To top it all, Simeon walked in. “Yanna's asleep,” he explained and took a vacant seat to one side from the pilot’s. “How long are we going to creep like this?” he asked, watching two fireballs trying unsuccessfully to catch up with the shuttle, bobbing about in the its engines' wake.
“Twenty minutes,” Jedian managed.
The ship entered a massive layer of clouds impregnated with water which stretched for many miles, covering the monitors with gray mist.
“You’d better go to the passengers’ cabin,” Jedian advised gloomily. “There’s a thunder front before us. It's going to be bumpy.”
“Can't we go any faster?” Simeon seemed to have ignored Jedian’s last words.
Jedian mentally counted to ten. “Too much electricity here. You don’t want one hundred fireballs to tail us, do you?”
“They're not fast enough,” Simeon objected. “According to calculations, we can go faster without weakening the force shields' protective properties.”
“How d’you know?”
Simeon smiled. “Arithmetic.”
“You're good at mental calculations, then?”
Simeon shrugged, watching the leaden cloud castles whirl to his right, discharging bolts of lightning that hit the gray haze. The claps of thunder rocked the shuttle quite perceptibly.
Jedian struggled to keep his cool. Just think that only two weeks ago he could have decided this brat's fate! Who did he think he was? Had he destroyed his memory crystal there and then, the Io would have disappeared in the depths of space as it should, a worthless piece of scrap metal!
But now it was too late, he thought glaring at Simeon's back. If that demented idiot Vorontsov made him his heir, Jedian couldn't stop him. Should he maybe strangle the kid now?
Momentarily Jedian indulged in the idea, only to recover the next minute at the thought of all possible consequences. If he as much as touched a hair of Simeon's head, the admiral would skin him alive. For him, this kid was a ghost of his irredeemable past. The old fool had decided to strike a deal with his own conscience.
Wait a sec, he stopped himself. Did Simeon actually know who had sentenced his adoptive father to a certain death, abandoning him on that ship's fragment? And how sure were they that Simeon was indeed Andrei's son?
Jedian shuddered with the thought. He turned his head. Simeon perched himself on the edge of the control panel, watching their progress across the sky. Jedian's thoughts resumed their course. Actually, Simeon's mother was absent from his memories. Were there really any women among the survivors?
Yeah, right. Even if he was who he was pretending to be, it was well worth planting a few doubts in grandfather's mind. Of course! It was Jedian's duty to make sure the two confronted each other. Knowing the Admiral's character, the outcome could be impressive.
Jedian felt he was on the right path. Asking for the boy's DNA test might not be a bad idea, either.
Simeon looked as if he was trying to second-guess him. "I've interfered in your life," he said without turning round, "but if you think that I want Vorontsov's money, you're wrong."
Jedian clutched the armrests of his seat. He was too much!
Simeon turned to him. "We simply wanted to get back, don't you understand?" his voice rang with bitterness. "It was all the same to us where to, we just wanted to see people."
"You were lucky to reach Rory's system," Jedian croaked, unable to restrain himself anymore. "That's the only reason you're still alive! Any idea what could have happened to you had you arrived at any other planet? You would have starved to death! Your stinking robot would have been scrapped, and as for Yanna, she would have never regained consciousness because you'd have been unable to pay for her treatment! Who do you think you are?" Jedian stood up in his seat. "Look around you. The world is crawling with bums like yourself! Why should anyone help you? Why should they feel sorry for you? There are thousands of starving children on any planet, dying without help from anyone!"
Simeon's face turned gray. "I need neither your world nor your money," he repeated. "You're all raving mad if you can watch your children starve and die. You'll exterminate yourselves."
"Then why are you going to Stellar?" Jedian shouted.
"That's none of your business. I need to see Vorontsov."
"Aha, so you admit you recognize the power of money. Without it, you're nothing. Do you know that it was Admiral Vorontsov who left his own son — your father! — there to die? Think I'm imagining it? Go check the archives, it's all there! He abandoned his son on a ship's fragment in exchange for a nice little career for himself ! In exchange for his money!"
"Stop it!" Simeon shouted. "I know it."
Jedian opened his eyes wide and sank back in his seat, totally confused. "Do you?" he asked.
Simeon was deadly pale. "I read my father's diaries," he answered. "Don't you worry: I know perfectly well what I've come back to."
He headed for the exit, but lingered in the doorway. "Just don't get Yanna into this mess," he said. "Keep yourself in check, at least until we reach Stellar. This is my sole request." The door closed.
Furious, Jedian punched the instrument board. "I'm going to show everyone what you're like," he hissed through his clenched teeth.
The gray haze of the monitors was replaced by a violet-black abyss with Stellar sparkling amid it.
The shuttle had entered outer space.
* * *
Time hung heavy on Jedian's hands. Finally the shuttle was docked with the personal spacecraft of the Admiral. Its little crew attended to Simeon and his companion.
Without paying attention to anybody, Jedian passed straight to his cabin equipped in the same way as was the laboratory on Stellar.
Jedian had firmly decided to fight to the end.
While the automatic system was establishing a connection with Stellar, he took out a duplicate of the crystal disc and inserted it into the disc drive of an on-board computer.
Simeon's memories had not been deciphered in their entirety.
Jedian was surprised at himself. He had always been so balanced, had calculated his moves so well while keeping his eyes on the prize. Not this time. The sudden crash of his hopes had unsettled him.
He had to pace himself, Jedian kept repeating.
His hand lay onto the keyboard. He lingered with sending a landing request to Stellar. Instead, he ordered a coffee and was deep in the analysis of Simeon's memories that the on-board computer was reading out for him from the crystal disc.
He was working as he never had before. Like a wolf sensing a prey nearby, he was going deeper and yet deeper into the surreal world of mental images, aiming to reach the very first, still semiconscious imprints. It wasn't easy. Even the perfect processors of the twenty-eighth century often proved powerless when faced with the mysteries of a human brain. The crystal disc now contained a few pieces of very special software designed in Stellar's secret laboratories. They were mainly intended for mnemonic interrogations.
It had been the pinnacle of his work. Jedian Lange's very own creation.
Ten years ago on Vorontsov's orders all battle spacesuits of the Confederation's Fleet had been equipped with special scanners. They recorded the electric pulses of the astronaut's cortex. Every day thousands of disks with these records arrived on Stellar, destined for Jedian's laboratories. Gradually, he'd created a unique database. The analysis of some entries allowed the identification of certain impulses as feelings or visual images.
His ten years' worth of hard work was now represented by the graphs running across the screen. They crossed to form a complex pattern; the computer was analyzing it while drawing an initially vague image that was gradually becoming more and more precise. The images on the screen were coming to life.
Now and then the images were accompanied by a running text line that represented the astronaut's thoughts. Normally, Jedian stopped the process and moved on to the next image whenever he realized that the memory had something to do with the gloom and chaos of the
cemetery of spacecraft.
He was searching for something else.
And he did find it. Forty minutes later he leaned back in his chair, pale and exhausted, clutching the armrests with his trembling fingers. Got it. Just what he'd been looking for.
Simeon hadn't been born at the ships' cemetery.
He sat huddled. The boulders exuded cold. The boy's tiny body gradually succumbed to exposure. Finally, it stopped quivering. A blue grass blade quivering in the breeze, the sound of heavy footsteps, the rattle of metal — these were the things he remembered. Inside him, resentment grew toward the warm world which had suddenly become cold and strange.
It was the earliest of Simeon's memories, and it explicitly proved that he'd been born on a planet. To top it all, the weird purple-hued grass could possibly indicate his home!
Jedian pulled himself together. He switched on a text encoder and started typing the first lines of a report to the Admiral. There was a feverish and almost insane gleam in his eyes.
* * *
The officer on duty took Simeon and Yanna to the visitors' cabin.
They found themselves in a spherical room, the walls and ceiling of which represented huge screens offering a full telescopic view. They could control the picture, zooming parts of it in and out and changing the viewing angle. The soft seats and folding couches by the little carved tables were screwed to the floor and stuffed with sensitive electronics; no sound penetrated the cabin, and only the movement of stars on the screen and the rare flashes of directional thrusters betrayed the ship's movement.
Yanna sat down in a chair and glanced sideways at Simeon who leaned over the computer's terminal. In the last few hours he hadn't said a word. She couldn't understand why he'd changed so much. Having awoken in the life support center on Rory, she'd found herself surrounded by the stuff of their dreams — the dreams that had always dwelt in their hearts. Then, why was Simeon so gloomy? Certainly she knew about the combat on board the Io, but all's well that ends well. Hadn't he had to fight battle machines day in, day out when they'd lived on the Island?
His sudden alienation made her feel uneasy. Nothing and nobody could separate them, but Simeon, how could she put it... he looked old.
Unable to conceal her feelings for much longer, she walked over to Simeon and wrapped her arms around him. "You okay?" she whispered.
Simeon covered her hand with his. "Our true happiness was in its anticipation," he admitted.
Yanna looked into his eyes. In the whole Universe they were the only two people to speak that way. "You know something."
Simeon's blue eyes concealed a grayish hue. 'Like blue steel,' Yanna thought. Neither he nor she realized that their relationship had already grown out of its youth.
"I've seen death."
That sounded like a verdict. The words hurt her like a whip lashing a delicate skin. Yanna started. "But we did come back," she tried to object.
"So what?"
The question stunned her. 'So what, really?'
Then she asked: "Perhaps we've come to the wrong place?"
Simeon shook his head. He had pondered a lot over their problems during those last days. The dreams once fostered by their childish minds had been crushed and discarded. He couldn't find the words to explain it to Yanna, just as he'd been unable to do so at their first meeting in the bowels of the spheroid; a deadly chill had been clenching his heart since the moment when the Io was attacked. His dreams had been trampled, sliced by lasers just like Spyte had been, torn apart like Frauenberg and killed by vacuum like Vladimir. People knew not what they did. And the most terrible thing was that they, in a way, enjoyed the process!
Yanna looked in his eyes again. "Please don't," she whispered in despair.
He gently took her by the shoulders and turned her toward the sectors of the screen that displayed the airless surface of Stellar drifting past.
Their spacecraft followed a high-altitude orbit, and the main city of the planet lay before their eyes.
The super-megalopolis could impress the most experienced traveler. It was located on the bottom of a crater that was one hundred miles in diameter and was protected by a spherical force shield. The city glowed its many colored lights, encircled by a mountain range topped with the menacing batteries of space defense systems. In fact, it was the mountain range itself, riddled with caves and tunnels, that had initially been called Fort Stellar. For decades it had remained an ordinary military base, conveniently located in close proximity to Rory. The city on the crater's bottom had appeared much later.
They were flying over a boundless, airless plain studded with the gray squares of strategic launching sites. Some of them were empty; others were occupied by pressurized repair rigs while yet others sheltered squadrons of spaceships ready to take off.
That was the heart of the military machine of the Tri-Solar Confederation. Tens, even hundreds of miles of gray armor, heaps of metal and plastic, billions of galactic credits, hundreds of thousands of human lives – all this in the name of the so-called Safety Doctrine.
As Simeon watched the unfolding panorama, his hopes dwindled. Rory's velvet plains which they had left far below and tens of other planets were but the hostages of this gloomy gray monster stretching over half the Universe. The Safety Doctrine: an unfeeling mechanical guardian of human life whose creators had long been reduced to an army of ants swarming inside it.
He glanced at Yanna. She stared at the screens, as silent as himself. Color had drained from her face, replaced by a deathly pallor.
Her lips moved. A nervous chill clenched her chest. The ten days that she had spent at Jedian's villa after leaving the life support center now seemed like a distant rose-colored dream. The scales began to fall from her eyes.
She tried to restrain her uneven breathing. Before Simon could say anything, she already found the right definition of the panorama unfolding below. That was their Island, the difference being that this one was in good working order, brimming with deadly mechanics and operated by soulless machines. As for people, they apparently didn't realize that the automatic world they had created would only bring destruction, death and suffering to the tens of worlds that existed so far.
The door behind them hissed open. Jedian walked into the cabin.
Simeon turned to him. "When are we going to land?" he asked.
"Soon," Jedian opened the bar's glass doors, produced a glass and pulled a chair toward himself. "You'd better take a seat," he suggested.
Simeon gave him a long look. "Bad news?"
Hatred flooded Jedian. Why was the boy so calm? "No. But I'd like to ask you a question before we land."
Yanna sat down opposite him. Simeon leaned back in his seat. He was ready for bad news and he wasn't mistaken.
Jedian took a sip from his glass. "Soon we'll be on Stellar. Your grandfather will certainly demand a full report on my researches into your memories. I think I've discovered something interesting," he grinned. "Tell me, did your father mention any planet with a blue grass in his diaries?"
Yanna looked at Jedian, then at Simeon.
"I don't think so," Simeon answered. "I can't see your point."
"Shame," Jedian rose. "You two think about it, anyway," he said, stepping out. "While you still have time."
The door closed.
* * *
Simeon slumped into his seat and sat still, clasping his head with his hands.
"Simeon, dear, what's the matter with you?" Yanna approached him. "Say something!"
"The grass," his voice rang with pain. "You see, I do remember."
"Remember what?"
Simeon squeezed his eyes so tight that he saw iridescent circles float before him. His brain was about to explode.
Finally, he heaved a sigh. "No, I can’t remember," he looked about in despair, as if seeking support from the large shimmering row of screens.
"Leave it. You're hurting yourself."
Simeon nodded.
"What can we do?" Yanna took him by th
e hand — their old habit. "I have this feeling like I'm drifting away through space and can’t come back," she admitted.
Stellar's surface filled the screens, rushing past in every detail. The ship approached the planet's artificial surface. Landing sites were followed by squat gun towers which, in their turn, gave place to the rectangular buildings of some automatic factory rising into the black sky. The planet was clad in gray armor with only the distraction of the spaceship's clearance lights. The glittering dome of the force shield over the super megalopolis towered in front of them, gradually growing in size.
"Would you like to stay and live here?" Simeon's voice sounded dull.
Yanna took her time answering. She watched the gray monolith of the planet, remembering Rory's warm plains; in her mind's eye, the creepy vines of the mirror trees whose soft leaves she'd kissed only yesterday reveling in the touch of organic life, were now reaching out through space, climbing the turrets of space defense towers: a surreal collage entitled hopelessness.
"Why?" she asked by way of reply.
Simeon chuckled bitterly. "We've left the spheroid searching for happiness. I used to think that the Island was the most unnatural place in the Universe, created by injustice and madness. That was what my father used to tell me. But the Island was our home, you see?"
A flame licked the screens as the craft began to land. Two rows of blinding blue lights flashed ahead, indicating a gap in the city's force dome.
Simeon turned to her, tenderness and fury in his eyes. He wasn't going to sacrifice their lives to this monster. He wasn't afraid of machines — nor of people.
"The Island was controlled by a set of rules. We were used to sticking to the rules and thought it would never change," he touched her cheek. "We were children then — and we wanted to remain just that."
He smiled. "We used to see everything in black and white. On one side there was light, on the other darkness.
"No," Yanna grabbed his hand. "What's the point in blaming people? We've been dreaming about meeting them, remember! It might not be as bad as you think!"
The Island of Hope Page 14
