by Greg Bear
“Is it as bad on shore as it looks?”
“Yes, sir,” Pitt said.
Beys indicated we should sit. His ruddy cheeks had blued to a pale violet in the last few days, and his skin was sallow from fatigue. His left hand trembled slightly on the white cloth of the table until he removed it and hid it beneath the table. “Brion should have killed you all, and Lenk, days ago,” Beys said. “We had Lenk in our hands. We both miscalculated badly.”
“What good to kill more?” I asked.
“My mistake,” Beys said shortly, his voice clipped but calm. “I underestimated Lenk, and in my profession, that's a crime.”
He leaned forward. “Still no help from the Hexamon? Lenk's clavicle no good for you?”
“I haven't seen it,” I said.
“Brion took you up the canal and showed you more than you cared to see, I'll bet.”
“He took us up the canal,” I said.
“The scientist, Salap ... what did he think?”
“He's still there.”
“Is Brion responsible for what's happening on shore? He and his wife?”
“It looks that way,” I said.
“He knew, damn him,” Beys said, looking up at the ceiling, then back at me. “He behaved like a kid whose dirty little secrets are going to come out soon. Do you know where he is?”
I shook my head.
“Neither do I. I can't reach him by the radio, and no one on shore has seen him.” Beys leaned back and glared at Pitt and Hamsun. “Get out,” he ordered loudly. They stood quickly and the imposing dark woman escorted them through the hatch. “Aphra, shut the door behind you and stay outside yourself.”
“Yes, sir,” the woman said.
Beys put both hands on the table. “We're equal now. Fate damn either one of us who lies.”
“All right,” I said.
“The oath assumed,” he added, staring at me with brows drawn together.
“The oath assumed.”
“Brion gave you the impression that I'm responsible for all the mayhem, didn't he?” Beys asked.
“I believe you carried out your interpretation of vague orders.”
Beys thrust his jaw out and leaned his head back. “Did Brion show you the army he wanted to make? Or rather, have the seed-mother make?
“Designs for scion soldier-weapons... ?” He read my features intently. “No,” I said.
His face shifted from a wry smile to disgust. “He wanted to start over again. He wanted all of Lenk's people to realize what Lenk had done to us. Anything to further that cause ... was legitimate. We were working to stabilize all settlements on Lamarckia, to transform this planet. Food was the first accomplishment. The scion soldiers would have been next ... But his wife died. That broke him. I thought he was strong, or I wouldn't have allied with him, but that broke him.”
Beys met my silence with a lift of his lip and a cluck of his tongue. “If I destroy this fleet of Lenk's in the next hour, what will you do?”
I avoided directly answering that question, instead explaining about the larval seed-mothers, the rotting scions of old Hsia. “Everyone in Naderville will starve,” I said.
“If I let Lenk go free, and ... whatever you might think is honorable or just, what will you do?”
“Naderville will need to be evacuated. That could take months. A lot of people will die, but not all of them.”
Beys considered this, rubbing his cheek with a short, fat finger. Then he lifted one eyebrow. “What would you have done, if you were me?”
“Why did you kill so many?” I asked in return.
Beys jerked slightly in his chair, but his expression did not change.
“Why kill the adults?” I asked, taking another angle.
“Irrational loyalty to Lenk and all he stood for,” he said.
“Yes, but why kill them?”
“To end the old and begin the new. How would you have done that, if you were me?”
“You really don't know why you ordered them killed, do you?”
Beys lowered his eyelids until he resembled a sleepy farm animal, a dog or a pig. “You judge me. Have you judged Brion?”
“I'm not a judge,” I said.
“Brion believed you were powerless,” he said. “He thought you were a gnawed-off piece of some aborted effort. I told him the Hexamon does not work that way. He laughed and said I was an idealist. I think that all you have to do is wink just the right way, and all this will end. Why not wink?”
I did not answer.
He refused to look me in the eye, and I saw sweat on his lip. “I have something for you. Brion asked that I take your companions, Ap Nam and Randall, with me on this ship. He learned that you and Ap Nam were lovers. They're here.”
“I'd like to see them,” I said.
Beys clenched his hands on the table and knocked it sharply with his knuckles. “I would have done anything to have never come here. I would have worked my way up in Way Defense.” His voice tensed. “I am in a backwater, with nowhere to go. When my family died, Brion was all I had.”
“Show me Shirla and Erwin,” I said.
“If I give them up to you, and let the fleet go, what then?”
I did not hesitate to tell a half-lie. “I will not turn you over to Hexamon justice.”
“Where will I live?”
“Wherever you can travel without my help.”
Beys mulled this over. “You can have this ship. It's hell to maintain. I can take one of Lenk's schooners and a crew of ten. I can manage with ten. If you want, I'll sink this ship.”
“We'll need all the ships,” I said.
His once-florid face had taken on the cast of wet freechunk paste. Beys lifted his eyes to meet mine. “A small ship. A boat. Where do you suggest I go?”
“I don't care,” I said.
“Lenk might have shelled his own children, you know,” Beys murmured. “They might have been kept in Naderville as protection.”
“Were they?”
“If I had thought about it, I would have ordered them kept there, but I was sixty miles out at sea when the attack began. I was going to Jakarta, and then to Athenai.”
I shook my head.
“I stay here on Lamarckia, whatever happens. You will not let them take me back to the Way.”
“All right,” I said.
Beys brought his hands up on the table. Star, Fate, and Pneuma be kind, I shook hands with that man.
Shirla and Randall stood in the shadow of the aft gun, guarded by three soldiers in gray and tan, and Pitt and Hamsun waited nearby. I walked along the passage to the rear deck. Shirla saw me and ran forward. Nobody tried to stop her. She grabbed me and I squeezed her tightly, burying my face in her neck and sweat-scented hair. We said nothing for a time.
“Are you a prisoner, too?” she asked.
“I don't think so,” I said.
“Are we going back to Liz now? I keep hearing that we can't possibly stay here, that the ecos is sick.”
So word was spreading around the ship. I wondered if Beys or Brion could possibly survive.
“I hope we can go, and soon,” I said. “There's a lot of work to do. A lot to prepare for.”
“No magic?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I'm afraid not.”
“Just you?”
“Just me,” I said.
Randall came closer and joined us. “I hope you'll be enough,” he said.
33
Yanosh and I have made our way to my newly assigned apartment. He has to leave soon; the presiding minister has been affording him considerable time to arrange for my care and debrief me, but other matters are pressing hard, and Yanosh can assign only so many incorporeal ghosts to do his work before his embodied authority becomes necessary.
Much has changed in the Hexamon in ten years. The art of ghosting—of projecting partial personalities to do one's work—has advanced to astonishing sophistication.
“Did you ever learn why Lenk destroyed the cla
vicle?” Yanosh asks.
Shirla was with me when we went ashore, in Lenk's main party, to pay homage to the dead. Brion, Hyssha Chung, and Frick had been found murdered, their bodies mutilated. Lenk claimed disgruntled soldiers from Brion's army had caught them and killed them. I never heard any reason to believe otherwise. Their alleged killers were going to be put on trial in Tasman.
They were being buried with a full divaricate Naderite funeral, allowing Lenk to show that time and honor can heal all wounds.
A few days later, the Khoragos departed Hsia. Because of the extraordinary fluxing, boats were being sent from Tasman and Elizabeth's Land, and some effort was being made to evacuate the citizens of Naderville. It would take months, and Lenk did not want to be there if things went wrong. He insisted Shirla and I accompany him to Tasman.
Beys left Naderville in a small schooner, with a five-man crew, all that would go with him.
None was ever heard from again.
Shirla sat on the deck of the Khoragos in a small folding chair, sipping from a bowl of tea. She smiled up at me as I approached, afraid but trying hard not to show her fear. I sat beside her and she offered me the cup. I took a sip.
“When is he going to show us?” she asked.
“Tonight. He's busy arranging things now. He's still Able Lenk.”
Shirla gazed out to sea and her teeth began to chatter. With a jerk, she stilled the quiver in her jaw and looked miserable. “You'll be going soon,” she said. There had been so little time to talk, so many meetings and arrangements before leaving Hsia. None of this had been worked over between us.
“I don't think so,” I said.
“If you can fix the clavicle...”
“Ferrier says he doesn't believe that's possible, now.”
“But if you can ... You'll go back to the Way.”
I took her hand. “I don't know what will happen.”
“You come from a larger place than anything I can conceive of,” Shirla said. “I've been taught all my life to be afraid of that place, to despise it. Now you're my love and you come from there.”
“We all come from there,” I said.
“But I don't want to leave here. You must.”
I squeezed her hand. In truth, nobody knew what would happen. “He wants you to be there, too,” I said.
“Good Lenk invited me?”
“He did.”
“Olmy,” she said, putting her other hand over mine, “I wanted—”
She tried valiantly again.
“I wanted—”
Tears dripped down her cheeks.
“I wanted,” she managed again, and shook her whole upper body to rid herself of this foolishness. “Never, ever, ever want anything with all your life, ever. Never want. They will take it away. You will go away.”
“I want, too. I know where I am now,” I said.
“Who are you?” she asked.
Lenk sat in the cabin where we had met it seemed years earlier. Allrica Fassid stood beside him, but left as Shirla and I came in. On the table before him was an ornate xyla box.
“Nobody can offer any proof that you are from the Hexamon,” he said as we sat in two chairs opposite. “That is remarkable. I accept that you are, because of what you have done. I know the ways of history, and it all smells right to me.” He turned to Shirla.
“You are a good woman, and have never wanted more than to have a family and live a decent life.”
Shirla blinked at him, then looked at me, too stunned to answer.
“Isn't that so? There's no need to be shy.”
She nodded. It was so. Lenk knew his people well.
“You have made love with this man, in a certain way, under difficult circumstances, and that means you are committed to him, and believe he is committed to you. Do you accept him for what he is?”
“I don't think we came here to talk about that,” Shirla said softly.
Lenk focused his deep-set, dark-lidded eyes on me. For a moment he looked remarkably like a dead man. “I hear that Brion and Beys thought you could pass judgment, that Beys worried you would split him like a ripe fruit. They were cowards. The Hexamon cannot judge us.”
He leaned forward and opened the box. Inside, the clavicle lay in many pieces, some of them melted. Even after years, at the end of two projections within the shattered sphere, a tiny bit of glimmer showed, the last trace of a small finite artificial universe sympathetic with the Way. None of the controls remained, however, and I saw it could never be repaired.
“You were a fool to come here alone,” Lenk said. “Whoever sent you here was a fool. I have withstood Lamarckia and treachery and the devils of my own nature. I do not fear you or the Hexamon. Brion is dead, and that is a kind of waste—though he had too much of the Hexamon in him—and Beys is gone. So what are we to do, you and I?”
I stared across the table at the man who had started all this, saw his weary defiance and his strength. I saw that Shirla was still in awe of him. He had his center of power, and the force necessary to oust him from that center would cause more bloodshed and, in the end, with all of Lamarckia changing, do nobody any good.
“You've made a beginning for yourself,” Lenk said. “You've gathered a following. You could be like Brion, only I suspect you'd be a little colder than he was, and never trust someone like Beys. You could be formidable, Olmy.”
I studied Lenk and felt the remains of my hate dissolve, not because of any lessening of indignation and anger, but because he was part of a river of human history that could not be shifted without immense pain. He was not the worst, far from the best; but inevitably, he was in his place, and for me to oppose him would be another kind of cruelty, not to him—he might relish the battle—but to his people.
To Shirla.
I could guarantee nothing. The Hexamon might never come, and I could not return to the Way.
My mission was over.
After a moment, Lenk leaned back and said, “I thank you for what you've managed this far. I bless you for your work. You're a smart and decent man, Ser Olmy, but you are not like me, and not like Brion. Go and live a life with this woman.”
I did not want my children on Lamarckia. Shirla wanted children; we compromised.
Shirla and I lived in Athenai for ten years. It was there we adopted our first boy, Ricca, one of the many orphans called Beys's children. I came in time almost to forget the Hexamon. For weeks on end I thought little or nothing of my past. I was well-known wherever we lived for being the Hexamon agent, but even in the worst of times, nobody resented me, or at least nobody expressed their resentments to me. The Adventists, what remained of them, came now and then, and Lenk did not oppose their coming. He knew I would not encourage them.
When Lenk died, Allrica Fassid took over the reins of power for a while, but the first starvation set in five years later, and she committed suicide. Others followed. The divaricates kept their political scheme, and never did I sense a place for me in that scheme. For this, Shirla was grateful.
We left Tasman after it began its own fluxing. We adopted our second son, Henryk, in Calcutta.
As the years passed, more and more the change spread. So much of the beauty and variety of Lamarckia was fleeing before Brion's gift of green. What replaced it was simple and direct, tiny ecoi, covering only a few acres, and getting tinier. Some of the scions—phytids, even mobile scions—seemed capable of independence, and perhaps even replicating on their own. Randall studied them closely and wrote more papers. We visited often.
Shirla and I and our two sons had our happiest five years together in Jakarta. Petain's Zone resisted the green longer than any but the island zones in the south, where most of the survivors clustered for decades. In those five good years, however, Jakarta became a wonderfully feverish city, an island of creative ferment and relative prosperity in the change.
We actually saw Salap again. Yes!—he had survived, and was back at Wallace Station, but he made a trip to Jakarta.
Many of us
were dying from new immune challenges as Petain tried different defenses against Hsia and the green. Salap had been charting the spread of new scion chemistries, and he arrived when Shirla was very ill, making the trip especially to see us, I suppose, but also as part of the research effort.
Shirla and I met with him in her room. Henryk and Ricca, ages ten and fifteen then, came in and out, carrying food, clean bedding, water. Shirla had become a real mother to them, and I had done my best, in my distracted way, to be a real father.
Salap made his tests, took samples from her withered body, told us that there might be ways to turn back such challenges in a few months. Idle hopes, as it turned out.
Salap finally related the story of his last few days with the female figure in the hemisphere. “She struggled to become human,” he said. “Having watched the Chung sisters and Brion, and finally paying close attention to me, the only model left to her—observing me while I observed her—we taught each other many things. But she could never think like us, much less understand our shapes. She was never more than a meticulous and crafty observer, without the cycling knot of self-awareness that must always separate us from the ecoi. At the last, though, she broke her second foot free and became independent for a few days. She managed to walk. She did pretty well, under the circumstances.”
“What did she want?” Shirla asked.
“The ecos had observed humans having sex. It was curious about the process. Thought it might result in another ‘name,’ like Brion's gift of chlorophyll. She actually became seductive, at the end.” He stared at us, eyes flicking back and forth. For the first time, Salap seemed ill at ease.
“Did you?” Shirla asked.
Salap smiled and leaned his head to one side. “Three months after you left, the hemisphere withered,” he continued. “The last of the balloons had been manufactured and sent away with the winds.”
“What happened to her? To the imitation of Caitla?” Shirla asked.
“She withered, too. She maintained her interest to the end, trying to speak, trying to extract biological secrets, hoping for more gifts of ‘names.’ Finally, she could not move, and she made only shrill whistles and rasping, barking sounds.
