Empery

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “Even when you disagree?”

  Berberon cocked an eyebrow and shrugged. “If my wisdom were better thought of, I would be on the World Council, not representing it.”

  “Felithe, please—am I wrong to mistrust Wells? To want this weapon never to come into existence?” There was honest anguish in her voice.

  It was Berberon’s turn to stare out the window as he carefully composed an answer. “I am convinced that Wells is sincerely interested in the security of the Unified Worlds. If I may revive .an archaic word, he is a patriot. That is both his strength and his weakness. As for Triad—perhaps it is my age that makes me so fearless. I hope the Mizari are gone, extinct thousands of years ago. But if they are not, I would like to know that we will fare better against them the second time.”

  “Then your own beliefs are not so far from official policy as you might have wanted me to think.“Berberon’s smile was rueful. “In this instance, perhaps not, after all.”

  Eyes downcast, Blythe drew her knees up to her chest and hugged them. “I suppose I’ve known this has been coming since he joined the Committee.” She raised her head and met Berberon’s gaze. “Thank you for coming by, Ambassador. You can see yourself out?”

  She seemed lonely; perhaps that was inevitable for one in her position. If he were a younger man, or a different kind of man, he might have stayed and tried to fill that need. But it was not the kind of thing Felithe Berberon did, not the kind of relationship he formed. He had learned that lesson decades ago: that as expediency demanded, he could find himself tomorrow lining up against a friend made today. Knowing that, he had kept his distance and been rewarded for his discipline. Through the years Chancellors and Directors alike came and went, while Berberon carried on just the same, his tenure unprecedented and unequalled.

  But as he left the executive complex, a part of him wondered against his will whether he knew how to stop playing the role in which he had submerged himself for so long, and whether he would have had what Erickson needed within him to give.

  “Archive,” Erickson said softly, curled up alone in the viewpit of her darkened apartment.

  “Ready,” answered the netlink.

  “Terran history. Nines. Statement of purpose. Exclude references previously accessed. Primary sources if available.”

  “No contemporary primary sources available. I have twenty-four speeches by founder Eric Lange from his campaign for supervisor of Sudamerica District 5.”

  “Oldest entry. Context.”

  “Year 610 A.R. A public rally in Montevideo, Sudamerica. Estimated attendance, six thousand. Source of reference, Earthnet polinews archive.”

  “Show me,” Erickson said, settling back firmly against the cushions.

  The greatroom lights dimmed further, and a flatscreen video element in the viewpit’s broad window came to life.“There were warnings,” the image of Eric Lange said to the overflow crowd in the seedy public hall. “William Clifford, a man who would be here tonight had he not lived nearly a thousand years ago, a man who was in every way one of us, saw what was coining.

  “ ‘A race which is fixed, persistent in form, unable to change,’ he said, ‘is surely in peril of extinction. It is quite possible for conventional rules and habits to get such power that progress is impossible, and the race is fit only for death. In the face of such a danger, it is not right to be proper!’

  “Clifford was right—but no one listened. We went on taxing the winners so that losers could be made equal. We went on legitimizing the claims of the have-nots and would-nots and could-nots. We went on elevating mediocrity. And we taught our children that that was what it meant to be civilized.”

  There was a light in Lange’s eyes that seemed to burn through Erickson’s objective remove, and his voice had the compelling power of honest conviction. A powerful speaker, yes, but no demagogue, she thought. Every word spoken from the heart, every idea the product of introspection—

  “They will ask us what we stand for,” Lange said. “We will tell them. We believe in survival.” He was cheered. “They will ask us what we want. We will tell them. We want the freedom to grow.” The cheers resounded.

  “They will ask us what we offer. We will tell them. We offer change—change for the better if we can, but if not, then change for its own sake. We have a right to live in interesting times. We have a right to struggle, and if we are worthy, to greatness.”

  The. audience told him, with six thousand massed voices, that they agreed. Lange smiled an uncomfortable, embarrassed smile and waited for them to quiet.

  “They will ask us our name,” he began again softly. “And we will tell them. We are the not-average. We are the non-followers.” As he continued, his voice rose, and the sound of voices crying “Yes” rose with it to reach a roar. “We are the un-mediocre. We are the movers. We are the dreamers. We are the builders and planners. We mastered fire. We invented writing. And we colonized the stars. We are the Nines. We are the Nines. And we will not be denied our birthright.”

  The images played in Erickson’s mind long after she closed the archive file and shut off the netlink. It was still “tonight” for Lange, still the pinnacle of his triumph. There was no hint there of what would come just three months later.

  How would it be different if you hadn’t been killed, if those who reacted to your message with fear instead of cheers hadn’t dragged you from your house and silenced you? she wondered. At the very least the Nines wouldn’t have felt the need to go underground, and we would have known who we were fighting.

  Would you have approved of them as they are now? Would you have embraced the same goals? I hear the origins of their agenda in your words—it’s all there. But is what they want what you wanted? I believe you truly meant to lift us up, but what they do promises to drag us down—

  Tipping back his head, Wells drained the tall glass of ice water, then refilled it and drank half. As he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, he noted the clock and was surprised to see that it read 20:40.

  Returning to his seat, Wells viewed one last time the seven-and-a-half-minute unnarrated clip of the Ba’ar Tell FFI exercise. The first edit had been too slick, too theatrical—too patently intended to end all debate over the Defender’s effectiveness. This one, the third, was better: the overview of the Defender system and strategy he had ordered added at the beginning made everything that followed more effective.

  “Save,” Wells said. “File to Wells, Defense Archives, Committee Chamber. Level One voice-lock.”

  “Done,” replied the terminal.

  Now—what else needs my attention before I leave? He ran through a mental list as precise and complete as if it had been written down and came up with only one item: Farlad’s new Thackery document. I’ll give it ten minutes, Wells thought. That probably will be enough.

  But first he touched the com key. “Ronina.”

  The terminal needed no more guidance than that. On its own it quickly sought out her com address from his directory and placed the call. When she came on, her voice contained a gratifying note of surprise and pleasure. “Mack—how nice. I’ve been hoping you hadn’t crossed me off your list.”

  That was one of Ronina’s few unattractive features—her propensity for prompting him for reassurance, for setting him up to offer some verbal endorsement of her status. As he usually did, he ignored the cue. “I’ll be done here in a little while—”

  “I’ll take that as an invitation,” she purred. “Do you want to come here or should I go up to your apartment?”

  “Mine, I think.”

  “I’ll be waiting for you—and thinking wicked thoughts.”

  Then, clearing the screen of his notes for the next day’s presentation, Wells called up his private files, an act that required voice-password and retinal identification. There was a brief pause as the decryptor failed to keep pace with the system’s file retrieval speed, and then the menu popped up on the screen.

  The file was named, unambiguously, MERR
ITT THACKERY. Shortly after becoming Director of Defense, Wells had begun a search of Service records for any and all anecdotal accounts by Thackery of his encounter with the D’shanna he called Gabriel and of what Thackery saw while on the spindle.

  There turned out to be hundreds of such documents. It was impossible to believe that anyone anywhere had ever been more intensively interviewed and debriefed than had Thackery after his return from the spindle. There were literally thou sands of hours of interviews: normal, under time-expansion hypnosis, and using endorphin memory-enhancement therapy.

  Had Service physicians known how to dissect Thackery’s brain and suck out the memories directly, Wells did not think they would have hesitated to do so.

  The documents told Wells what every schoolchild knew, and little more. Then in the drive core of the shattered Survey ship Dove, Gabriel had reached out from the spindle and taken Thackery back with him across the barrier. That from the vantage of the energy matrix of the spindle, Gabriel showed Thackery the echoes of the ice-age Earth-based civilization that had founded the heretofore inexplicable human colonies.

  Traveling downtime on the spindle, Thackery witnessed the Mizari’s savage attack on the Weichsel civilization. He learned the danger that awaited in the Ursa Major cluster, and he brought that warning back to the matter-matrix, once thought the only reality. And in doing so he had become the best-known personage in human history. Thackery’s miraculous translocation persuaded the skeptics, as it had the Survey brass, that the story he told was not fantasy, however fantastic.

  But the things that Wells wanted most to find, even needed to find, simply were not there. There were no details about the Mizari, no glimpse of their world or even themselves, no hint of what moved them or, even more importantly, what their vulnerabilities might be. Not trusting the task to anyone else, Wells had plowed his way through more than two thirds of the documents in a search for even a handful of clues about the Mizari.

  He had not found even one.

  Farlad’s flagnote for Jiadur’s Wake indicated that it had been written after Thackery’s retirement and represented the last contact between the Service and the one time Director of the Survey Branch. When Thackery had offered the text to the Earthnet for distribution, they had routinely referred it to the Committee for clearance. Clearance had been summarily denied—and rightly so, Wells saw immediately—on grounds of executive privilege and internal security. It began:

  I am Merritt Thackery. If you think you know me, you do not. I have seen the videos of my life, and it was not so. The creators of those images grafted the places and faces of my life onto another person, a stronger, more self-confident person, a person who might well have been due the acclaim that I have accrued. That person was admirable, even heroic, and his story entertaining. But it was not me, and it was not my story.

  When I returned to Earth, I was asked what I did, and I told them. I was asked what I saw, and I told them. But I was never asked what I felt, and when I offered it myself, there was little interest. Somehow that was deemed not worthy of study, or thought too subjective to be trustworthy. What they wanted, and therefore what they got, was the testimony of a witness, not the experiences of a man.

  So the story that the Service eventually released, and the creative talents of the Nets transmogrified, was but the skeleton of truth, lacking the sinew of emotion to animate it, the tissue of humanity to smooth over the awkward joints. The truth is this: What I did could have been done as well by another. And there have been times when I wished that it had been.

  If you prefer your histories simple and your heroes untarnished, read no farther. But if you prefer the truth, whatever shape it takes, then read on, for it is for you that I have written this.

  Farlad was right—I’ve found you at last, Wells thought with satisfaction. He touched the com key. “Ronina.”

  “I’m here, sweet. Will you be long?” She answered in video mode, posing before the terminal in a translucent cat suit that revealed creamy white skin down nearly to her nipples and hid very little elsewhere. But even that sight was insufficient inducement to change his mind. “Go home. I won’t be coming back to the apartment, after all,” he said, and cued forward to the first chapter.

  Chapter 3

  * * *

  Sword

  It was nearly four in the morning when Wells finished reading. He had moved from the desk to a couch and traded the fixed terminal for a hand-held slate. His eyes were weary, and when he set the slate aside, he dimmed the room’s lights for their sake. But he was nowhere near sleep, for his mind was full of what he had just read.

  The tone of the manuscript was mocking, cynical, almost embittered. Despite it, or perhaps because of it, Jiadur’s Wake sang, and Wells had found himself drawn in.

  Though not strictly chronological, most of the first half of the text dealt with the early history of the Service, beginning with the Reunion of Earth with its daughter world, Journa, and continuing through the Revision, which had closed out the Phase II explorations in which Thackery had taken part.

  His portrait of the Service was blunt and unflattering, pointing up the flaws and foibles of both the organization as a whole and the individuals who comprised it. But he was no more kind to himself. Speaking frankly of his initial lack of commitment, his later selfishness, his subsequent obsession, Thackery laid waste to his own popular image as a self-directed hero.

  Wells was not obliged to accept Thackery’s own harsh appraisal of his worth. Clearly Thackery had succumbed in his later years to the imposter syndrome, that self-destructive suspicion that one’s success is due to luck and accident, not personal merit. Even great men grow weary, Wells thought.

  But Wells accepted enough of Thackery’s self-deprecation at face value to lay to rest a nagging puzzle. From the time he first began to study Revision history, Wells had been haunted by the conviction that there was more to the story than was being told.

  Wells could not believe that Thackery had not demanded to see the Mizari home world, to divine their nature. All he would have had to do is look out from the spindle and he would have seen them, as he had seen what they had done to Earth, as he had seen the death of the Weichsel ship, which in turn had brought on the death of the Weichsel. Thackery must have done so; the Service must be concealing what he learned. Of that Wells had been certain.

  That certainty had been one of several motivations that had led him to a career in the USS. If there was more to learn, the Service was the natural custodian of that knowledge. To share in it, he would have to become one of them. To learn, then, that even the Service knew nothing more had only compounded his consternation. The months-long search through the Thackery file had been motivated by the hope that they contained data lost or overlooked.

  Now, as Thackery the man rewrote Thackery the legend, it was easier to understand. Thackery had been afraid. He had been overwhelmed by what he had seen—no shame in that, surely!—and his time on the spindle had been cut short by his own inability to deal with the revelations granted to him. Consequently the things that Wells needed to learn, Thackery had never known.

  But the D’shanna knew. Looking out from the energy-matrix that flowed from the universe’s beginning and guaranteed its end, the D’shanna could provide perfect knowledge of the Mizari: what they were, where they were, and how they could be dealt with. The D’shanna could do at any time what Thackery had failed to do in his only opportunity.

  Yet in the century and a half since the Revision, no such collaboration had taken place. Thackery had reported that of all the D’shanna only Gabriel had taken note of the human species and an interest in its plight. And Gabriel had been crippled by the time of his encounter with Thackery and thereafter had either “died” or gone far uptime on the spindle to rejoin his own kind and replenish himself. Either Way, Gabriel was beyond reach.

  These were the givens: that Thackery’s experience had been unique and unrepeatable and that the D’shanna could not be counted on to do an
y more than they already had.

  But Jiadur’s Wake told Wells that Thackery’s feelings toward the D’shanna had not been sufficiently taken into account. One passage near the end illumed that more clearly than the rest:

  … Somehow, because of our need for heroes, I have been credited for that which Gabriel did. If there was sacrifice, the greater sacrifice by far was his, for he owed us no loyalty save that which his morality imposed upon himself. For that reason, if there was nobility, it was Gabriel’s, not mine. My interests were selfish, his selfless. The human race has never had a better friend. Nor have I.

  For, while I was on the spindle, Gabriel and I were intimate in a way that I had never before nor have ever since experienced with another human. It was a quality of relationship that is beyond depiction, beyond description, just as the spindle itself cannot be understood solely in terms of. the matter-matrix. Without masks or barriers or deceptions each grasped and accepted the essence of the other. It was the purest moment of my life, a high, clear note of joy.

  Gabriel gave us life, knowledge, and identity, perhaps at the cost of his own. And I, our feeble ambassador, was able to give him nothing in return…

  Wells had been searching for what had been overlooked, not hidden. None of the memory aids used in Thackery’s debriefing could make a man say what he did not want to say. It was assumed throughout that Thackery was a willing subject, eager to share everything that he knew.

  But was that true?

  A dark suspicion was forming in Wells’s mind, a slippery, shadowy thought that resisted his efforts to dislodge it. Where were your loyalties, Thackery? What didn’t you tell us? Perhaps that you could call Gabriel at will? Did you think to protect him from further demands, or perhaps insure that no one would intrude on that most perfect relationship with that most empathic mind?

  It was a shocking, almost treasonous thought—that Merritt Thackery, the most outstanding figure in Service history, the architect of the Revision, had been compromised by divided loyalties, had held back information because of the bond he felt with an alien being.