by Wren, M. K.
Amik only laughed at that, a response that confounded Val; she didn’t know Amik’s penchant for games or understand that Jael’s revelatory anger was the object of this one.
“So. Run short by my own kith.” Then, with a long sigh, “But, so be it. Alex, take your pretty lostling, and your gratitude will be recompense enough, apparently, since my son has developed such a taste for honesty.” Then Amik looked at Val with an engaging smile. “Forgive an old dodder his foolishness, my dear. Valentin. A lovely name, and a lovely young woman. Now—” He put on a frown for Alex and Jael. “Go with! I have no more time to waste on lessons in honesty at my son’s hands.”
Jael sent him a brief, annoyed look, then offered his arm to Val. “Alex, where shall I take her?”
“The Cave. But first you might get her some more practical clothing. Are you off duty with the chapter now?”
“Yes. For a few hours, anyway.”
“Then you can escort us to the shafts lock. I’ll wait for you here.”
Val went with Jael without hesitation, but cast a questioning look back at Alex before the door closed behind them.
Amik was smiling faintly through a veil of smoke.
“It seems my son is full of secrets. Apparently he and the Ferra have met before. Alex, will you take supper with me tonight?”
“Thank you, no. I have too much work at the Cave.”
Amik sighed gustily. “My friend, you’ve hardly come up for air these last ten days. It isn’t healthy or reasonable.”
“But necessary,” Alex laughed. “Amik. thanks for finding the ‘lostling.’ Again, I’m indebted to you.”
“From the look of it, Jael’s the one most indebted.”
“Then this one is between you and Jael.”
Amik nodded, smiling wryly. “So it seems.”
7.
Alex set the doorway shock screens as he left the small, rock-hewn bedroom. He set them for Val’s protection, not to imprison her there. The sleeping rooms were cut into the walls of the large natural chamber that presently served as a dormitory for the Brotherhood workers. But Val wouldn’t be leaving her room soon. When he left her, she was already succumbing to the inevitable reaction and exhaustion.
He found himself smiling, and there was reason enough for it. Val Severin would recover, and Predis Ussher would find an ally turned into an enemy. And this was one problem that had resolved itself positively. In that it was unique.
He paused outside his own sleeping room and looked down the tunnel connecting this chamber with the next—the chamber that would house the comcenter. It would be functional in three weeks, and within six weeks his HQ in exile would be self-sufficient and independent of Amik and the Brothers, and that would be another occasion of profound satisfaction.
It would be especially satisfying to be rid of the Brotherhood work crew, hard, wary-eyed men who prowled the chambers like wolves and, even when stripped all but naked against the daytime heat, never removed the knives sheathed at their sides. But they were hard workers, especially under Jael’s sharp eye, and they were not only conditioned, but Jael had laid blood edict for the “Insiders” supervising them. There had been no discipline problems, except for a few brawls among themselves, and the knives had never been drawn.
Still, Alex wouldn’t be sorry to see them gone.
He went into his room and set the doorscreens, then stripped off his shirt and unfastened the X1 sleeve sheath. The shirt was soaked with perspiration, and even without it he felt no cooler. Yet in a few hours, in the Midhar night, he would be uncomfortably cold. But, as Jael had promised, it was more livable here than on the surface; there his blood would literally boil at noon and freeze at midnight.
This room—he found himself thinking of it as his cell—was larger than the one assigned Val, but only because it housed a bank of monitoring screens and a comconsole. His hand moved across the controls, and six screens activated, showing him different parts of the cave.
In the hangar, where Jael was supervising the bulk of the Brotherhood crew, blasting lasers threw up dense clouds of dust; the men, wearing filter masks, moved like faceless wraiths through a hellish and bitterly connotative scene. But the work was going well; the inner locks for the surface ship access tunnel could be installed tomorrow.
Another screen showed less violent activity: the comcenter, a cavern thirty meters in diameter that would be the heart of the COS HQ. Already it had been reduced to that initialed shorthand. Ten Brothers were at work here under the aegis of three face-screened men—Phoenix comtechs, defectors from Ussher’s Phoenix—and, in time, this chamber would be comparable to the Fina comcenter, if on a smaller scale.
Alex frowned and looked at his watch. Ben would be in Leda now, but Erica was on stand-by. He put on a transceiver headset, then set the call seq on the microwave console. There was still no visual image, and these disembodied conversations were an added irritant.
“Radek on line.”
“How’s the weather?” he asked.
“I’m clear, Alex. How are you?”
“Hot and dusty, but otherwise very well.”
“How’s the installation going?”
“On schedule on every front. My next major hurdle is an MT.”
“Ben’s been working on that. M’Kim has most of the raw materials for the MTs for the Corvets. He’s already set up an assembly area, so we’ll just purloin what you need. Ben thought it would be safer to trans an MT to you piece by piece than for you to try to capture one of the Corvets. The components are small; they can be hidden or disguised very easily.”
“We’ll work out the details later.” He shifted the images on one screen to the surface and the glaring, barren vista of the Midhar. On the southern horizon, a procession of black, volcanic cones rose stark against the yellow sands. “Erica, I have some good news for you. Valentin Severin is here at the COS.
“Val? Oh, thank the God! Is she all right, Alex? Where was she? How did you—”
“Give me a chance, Erica,” he put in, laughing. “She’s exhausted and probably a little malnourished, but otherwise unharmed. Amik’s hounds found her in Leda in the main serallio of one of the Brothers; Powlo, in fact. But the hounds reached her before Powlo introduced her to his line. Anyway, she has no illusions now about the great lover, Hendrick, or about Ussher.”
“No, I’m sure she doesn’t. I’d like to talk to her.”
“She’s sleeping now, and she needs it. I’ll have her call you tomorrow. I think she’ll be just as anxious to talk to you.” He turned from the screens and sat down on the narrow bed, nerving himself to ask the question. He knew the answer, but some stubborn compulsion always drove him to ask it. “Any news on Andreas?”
Her long sigh was as much expected as the answer.
“No. Nothing new.”
Alex stared at the black stone across the narrow width of the room. “Well, they haven’t announced his execution. He’s still alive, Erica. Any field reports I should know about?” “Yes, but there’s something else that’s come up in the last hour. We’ve only had fragmentary reports so far. You’d better turn on your PubliCom screen; there should be some reports on the newscasts soon. There’s been an uprising in the Ivanoi mine complex on Ganymede. We anticipated something of the sort there, you know, and the uprising itself was relatively limited, but the ’bubble systems were at least partially incapacitated. We don’t know yet if there was a total failure or how long it lasted.”
If it was more than thirty seconds on Ganymede, it didn’t matter, not even if it was a partial failure. Jupiter’s radiation belts would make even that lethal. And if there had been a total failure—
He sat stunned and silent, skin crawling with an irrational chill. For those who lived outside the protective atmospheres of Terra or Pollux, it was a fear as basic as the infantile fear of f
alling: fear of the loss of those artificial wombs that closed out the ravenous, frigid vacuum of space.
“Any idea of the casualties?” he asked dully.
“Not yet, but if the ’bubbles were totally knocked out, the fatalities can’t be less than fifty thousand.”
“Fifty thous——Holy God!” He ran his hands through his hair distractedly. He couldn’t translate that number into comprehensible terms.
It was perhaps inevitable that one of these uprisings would turn into a real disaster in the vacuum colonies. It would also be a disaster for the liberals on the Directorate, a disaster for all Bonds, for the Concord. He went to the comconsole and turned on the PubliCom screen, leaving the sound off, watching a clown in a suit of flashing lights entertaining the children of the worlds with skillfully inept acrobatics. No news bulletin yet.
“Erica, keep me up to date on this, and get me any information you can on what triggered the uprising. There was only one strong Shepherd in the Ganymede compounds, old Matheus; he died six months ago, and I didn’t have much confidence in his successor. And as soon as the COS HQ is operational, the Brother will have to go on tour again.”
“I know. I’ve been correlating field reports, and I can pinpoint the compounds that need attention first. I’ll get that in a tape capsule tomorrow and send it to you. I have two other reports almost ready, too. One is a general stat report on the ROM, and the other—”
“The ROM?” He stared at the flashing clown, finding a dark irony in its antics.
“Oh, I guess that was one of the things that came to a head while you were vacationing at the Cliff. ROM stands for Rights of Man, an extremist liberal student organization headed by a young agitator we’ve been watching for some time, Damon Kamp. It’s a small group, but adept at attracting attention, and that tends to polarize liberal and conservative factions in the Fesh. I have another report for you, too; the Court of Lords is drafting a resolution censuring Galinin. Their main complaint is taxes and ‘general disorder,’ and it’s indicative of reactionary tendencies among the Elite.”
Alex turned away from the silenced clown and sagged down on the bed again, frowning at his begrimed hands.
“I suppose the Court doesn’t have anything better to do, but Galinin hardly deserves that. Anything else important?”
“Yes. The report you’ve very carefully refrained from asking about—the progress of the rumor campaign against Selasis.”
There was a container of water and a cup on the table by the bed. No dispensers here at the Cave of Springs, only a stringently rationed liter of water. He poured out half a cup, annoyed to find his hand so unsteady.
“Is it working, Erica?”
“Well, the story is making the rounds, and as Ben predicted, the Elite love it. In fact, some incredible embellishments have been added along the way. Both Orin and Karlis are privately livid, but publicly aloof. Karlis, of course, doesn’t manage that as well as his father. Last night he went storming into some of his old haunts in the Outside in Concordia threatening to have the entire Outside district shut down if the rumors weren’t stopped and the culprits guilty of spreading them turned over to him personally. A PubliCom news team caught him in action at one float. The story went out on the evening newscasts in Concordia.”
“What about Eliseer? Has Ben heard from Perralt?”
“This morning. He’ll fill you in when he gets back from Leda. He only had time to give me the highlights. The rumors have definitely reached Lord Loren, though. Perralt went out on a limb to talk to him about it, and Eliseer is worried, Alex. He even asked Perralt’s medical opinion—if sterility could result from any known type of venereal infection. Perralt assured him it was possible, of course, and quoted medical confreres on a recent outbreak in Concordia of a particularly virulent strain.”
Alex took a swallow of water, wincing at the bitter, mineral taste of it. It seemed to catch in his throat.
“Did Eliseer give Perralt any hint of what he might do?”
“No. Perralt said he wouldn’t hazard a guess at what his final decision will be.”
Alex looked up at the stone walls. “Erica, I must have a direct line of communication with Perralt. I don’t ask or expect it with Adrien; it’s too risky, I know, and I know Perralt is in SI and responsible first to Ben, but I would hope Ben has enough faith in me to realize I won’t abuse the . . . privilege.” He drained the cup and put it down, aware that he was betraying himself with that irritable tone. “Be grateful for small luxuries, Erica, like pure water.”
She laughed at that. “I gather you’ve slipped back into the stone age temporarily. Alex, have you talked to Ben about a direct line to Perralt?”
He rose and returned to the comconsole. “Well . . . no.”
“Then I think you should.”
“You’ve softened him up for it, I assume? All right, Erica, I’ll talk to him. Now, what’s the situation there?”
“The same. Both sides are still working at covert levels; nothing’s out in the open yet.”
“What about this war of nerves you were talking about last week?”
“I’ve come up with a tentative program, but I’ll need some recordings from you. I have a series of statements for you to tape, then Ben will plant some microspeakers. The timing will be important. Ideally, no one should be present except Predis when the speakers activate, but there should be witnesses close enough to catch his reaction.”
Alex smiled coldly. “Send me the scripts. I’ll give them the best dramatic rendering I can manage. What about Lyden and Bruce? Are they ready to leave Fina when I get set up here?”
“Yes, they’re ready and willing any time—” She stopped, and Alex saw the reason before him on the vidicom. The dancing clown was abruptly displaced by a sober newscaster, and superimposed over his image were the red-limned words, SPECIAL NEWS BULLETIN.
Alex reached for the sound control.
“All right, Erica, we’ll finish this later.” After the disaster, he thought grimly; the latest disaster.
PHOENIX MEM FI LES: DEPT HUMAN SCIENCES:
BASIC SCHOOL. (HS/BS)
SUBFILE: LECTURE. BASIC SCHOOL 29 FEBUAR 3252
GUEST LECTURER: RICHARD LAMB
SUBJECT: POST-DISASTERS HISTORY:
PANTERRAN CONFEDERATION (2903–3104)
DOC LOC #819/219–1253/1812–1648–2923252
One question should be asked in considering the Golden Age of the PanTerran Confederation—or even in considering the post-Mankeen Concord—and that is, What happened to the promised leap to the stars? Why have we leapt no further than to Centauri, our nearest stellar neighbor?
One answer is inherent in the Confederation’s method of funding and organizing exploratory expeditions. As I’ve noted, that was left to individual Houses or coalitions of Houses, and it was done in the spirit of speculation, in the hope of making a profit on an investment. Exploration for its own sake tends to be highly unprofitable, although it must be said to the credit of the Confederation Lords that many of them did invest in such nonprofit investigations in the sciences. However, with his fiscal survival at stake, a Lord might invest a small percentage of his revenues in a venture with little hope of future return, but he won’t invest a large percentage unless he’s very sure of a return, and stellar exploration is an expensive undertaking. The manufacture and “fueling” of MAM-An generators alone is a major fiscal factor, and the greater the distance involved, the greater the cost. Sometimes I think we tend to forget that SynchShift doesn’t eliminate distance, or the energy requisite to moving a body across it; it only eliminates—or, rather, modifies—the time factor.
Still, the Lords of the Confederation did invest very heavily in the leap to the stars, although more money and effort went into colonizing Centauri, as well as further development of the established Solar System colonies. In 3079,
just after the discovery of the Twin Planets, when enthusiasm for extrasolar exploration was running high, a coalition of three hundred Houses pooled their resources to finance a series of voyages beyond Centauri, the last of which lifted off in Febuar of 3104, only three months before the fateful meeting of dissident Lords in Lionar Mankeen’s Mosk Estate.
By that time, however, the number of Lords in the stellar coalition had dropped to 140, and the loss of enthusiasm wasn’t due entirely to the disruptive effects of Mankeen’s impending revolution. It was a natural result of disappointment. When the first reports came in from Alpha Centauri A describing planets that were not only inhabitable as vacuum colonies, but one so much like Terra that people could walk about on it sans vacuum suits in perfect comfort, the Lords of the Confederation—ignoring the negative evidence of Proxima and Alpha Centauri B—concluded that the existence of such planets in any solar system must be the rule and not the exception. Those Terrene planets were important not only as future sites of colonization, or for what they might produce themselves—without the expense of habitat systems—but as in-system backup and supply bases for vacuum colonies, which would lower the cost of resource exploitation considerably.
However, such Terrene planets proved to be the exception in our stellar neighborhood, although, if you could take a galactic average, that probably wouldn’t be the case. The Confederation coalition’s first ventures beyond Centauri, to Barnard’s star and Lalande, were total disappointments. The former offered only three gaseous giants, protosuns larger than Jupiter with even more extensive radiation belts, and the latter nothing at all in the shape of planets. The coalition gamely dug deeper into its collective coffers and built more advanced and powerful MAM-An generators and sent another expedition to Sirius, and there met with some success in the first four planets of Sirius A. But they found no watery Terrene planets, only small images of Mercury and Mars. Still, the initial surveys indicated huge lodes of ores of many kinds, and Ivanoi, Cameroodo, and Shang established outposts on all of Sirius A’s inner planets.
