Shen was nearby, taking a break from haranguing gardeners. When Kareem Mar-Kize’s face disappeared, she said, “Not so.”
“What’s not so?”
“Better. Not so.” She glided closer, stood over him, leaned over and poked a rigid finger into his belly. The flesh did not yield, but she said, “Soft.”
“I am not.”
“Lived good too long. Baby girls, stray cats—”
“Like you.”
“Like me. Listen, that Gian, say he knew more. Call that an answer? You want answers? Ways to get ’em. One way or another.”
“I know Valentine. I know how he thinks. Go away and let me think.”
The thing he was trying to remember twitched at intervals through the day. Theo and Shen stayed away. The animals of the house came one by one to doze in the warm afternoon. None were native to Valentine; humanity’s bonds with its pets stretched back beyond recorded history, and humans had not been on Valentine long enough to breed anything native into something that could be loved. But dogs lay at Michael’s feet, cats stalked through the shade, a kitten slept on his knee; presently a F’thalian tourmaline, an exotic abandoned by some human visitor to Valentine, inched up his arm and perched on his shoulder. Later Lise, too, came to the open-air study where he watched the sun and shadows. She stayed some distance from him, curled in a chair with a reader in her lap that showed pictures of pretty clothes. She did not say a word and it was impossible to guess what she thought. He supposed she was occupied with new plans for ravaging his credit, to which he had given her access; the string of deliveries, having driven Shen nearly mad, had tapered off, but probably not for long. Lise had not wanted to live with Flora, she refused with lamentations to be parted from Michael, and was on her way to becoming a permanent member of the household.
The sun finished its morning arc and the shadows grew long. The blossoms of the trees Gian had seen only in darkness blazed brighter in the slanting light. They were hardly more colorful than the flowers mounded at their feet: D’neeran millefleurs, difficult to grow most places, but here showing their native bent for taking over everything around them. They were so much a fixture that most days Michael scarcely saw them. But it was the millefleurs—little known outside their home, obscure symbols of a place off traveled paths—that gave him the idea.
In the evening he went back to the computer and specified a search. He wrote: “Subject—human settlements, associated features, geographical or social, Standard or colloquial terminology. Exclude Earth. Exclude all cities above population 100,000. Exclude all official place names. Mark: Rose. Search.”
He left the program running and went for a walk outdoors. He had bought the house and grounds two Standard years before from the heirs of a gambling magnate who had finally died in spite of all that artificial organs could do. There was no satisfactory replacement for the whole of a deteriorating brain. The place was not a home, but it was the closest he had ever had to one. When he was tired of walking, he sat on a wooden bench and listened to the sea. He was high above it, but it was audible from here, a steady thump-and-rumble, the pulsebeat of a planet.
After a while Shen came to find him, unerring in the dark. She carried a light and a long printout. She sat beside him and gave the things to him without comment. He looked at the printout and saw that the computer had finished its search.
“The Rose: Colloq. Mt. Greene, near Thule, Montana, Heartworld.
“The Rose: ST. Biennial underwater race limited to modified human organisms. Town of Eiger, Nestor.
“The Rose(s): Colloq. Metatree forest near Hai, Co-op.”
There were more entries like that. He scanned them impatiently. Near the bottom of the list he saw: The Rose: ST (1) Stone venerated by The People of the Rose, Riordan’s Revenge. (2) The People of the Rose.”
Shen saw his attention. “That it?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been there. A long time ago, ten years maybe. I forgot about the ‘Riordan’ part, I only heard it called Revenge. Come on, let’s look it up.”
They went back to the house and got what they wanted immediately. Riordan’s Revenge was obscure, but properly cataloged. Michael read:
“Riordan’s Revenge is one of thirty planets visited and reported as habitable by Miles Riordan in the years 2463 through 2481, only two of which—Riordan’s Revenge and Isle—are actually classifiable as such.
“‘Revenge’ is little known and is seldom visited except by representatives of the Colonial Oversight and Protection Service once each Standard year, and by merchantmen on no fixed schedule. Though terrestrial in composition and atmosphere, the planet is locked in an ice age which may be permanent. (See Subfile 1.) Revenge is considered marginally habitable, under the guidelines of the Colonial Oversight and Protection Service, only in the following regions: (a) The so-called Long Archipelago, approximately 8N-12S, 60E-75E; (b) the southernmost portion of the planet’s largest continent, the habitable portion lying 6N-4S, 94W-113W. Even in these areas the growing season is short, and the population of Riordan’s Revenge relies exclusively on accelerated-growth crop strains for agricultural sustenance.”
There was more, but Michael quit reading. His memory had gotten the jog it needed. The City of the Rose was not a city but a scanty town, ugly under a cold sun. Stone ranging rust to scarlet in brutal outcroppings of rock; rose-shapes everywhere and a temple whose interior no unbeliever could see; pathological rejection of outsiders, so that Revenge did not have Inspace communications, not even a single transmitter; veiled women he had hardly glimpsed, because they feared defilement if an infidel’s gaze fell on them—
A man could hide on Revenge.
“Mike?” said Theo, reading over Shen’s shoulder.
“Yeah?”
“Why would he go there?”
“Stay out of sight. Stay hidden. Maintain a base? Where’d he dock that ’vette he got? Where’d he go to install the guns? You want to be hidden for something like that. Cheaper to do it in atmosphere.”
He spoke with authority; from experience.
“Think this might be it?” Shen said.
“Worth a try, maybe. It’s his kind of place.” His breath caught. Shen looked at him narrowly. “God, yes, it’s his kind of place,” Michael said with feeling. “Isolated, primitive, helpless—that’s why I went there. But it wasn’t the place.”
Theo had punched up a subfile. He said practically, “It’s a long way out. That Riordan, he must have been right out on the edge when exploration slowed down. That was just before it did, wasn’t it?”
“It was at the very end of the Explosion,” Michael said. He did not have to search his memory for details of the great age of exploration; he had made himself an expert on the topic. “I know about Miles Riordan. He was one of the reasons they put the freelancers out of business. Then the big colonies started breaking away, Heartworld first and then Willow and Co-op, and nobody had time for exploring.”
Shen folded her arms and stared at him without expression. She said, “Catch up this time, maybe. Lousy place. No people. No people, no cover. You get spotted first. GeeGee’s got no guns. Shields’ll stop a meteorite. No more. Stupid.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Crazy man.”
“I want him alive. I want his records intact. The guns come later.”
Shen said to Theo, “Crazy man wins all the arguments. You noticed? Start packing.”
Michael nodded. They would be in space by morning.
There was a full moon the night before Hanna entered quarantine, the night she finally went to see Jameson. She rode under it in an Admin aircar, and the moon-frosted land below slipped past like water. The aircar made no sound. It homed in on Admin and guided itself. Hanna, with nothing to do but be carried through the silver night, thought she stood still over the turning Earth. She thought perversely that she could change course, fly away at random, look down on the busy towns and quiet countryside contemplative and unseen. Why not?—all her good-bye
s were said. Admin could not possess her much longer; her ties with Earth, with all of human space, attenuated. It was the same for Rubee and Awnlee. Of late they seemed more alien, not less; as if the days running past already brought them nearer to their home, and they could begin to take off a conforming skin they had worn politely through the months with humankind. The vast gulf waited for all of them.
The guards at Admin’s rooftop hardly bothered to check Hanna’s identity. Not bad for a spacer from D’neera. The tubes that wound through Admin shot her down, south, east, and spat her out at Jameson’s door. With luck I will not come here again, she thought, saw in his puzzled face that some of the thought had escaped her, and to forestall a question said good evening hurriedly.
“What is it you want me to see?” she asked.
“Oh—” Her abruptness startled him. He drew her into Contact’s deserted rooms and said, “It is an historical piece. In a manner of speaking.”
“It is about this man? This ghost who haunts I&S?”
“Yes, of course. Also this is farewell, or nearly,” he added, and when they came to his inner chamber she was prepared to accept with courtesy a glass of wine, a stirrup cup—courteously, because Rubee and Awnlee had taught her more about manners than all her life before.
“You can regard the file as the evening’s entertainment,” he said.
He had forgotten or chose to ignore the past days’ strain. Hanna was glad to let it pass. She settled onto a couch that tested the contours of her body, shuddered and reshaped itself to her measure. Jameson sat beside her and the couch shuddered again. Universal minor earthquakes, she thought.
“Is it a pageant?” she said. “Like Rubee’s tales?”
“How odd that you should say that.” He smiled; the parting near at hand might be a relief to him, too. “I haven’t been immersed in the tales as you have,” he said, “but I must confess I find myself at times reinterpreting events as an Uskosian might, or as I imagine he might. What you’ll see is interesting enough without adding an alien perspective, however. It’s neither text nor pageant; it’s a holo recording of an interview between an I&S investigator and the former head of the Abbey of St. Kristofik on Alta. The abbot is dead now; the monks believe an extended lifespan pleases the Deity less than a natural one. I’m told that shortly after he died an anonymous donor made a generous gift to the school in his memory. The source was Valentine; you can make what you want of that. The interview took place fifteen years ago, five years after the Pavonis Queen incident. It concerns events that happened even earlier, between the time Kristofik appeared on Alta and the time he left—ran away, the abbot said, to Valentine.”
Hanna started to say: It seems irrelevant. But Jameson spoke an order and the room went dark, and before she could say anything there was a new burst of light, the light of a holographic projection that took up most of the room. In its center, stone-still but three-dimensional, stood two men. One, cloaked and booted in black, had the look of assured competence that marked the men and women of Admin. The morning light left no shadows on his ebony skin. Surely he looked just the same today, performed the duties of the present with confidence. Fog lay on the fields behind him, as on a damp morning in autumn. Also he stood on gray-white stone, so that Hanna’s eye fell automatically on his darkness and solidity, drawn to the only thing of substance in that land of mist.
The other man was old and pale. His cropped hair was snowy, and the top of his head was bald. He wore a long white robe loosely belted with rope. He was frail beside the investigator, an aged wraith, part mist, part old white stone. More than age twisted his face, but Hanna did not know what it was until the figures moved; then she saw that it was sorrow.
“I am still trying to assimilate what you have told me…Accept it? No, not yet. I cannot accept it yet. I must forgive, but my charity falls short. In time. Time and prayer…”
The investigator listened, but the old man spoke to himself. They walked together on stone pathways, past twisted trees or treelike shrubs, stone walls, stone statues, white and ghostly.
The old man said, “To think the boy I knew could do that deed! And then you say he turned to evil long before!”
The other man said quietly, “There is evidence to support the theory that he was involved in the matter I spoke of. There is no doubt about the rest of it.”
“Oh dear, oh dear, how distressing this is! Please forgive me. You have questions, don’t you? I’m not helping much.”
“I’m sorry to have such news to bring. Believe me, I am sorry. You were fond of him?”
“Yes. Yes, I was. It was a blow when he ran away. I always hoped to hear of him someday. To have news at last, and such news!”
There was a stone bench by the path. The old man sat down on it, gathering his robe with a wrinkled hand. His face was unabashedly grieved. “Oh,” he said, “his immortal soul! How I pity him!”
“I’m very sorry.” The investigator remained standing.
“Yes, yes, I know. Pray for him. I will, all of us will. That’s all that’s left to do. We failed, you know, failed at everything else we should have done. That’s plain enough!”
The I&S man waited a moment. Then he said, “You understand that I must get as much information about him as I can. I hoped you could tell me how he came here, what he was like, what he thought about, why he left.”
“Oh dear, oh dear. What he thought about? Who knows? Things I never guessed. There must have been things I never saw. His confessor, maybe—but that is out of the question,” he said, the old voice suddenly stone, and he looked at the investigator with eyes of iron.
“Of course,” said the I&S man mildly. “I don’t think we need to worry about that. Just tell me where he came from.”
“I don’t know where he came from.” The old man stirred; there was a new glint in his eye. “Do you want to hear a mystery?” he said.
“By all means.”
“Well, then, I will tell you a mystery. You can confirm it with the secular authorities. I won’t say you can find out more about it; you won’t find out any more. Eleven years ago—pardon, me, fifteen in Standard time—I came out of the rear gate one morning—have you seen all our grounds? No? The rear gate opens on an alley behind the sheds where we keep our tools. Sometimes we put food scraps in the alley. It doesn’t happen often. We waste very little here. That morning Brother Cook burnt the bread. Some of it was past saving, and so it was put out for the dogs. Later I went out, I forget why I went, I forgot it then and never could remember. I found him in the alley. He was too busy eating to hear me. He was so starved there was no room in his belly for caution; there was only the hunger. When I spoke to him, he would have run away, but he would not leave the bread. I think he would have killed me if I had tried to take it from him. A wild animal. Nothing but bones, and at the time when a boy can hardly keep up with his bones, they grow so fast. His eyes were yellow, a strange sick color. Later it went away. Do you know how I finally got him to trust me? With food. Like an animal. And so we took him in.”
“Was he from Alta?”
“Oh, no. I don’t know where he came from, but it wasn’t anywhere on Alta. Listen to this. He did not understand Standard speech, and we could make nothing of what he said. We recorded it and sent it, oh, everywhere. To Earth; even to Earth. The report would be still in his file. It said the language he spoke came from Earth, originally, I mean. As long ago as the twenty-fourth century, they said, his people must have been isolated; just before Standard was mandated, or maybe just after, so they hadn’t got into the habit of using it. I don’t remember what language it was. He learned Standard fast. He always learned fast.”
“So he came from a colony? Which one?”
“That’s the mystery, you see. I said there was a mystery. No one knows. The dialect didn’t match anything.”
“Who did this report?”
“Oh, famous people. Experts.” The old man looked up, bright-eyed. “You know, during the Explosion, in th
e early days, the colonists went out so fast, so many from all parts of Earth, the records broke down. Ships vanished, too. Hundreds of them. Hundreds of thousands of people, I think it was millions, they fell into space and disappeared. I think about that sometimes. I thought about it when he was here. You’ve heard of the Lost Worlds?”
“Yes,” said the other man, “but I don’t believe in them. I’d like to see that report, if I may.”
“Of course you can. But you’ll find it says just what I’ve said.”
“All right. How did he get to Alta from wherever it was?”
“I don’t know. We guessed. A month before I found him a merchant put in at the port here. There were others, merchants and freighters come here all the time, but the others had nothing to hide. They were tracked and questioned. They’d never seen him. One of them couldn’t be tracked. The port here isn’t as careful as the ones in the Polity. That’s what I’m told; I wouldn’t know. When they looked into it they said the registration was false. There was no ship with that number and name.”
“He could have told you something, surely. When he learned Standard.”
“Could have, but didn’t.” The old man’s grief had eased as he told the story. It caught up with him now. He bowed his head and took hold of the coarse rope that gathered his robe. There were knots in it; he fingered them as if for comfort. The investigator waited patiently. Presently the abbot began to speak, slowly.
“We asked him. He said he didn’t know. I think he told the truth. That was at the beginning. When he said it, his eyes had that lost look, the look you see on children’s faces when they’ve lost everything, parents, homes, and don’t know why, don’t understand why they’ve been hurt. We had sixty boys here then, homeless children from everywhere. It’s near eighty now. Their faces run together now that I’m old. But he stands out. He was a beautiful child when we got some meat on him. He had beautiful hands, too, except, you know, they’d been broken. Broken on purpose, the doctors said, and set too late and badly. They weren’t good for much. So I took him to Willow myself to have them fixed. There were signs of—of other kinds of violence. I don’t need to tell you about that. It’s in his file.”
The D’neeran Factor Page 49
