

  "Did she come back, Min? Have you seen her?"

  She understood the question then. Didn't like to understand it, no. She choked down another hiccup and pressed a hand to her chest. "No. Nobody's seen 'er. Just dropped out o' sight."

  He didn't say anything. He just sat there so long she kept thinking over what she'd said and wondering what he was thinking. Except all Jones' friends was worried, because they kept saying she was going to go up there once too often and she was going to end up in that place with Tom. . . .

  Which was burning down there. Which was all the fires. And the banging and the gunshots you could hear far off. It was the embassy was burnin', with all those pretty fires. . . .

  She tried to think why Mondragon wasn't in there. Sometimes she forgot things. She tried to think if she'd had one of those blank spots or was having one now.

  She said, "She ain't in there, is she, Tom?"

  He said—she'd never think she'd hear a shake in Mondragon's voice—"I don't know, Min. I don't know."

  Lord, pain hurt. She knew. She felt tears in her own eyes and an empty spot in her own heart if Jones was gone like that. She tried to get up on her knees, made a clumsy try at reaching the side where she could reach Mondragon. But all she could reach was his hand on the rope. She said, "She's a good 'un, Mondragon, her mama was."

  "I've got another place to try." A steadier voice this time. "If they lied to me, I'll kill them. Min—"

  "Yey?" She wanted to help. She'd helped before. She was another year older, but she wasn't worse.

  Mondragon said, steadier and steadier now: "There's a chance, too, she's just lying low. At Moghi's, maybe. In the Room."

  "Tom. I been around there. Moghi asked me, You seen Jones, he ask't, an' I said, no, I ain't. Not fer two day, now. That's what I said."

  Mondragon didn't say anything for a couple breaths more. Then he took her hand in his young strong one, Lord, he felt good. . . .

  He said, quietly, "Min, you ever want a fancyboat? You can have this one. Sell it. Do anything you like. I want your skip."

  Didn't make sense. But Jones' doings and his always started out sounding crazy. Just sit here and watch, Min. Min, you wait here a few minutes, then you just pull crosswise of that canal. . . .

  She said, "Ain't real fair, Tom. Ye're jokin', right?"

  "That's one thing I want. The other's your getting down to Moghi's and giving Moghi a handful of sols, tell him I want the pickup out on Jones. Hear me? If she's laying low, tell him get her in. Anastasi could be looking for her."

  "Oh, damn!"

  "—if he hasn't got her, Min. You do that. The boat's yours. Free and clear. Right of salvage." "She's got to be empty."

  Mondragon got up and dragged the boats up close. Stepped down into her well and held the big boat steady with one hand. Held out the other to her, and helped her like she was some hightown m'sera, getting into her boat. He said, "You get down there, Min."

  "Yey," she said, trying the wheel. She'd not stood on a fancyboat in years. And only once in her life. Hightown man, she'd had, when she was young. He'd take her in his boat. They'd ride in the harbor, to the Rim—

  "You all right, Min? Can you turn her around?"

  "Oh, yey, ain't no problem."

  He'd iet her go. She backed the prop, she backed a little hard. Took her a while.

  By the time she was full about in Romney West, she was out of breath, so she sat down. Just let the engine idle a bit. And steered with the little way the idle gave her. Just till she caught her breath. She was sweating. And cold.

  But she drifted backward out of Romney West, on the strong Greve current, and back onto Grand End, seeing a skip all lonely against the fire, black against the shimmery red. Seemed to her a curious sight. Seemed to her she knew that skip. And that poler. Long time ago. Sammy Elgin was his name. Pretty, pretty hair he had.

  Bang! against a Dorjan piling. Dreadful way to treat a boat. A pretty boat. Couldn't figure what she was doing here. So she took it slow. Didn't want to bang the sides. And it moved faster than she was used to.

  Wasn't safe to take this big boat through the fire. There were skips and Farren's fireboat shooting water down there, and floating booms and all, and this a wide, high fancyboat. So she decided she should back again, the current and the piling having turned her mostly about, and go up Romney, the way up by the Rock. That was where.

  Only getting across the Grand above Zorya was a mortal nightmare, there was fire and drifting timbers, and shooting everywhere, and cannon booming. She knew that sound. She throttled up and got the Justiciary corner and there was shot falling into the water. So she stopped. Something whistled overhead and fell into the water by her bow, and there were blacklegs shooting ahead and behind now.

  So she backed and she turned and she backed and she got the bow around while the shots were still flying and whistling and falling, and she shoved the throttle in and took a scary turn down somewhere, she wasn't even sure, the way the walls flew by. But there was shooting that way, too. So she found herself a cut and swung way out and suddenly she knew where she was. Knew the archway and the watergate.

  It was Elgin. It was Sammy's watergate. And she was at the wheel. She powered right in, where people were getting out of another boat in the dark. She called out, "Sammy?"

  Bad trouble tonight. She could still hear the shots. Retribution and her had ducked a few. But she stood up and waved her hand to the hightowners in the dark. She said, "I come here for Sammy Elgin."

  Clank of chain. Watergate was shutting. Electrics came on, blinding bright. Min winced, and off in the outside, cannon boomed.

  "Who is that?" someone asked.

  "Min Fahd! I come fer Sam Elgin. Ye tell 'im, hear?"

  They came alongside, they caught the bow-rope and drew her snug. They all looked scared. There was this wounded boy they were taking inside, up the stairs.

  But they helped her ashore. They said she should come inside, and, Lord, she remembered this. She said, "I got t' wash. . . ."

  They said she could use the kitchen. So she did. But then a cook showed up with a pretty robe and said she could put that on, she was going to have to come upstairs.

  Long, long walk that was. Long climb. She was breathing hard when she got to the top. Dizzy. But there was a servant girl to steer her for the sitting room.

  Old man sitting there, old and wrapped in a lap-robe. He said, squinting at her, "Min Fahd?" "Yey."

  He said get tea. He asked her to sit down. He said she still had pretty eyes. He said it was a shame what was happening out there.

  She said so, too. It was kind of strange, sitting here. She said she had to go, soon, she had to get down to the Grand—

  "They're shooting out there, Min. They're crazies."

  "Yey," she said. "Don't never change, do it?"

  Sammy looked at her a long, long time. "Lot of things change, Min."

  "Not on th' water. Always th' same."

  Sammy said, "You still running that skip alone?"

  "Yey." Then she remembered. "Traded 'er. Sammy, I got t' get t' Ventani."

  "You can have another cup, can't you?"

  It was like a dream. Sammy's folks had had a fit, him bringing her inside. But this time they could sit here. Sammy told a servant bring the tea. Sammy said, "It's not a night for going out, Min." Cannon shot boomed close. Something hit the roof.

  She looked at Sammy, remembered him poli
ng down the canal. Liked to help her with the skip, he did. Such a pretty 'un, he'd been. She wished she'd fixed her hair.

  He said, "God, Min."

  Hard to know what to say. She sat there with this fancy cup, opposite Sammy Elgin, and he was talking about how the time they'd watched the sun come up from out on the Rim.

  God, yes, she remembered. . . .

  "You aren't afraid," he said. She laughed, rolled a glance toward the wall and the thunder. "Hell, I outrun 'em. You remember Retribution? No, you was off th' water, then, had yourself a wife—ye wouldn't a knowed 'er, ye hightowners. ..."

  "Tell me," he said. "Talk, Min, I want to hear."

  ESCAPE FROM MEROVINGEN

  Finale in Two Acts

  by Janet & Chris Morris

  Act Two: ESCAPE FROM MEROVINGEN

  Magruder moved through the night and the smoke with a feeling of predestination. The sky was alight with fires, blurred with mist, and low with ashes. The waterways and bridges were transformed, this night, into a dream or a nightmare Merovingen, lit with fury and rage and fear and metamorphosis.

  Through this altered cityscape, Magruder slipped as if he were an astral traveler, devoid of even a body to risk. The real world had become one of Cassiopeia Boregy's prophecies, lock, stock, and crashing timbers. Chance felt removed, detached, disconnected.

  His work here for Nev Hettek was done. What he did now, he did for himself and for his people, those whose futures were in his hands. Always, at times like these, ennui overswept him. Once plans became reality, they took on a life of their own. You could no longer steer them. The best you could do was steer by them. Keep the wind at your back. Keep your people safe. Get them out of the path of metamorphosis alive.

  These times of actual revolution never much resembled the plan of revolution envisioned by men like Magruder during preparation phases. Once the wave of revolution crested, no one could control the result. So for the architects of change, the reality of change was always unfamiliar, sometimes deadly, inevitably suffused with an air of unreality. Survival was suddenly the only real thing in a phantasmagorical world full of death and destruction.

  In a moment, any person or place or thing here could cease to exist, finally, completely, inarguably. Death and destruction brooked no argument; real change could not be appealed, only obeyed, outrun, or eluded. The safety of personnel was all that mattered to Magruder at times like these.

  On this particular occasion, he had too personal a stake in the fates of his people to think as clearly as he wished. Yet instinct and training prevailed. So he moved, as he must, to stay ahead of the tidal wave of revolution.

  He moved quickly, seemingly without thought or plan, trusting to instinct and training to bring him where he must go without incident.

  He moved. Along empty walkways Eastside, avoiding crowds, avoiding barricades. Along hightown bridges where neither looting nor fire had so far changed a thing. It seemed as though he was moving between Merovingen of the Past and Merovingen of the Future, in some timeless space where change was holding itself in abeyance until he'd passed by.

  Twice, when he was safely across a bridge, trouble started there. Once a fiery torch hit the planks where he'd just walked and he smelled creosote and oil. But he was safe by then.

  He was as safe as a man in a dream, armored by fate and purpose and knowledge of what was happening here, and how, and why.

  Some of his own were safe, already. Chamoun was safe on the Detqueen, if Kenner could keep him there.

  Safe was a nice word. For some, it meant removal from danger. Magruder had always aspired to that state. But "safe" wasn't a word or a state that came naturally to him. He understood its desirability, but it was always somehow incompatible with his needs, desires, responsibilities, gameplan, and interim projections.

  For Magruder, safety was a state of relative excitation that came only in the midst of deadly risk, a surety of survival that was a concomitant of not caring whether he himself survived. You put yourself in the hand of fate and moved on, content to let caprice decide if you were fit to live another day.

  Safety, when it was his, came because it was beside the point, a corollary of moving faster than events in order to take control of them. Or moving in harmony with the time so that you were its instrument. He who broke the laws of nature was destined to be broken upon them; he who let himself become one with the force of nature, acting in harmony with the time, survived.

  Or so it had always been for Magruder. If he was out of harmony, out of sync with the universe as he perceived it—as he might be, this time, because he was too concerned with particular people under his care—he would be crushed by the forces he'd unleashed here.

  He hadn't been distressed when Kenner had told him that Jacobs had been killed after the assassination of Mikhail Kalugin. To light a fire, you had to burn a match.

  He'd felt almost relieved. The time had demanded a sacrifice, and perhaps Jacobs had been enough. Magruder was a pragmatic man, but his mother had named him Chance, and a man with such a name couldn't help but be touched by it.

  If he had a religion, it wasn't one he could proselytize; it was a sense of the violence of natural evolution and the order of chaos. If this religious sense of natural selection was a religion, then, without ever meaning to, he'd become its high priest. There was safe harbor for his flock, so long as he stayed alive to steer them to it.

  Change was the thing that steered all things through all things, and change was Chance. Chance knew what to do in moments like these with a preturnatural clarity and a sense of purpose that separated him from everyone else and everything that was happening as if he were some omniscient observer.

  Take tonight. He absolutely did want to be safe on one of the Chamoun shipping vessels, headed out of the harbor toward Nev Hettek. That was the whole point of this exercise. After that, he wanted to be safe in Nev Hettek, having given an acceptable account of himself and this enterprise to Karl Fon.

  But Change was master here, and it wanted certain things from Magruder, as from everyone else. He could have what he wanted, he knew, only if he was willing to give up his life to secure the lives of those he loved here. So safety, as an abstract, was beside the point.

  Before he could go back to the ships, he had to find Dani Lambert, and they, together, had to finish up the job here. He wasn't looking forward to facing Dani and telling her what he now must tell her. But he couldn't leave her behind, and he couldn't leave the part of himself-behind that still was here, smoldering slowly on the fire-licked canal, as if it might burst into flame at any moment.

  He changed course; it was always easy for Magruder to find another way to go. He wished he could have found another way for Merovingen. He'd tried to bring hope, dreams, new ways of thinking and of acting. But places and populations had their own ideas about what they were and who they were, and often you could not shake them from the course their nature determined.

  Ahead of him, a small riot was in progress: looters and locals with something to protect, plus a few harried blacklegs with clubs and shields, trying out riot-control techniques they'd never really expected to bet their own lives upon.

  He changed course again, climbing higher, up where he'd have a better view of what he'd wrought here.

  Merovingen was growing up tonight. When the flames had cleansed the town of infection and rot, maybe it would have a shot at becoming a living society, instead of a tracing from some forgotten temple's wall.

  People went through the motions of life here, promised an afterlife for which they were paying in advance, and expecting to be punished by an inimical universe for all the wrongs they'd done in previous lives.

  At first it had been hard for Magruder to respect these people, who let themselves be duped out of their current lives by fictions constructed to control them and keep them in misery.

  But now, maybe because he'd finally been ordered to kindle this blaze—figuratively and actually, he felt a deep pity, a fatherly regret, a
nd a wish that somehow it could have gone differently, here—peacefully.

  But he shook out of it, as best he could. He was getting soft, in his dotage. He was thinking like a parent, and looking at these dangerous, untutored oafs as errant children. Any of these maddened children would kill him tonight without a second thought if he made the mistake of resembling or embodying an authority figure, or reminding them of someone who could be blamed for their furious misery, or merely getting between a looter and his next acquisition.

  Dani was going to give him one serious hard time. He couldn't think ahead, or penetrate his own feeling of detachment. His mind was shying away from everything unnecessary to keeping Chance Magruder alive.

  He'd done this so many times that he slipped around the worst of the fires and the worst of the rioting as if he had foreknowledge. But he had only honed instinct, sure knowledge of the twisted, multi-tiered maze city with its bridges and its classes.

  He was up in hightown before he knew it, and stopped only when he found himself facing a choice between heading for Boregy House, where Dani was, and the Residency, where, he hoped to hell, Tatiana was.

  Tatiana Kalugin, the governor's daughter.

  If Tatiana and he could have staved this off just a little longer, they might have given everybody—Karl Fon, the vicious Cardinal Exeter, Iosef and Anastasi Kalugin—a run for their money. All Merovingen wanted was a ehance to realize its hopes.

  It had gotten a chance: Chance Magruder.

  You couldn't have everything. And Magruder wasn't a free agent. He might have been, with Tatiana—or more of one. But in the end, he'd chosen the Nev Hettek way, because it would free these people, those who survived, more surely than Tatiana's way. Although he'd have had a nice life with her. Power. Wealth. Sex. But she was a creature of the old guard.

  He could never have changed her. And he couldn't change himself. Seeing Dani Lambert again had reminded him of that.

  He struck out for Boregy House with an odd foreboding, as if he'd made a final decision only at the moment when he turned his back on the path to the Residency. Magruder had been in this business too long. He'd begun to believe, somehow, that all these people were souls in his care. He'd begun to think that the loss of some lives in order to provide better lives for the majority and the unborn might be worth it.