Being Human

by Peter David

  The boy did not stop watching out all around himself for the rest of the day. And anyone who encountered him thought it was some sort of bizarre game when he would be walking around, constantly turning in circles as if hoping he would be able to see in all directions at once.

  DANTER

  i.

  SPEAKER LODEC OF THE DANTERI SENATE strode through the elaborate garden that lay in the back of his home, his arms spread wide in welcome when he saw Si Cwan waiting for him at the far end. Si Cwan couldn’t help but notice that Lodec moved with a vehemence and enthusiasm that belied his aged appearance, which meant one of two things: Either Lodec was a rather old fellow with a young man’s vigor . . . or else he was a younger man who had simply been through quite a lot, and the few years he had lived had weighed heavily upon him. He had a gut feeling it was the latter. Nevertheless, he carried himself with poise, his back straight, his chin level. Si Cwan couldn’t help but notice that Lodec had a very measured tread, each footfall precisely the same distance from the one before. Soldier. Definitely soldier, he thought. Lodec’s hair and beard were neatly and precisely trimmed, and his bronze skin was glistening in the lengthy rays of the twilight sun. His clothes, various shades of blue, were loose-fitting, although his arms were bared and displayed solid muscle.

  Si Cwan had to admit that the garden itself was a beautiful sight. Large topiaries, bushes trimmed into the shapes of various Danteri wildlife, dotted the terrain. There was a narrow spring trickling right through the middle of the garden that apparently fed the dazzling assortment of multicolored plant life throughout the garden. The aromas of the flowers were so pungent that for a brief time Si Cwan felt almost light-headed from them all. But it was only a minor effort of will to bring himself back to the matter at hand.

  Lodec came to within two feet of Si Cwan, stopped, and bowed in greeting, hands clasped together and held tightly in front of him. “How excellent that you have come to visit me, to see my lovely garden. And I admit to being a bit surprised . . .”

  “Surprised? In what way?” asked Si Cwan.

  “Well, you spend so much time at the Senate, and then in committee meetings, discussions, and the like. I would think, given how much of your time is spent involved with us, that during your private time you would want to be as far removed from us as possible.” Then, in a slightly forced endeavor to show that he was jesting, Lodec produced what passed for a laugh. At least Si Cwan thought it was a laugh. It might have been a strangled cough.

  “I am flattered that you see me as so dedicated a worker,” said Si Cwan.

  “No flattery intended,” Lodec assured him. “And there is much to do, much to do. Alliances to be formed, meetings to be held . . .”

  “That is what I wish to discuss with you, in point of fact.”

  “Your work schedule?” asked Lodec with concern. “You think it too demanding . . . ?”

  “No,” said Si Cwan stiffly. “I am worried because I feel that I am accomplishing nothing.”

  “What?” Lodec once again emitted that odd sound that passed for laughter. “Ambassador, good Lord, you’ve been here less than a week! The Danteri Empire was not built in a day, you know, nor can the new Thallonian Empire expect a faster timetable.”

  “It is not the long-term timetable that concerns me,” said Si Cwan. He pulled himself in, looked for the calm center, because he could feel his anger rising and he knew that losing his temper now would not serve any purpose. “It is the short-term attitude that I see being displayed by your fellow senators. Despite all the great words, the grandiose promises that were made to me in the beginning, I sense that I am being kept at arm’s length from the true process of empire building.”

  “Whatever do you mean?” asked Lodec, wide-eyed.

  Si Cwan was a good foot taller than Lodec. It gave him considerable opportunity to exert his commanding presence, and he did so at that point. Looming over Lodec, his voice dropping into a tone that had a distinct edge of warning to it, he said, “Let us cease fencing, Speaker. I walked the halls of power of Thallon. I know the difference between meetings and sessions where pretty words and sentiments are being bandied about, as opposed to meetings of true power, when genuine negotiations that will make a difference are being held.”

  “Si Cwan, I—”

  “The primary purpose to which I have been put thus far,” said Si Cwan, “is to be one who greets incoming delegates, ambassadors, representatives of other worlds. Then I am immediately shunted away to ‘other’ responsibilities, which turn out not to be very important at all. It is as if you are using my name, my reputation, to lure people here, and then isolating me so that you can tell these people . . . what? What are you telling them, Lodec?”

  Lodec appeared thunderstruck. Si Cwan reasoned that either he was completely off the mark, or else Lodec was a formidable actor. “Si Cwan, you . . . you misunderstand!”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes!” He started to walk through his garden, shaking his head, seeming almost oblivious of Si Cwan, who was walking beside him. He seemed far more intent on speaking to his feet than to Cwan. “Yes, you greatly misunderstand. We are . . . we are simply trying not to waste your time!”

  “Really,” said Si Cwan, unconvinced.

  “Yes, really! Truly! These ‘power meetings’ as you call them—why, they are exercises in political gamesmanship, nothing more. If you attended them, you would see. They are little more than a series of verbal feints, thrusts, and parries. People trying to feel out each other’s weaknesses . . . it’s fairly juvenile, in many ways. It was felt that such things were beneath you. A waste of your time. You are, after all, nobility. Why should nobility have to condescend to such . . . such relative trivialities?”

  Si Cwan nodded slowly. “Your words are very flattering, Lodec.”

  “Thank you, noble one. I seek merely to—”

  “In some ways, too flattering. As if you hope that by appealing to my ego, I will overlook certain transgressions.” He snagged Lodec by the elbow and snapped him around. But Lodec instinctively pulled away, twisting his arm out of Si Cwan’s grasp, and for a moment the two faced each other not as Thallonian noble and Senate speaker, but as two soldiers. For just a moment there was a different charge in the air, as if they were truly facing each other for the first time. Then Lodec, quickly and smoothly, drew a virtual curtain over himself. “I do not think that physical abuse is necessary, honored one,” he said very softly.

  “Really. I would wager that Mackenzie Calhoun’s father thought much the same thing . . . before you beat him to death.”

  To a degree, Si Cwan felt annoyed with himself, because he was taking something that he knew was someone’s personal tragedy, and throwing it at Lodec just to get a reaction out of him. Nevertheless, it worked. Lodec’s face fell, and this time there was no quick restoring of his aplomb. “How—?”

  “When you are nobility,” Si Cwan said with faint sarcasm, “you’re expected to know these things. Tell me, Lodec . . . did it feel good when you did it?” He lowered his voice in an intimate manner designed to be as disconcerting as possible. “Did you enjoy exercising your power over someone who had none? Was it entertaining, depriving a young boy of his father? Did you enjoy abusing your power—”

  And Lodec shot back, with an infuriated snarl, “Power?” He was reacting with such vehemence that Si Cwan, despite the size deferential, was taken aback for a moment. “Are you under the impression that I beat people to death because it gives me some sort of pleasure? Do you think if I had any power at all, I would have done what I did? I was power less, Lord Cwan. As a soldier, I had no choice. No choice.”

  “One always has a choice,” Si Cwan said quietly. “The question is whether one chooses to take it or not.”

  Lodec stepped back, shaking his head. He walked in a small circle for a moment, continuing to shake his head the entire time, as if trying to dismiss the past. “If I had refused . . . my commander, Falkar, would have killed me on the spot and
brought in another to take my place. Should I have sacrificed myself? For what? For what purpose?”

  “Perhaps,” Si Cwan suggested, “so that you would not be wondering, years later, whether you should have sacrificed yourself.”

  They stood there for a long time, as the shadows continued to lengthen in the garden. Then, sounding much older than he had before, Lodec said, “My humblest apologies, Lord Cwan, if you believe that you are being deliberately distanced from the rebuilding of the Thallonian Empire. I shall make certain, in the future, to do all that is possible to include you.”

  “That would be appreciated,” said Si Cwan stiffly.

  “And Lord Cwan . . .”

  “Yes, Speaker?”

  Lodec looked at him grimly. “If it had been you issuing the command . . . and a soldier pledged to you had refused your order . . . you would have struck him down where he stood. Do not waste both our time telling me otherwise, for we both know it to be true. And you would have given no thought to the man’s conscience, or sacrifice, or principles. You would have stepped on him with no more thought than you would a bug, and dismissed him from your mind almost immediately thereafter as not worth dwelling upon. So do not lecture me on matters of principle . . . if you would be so kind.”

  Si Cwan’s jaw twitched, but he said nothing as he turned and left . . . because he knew that Lodec was perfectly right. And worse, he knew that Lodec knew.

  ii.

  If there was one thing that Kalinda knew when she saw it . . . it was death. The home that the Danteri had provided for Si Cwan and her was spacious enough, certainly. It was well designed, with copious room—and rooms—for parties, gatherings, meetings, and so on. But she felt uncomfortable when she was there by herself, and so she had promised that she would meet Si Cwan outside the Senate building and go home with him from there.

  It truly was a gargantuan structure. She craned her neck to look up at the towers, silhouetted against the twin moons, and she still felt as if she was not coming remotely close to seeing the top. Thanks to optical illusion, it seemed as if the three towers that composed the senate building literally came down from the sky, rather than having been built on the ground and stretching upward.

  It was a cool night and Kalinda drew her cloak more tightly around her.

  Then she heard laughter, the voices of senators approaching. Apparently they had been working late. They seemed to be in exceptionally good spirits, their voices echoing through the main entranceway that led to the great front doors. And they seemed to be saying something about “Wait until you meet him” and “We knew it was right from the first moment,” but she had no clue specifically as to what they were talking about.

  Kalinda had trained, as had Si Cwan, in the art of being unnoticed. Had it not been nighttime, she could still have blended in with the background and easily eluded all but the trained eye, which happened to be staring right at her. But here, with night having fallen, cloaked as she was, it was almost too easy.

  She simply thought of herself as not being there. There was no magic to it, no supernatural mumbojumbo. Long ago she had learned that people tend to be noticed because they draw attention to themselves in any one of a hundred ways. So in order not to be noticed, all one had to do was firmly believe that one was not there. Pull into oneself, as it were. Do nothing to command attention, and you would be given none. “I think not,” Si Cwan had once explained, “therefore I am not.”

  Indistinguishable from a tree or a shadow, Kalinda melted into the background as the senators emerged. “He was supposed to be here,” one of them said, and “I think you were exaggerating about him,” claimed another.

  Then their animated discussion suddenly faded, even became choked off, as if they’d seen something so startling that it had closed off the air in their throats. A tree blocked Kalinda’s view, and she moved ever so slightly in order to make out what was happening.

  That was when she saw death.

  He was tall, incredibly tall . . . eight, maybe nine feet. And wide, powerfully built, muscles rippling. He was wearing what appeared to be a sort of gold-scaled kilt around his middle, and an elaborately sculpted breastplate that curved up and back around his shoulders. His skin was black, as black as night, as black as the end of days, and yet it seemed to give off a glow. But not a glow from the moonlight; it seemed generated from within.

  Most terrifying was his face. It reminded Kalinda a bit of the Dogs of War, and for a moment she thought that he was one of that breed. But there was no hint of fur on him, nor were his hands clawed. But his jaws, his nose, were long and distended, like a dog’s snout. The edges of his mouth were frozen in a slight upturn, like a leering death’s-head grin. His eyes were glistening, red and pupilless, and to a degree they looked dead as well. The creature wore a gleaming helmet upon his head that rose in a semi-conical style, and it obscured the upper portion of his head. But she would have wagered that he had the triangular ears of a dog, or mastiff of some kind.

  She perceived a dark and terrifying aura around him. He was there, right there before her, and yet in some ways it seemed that he wasn’t. That made no sense to her.

  The Danteri senators were paralyzed in front of him. And then, almost as one, they went to their knees, and bowed their heads before him. As they did so, the glow surrounding him became that much stronger, the aura more defined.

  When he spoke, it was with a low and frightening rumble, like an avalanche about to occur, and she was afraid she would be caught up in it. “Well met,” he said. “We shall talk of many things . . . we . . .”

  Then he stopped.

  And turned.

  And death looked straight at Kalinda.

  She didn’t move, didn’t breathe. If she could have faded through the wall at that moment, she would have done so. He was staring right at her . . . and yet she wasn’t certain that he could actually see her. Rooted to the spot, she didn’t move so much as a centimeter.

  The Danteri were, one by one, looking up at him in curiosity. They felt something in the air, felt the tension, but didn’t know to what it should be ascribed. Finally one of them ventured, “High One . . . ?”

  “It is nothing,” he said at last.

  Kalinda’s gut reaction was to let out a sigh of relief, but she caught herself a heartbeat before doing so. It would have made her presence so obvious that even the deafest of senators would have perceived her at that point.

  The creature turned his back to her and walked away, the other senators following behind him like sheep. Kalinda waited a long time to make certain they were gone, and even then had trouble getting her legs to move because she’d been so paralyzed with fright.

  She had no idea who or what that had been.

  But she knew she had to find out.

  iii.

  “You saw . . . death?” Si Cwan and Kalinda were in their posh suites, Kalinda seated on the large couch and looking very apprehensive while Si Cwan was standing, hands draped behind his back, and looking extremely grave. It was not an affected look. There were certainly big brothers who condescended to their younger siblings, but Si Cwan was not one of those. And when it came to discussing matters of death, afterdeath, ghosts, and the like, he was fully prepared to acknowledge Kalinda as possibly the most knowledgeable Thallonian alive. “What do you mean ‘death’ precisely? Leave nothing out, Kally.”

  So she omitted nothing. She told him about everything that she had witnessed: the discussions, the genuflection, all of it. And most particularly, she told him about . . . the thing. The creature that she had seen. The mere description of the thing was enough to give Si Cwan chills.

  “And you are quite certain,” he said after giving her comments due consideration, “that it was not one of the Dogs of War. From your description, one of those—”

  “I know, Cwan, I know that. That would make the most sense.” Her hands were crossed carefully on her lap, a habit drilled into her by a mother long gone. “But it wasn’t. It had . . . it had a tota
lly different aura to it. An aura of something ancient. Of something . . .”

  “Evil?”

  She gave it some further consideration. “Actually . . . not evil. Not necessarily. Perhaps . . . trickery . . .”

  “Trickery? Why do you say that?”

  “Just . . . an impression I received. Nothing I can describe precisely. Just a feeling. I think we’re dealing with something much bigger, much greater than the Dogs of War. Something very ancient. Something very frightening.”

  “And it frightened you because . . .”

  “It just did, Cwan,” she said, sounding a bit exasperated. “But I think you need to do something about it.”

  “Yes,” said Cwan thoughtfully. “Yes . . . I do.” He clapped his hands together briskly. “Very well, then. Let us attend to this.”

  Kalinda almost felt a little taken aback. “Just like that?”

  “Yes. Just like that,” Cwan said. “We will talk to the right people. We will tell them the right things. We will prompt them to believe,” he continued, warming to the task, “that we know more than we do . . . and they will suffer if they do not cooperate with us.”

  “Are you going to hurt people?”

  He looked at her mildly. “Only the ones who bother me,” he said.

  EXCALIBUR

  i.

  SOLETA SAT ALONE in the officers’ dining hall, having breakfast by herself, as was her custom. She tended to eat lightly most mornings, and this was no exception. She had a small bowl of plomeek soup in front of her, and was daintily sipping the hot broth from a spoon, when she came to the slow realization that it had suddenly gotten rather quiet. This in and of itself was unusual enough, for the dining hall was usually fairly boisterous in the morning. But when she looked up to see what could possibly have caused this unexpected drop in the decibel level, she saw that everyone was staring at her. Or, to be more precise, at a point directly behind her. Very slowly she turned and looked over her shoulder.