by Dan Simmons
Father Captain de Soya nodded to the sergeant and inspected the five commandos—three men, two women, all terribly, terribly young. They were also lean, muscular, perfectly adapted to zero-g, and obviously honed for battle. All of them were combat veterans. Each of them had distinguished himself or herself adequately to be chosen for this mission. De Soya saw their eagerness for combat and was saddened by it.
After a few minutes of inspection, introductions, and commander-to-commando chatting, de Soya beckoned for Gregorius to follow and kicked off through the aft soft spot into the launch-tube room. When they were alone, Father Captain de Soya extended his hand. “Damned good to see you, Sergeant.”
Gregorius shook hands and grinned. The big man’s square, scarred face and short-cropped hair were the same, and his grin was as broad and bright as de Soya remembered. “Damned good t’ see you, Father Captain. And when did the priesty side o’ ya begin usin’ profanity, sir?”
“When I was promoted to commanding this ship, Sergeant,” said de Soya. “How have you been?”
“Fair, sir. Fair an’ better.”
“You saw action in the St. Anthony Incursion and the Sagittarius Salient,” said de Soya. “Were you with Corporal Kee before he died?”
Sergeant Gregorius rubbed his chin. “Negative, sir. I was at the Salient two years ago, but I never saw Kee. Heard about his transport bein’ slagged, but never saw him. Had a couple of other friends aboard it, too, sir.”
“I’m sorry,” said de Soya. The two were floating awkwardly near one of the hyper-k storage nacelles. The father-captain grabbed a holdtite and oriented himself so that he could look Gregorius in the eye. “Did you get through the interrogation all right, Sergeant?”
Gregorius shrugged. “They kept me on Pacem a few weeks, sir. Kept askin’ the same questions in different ways. Didn’t seem to believe me about what happened on God’s Grove—the woman devil, the Shrike-thingee. Eventually they seemed t’ get tired o’ askin’ me things and busted me back down to corporal and shipped me out.”
De Soya sighed. “I’m sorry, Sergeant. I had recommended you for a promotion and commendation.” He chuckled ruefully. “A lot of good that did you. We’re lucky we weren’t both excommunicated and then executed.”
“Aye, sir,” said Gregorius, glancing out the port at the shifting starfield. “They weren’t happy with us, that’s a’ sure.” He looked at de Soya. “And you, sir. I heard they took away your commission and all.”
Father Captain de Soya smiled. “Busted me back to parish priest.”
“On a dirty, desert, no-water world, I heard tell, sir. A place where piss sells for ten marks a bootful.”
“That was true,” said de Soya, still smiling. “MadredeDios. It was my homeworld.”
“Aw, shit, sir,” said Sergeant Gregorius, his huge hands clenching in embarrassment. “No disrespect meant, sir. I mean … I didn’t … I wouldn’t …”
De Soya touched the big man’s shoulder. “No disrespect taken, Sergeant. You’re right. Piss does sell there … only for fifteen marks a bootful, not ten.”
“Aye, sir,” said Gregorius, his dark skin darker with flush.
“And, Sergeant …”
“Aye, sir?”
“That will be fifteen Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers for the scatological outburst. I’m still your confessor, you know.”
“Aye, sir.”
De Soya’s implant tingled at the same instant chimes came over the ship’s communicators. “Thirty minutes until translation,” said the father-captain. “Get your chicks tucked in their crèches, Sergeant. This next jump is for real.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” The sergeant kicked for the soft spot but stopped just as the circle irised open. “Father Captain?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“It’s just a feelin’, sir,” said the Swiss Guardsman, his brow furrowed. “But I’ve learned to trust my feelin’s, sir.”
“I’ve learned to trust your feelings as well, Sergeant. What is it?”
“Watch your back, sir,” said Gregorius. “I mean … nothin’ definite, sir. But watch your back.”
“Aye, aye,” said Father Captain de Soya. He waited until Gregorius was back in his wardroom and the soft spot sealed before he kicked off for the main dropshaft and his own death couch and resurrection crèche.
Pacem System was crowded with Mercantilus traffic, Pax Fleet warships, large-array habitats such as the Torus Mercantilus, Pax military bases and listening posts, herded and terraformed asteroids such as Castel Gandolfo, low-rent orbital can cities for the millions eager to be close to humanity’s center of power but too poor to pay Pacem’s exorbitant rates, and the highest concentration of private in-system spacecraft in the known universe. Thus it was that when M. Kenzo Isozaki, CEO and Chairman of the Executive Council of the Pancapitalist League of Independent Catholic Transstellar Trade Organizations, wished to be absolutely alone, he had to commandeer a private ship and burn high-g for thirty-two hours into the outer ring of darkness far from Pacem’s star.
Even choosing a ship had been a problem. The Pax Mercantilus maintained a small fleet of expensive in-system executive shuttles, but Isozaki had to assume that despite their best attempts to debug the ships, they were all compromised. For this rendezvous, he had considered rerouting one of the Mercantilus freighters that plied the trade lanes between orbital clusters, but he did not put it past his enemies—the Vatican, the Holy Office, Pax Fleet Intelligence Services, Opus Dei, rivals within the Mercantilus, countless others—to bug every ship in the Mercantilus’s vast trade fleet.
In the end, Kenzo Isozaki had disguised himself, gone to the Torus public docks, bought an ancient asteroid hopper on the spot, and ordered his illegal comlog AI to pilot the thing out beyond the campfire zone of the ecliptic. On the trip out, his ship was challenged six times by Pax security patrols and stations, but the hopper was licensed, there were rocks where he was headed—mined and remined, to be sure, but still legitimate destinations for a desperate prospector—and he was passed on without personal interrogation.
Isozaki found all this melodramatic and a waste of his valuable time. He would have met his contact in his office on the Torus if the contact had agreed. The contact had not agreed, and Isozaki had to admit that he would have crawled to Aldebaren for this meeting.
Thirty-two hours after leaving the Torus, the hopper dropped his internal containment field, drained his high-g tank, and brought him up out of sleep. The ship’s computer was too stupid to do anything but give him coordinates and readouts on the local rocks, but the illicit AI comlog interface scanned the entire region for ships—powered down or active—and pronounced this sphere of Pacem System space empty.
“So how does he get here if there is no ship?” muttered Isozaki.
“There is no way other than by ship, sir,” said the AI. “Unless he is here already, which seems unlikely since …”
“Silence,” ordered Kenzo Isozaki. He sat in the lubricant-smelling dimness of the hopper command blister and watched the asteroid half a klick distant. Hopper and rock had matched tumble rates, so it was the familiar Pacem System starfield beyond the heavily mined and cratered stone that seemed to be spinning. Other than the asteroid, there was nothing out there except hard vacuum, hard radiation, and cold silence.
Suddenly there was a knock on the outer air-lock door.
8
At the time that all these troop movements were under way, at the same time that great armadas of matte-black starships were tearing holes in the time and space continuum of the cosmos, at the precise moment when the Church’s Grand Inquisitor was sent packing to Shrike-ridden Mars and the CEO of the Pax Mercantilus was traveling alone to a secret rendezvous in deep space with a nonhuman interlocutor, I was lying helpless in bed with a tremendous pain in my back and belly.
Pain is an interesting and off-putting thing. Few if any things in life concentrate our attention so completely and terribly, and few things are more boring to listen
to or read about.
This pain was all-absorbing. I was amazed by the relentless, mind-controlling quality of it. During the hours of agony that I had already endured and was yet to endure, I attempted to concentrate on my surroundings, to think of other things, to interact with the people around me, even to do simple multiplication tables in my head, but the pain flowed into all the compartments of my consciousness like molten steel into the fissures on a cracked crucible.
These things I was dimly aware of at the time: that I had been on a world my comlog had identified as Vitus-Gray-Balianus B and in the process of dipping water from a well when the pain had felled me; that a woman swathed in a blue robe, her toenails visibly blue in her open sandals as I lay writhing in the dust, had called others in blue robes and gowns and these people had carried me to the adobe house where I continued battling the pain in a soft bed; that there were several other people in the house—another woman in a blue gown and head scarf, a younger man who wore a blue robe and turban, at least two children, also dressed in blue; and that these generous people not only put up with my moaned apologies and less articulate moans as I curled and uncurled in pain, but constantly spoke to me, patted me, placed wet compresses on my forehead, removed my boots and socks and vest, and generally continued whispering reassurances in their soft dialect as I tried to fight to keep my dignity against the onslaught of agony in my back and abdomen.
It was several hours after they brought me to their home—the blue sky had faded to rose evening outside the window—when the woman who had found me near the well said, “Citizen, we have asked the local missionary priest for help and he has gone for the doctor at the Pax base at Bombasino. For some reason, the Pax skimmers and other aircraft are all busy now, so the priest and the doctor … if the doctor comes … must travel fifty pulls down the river, but with luck they should be here before sunrise.”
I did not know how long a pull was or how much time it would take to travel fifty, or even how long the night was on this world, but the thought that there might be an end point to my agony was enough to bring tears to my eyes. Nonetheless, I whispered, “Please, ma’am, no Pax doctor.”
The woman set cool fingers against my brow. “We must. There is no longer a medic here in Lock Lamonde. We are afraid you might die without medical help.”
I moaned and rolled away. The pain roiled through me like a hot wire being pulled through too-narrow capillaries. I realized that a Pax doctor would know immediately that I was from offworld, would report me to the Pax police or military—if the “missionary priest” had not already done so—and that I was all but certain to be interrogated and detained. My mission for Aenea was ending early and in failure. When the old poet, Martin Silenus, had sent me on this Odyssey four and a half standard years earlier, he had drunk a champagne toast to me—“To heroes.” If only he had known how far from reality that toast had been. Perhaps he had.
The night passed with glacial slowness. Several times the two women looked in on me and at other times the children, in blue gowns that may have been sleeping apparel, peered in from the darkened hallway. They wore no headdress then and I saw that the girl had blond hair worn much the way Aenea had when we first met, when she was almost twelve and I twenty-eight standard. The little boy—younger than the girl I assumed to be his sister—looked especially pale; his head was shaved quite bald. Each time he looked in, his fingers fluttered at me in a shy wave. Between rolls of pain, I would feebly wave back, but each time I opened my eyes to look again, the child would be gone.
Sunrise came and went without a doctor. Hopelessness surged in me like an outgoing tide. I could not resist this terrible pain another hour. I knew instinctively that if the kind people in this household had any painkiller, they would have long since given it to me. I had spent the night trying to think of anything I had brought with me in the kayak, but the only medicine in my stowed kit was disinfectant and some aspirin. I knew that the latter would do nothing against this tidal wave of pain.
I decided that I could hold out another ten minutes. They had removed my comlog bracelet and set it within sight on an adobe ledge near the bed, but I had not thought to measure the hours of the night with it. Now I struggled to reach it, the pain twisting in me like a hot wire, and slipped the bracelet back on my wrist. I whispered to the ship’s AI in it: “Is the biomonitor function still activated?”
“Yes,” said the bracelet.
“Am I dying?”
“Life signs are not critical,” said the ship in its usual flat tones. “But you appear to be in shock. Blood pressure is …” It continued to rattle off technical information until I told it to shut up.
“Have you figured out what’s doing this to me?” I gasped. Waves of nausea followed the pain. I had long since vomited anything in my stomach, but the retching doubled me over.
“It is not inconsistent with an appendicitis attack,” said the comlog.
“Appendicitis …” Those useless artifacts had long since been gene-tailored out of humanity. “Do I have an appendix?” I whispered to the bracelet. With the sunrise had come the rustle of robes in the quiet house and several visits from the women.
“Negative,” said the comlog. “It would be very unlikely, unless you are a genetic sport. The odds against that would be …”
“Silence,” I hissed. The two women in blue robes bustled in with another woman, taller, thinner, obviously offworld-born. She wore a dark jumpsuit with the cross-and-caduceus patch of the Pax Fleet Medical Corps on her left shoulder.
“I’m Dr. Molina,” said the woman, unpacking a small black valise. “All the base skimmers are on war-game maneuvers and I had to come by fitzboat with the young man who fetched me.” She set one sticky diagnostic patch on my bare chest and another on my belly. “And don’t flatter yourself that I came all this way for you … one of the base skimmers crashed near Keroa Tambat, eighty klicks south of here, and I have to tend to the injured Pax crew while they wait for medevac. Nothing serious, just bruises and a broken leg. They didn’t want to pull a skimmer out of the games just for that.” She removed a palm-sized device from the valise and checked to see that it was receiving from the patches. “And if you’re one of those Mercantile spacers who jumped ship at the port a few weeks ago,” she continued, “don’t get any ideas about robbing me for drugs or money. I’m traveling with two security guards and they’re right outside.” She slipped earphones on. “Now what’s wrong with you, young man?”
I shook my head, gritting my teeth against the surge of pain that was ripping through my back at that second. When I could, I said, “I don’t know, Doctor … my back … and nausea …”
She ignored me while checking the palm device. Suddenly she leaned over and probed my abdomen on the left side. “Does that hurt?”
I almost screamed. “Yes,” I said when I could speak.
She nodded and turned to the woman in blue who had saved me. “Tell the priest who fetched me to bring in the larger bag. This man is completely dehydrated. We need to set up an IV. I’ll administer the ultramorph after I get that going.”
I realized then what I had known since I was a child watching my mother die of cancer—namely, that beyond ideology and ambition, beyond thought and emotion, there was only pain. And salvation from it. I would have done anything for that rough-edged, talkative Pax Fleet doctor right then.
“What is it?” I asked her as she was setting up a bottle and tubes. “Where is this pain coming from?” She had an old-fashioned needle syringe in her hand and was filling it from a small vial of ultramorph. If she told me that I had contracted a fatal disease and would be dead before nightfall, it would be all right as long as she gave me that shot of painkiller first.
“Kidney stone,” said Dr. Molina.
I must have shown my incomprehension, because she went on, “A little rock in your kidney … too large to pass … probably made of calcium. Have you had trouble urinating in recent days?”
I thought back to the beginni
ng of the trip and before. I had not been drinking enough water and had attributed the occasional pain and difficulty to that fact. “Yes, but …”
“Kidney stone,” she said, swabbing my left wrist. “Little sting here.” She inserted the intravenous needle and derm-plasted it in place. The sting of the needle was totally lost in the cacophony of pain from my back. There was a moment of fiddling with the intravenous tube and attaching the syringe to an offshoot of it. “This will take about a minute to act,” she said. “But it should eliminate the discomfort.”
Discomfort. I closed my eyes so that no one would see the tears of relief there. The woman who had found me by the well took my hand in hers.
A minute later the pain began to ebb. Nothing had ever been so welcome by its absence. It was as if a great and terrible noise had finally been turned down so that I could think. I became me again as the agony dropped to the levels I had known from knife wounds and broken bones. This I could handle and still retain my dignity and sense of self. The woman in blue was touching my wrist as the ultramorph took effect.
“Thank you,” I said through parched, cracked lips, squeezing the hand of the woman in blue. “And thank you, Dr. Molina,” I said to the Pax medic.
Dr. Molina leaned over me, tapping my cheeks softly. “You’re going to sleep for a while, but I need some answers first. Don’t sleep until you talk to me.”
I nodded groggily.
“What’s your name?”
“Raul Endymion.” I realized that I could not lie to her. She must have put Truthtell or another drug in the IV drip.
“Where are you from, Raul Endymion?” She was holding the palm-sized diagnostic device like a recorder.
“Hyperion. The continent of Aquila. My clan was …”
“How did you get to Lock Childe Lamonde on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, Raul? Are you one of the spacers who jumped ship from the Mercantilus freighter last month?”
