Of course, Molitor's people couldn't refuse, because this is the first overt sign that Merseia will recognize him rather than some rival as our lord, and deal with his agents later on, about matters more real than this farce.
The intention is no surprise, when he's obviously winning. The surprise was the form the feeler took—and Tachwyr's note to me. Neither action felt quite Merseian.
Therefore I had to come.
"Let me guess," Flandry said. "You know I'm close to his Majesty and act as an odd-job man of his. You and your team hope to sound out me and mine about him."
Tachwyr nodded. "If he's to be your new leader, stronger than the past several, we want to know what to expect."
"You must have collected more bits of information on him than there are stars in the galaxy. And he's not a complex man. And no individual can do more than throw a small extra vector or two in among the millions that whipsaw such a big and awkward thing as the Empire toward whatever destiny it's got."
"He can order actions which have a multiplier effect, for war or peace between our folk."
"Oh, come off it, chum! No Merseian has a talent for pious wormwords. He only sounds silly when he tries. As far as you are concerned vis-á-vis us, diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means." Flandry tossed off his drink and poured a refill.
"Many Terrans disagree," Tachwyr said slowly.
"My species also has more talent than yours for wishful thinking," Flandry admitted. He waved at the cold landscape. "Take this base itself. For two decades, through every clash and crisis, a beacon example of cooperation. Right?" He leered. "You know better. Oh, doubtless most of the scientists who come here are sincere enough in just wanting to study a remarkable xenological development. Doubtless they're generally on good personal terms. But they're subsidized—they have their nice safe demilitarization—for no reason except that both sides find it convenient to keep a place for secret rendezvous. Neutral domains like Betelgeuse are so public, and their owners tend to be so nosy."
He patted the Merseian's back. "Now let's sit down to eat, and afterward serious drinking, like the cordial enemies we've always been," he urged. "I don't mind giving you anecdotes to pad out your report. Some of them may even be true."
The heavy features flushed olive-green. "Do you imply our attempt—not at final disengagement, granted, but at practical measures of mutual benefit—do you imply it is either idiotic or else false?"
Flandry sighed. "You disappoint me, Tachwyr. I do believe you've grown stuffy in your middle age. Instead of continuing the charade, why not ring up your Chereionite and invite him to join us? I'll bet he and I are acquainted too."
{The sun went down and night leaped forth in stars almost space-bright, crowding the dark, making the winter world glow as if it had a moon. "May I turn off the interior lights?" Aycharaych asked. "The outside is too glorious for them."
Flandry agreed. The hawk profile across the table from him grew indistinct, save for great starlight-catching eyes. The voice sang and purred onward, soft as the cognac they shared, in Anglic whose accent sounded less foreign than archaic.
"I could wish your turban did not cover a mindscreen and powerpack, my friend. Not merely does the field make an ugliness through my nerves amidst this frozen serenity; I would fain be in true communion with you." Aycharaych's chuckle sounded wistful. "That can scarcely be, I realize, unless you join my cause."
"Or you mine," Flandry said.
"And each of your men who might know something I would like to learn is likewise screened against me. Does not that apparatus on their heads make sleep difficult? I warn you in any case, wear the things not overmany days at a stretch. Even for a race like yours, it is ill to keep the brain walled off from those energies which inspirit the universe, behind a screen of forces that themselves must roil your dreams."
"I see no reason for us to stay."
Aycharaych inhaled from his glass. He had not touched the liquor yet. "I would be happy for your company," he said. "But I understand. The consciousness that dreary death will in a few more decades fold this brightly checkered game board whereon you leap and capture—that keeps you ever in haste."
He leaned back, gazed out at a tree turned into a jewel by icicles, and was quiet awhile. Flandry reached for a cigarette, remembered the Chereionite disliked tobacco smoke, and soothed himself with a swallow.
"It may be the root of your greatness as a race," Aycharaych mused. "Could a St. Matthew Passion have welled from an immortal Bach? Could a Rembrandt who knew naught of sorrow and had no need for steadfastness in it have brought those things alive by a few daubs of paint? Could a Tu Fu free of loss have been the poet of dead leaves flying amidst snow, cranes departing, or an old parrot shabby in its cage? What depth does the foreknowledge of doom give to your loves?"
He turned his head to face the man. His tone lightened: "Well. Now that poor mortified Tachwyr is gone—most mightily had he looked forward to the sauce which gloating would put on his dinner!—we can talk freely. How did you deduce the truth?"
"Part hunch," Flandry confessed. "The more I thought about that message, the more suggestions of your style I found. Then logic took over. Plain to see, the Merseians had some ulterior motive in asking for a conference as nugatory per se as this. It could be just a signal to us, and an attempt at sounding out Molitor's prospective regime a bit. But for those purposes it was clumsy and inadequate. And why go to such trouble to bring me here?
"Well, I'm not privy to high strategic secrets, but I'm close enough to him that I must have a fair amount of critical information—the kind which'll be obsolete inside a year, but if used promptly could help Merseia keep our kettle longer on the boil, with that much more harm to us. And I have a freer hand than anybody else who's so well briefed; I could certainly come if I chose. And an invitation from Tachwyr could be counted on to pique my curiosity, if nothing else.
"The whole idea was yours, wasn't it?"
Aycharaych nodded, his crest a scimitar across the Milky Way. "Yes," he said. "I already had business in these parts—negotium perambulans in tenebris, if you like—and saw nothing to lose in this attempt. At least I have won the pleasure of a few hours with you."
"Thanks. Although—" Flandry sought words. "You know I put modesty in a class with virginity, both charming characteristics which should be gotten rid of as fast as puberty allows. However... why me, Aycharaych? Do you relish the fact I'll kill you, regretfully but firmly, the instant a chance appears? In that respect, there are hundreds like me. True, I may be unusual in having come close, a time or two. And I can make more cultured noises than the average Navy man. But I'm no scholar, no esthete—a dilettante; you can do better than me."
"Let us say I appreciate your total personality." The smile, barely visible, resembled that upon the oldest stone gods of Greece. "I admire your exploits. And since we have interacted again and again, a bond has formed between us. Deny not that you sense it."
"I don't deny. You're the only Chereionite I've ever met—" Flandry stopped.
After a moment he proceeded: "Are you the only Chereionite anybody has ever met?"
"Occasional Merseians have visited my planet, even resided there for periods of study," Aycharaych pointed out.
Yes. Flandry remembered one such, who had endangered him here upon Talwin; how far in the past that seemed, and how immediately near! I realize why the coordinates of your home are perhaps the best-kept secret in the Roidhunate. I doubt if a thousand beings from offworld know; and in most of them, the numbers have been buried deep in their unconsciousness, to be called forth by a key stimulus which is also secret.
Secret, secret... What do we know about you that is substance and not shadow?
The data fled by, just behind his eyes.
Chereion's sun was dim, as Flandry himself had discovered when he noticed Aycharaych was blind in the blue end of the spectrum though seeing farther into the red than a man can. The planet was small, cold, dry—deduced from Aych
araych's build, walk, capabilities, preferences—not unlike human-settled Aeneas, because he could roam freely there and almost start a holy war to split the Empire, nineteen years ago.
In those days he had claimed that the enigmatic ruins found upon many worlds of that sort were relics of his own people, who ranged and ruled among the stars in an era geologically remote. He claimed.... He's as big a liar as I am, when either of us wants to be. If they did build and then withdraw, why? Where to? What are they upon this night?
Dismiss the riddles. Imperial Intelligence knew for certain, with scars for reminders, he was a telepath of extraordinary power. Within a radius of x meters, he could read the thoughts of any being, no matter how alien, using any language, no matter how foreign to him. That had been theoretically impossible. Hence the theory was crudely modified (there is scant creativity in a waning civilization) to include suggestions of a brain which with computerlike speed and capacity analyzed the impulses it detected into basic units (binary?), compared this pattern with the one which its own senses and knowledge presented, and by some incredible process of trial and error synthesized in seconds a code which closely corresponded to the original.
It did not seem he could peer far below the surface thoughts, if at all. That mattered little. He could be patient; or in a direct confrontation, he had skill to evoke the memories he wanted. No wonder that the highest Merseian command paid heed to him. The Empire had never had a more dangerous single enemy.
Single—
Flandry grew aware of the other's luminous regard. "'Scuse me," he said. "I got thinking. Bad habit."
"I can guess what." Aycharaych's smile continued. "You speculate whether I am your sole Chereionite colleague."
"Yes. Not for the first time." Flandry drank again. "Well, are you? What few photographs or eyewitness accounts we've garnered, of a Chereionite among outsiders—never more than one. Were all of them you?"
"You don't expect me to tell you. I will agree to what's obvious, that partakers in ephemeral affairs, like myself, have been rare among my race. They laid such things aside before your kind were aught but apes."
"Why haven't you?"
"In action I find an art; and every art is a philosophical tool, whereby we may seek to win an atom deeper into mystery."
Flandry considered Aycharaych for a silent span before he murmured: "I came on a poem once, in translation—it goes back a millennium or more—that's stayed with me. Tells how Pan—you know our Classical myths—Pan is at a riverside, splashing around, his goat hoofs breaking the lilies, till he plucks a reed and hollows it out, no matter the agony it feels; then the music he pipes forth enchants the whole forest. Is that what you think of yourself as doing?"
"Ah, yes," Aycharaych answered, "you have the last stanza in mind, I believe." Low:
"Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain—
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river."
Damn! Flandry thought. I ought to stop letting him startle me.
"My friend," the other went on gently, "you too play a satanic role. How many lives have you twisted or chopped short? How many will you? Would you protest me if the accidents of history had flung Empire rather than Roidhunate around my sun? Or if you had been born into those humans who serve Merseia? Indeed, then you might have lived more whole of heart."
Anger flared. "I know," Flandry snapped. "How often have I heard? Terra is old, tired, corrupt, Merseia is young, vigorous, pure. Thank you, to the extent that's true, I prefer my anomie, cynicism, and existential despair to counting my days in cadence and shouting huzza—worse, sincerely meaning it—when Glorious Leader rides by. Besides... the device every conqueror, yes, every altruistic liberator should be required to wear on his shield... is a little girl and her kitten, at ground zero."
He knocked back his cognac and poured another. His temper cooled. "I suspect," he finished, "down inside, you'd like to say the same."
"Not in those terms," Aycharaych replied. "Sentimentality ill becomes either of us. Or compassion. Forgive me, are you not drinking a trifle heavily?"
"Could be."
"Since you won't get so drunk I can surreptitiously turn off your mindscreen, I would be grateful if you stay clear-headed. The time is long since last I relished discourse of Terra's former splendors, or even of her modern pleasures. Come, let us talk the stars to rest."}
In the morning, Flandry told Susette he must scout around the globe a few days, using certain ultrasensitive instruments, but thereafter he would return.
He doubted that very much.
X
Shadow and thunder of wings fell over Kossara. She looked up from the rolling, tawny-begrown down onto which she had come after stumbling from the forest. Against clouds and the plum-colored sky beyond, a Diomedean descended. She halted. Weariness shivered in her legs. Wind slithered around her. It smelled of damp earth and, somehow, of boulders.
An end to my search. Her heart slugged. But what will I now find? Comrades and trust, or a return to my punishment?
The native landed, a male, attired in crossbelts and armed with a knife and rifle. He must have been out hunting, when he saw the remarkable sight of a solitary human loose in the wilds, begrimed, footsore, mapless and compassless. He uttered gutturals of his own tongue.
"No, I don't speak that," Kossara answered. The last water she had found was kilometers behind. Thirst roughened her throat. "Do you know Anglic?"
"Some bit," the native said. "How you? Help?"
"Y-yes. But—" But not from anybody who'll think he should call Thursday Landing and inquire about me. During her trek she had sifted the fragments of memory, over and over. A name and nonhuman face remained. "Eonan. Bring me Eonan." She tried several different pronunciations, hoping one would be recognizable.
"Gairath mochra. Eonan? Wh... what Eonan? Many Eonan."
There would be, of course. She might as well have asked a random Dennitzan for Andrei. However, she had expected as much. "Eonan who knows Kossara Vymezal," she said. "Find. Give Eonan this." She handed him a note she had scrawled. "Money." She offered a ten-credit bill from the full wallet Flandry had included in her gear. "Bring Eonan, I give you more money."
After repeated trials, she seemed to get the idea across, and an approximation of her name. The hunter took off northward. God willing, he'd ask around in the bayshore towns till he found the right person; and while this would make the dwellers curious, none should see reason to phone Imperial headquarters. God willing. She ought to kneel for a prayer, but she was too tired; Mary who fled to Egypt would understand. Kossara sat down on what resembled pale grass and wasn't, hugged herself against the bitter breeze and stared across treelessness beneath a wan sun.
Have I really won through?
If Eonan still had his life and liberty, he might have lost heart for his revolution—if, in truth, he had ever been involved; she had nothing more than a dream-vision from a cave. Or if he would still free his people from the Empire, he might be the last. Or if cabals and guerrillas remained, he might not know where they hid. Or if he brought her to them, what could she hope for?
She tossed her head. A chance to fight. Maybe to win home in the end, likelier to die here: as a soldier does, and in freedom.
Drowsiness overflowed. She curled herself as best she could on the ground. Heavy garments blunted its hardness, though she hated the sour smell they'd gotten. To be clean again... Flandry had saved her from the soiling which could never be washed off. He had that much honor—and, yes, a diamond sort of mercy. If she'd done his bidding, tried her best to lead him to whatever was left of her fellows, he would surely have sent her back, manumitted—he'd have the prestige for such a favor to be granted him—unscathed—No! Not whole in her own honor! And release upon a Dennitza lashed to the Empire would be a cruel jo
ke.
Then rest while you can, Kossara. Sleep comes not black, no, blue as a summer sky over the Kazan, blue as the cloak of Mary.... Pray for us, now and in the hour of our death.
A small callused hand shook her awake. Hunger said louder than her watch what a time had passed while the sun brooded nightless. She stared into yellow eyes above a blunt muzzle and quivering whiskers. Half open, bat wings made a stormcloud behind. He carried a blaster.
His face—She sat up, aware of ache, stiffness, cold. "Eonan?"
"Torcha tracked me." Apart from the piping accent, mostly due to the organs of speech, his Anglic came fluent. "But you do not know him, do you?"
She struggled to her feet. "I don't know you either, quite," she got out. "They made me forget."
"Ungn-n-n." He touched the butt of the gun, and his crest erected. Otherwise he stood in taut quietness. She saw he had arrived on a gravsled, no doubt to carry her.
Resolution unfroze him. "I am Eonan Guntrasson, of the Wendru clan in the Great Flock of Lannach. And you are Kossara Vymezal, from the distant planet Dennitza."
Gladness came galloping, and every weakness fled. "I know that, barem! And you dared meet me? Then we are not finished yet!"
Eonan drew the membranes over his eyes. "We?"
"The revolution. Yours and mine." She leaned down to grip his upper shoulders. Beneath fur and warmth, the flight muscles stood like rock.
"I must be careful." His tone underlined it. "Torcha said you promised him a reward for fetching me. I paid him myself, not to have him along. Best we go aside and... talk. First, in sign of good faith, let me search you."
The place he chose was back in the highlands. Canyon walls rose darkly where a river rang; fog smoked and dripped till Kossara was soaked with chill; at moments when the swirling grayness parted, she glimpsed the black volcanic cone of Mount Oborch.
Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra Page 38
