At the time she had attributed the reason for this inexplicable action to naval politics, as well as the ongoing suppression of anything that might reveal Ares’s possession of a hyperwave. She altered her posture, observing the Dol’jharian captain. This woman was a tempath, and Vannis was morally certain that Brandon did not want her to know about that call. Time to find out why.
Vannis launched herself on one of her social circuits of the room, making certain she spoke to everyone. The words were random, automatic after so many years of practice. She waited until Jaim finished his conversation with Vi’ya and moved away. A quick glance showed Brandon deep in talk with Omilov and Fierin, the latter still hugging her elbows tightly against her.
Approaching with leisurely step, Vannis said, “What is it like, being a tempath?”
The night-black eyes lifted and considered Vannis coolly. Up close, she seemed much younger than she first appeared. “What is it like not being one?” Her voice was low, pleasant, with a subtle and faintly sinister accent sharpening the consonants.
“A foolish question, for which I apologize,” Vannis said, gesturing in mercy mode. “But you are a rarity, with a talent many consider quite formidable. I would like to learn more about it.”
The tempath again waited, her gaze steady and direct. Vannis felt her own gaze slide away, and forcing herself to meet those eyes, she knew her own to be limpid as pondwater.
“It is a burden,” the tempath said.
“Can you read words?”
“No. Emotions only.”
“Can you affect others’ emotions?”
“Only as anyone else can.”
“Curious,” Vannis said. Her heart accelerated again. “If your talent is only reactive, not proactive, why would it be necessary for tempaths to be involved with this Suneater horror?”
“I do not understand,” the tempath said.
Vannis gestured toward Brandon’s console. “By accident I saw one of those broadcasts . . .” And she saw in the woman’s comprehension that she knew about the hyperwave the Navy had captured.. “The enemy seeks tempaths.”
“I had not known this,” Vi’ya said.
“Well, I believe Brandon put it under his seal.” Vannis watched the dark eyes glance Brandon’s way.
“Why do you tell me this?”
Because Vi’ya the Rifter was not just a personal inconvenience, but a political nightmare. “Does it matter?” Vannis countered.
“No,” Captain Vi’ya said, her soft voice as impassive as her face. “It does not.”
PART THREE
ONE
Eloatri was pleased to discover that when she requested a meeting with Sebastian Omilov, he readily agreed, asking only that she and Manderian come to the Jupiter Project labs. On their arrival—meeting along the way even stiffer security than during her first visit—she again found the gnostor working with the stellar hologram.
This time she was prepared. She felt only a faint frisson of unease as she stepped out into the vast infinity of interstellar space. Manderian evinced no reaction; he stood relaxed, clasped hands half-hidden by the sleeves of his robe. The stars spilling thickly across the chamber silhouetted Omilov’s portly figure against a drift of tortured gases glowing in a slash of darkness.
He greeted them politely, though she sensed a lingering reserve in his address to her. Perhaps he didn’t trust her not to catapult him back into the deep connectedness of the Dreamtime again. Sebastian Omilov had put himself there, she thought; it would never let him go.
The gnostor tapped his boswell and spoke into the air. “Run temporal regression, minus ten megayears.” He turned to Eloatri and Manderian. “I know you both are following the discussions—increasingly heated, I fear—about the fate of the Suneater. This regression reveals both the most damning and the most exciting datum about that device.”
Lettering flashed across the sea of stars: incomprehensible numbers and symbols. “I’ll have to dress this up for my presentation,” Omilov murmured. “We used data from the Telvarna’s mission and older surveys from the DataNet that I requested some time ago. The couriers are overloaded, trying to keep us connected.”
Eloatri watched as the twisted chaos of the Rift slowly straightened, the wisps of nebulae raveling back into stars, as if a wound in the substance of the galaxy was healing. When the motion stopped, the gash across the stars was still untidy, but now it could be seen to be a narrow, twisted cone. A red point of light glowed near the blunt point.
“The Suneater,” said Omilov. “The regression supports my hypothesis that it created the Rift.”
But the High Phanist already understood. She remembered Tomiko and the chalice filled with blood, saw again the strong-shouldered, dark-visaged man staring at her. Now she knew that the image of the restaurant in her vision was multivocal, an ingestion archetype confirming the terrible power of what they faced.
“Devourer of Suns,” she said to Omilov. His eyes reflected points of starlight. “I, too, have both damning and exciting news. As yet I have told no one but Gnostor Manderian. I have found the last member of the Unity.”
“Ah.” Omilov was politely curious but unimpressed.
“It is Anaris achreash-Eusabian, the Avatar’s son and heir.”
The gnostor grunted as though punched in the his chest. “He is on the Suneater, and our enemy.”
“As for the Suneater, his father is calling for tempaths to control it. As for the enmity, he seems to be his father’s enemy as well.”
Omilov gestured absently, dismissing the topic of Anaris. “I doubt that control is the proper word, considering the Suneater’s probable complexity. The hyperrelay brought in by Captain MacKenzie is almost incomprehensible—a black box, if you will. I have enormous respect for whoever designed the human-Urian interfaces on it.”
“Eusabian thinks only in terms of control,” Eloatri stated, mildly irritated at Omilov’s tendency to take refuge in pedantry.
“We do not know how true that is of Anaris,” Manderian said. “The Ares replicates of his fosterage records are incomplete. I have requested more information, but the fall of the S’lift on Arthelion destroyed most of its links to the DataNet.”
Eloatri looked back at the Rift. “In any case, Gnostor Omilov, you see that our goals converge. You wish to preserve the Suneater for study.”
She turned away from the terrible vision, her confidence in the path Telos had set her on shaken.
“And you, Numen?” Omilov prompted.
“And I,” she said slowly. “I must ensure that the members of the Unity here on Ares reach the Suneater before it is destroyed.”
Sebastian Omilov stared at the High Phanist. Her face was shadowed; stars gleamed in her eyes, giving him an eerie sense of looking through a pair of pellucid windows into infinity. He recollected one of her titles: Gate of Telos.
He twitched his shoulders, trying to dispel the . . . awe. It was too unsettling a reminder of the Dreamtime. He could not discern whether she meant the Suneater would inevitably be destroyed, or if she saw that as the outcome only if the polymental unity were not assembled there.
But when he asked her, she only shrugged and smiled wanly. “I have no idea why I phrased it that way. It was appropriately Delphic, wasn’t it?”
Omilov sensed she meant more than just “ambiguous,” and wondered if the term had once had a religious connotation.
The penumbral gloom of the hologram chamber had become oppressive. He tapped his boswell to bring the lights up. “Why don’t we move to my workroom, where we won’t be disturbed?” He could no longer deny the reality of the realm in which Eloatri moved, but he needed the hard-edged rationality of his workroom as a counterbalance to the mysticism that he could not quantify.
He seated them in a comfortable circle of overstuffed chairs in one corner, cut off from the main work area by a bank of consoles. A steward brought coffee; the cup looked incongruously toy-like in Manderian’s huge hand. Next to him Eloatri looked tiny,
almost fragile.
Omilov dismissed the steward and turned on the acoustic dampers as she left.
Then Eloatri spoke. “Sebastian, I must be frank with you.” The familiar address underscored her words. “I cannot guarantee that the Unity’s purpose may not be the destruction of the Suneater, rather than its preservation. We call such a nexus a hinge of time because it may either open or shut a door. But the Navy will seek only to destroy it, you know that.”
Omilov sighed. “Yes. I had hopes of persuading them otherwise, and will still attempt to do so, but I will undoubtedly fail. Even Brandon—the Panarch—seems inclined that way. But even though the Eya’a are determined to reach it, how do you propose to persuade Captain Vi’ya and the rest of her crew, let alone the Kelly, to go to the Suneater?”
“The Kelly are no longer a problem,” Eloatri said. “With the arrival of the Elder, the genome of the Archon has been transferred to threir sibling, so Portus-Dartinus-Atos are free to go. I am sure that if Ivard goes, so will threy; and Ivard will go if Vi’ya does.”
“And will she?”
Eloatri turned her gaze to Manderian, who put his cup down. “The meeting of two tempaths is always problematical,” he said. “In fact, one reason there are so few of us is that we seldom mate with each other; the feedback created by sexual congress can be fatal.” Manderian’s gaze was distant. “It was not always so, long ago on Dol’jhar, but the rituals of the Chorei are lost.” He met Omilov’s gaze.
“I tell you this so that you may understand why my knowledge of Vi’ya’s motives can be simultaneously certain and ineffable. Each tempath meeting another accepts a certain blunting of his or her perceptions to avoid that overload, yet much still comes through. From our discussions, for she has come to trust me to some extent, I know that she has learned of the call for tempaths. She not only will go to the Suneater, but desires that course of action strongly. This is, to her, both an escape from, and a gift to repay a personal obligation stronger than she has ever felt before.”
Manderian hesitated, visibly seeking words. “It is more complex than that. She is evidently dealing with a relationship that is not . . . usual . . . to Dol’jharians. That all lies in the parts of her soul not open to me; nor, I suppose, could I understand it if they were. But the sense of obligation is very strong. It is perhaps a sublimation of these other feelings.”
Omilov felt his understanding floundering under a welter of imprecision. He tried to pin down the meaning. “You say obligation, and relationship, and feelings. Do you mean Brandon?”
“Yes. That is the difficulty,” said Eloatri. “I fear he will not let her go.”
Omilov blinked. He had not known the relationship had continued. Brandon was being properly discreet about it. “I think,” he said carefully, “that you may be assigning this relationship more significance than it will bear.”
“Perhaps,” Eloatri replied, but Omilov could hear no doubt at all in her voice. He found he couldn’t entirely dismiss her certainty, even if it was most likely based on some gnosis he couldn’t follow. “But can we afford to take that chance?” she continued.
“No,” he agreed. The irony was painful. As his sole act as Praerogate, he had given Brandon the means to enforce his will on Ares. Now, if Eloatri was correct, Sebastian must join her in plotting to defy his will.
“We cannot inform Vi’ya,” Manderian said. “She will not trust anyone but herself in this matter. We can only offer her opportunities that she can turn to her own advantage.”
They sat in a silence broken finally by the faint tick of Omilov’s cup on the table.
“I was thinking of a new experiment,” Omilov said, “that would bring them all together on the Telvarna. I wanted to see what their combined sensorium was capable of if isolated from the noetic noise of Ares, or of any other humans not of their unity. Of course, with the fiveskip disabled, there would have been no question of their escape, even lacking Marines on board.”
“She has already received permission to sleep on board the Telvarna, distant from the storm of emotion that otherwise surrounds her,” Manderian said.
“And I have arranged to deflect the routine engine inspections.” Eloatri’s voice was firm, and Omilov wondered how far she would go in the service of Telos and the triune god she now served. He wondered how far he would go to preserve the Suneater.
The High Phanist continued. “I expect as soon as she notes their abeyance she will breach the outer seal and go to work. Her light-fingered DC-tech, Marim, is doubtless already obtaining the parts she needs to repair the fiveskip. Tuan found her looking for booty at New Glastonbury cathedral.” Eloatri chuckled. “She found more than she sought and carried it away with her against her will.”
“Then,” said Omilov, “if I can arrange for them to carry out this experiment beyond the radius of Ares Primary, and Vi’ya is able to repair the fiveskip, there is nothing to stop them.”
o0o
“We have a few minutes before that fool Torigan arrives,” Hesthar said on entering the garden room on Srivashti’s sumptuous yacht. “I arranged for his shuttle to be delayed by some problems with the bay systems.”
Srivashti bowed and gestured toward a chair. “I’m very much afraid that Stulafi’s alacrity at obtaining the Omori complex, spacious as it is, has left him vulnerable. Shipboard life is much more predictable.”
Hesthar smiled, acknowledging the riposte as she seated herself on a settee next to a reflecting pond whose still surface was dotted with tiny flowers basking in the tree-filtered sun. “You do have better weather than Ares. Even in the oneill the air reeks of Polloi now.”
Srivashti was a fool, too, if he thought his defenses that good. His ship was realtime-linked to Ares; his threads to the DataNet would be useless otherwise. True, she’d found she couldn’t touch ship functions, but the walls around his dataspace were otherwise porous, and his protections shallow. If need be, Srivashti’s deepest records would be open to her.
But no need to alert him just for the sake of curiosity. Not yet. And there was much useful information in the shallow levels of his databanks, including his Familial link to Tate Kaga. That was quite interesting—and worrisome.
“I’ve noticed,” Srivashti said, moving to a side console. “What will you drink? The chef has made up some Vilarian Cloud.”
“Appropriate to the mood,” she said, smiling. “Extravagance is an inspiration to the senses.”
He returned smile for smile. “Why not call it profligacy?”
He wouldn’t apologize for the ship or his tastes, and he knew she coveted the former. And—she had to appreciate his subtlety—he knew she knew.
“I find it inspirational as well,” he said as he brought her the tall, cobalt-blue glass. The sides were already clouded with moisture. She sipped at the creamy vapors wisping up. The chill shocked her; the taste zinged her palate.
“Less inspiring to contemplate is Torigan’s handling of the trial,” she said, lowering her glass.
“He seems to have assembled the best team possible under the circumstances,” Srivashti said mildly, sipping from his own fluted glass. He did not drink the Vilarian Cloud; she wondered why, and when he sipped again she shot a look at Felton, glancing down at her glass, and he shook his head fractionally. No poison. Not that she had expected it. Srivashti needed her too much.
“His team is not the point,” Hesthar said, permitting none of her impatience to reach her voice.
Srivashti lifted a shoulder. “His record is brilliant, but it does seem odd that Tovr Ixvan is handling this himself, without so much as a clerk.” He seated himself on a circular bench surrounding a large tree, whose green bark was deeply fissured, with glints of phosphorescence deep in the cracks. “Although I’m surprised you haven’t told me about the people the Panarch has no doubt directed to assist him.”
Hesthar frowned. It rankled to admit failure. “I cannot discover anyone of note. The Enclave is opaque to me. But neither is that the point, Tau.�
� Her use of the familiar obliterated the hint of a smile on his lips.
He gestured gracefully for her to continue. She sensed the restraint in his motion.
“The point is that no vocat, however talented, can run a modern defense without a host of specialists. Three just to model the presiding Justicials’ minds from past decisions and personal data, another to do the same for the prosecutor, nomic eidetics, noderunners.” She let her voice trail off and sipped her drink, feeling its coolness penetrate her sinuses. Srivashti need not know about the noderunners that someone had put on her own threads and webs of data. Were they Ixvan’s or someone else’s? They were consuming more and more of her time. “Ixvan has none of those, which implies that he knows he doesn’t need them.”
“Which implies that he knows something he shouldn’t,” Srivashti said. “Unless it’s a colossal bluff.” He smiled. “Aimed at provoking just this kind of conversation.”
“Perhaps.” Now was an opportune moment to probe the relationship she’d discovered with the old nuller. “I wonder if Tate Kaga has been in communication with him?”
She saw from Srivashti’s eyes that she had scored a hit, but she couldn’t interpret its effect. “You seem fascinated by him,” he said.
Of course, fool, she thought: you would fear him more if you knew how invisible he is on the Net. No one lived nearly seven hundred years and left so little data behind; not without formidable talent. Was he among those digging at her in the Net?
Srivashti sipped at his drink, his poise recovered. “If the nuller knew anything, he would have used it earlier.”
Hesthar smiled faintly, enjoying Srivashti’s reluctance to refer to the abortive coup. He maintained his poise in public, but with one who knew the truth of how horribly awry that had gone, he was more circumspect.
“No doubt. But all this would be meaningless to Stulafi, and I propose we not trouble him with it.” If it hadn’t been for the Covenant of Anarchy, someone would have gobbled up Torigan long ago.
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