by Joe Pace
As they continued their descent, the stairs began to widen and the quality of the light to change. Most of the stairwell had been suffused with flickering lamplight, making each step dance with shadow beneath their feet. Pearce had grown accustomed to such illumination during evenings at Arkadas’ home and elsewhere on Cygnus; there was a kind of rustic romance to it, and it reminded him of the fire in the hearth at Minister Banks’ house so many evenings and parsecs ago. But the deeper they went, the more smooth and unchanging the glow became, spilling upward from some unknown source below. At last, they reached the bottom. The stairs ended, without doorway or other barrier, opening into a huge room that Pearce knew he would never forget for the rest of his days, however many might remain.
It was wide and deep, the size of a cricket pitch, though the ceiling was low, no more than three meters above. All of it was blindingly white and sterile, like a hospital. Or a laboratory, thought Pearce. For an instant, his attention was drawn to the recessed panels at regular intervals overhead. These were the origin of the clear, even lighting, and he was struck by the incongruence of it, but then what was in the room, the realization of what it had been so clearly built to house and to study, drove all other thoughts from his mind.
“My God,” he murmured. “Alexander.”
The remains of the robot – even in this condition of obvious inhumanity, Pearce could not help but think of them as remains – were spread, dissected and sprawling, across the square meters of the white tile floor in the approximate pattern of an absurdly distended, spread-eagled man. The jumble and layout resembled the fossil fragments of some ancient beast, laid out for articulation. Wires ran alongside painstakingly deconstructed servos, gears, and circuits, all bracketed in ghoulish silhouette by segments of the plastisteel exoskeleton. Here and there the casings showed scrapes and dents, and Pearce knew those were where Cygni blows had fallen a decade before. He stood alongside Arkadas, hands hanging loosely at his sides in astonishment, just above what had once been the head of the machrine. Near Pearce’s foot was the rounded dome of the skullcap, crumpled and misshapen. Just below, farther apart than they should have been, and darker than they should have been, too, were the translucent optic covers, one cracked almost precisely in half.
Pearce wanted, absurdly, to apologize to Alexander-457. Staring at the desecrated mechanical innards of the robot, his mind kept replaying the thing’s…what? Death? Why would you apologize to a machine? he thought. Would you apologize to a desk computing unit, disassembled for recycling when broken or worn out? And yet, a computer had never given up its existence, sacrificed itself for him. Those forever darkened optics glared at him unblinking, reproachful, abandoned, and violated.
“You see before you,” Arkadas whispered, his voice low, as though they were in a place of worship instead of illicit science, “the salvation of my people.”
“I see before me,” Pearce growled, his hands balling into fists, “the theft and vandalism of His Majesty’s property.” Arkadas smiled, a bit indulgently.
“Come now. Theft? You abandoned this piece of equipment in your haste to flee, remember?”
“I remember. And I remember why we had to flee that night. Have you forgotten?”
“I haven’t,” Arkadas replied softly. “I told you before about the shrewdness of General Tavar. Part of his signal brilliance was his mastery of timing. When he felt the time was right, he swung the military’s support behind Priestess Kaitsma, and together they drove you from Horfa.”
“Why?” demanded Pearce. “Surely we had demonstrated during our stay that we were neither bloodthirsty conquerors nor plundering raiders. We exchanged knowledge, shared our technology with you…” He trailed off, his eyes returning to the meticulously preserved ruins of Alexander-457.
“Yes,” said Arkadas. “You descended in your marvelous vessel – merely a rowboat compared to your interstellar vehicle, we later came to understand – and paraded about with your automatons and your advanced weapons. And then you so generously doled out your vast technology in nice, digestible chunks, so appropriate to what you considered to be our stage of development. Not unlike your performance upon your recent return to Horfa, my friend. Farming techniques. Steam power. Discoveries and advancements we would have achieved within decades without your help.” He fixed Pearce with his unwavering blue stare. “And you say I lied to you ten years ago. Who lied in the Council chambers, Commander? Well, if you want what you came for, we demand fair exchange.”
“Arkadas, where is Luther-45?”
“You know,” the Cygni replied, one corner of his mouth twitching into a near-smile, “it took us the better part of two years just to take this one apart. It was clearly non-operative, but we had no idea what manner of energy powered the thing, or what kind of damage might occur – to us or the robot – if we proceeded too swiftly. We understand electricity, of course, and have for some years now. But generating it reliably, capturing it and taming it for our own purposes has always eluded us. Ah, but what your Alexander taught us! We learn swiftly, judar, and with time and effort and caution we deduced a great deal from what you see before you.” Arkadas gestured upwards at the lighting panels. “It is, of course, an ongoing process, and one limited by the defunct nature of this machine. What we needed was a working example.” He was pacing now, just a little, his hands clasped behind his thin back. “Would you ever come back? I, and many of my caste, thought it unlikely, but General Tavar, in one of his final letters, surmised that you were too great an empire to overlook what happened for long, and that in time you would return to chastise us.” Arms outstretched, he almost laughed. “All we wanted was another robot to study. More of your technology to penetrate and mimic. Perhaps The Faith is correct. All comes to those in need.”
“Where is Luther?” repeated Pearce, grinding his teeth. They had been played for fools from the moment the Harvest arrived. No, he realized, long before that. From when the Drake came. He thought of Captain Jane Baker, cold in that grave at Friendship Point – how that name rankled – and that stone monument. Visitor and benefactor indeed.
“Oh, he is here. Or rather, it is here. I’ve noticed you use the terms interchangeably, which I can appreciate. It is an object, a thing, but it replicates sentience well enough that it can be difficult to remember that it is not a living creature.”
“I am running out of patience,” Pearce snarled. “Men and women died that day, ours and yours, and you speak as though it was all worthwhile so you can greedily devour whatever knowledge you can steal from us. Jane Baker was a great officer and a great woman, and she is dead because of you.”
“Not me. Tavar. Or, more accurately, because of Tavar’s tactical genius mixed with her refusal to treat us as an adult society.”
“Enough! You must know that there are laws and regulations that prohibit us from introducing inappropriately advanced technology into a society that is not ready for it. You will not blame Captain Baker, or me, for adhering to those rules.” Now Arkadas actually did laugh.
“Appropriate by whose evaluation? Yours?”
“Yes,” said Pearce, through a clenched jaw. This is taking too long. “We are centuries ahead of your people, Arkadas. The Kingdom earned every advance, through the mistakes and trials of our scientists, through our own intellectual labors, every step built upon others in a meaningful process, our leaders forced to deal with the moral consequences of each advance in its own sequence.”
“You lie again,” Arkadas said simply. “You once told me yourself that your United Kingdom of Earth comprised hundreds of disparate tribal nations, united through commercial and military means. I will not believe that you never absorbed the innovations of another culture, one that may have been more highly developed than your own in one area or another. Discovery is never linear. And,” he added, with a tinge of accusation in his voice, “I have watched some of your crewmen, and how they treat our citizens. You are not as advanced a civilization as you would like
to believe.”
“Give me Luther.”
“No.”
Pearce sighed heavily and drew his laser sidearm, pointing it squarely at the middle of Arkadas’ chest.
“I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt anyone. But I will have that robot back.” The Cygni seemed unconcerned with the weapon aimed at him.
“You told me upstairs that your Lieutenant acted without authority when she agreed to give us the machine.”
“That’s right.”
“Would your authority be sufficient?”
“I would be in violation of a score of Admiralty regulations, but if anyone had the authority, it would be me. But it doesn’t matter, I would never agree.”
“Never?” Arkadas asked. He raised his voice ever so slightly, and said, “Now, please.”
Eight doors opened in the walls of the wide room, and eight Cygni military personnel emerged. One of them was General Leyndar, with his perpetual scowl. Each was armed, not with a kerabin, but with the strange weapons Pearce had noticed earlier. He suspected he was confronted with another technological advance cribbed from the study of Alexander-457.
“They will shoot you, Commander. We will kill all of you, if need be, or drive you off again. We have done it before, and we are more formidable now than we were then. We have no true desire to hurt you,” he added, with a sideways glance at Leyndar, “at least, most of us do not. What I told you before was true. Alexander-457 was – is – the salvation of the people of Horfa. With his acquisition, we have come to common terms, finally. The military, the intellectuals, even the priestesses. We know now that we are not alone, and we know that if we are to fulfill our destiny as a chosen people, we must grow and learn and develop our technology to ensure we will never again be at the mercy of those stronger than us.”
Pearce said nothing. He looked at each of the eight weapons, all trained on him. He looked at General Leyndar’s face, at his scar, at the desire for vengeance in his gray eyes. He looked at Arkadas, so in control, so brilliant, so suffused with righteousness. And he looked again at the scattered machrine on the floor, at the tiny labels attached to each piece, and tried to shut out the memory of ten years before, of the nightmares since. He closed his eyes, and in his imagination, the lifeless figure prone on the floor was no longer Alexander, but his own son, James, arms and legs outstretched in the same pose. And he thought of the tens of billions of others who would die, too, if he failed.
He did not hear the soft click as another door opened, but he saw the eyes of the soldiers flicker toward a far corner of the subterranean chamber, and he felt the air change, becoming suddenly warmer and somehow thicker, harder to breathe. Reluctantly, he turned his attention away from the guns pointing in his direction, and saw her.
The woman walking across the tiled floor was inordinately beautiful, though through the gauzy haze that clung to her, Pearce could not have described her features in any detail. Her flowing robes were red and black, clinging first here, then there, hinting at a chaste and yet seductive form beneath. As she came closer and closer, it was like the moment he first met Mary, the moment he fell in love with her, the first time they made love, all added together and multiplied by infinity and stretched out for eternity.
“My friend,” Arkadas said, quietly, “permit me introduce the third elder of our councils. This is Kaitsma, the High Priestess of The Faith.”
“Captain,” she said, a soft thunderclap in his ear, “I know you will help us.”
She touched him then, lightly, a hand on his cheek with the merest hint of dry, smooth fire, and his knees nearly buckled beneath him. His heart hammering in his chest, his pulse sprinting at the nearness of her, a corner of his mind wondered, is this how Fletcher felt?
“I must have those plants and seeds,” Pearce murmured huskily, searching out each word through the fog in his brain. “If we get what we need, you can have Luther.” It was wrong and he knew it, wrong in any interpretation of Navy regulations. He did not have the authority to unilaterally interfere with the technological development of an alien society. Neither, though, did he have the authority to condemn all of human life to starvation and death through a slavish devotion to orders. What use, what possible use, to preserve Cygni society at the cost of the entire Kingdom? If this is the only way, then so be it. “Hell, I’ll recommend to the Science Minister a full-scale exchange of technology between the Kingdom and Cygnus. But I must have those plants and seeds. Tell them to power down their weapons.”
“Of course,” Arkadas replied graciously, stepping nimbly forward and taking the gun from Pearce’s suddenly flaccid fingers. “We haven’t gotten those things to work right yet anyway.” He nodded, and the soldiers returned their weapons to their holsters. Even Leyndar did so with demonstrated reluctance, though he then strode forward, glowering, until he was very close to Pearce.
“Were it up to me,” the Cygni general said, gravel in his voice, “I would kill you where you stand.”
“Go ahead,” Pearce spat back. “And when word reaches my ship, they’ll…”
“They’ll do what?” the general interrupted. “Turn tail and run away, like you did ten years ago? You’re a spineless people. To think we were afraid you had come to conquer us. Bah. Maybe we should come and conquer you.”
“See you in four hundred years, when you develop space flight,” said Pearce, returning Leyndar’s unblinking gaze.
“This is not helping,” interjected Kaitsma. “General, Captain, please.” Her smiling face, coming more clearly into focus, had a calming effect on both men, but it seemed to Pearce that she was not nearly so young, nor so warm, as she had appeared moments before. “We are to be friends again, our two peoples.”
Pearce felt weary, hundreds, thousands of years weary, and impossibly distant from anything he loved. He had wanted to go back into space so badly, had wanted that elusive captain’s commission as desperately as a drowning man fighting for air. Now, in this too-modern basement, surrounded by strangers and strangeness, he wanted nothing more than to finish this business and go home to Mary and James.
“Take the machrine,” he said, his voice sounding thin and reedy in his own ears. He looked at Arkadas, and the Cygni had the grace to not appear smug. “Promise me we will leave with what we need.”
“All that and more, judar.”
Thirteen
Fruitless
It was dusk when Pearce returned to Friendship Point and the waiting shuttle. He had heard the reports from Pott and Crutchfield. The deserters were aboard and in custody, as was Christine Fletcher. He had recalled Dr. Reyes and Sir Green from their field work, instructing them to collect whatever specimens they had, in whatever condition they existed, and prepare for departure. There was to be no more exploration, no more botanizing in the countryside, no more languid nursing of seedlings in the sprawling farms outside Horfa.
It was time to leave.
He stood in the gathering darkness on that tiny spit of land where Baker had died, where Fletcher had slapped his face, where the bookends of his adult life had been forged, and he wondered if any of it could have been any different. Venn Arkadas stood alongside him, his sole escort, the man who had saved his life ten years ago and yet was the architect of his troubles now.
“Do not look so sad,” the Cygni scholar/bureaucrat/schemer said, shadows falling across his aging but still-handsome face. “The holds of your ship are full of the plants you sought. Your mission will be a success, William. So the price was somewhat higher than you anticipated. What of it? You’ve been a trader long enough to know that negotiations are always part of the deal.”
Pearce stared at the sky, watching pinpricks of light grow among the rising stars, draw closer and then show themselves to be the running lights of the Harvest’s shuttle. He sighed. Perhaps he’s right, he thought. And if he was wrong, it hardly mattered. Let Banks and Exeter and others sort out the morality of it. Even his own promotion in the service mat
tered little to him at this point, as long as they delivered on their promise to help James. The two men stood in silence, watching the small craft approach. As it drew near, Arkadas put a hand on Pearce’s arm.
“This is for you,” he said, and he took from inside his robes a large package wrapped in brown paper. “Don’t open it now, but when you are alone, in your cabin.”
“What is it?” Pearce asked wearily. He took it listlessly, not caring what it contained.
“A gift. These are tervis berries. Very rare, and very precious. I am giving them to you as a symbol of our friendship, judar. A gesture of thanks. A hope that we will meet again someday, and we will recognize one another as the savior of our peoples.”
The shuttle had landed. Charles Hall emerged as the door opened, electrostatic engines still active.
“Thank you.” Pearce was gruff. “But I am telling you the truth when I say I’m never coming back to this damn planet ever again. Goodbye, Arkadas.” Without a look back, he strode to the small craft, package under his arm.
****
It was a wordless flight back to the Harvest, Kepler-22B shrinking behind them. Pearce had nothing to say and Hall had the good sense to say nothing. As the shuttle docked alongside its sister and the doors of the cavernous bay closed, Pearce felt a wave of relief crash over him. He was back on his ship, in a place where the world made sense. I will never set foot on Cygnus again, he vowed. The only planet he would ever see or walk upon again would be his own.
He was greeted by John Pott and Orpheus Crutchfield as he disembarked.
“Captain,” Pott said. “As per your orders, everyone is aboard, and the ship is ready for departure.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant. Well done.”
“Not everyone!” growled Crutchfield.
