by Greg Bear
Tritch had never allowed any work on a hyperdrive while her ship was actually in transit. What Planch was doing fascinated and frightened her.
Tritch and Trin watched from the engine gallery, a small weighted balcony that looked down the fifteen-meter length of the drive core. The end of the core was darkness; Planch had suspended a light over the place he worked, surrounding him in a pale golden glow.
“You should tell us what you’re doing,” Tritch said nervously.
“Right now?” Planch asked, irritated.
“Yes, right now. It would ease my mind.”
“What do you know about hyperphysics?”
“Only that you pull up the deep roots of all atoms within a ship, twist them widdershins, and plant them in a direction we don’t normally go.”
Planch laughed. “Very impressionistic, dear Tritch. I like it. But it doesn’t butter any parsnips.”
“What are parsnips?” Trin asked Tritch. She shook her head.
“Every traveling hypership leaves a permanent track in an obscure realm called Mire Space, named after Konner Mire. He was my teacher, forty years ago. It’s not studied much anymore, because most hyperships get where they’re going, and the Empire’s actuaries believe it’s more trouble than it’s worth to track lost ships, since they’re so few.”
“One in a hundred million voyages,” Trin said, as if to reassure herself.
Planch poked up from between two long pipes and pushed a mobile diagnostic machine away from the engine, allowing it to float free. “Every engine has an extension into Mire Space while a ship is in transit, which helps the ship avoid becoming random particles. Old techniques which I won’t go into allow me to hook up a monitor to the engine and look at recent trails. With some luck, we can pick up a trail with a frayed end, like a sawed-off rope-and that will be our lost ship. Or rather, the track of its last Jump.”
“Frayed end?” Tritch asked
“An abrupt exit from hyperdrive status leaves a lot of ragged discontinuities, like a frayed end. A planned exit solves all those discontinuities, smoothes them over.”
“If it’s so simple, why doesn’t everybody do this?” Tritch asked.
“Because it’s a lost art, I said, remember?”
She huffed in disbelief.
“You asked,” Planch said, his voice muffled and hollow in the engine bay. “There’s a one-in-five chance of screwing it up and throwing us out of hyperspace, scattered over about a third of a light-year.”
“You didn’t mention that,” Tritch said tightly.
“Now you know why.”
Trin swore under her breath and glared accusingly at her captain.
He worked for several more minutes, then poked up again. Trin had left the balcony, but Tritch still stood there.
“Still good for a couple of bottles of Trillian?” he asked her.
“If you don’t get us killed,” she answered grimly.
He floated away from the cylinders and pushed the diagnostic machines toward the hatchway. “Good! Because I think I’ve found her.”
15.
Hari’s legs hurt from standing so long. Klayus had finally stopped describing his beast statues and gone off, and Hari had found a divan and sat gingerly, blowing out his breath.
Here was his chance to see just how far things had gone to ruin, and how much further the Empire had to decay. He didn’t relish the opportunity, but he had long since learned that the best way to get along in life was to find multiple uses for unpleasant experiences. He longed to get back to his Prime Radiant and lose himself in the equations. People! So many tiny and yet possibly disastrous disruptions, like being chewed by hungry insects…
Hari turned toward the still-open hatchway and tried to see the crawling insects, but the projectors had turned off at Klayus’s exit. When he turned back, a small Lavrentian servant, a young male, stood beside him.
“The Emperor says I shall make you comfortable before your business engagement,” the servant said, smiling pleasantly, his round, smooth face like a small lamp in the gloom of the statue room. “Are you hungry? There’s to be an elaborate dinner later this evening, but you should probably eat something now, something light and delicious…Shall I prepare something for you?”
“Yes, please,” Hari said. He had eaten Palace food often enough not to turn down a chance to have more, and to eat in semiprivacy was a luxury he had not hoped for. “My muscles ache, too. Could I have a masseur sent in?”
“Certainly!” The Lavrentian smiled broadly. “My name is Koas. I am assigned to you for your stay. You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”
“Yes, the last time in the reign of Agis XIV,” Hari said.
“I was here then!” Koas said. “Perhaps I or my parents served you.”
“Perhaps,” Hari said. “I remember being very well treated, and I’m afraid parts of this evening are not going to be pleasant. I’m sure you’ll relax me and prepare me for the work to be done?”
“Our pleasure,” Koas said, and bowed fluidly. “What shall I prepare for you, or do you require a menu? We will, of course, use only the finest offworld and Mycogenian ingredients.”
“Farad Sinter is a connoisseur of Mycogenian delicacies, is he not?” Hari asked.
“Oh, no, sir,” Koas said, lips turned down. “He is fond of much simpler fare.” Koas did not seem to approve of this.
Then he’s in Mycogen to force a little information out of them, Hari thought. Their myths about robots. The man may very well be obsessed!
Koas did not specialize in bodyworks, so two female servants entered with a suspension couch. Hari lay on the couch and gave in to their skilled ministrations with a grateful sigh, and for a few minutes, at least, was almost glad he had come to the Palace and requested his audience with Klayus.
The masseuses began work on his legs, smoothing out the corded muscles and somehow removing a pain in his left knee that had been bothering him for weeks. They then worked on his arms, pushing and prodding with a surprising force, causing a delicious sort of pain that quickly melted into a liquid lassitude.
As they worked, Hari thought of the special privileges accorded to leaders and their associates, their families. There was, of course, the velvet trap of power, sufficient luxuries to attract reasonably competent and competitive individuals to an ungratefully demanding job (in Hari’s opinion; of course, Cleon I had been remarkably sanguine about being an Emperor at times, and even Agis had tried to act the part, which had led to his downfall under Linge Chen’s Commission).
For Klayus, there was luxury without much responsibility; that meant endless opportunities for distortions of the personality, which Hari had seen so often in history, among figurehead rulers of various systems…
As the masseuses caressed and pummeled and prodded, he lapsed back into his memories of the meetings with the tyrants. They had taken place more than a kilometer beneath the Hall of Justice and the Imperial Courts, in the Rikerian Prison, at the center of a labyrinth of precisely controlled security systems. During his decades on Trantor, Hari had come to love interior spaces, even small ones, but the Rikerian Prison had been designed to punish, to flatten the spirit.
He had had nightmares about those tiny confined spaces, on and off, for years after.
In a cell barely tall enough to stand in, with slick hard black walls and two holes in the floor, one for waste and one for food and water, and no chairs, he had interviewed Nikolo Pas of Sterrad, the butcher of fifty billion human beings.
Cleon had his bizarre sense of humor, forcing the interview to take place there and not in some neutral meeting area. Perhaps he had wanted Hari to understand the man’s current plight, to put things in perspective, perhaps to pity him, at least feel something, and not reduce everything to equations and numbers, as Cleon felt was Hari’s wont.
“I’m sorry I have nothing to offer in the way of hospitality,” Nikolo had said as they faced each other in the tiny, dim space. Hari had responded with some di
smissive pleasantry.
The man before him was more than six centimeters shorter than Hari, with pale blond, almost white hair, large dark eyes, a small pug nose, broad lips, and a short chin. He wore a thin gray shirt and shorts and sandals. “You’ve come to study the Monster,” Nikolo continued. “The guards say you’re the First Minister. Surely you’re not here to pick up some political tips.”
“No,” Hari said.
“To observe Cleon’s triumph and the restoration of dignity and order?”
“No.”
“I never rebelled against Cleon. I never usurped the Emperor’s authority.”
“I understand. How do you explain what you did?” Hari asked, deciding to jump in with no further preliminaries. “What was your reasoning, your goal?”
“They tell everybody I butchered billions on four worlds within my system, the system I was chosen to preserve and protect.”
“That’s what the records tell. What happened, in your opinion? And I warn you-I have the accounts from thousands of witnesses and other records at my disposal.”
“Why should I even bother talking with you, then?” Nikolo said.
“Because it’s possible what you say can prevent more butchery, in the future. An explanation, an understanding, could help us all avoid similar situations.”
“By killing a monster such as myself at birth?”
Hari did not answer.
“No, I see you’re more subtle than that,” Nikolo murmured. “By preventing the rise to power of one like myself.”
“Perhaps,” Hari said.
“What do I get out of it?”
“Nothing,” Hari said.
“Nothing for Nikolo Pas…How about the right to kill myself?”
“Cleon would never allow that,” Hari said.
“Just the right to inform Cleon’s First Minister, to give him more understanding, and therefore more power…”
“I suppose you could look at it that way.”
“Not in this hole,” Nikolo had said. “I’ll talk, but someplace clean and comfortable. That’s my price. You wouldn’t put vermin in a hole like this. And I have ever so much to tell you…about humans as well as machines, or about machines that seem human….past as well as future.”
Hari had listened, trying to keep his face impassive. “I’m not sure I can get Clean to-”
“Then you’ll learn nothing, Hari Seldon. And I see by the look in your eyes…I’ve touched something that provokes a deep curiosity, haven’t I?”
Hari twitched on the suspension couch and the masseuse working on his neck softly ordered him to lie still. Why haven’t I remembered this conversation before now? Hari asked himself. What else has been suppressed? And why?
Then, tension spoiling all the masseuses’ work, another question, Daneel, what have you done to me?
16.
The bodies had been arranged in neat floating rows in the crew lounge, the largest space in the ship, and also the closest space to the emergency hatch amidships.
Mors Planch backed away from the entrance, wondering for a moment if he had come upon a scene of torture and piracy. All the bodies were connected by ropes to keep them in place. Tended to, taken care of even in death. The air in the weightless chamber smelled from the decay of several days. Yet he had to make a count, to see if there was any value in searching elsewhere in the ship.
Tritch kept well back from the hatchway. Her red-rimmed eyes stood out above the white handkerchief she held over her nose and mouth. “Who put them in there?” she asked, voice muffled.
“I don’t know,” Mors said grimly. He put on a breather mask and entered to make his count. Several minutes later he emerged, his face wan. “Nobody alive, but not everybody is in there.” He pushed past her and expertly caromed down the corridor, toward the bridge. Reluctantly, Tritch followed, stopping briefly to pass an instruction to Trin.
“They all died within minutes of each other, I’m guessing,” Planch told Tritch as she caught up with him. “Radiation poisoning from the shock front.”
“The ship is heavily shielded,” Tritch said.
“Not against neutrinos.”
“Neutrinos can’t hurt us…They’re like ghosts.”
Planch peered into the darkened officer’s lounge, switched on his torch, played it around the furniture and walls, saw nobody. “Neutrinos in sufficient numbers are what blew away the outer shells of the supernova,” he said tightly. “Under such conditions, in such hordes, they can play strange and deadly tricks with matter, particularly with people’s bodies. Smell the ship?”
“I smell the dead, back there,” Tritch said.
“No. Smell the ship here. What do you smell?”
She took the handkerchief away from her nose and sniffed. “Something burnt. Not flesh.”
“Right,” Planch said. “It’s not a common smell, and I’ve only experienced it once before…in a ship caught in a neutrino surge, but not from a supernova. From a planet being broken up and swallowed by a wormhole. One of the transit-station disasters, thirty years ago. The ship was caught in the emerging jet of converted mass. I investigated, part of a salvage crew. Everybody aboard was dead. The ship smelled scorched, like this…Burnt metal.”
“Pleasant work,” Tritch said, putting the cloth back to her nose.
The hatch to the bridge was open. Planch held out his arm to keep Tritch back. She did not argue. The bridge was illuminated only by starlight from the open direct-view ports. He turned his torch on and shined it on the panels, the captain’s chair, the displays. The displays were all blank. The ship was dead.
“We won’t have much air soon,” he told Tritch. “Keep your crew back.”
“I already have,” Tritch said. “I don’t want to stay here any longer than I have to. We can’t salvage anything if the ship can’t be revived.”
“No,” Planch said. The bridge seemed empty, and cold enough to make his breath cloudy. He pushed in farther, flailing briefly against the cold stale air with one hand until he caught a stanchion and rotated. From that vantage, he aimed his beam into the opposite corner. There, he saw a form curled into a fetal ball.
He pulled himself along until he floated a meter from the form. What he had been told was true; this one was alive. The head turned, and he recognized the features of Councilor Lodovik Trema. But it was not Chief Commissioner Chen who had told him Trema would be alive.
When they had first sighted the hulk in deep space, drifting helplessly, he had communicated first with Chen, then with another, who had paid him even more handsomely than Chen: the tall man who had many faces and many names, and who had hired him so often before.
That man was never wrong, and he had not been wrong this time. Where all others might be dead, one might still be alive…And he must not be returned to Chen. He must be reported dead.
Lodovik Trema blinked slowly, calmly, at Planch. Planch held his fingers to his lips, and whispered, “You’re still dead, sir. Don’t move or make a sound.” Then he spoke a coded phrase incorporating both numbers and words that the man of many faces had told him to use.
Tritch watched them from across the bridge. “What did you find?” she asked.
“The man I’m looking for,” Planch said. “He lived a little longer. He must have arranged the others, then come here to die.”
As he brought out Lodovik, Tritch tried to back away, but could not find a grip fast enough. The body, curled and lifeless, floated ahead of Planch, under Tritch’s nose, and she nearly gagged with some reflex expectation.
“Don’t worry,” Planch said. “This one doesn’t smell much. It’s colder on the bridge.”
Tritch could not believe they had come all this way just to retrieve a single body. Back aboard the Flower of Evil, with Lodovik safely stowed in a box in the hold, she passed Planch a bottle of Trillian water of life, and he poured himself a glass and lifted it in cheerless toast.
“The Chief Commissioner wanted to make sure. And now that we know he�
��s dead, and all the others with him, I’m to take him back to his home world and see him decently buried, with full Imperial honors.”
“And leave all the others? That seems a little bizarre.”
Planch shrugged. “I don’t question my orders.”
“Which world is he from?”
“Madder Loss,” Planch replied.
Tritch shook her head in disbelief. “A man in such high authority, from a planet of disgraced parasites?”
Planch inspected his glass and lifted one finger before finishing its contents. Then he poked glass and finger at Tritch. “I remind you of our contract,” he said. “The death of this man could have political repercussions.”
“I don’t even know his name.”
“People could guess from what little you do know, if you spread it around in the wrong places. And if you do, I’ll find out.”
“I keep my contracts, and I keep my mouth shut.”
“And your crew?”
“You must have known we were trustworthy when you hired us,” Tritch said softly, dangerously.
“Yes, well it’s even more important now.”
Tritch stood and lifted the bottle from the table between them. She corked it firmly. “You’ve insulted me, Mors Planch.”
“An excess of caution, no insult intended.”
“Nevertheless, an insult. And you ask me to go to a world that no self-respecting citizen willingly visits.”
“They’re citizens on Madder Loss, too.”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “How long do we stay?”
“Not long. You drop me there and leave at your own pleasure.”
Tritch was finding this harder and harder to believe. “I will ask no more questions,” she said, and tucked the bottle under her arm. Apparently Planch was no longer so attractive to her, and henceforth their relationship would be strictly professional.
Planch regretted this, but only slightly.
When he delivered Lodovik Trema to Madder Loss, he would be a very wealthy man, and he would never have to work for anyone again. He imagined buying his own luxury vessel-one that he could keep in tip-top condition, which was more than could be said for most Imperial ships.
