by M. K. Wren
“Why? You’d like to retain that privilege for the Phoenix?”
Alexand felt his muscles tighten. His father was listening, but he heard only what he wanted to hear.
Galinin’s brows drew down; he sent Woolf a penetrating look, but addressed himself to Rich.
“You’ve convinced me that Bond religion offers a potentially powerful tool. How do you intend to use it?”
“I intend to become a saint.” Rich glanced at Alexand and smiled. “There’s irony enough in that—a slightly cynical agnostic like me with ambitions for sainthood.” Then he turned again to Galinin. “But sainthood is within my grasp. When I first began studying the Bonds, I used to memorize various philosophical passages before I went to the chapels and recite them to encourage the Shepherds to open their memfile memories. By the time I began the more intensive studies I carried out for the Phoenix, I’d acquired a name for erudition and wisdom comparable to the Shepherds themselves. They call me a holy man. Of course, my . . . affliction made it easier to gain their trust from the beginning. They regard it as a divine sign. A year ago, I began to realize I might be able to make use of this hard-earned reputation. For my purposes their religious tendencies are ideal: very conservative, with a rigid moral code reinforced by fear of punishment meted out by an omniscient pantheon of saints, and this I haven’t touched on yet—extremely fatalistic. In spite of the increasing number of uprisings, Bonds are far more inclined to accept rather than react. How else would you keep seventy percent of the population in a state of virtual slavery?” He shook his head, sighing. “And how else would they explain their slavery, except by a deeply ingrained fatalism. ‘What is, is a Rightness: the will of the Mezion is hidden to mortal eyes.’ ”
He paused, as if to gather his flagging strength, or perhaps to steel himself against the pain.
“So, I began my campaign. In the last year I’ve visited nearly three thousand Elder Shepherds throughout the Two Systems. No small task. I’ve been preparing them for my Testing. My martyrdom. I’ve warned them that it’s coming, and I’ve laid my dictums. I scavenged the Holy Writ, the Word, the literature of all history, for sources. I even invented dictums of my own: ’Wrath mothers blood; submission mothers peace.’ ‘Dark Souls feed on anger; humility withers them.’ ‘The Mezion will Test you to know your soul; lift your hand against His tools and you are doomed, for they are the instruments of His will.’ ‘The way of the Blessed is peace. As all people are children of the All-God, they are all brothers. Who lifts his hand in wrath against any person, lifts his hand against his brother and reaps the harvest of doom.’ ” He hesitated, then, “Do you understand now, Grandser, what I hope to accomplish with my sainthood? They don’t know I have a terminal illness. All I want them to know is that I went to my death with absolute submission. Then these words and the years I’ve spent with these people—studying them, guiding them, even loving some of them—then all this will bear fruit. Nothing I’ve said will be forgotten. It will be incorporated into the Holy Words and locked in those memfile memories to be called up when the occasion demands, and that will be at the beginning of the reactive cycle, before the chain reaction of violence starts. They’ll think I’m out in the Beyond waiting to toss them into Nether Dark if they defy my dictums, and the gist of all the words I’ve poured into their memories is this: violence and resistance are sins, submission and humility virtues; the Fesh, Confleet, Conpol, etc., are instruments of the Mezion—or brothers—and violence against them is a mortal sin.” Rich was leaning forward, his burning eyes fixed on Galinin. “Grandser, do you understand?”
Galinin rested his white-bearded chin on his folded hands. “Yes, I understand what you hope to accomplish.”
Rich didn’t move except for the whisper of a smile that touched his lips.
“But you have reservations.”
“Of course. Not about the feasibility of your plan. I don’t doubt that it would serve to inhibit the Bonds in future encounters with Fesh.”
“Then you have reservations about me?”
“I haven’t entirely dismissed the possibility that you may be lying to me, but I find it highly unlikely.” He paused. “No, my reservations are for the Phoenix, of course. However, those doubts can be resolved—on this particular issue, at least—with a single question.” His eyes narrowed, probing. “Rich, what I must know is this: Have you ever told the Bonds that you’re a member of the Phoenix?”
The answer came without hesitation, firm and decisive.
“Definitely not. And for a very pragmatic reason: it would destroy their faith in me. They regard me as a Beyond Soul with no identity with any class, group, or organization in this world. The few who have even heard of the Phoenix identify it with the Outsiders, whom they distrust and fear. I’ve never once mentioned the Phoenix or suggested that I was associated with any kind of organization.”
“But they’ll find out if you’re executed as an agent of the Phoenix.”
Rich shrugged. “The charge will be meaningless. My execution will be a Testing, Grandser, and it will make no difference to them what brings me to it. You could charge me with anything, even murder, and they wouldn’t believe it.”
Galinin nodded acceptance. “And you’re quite sure they have no inkling of your connection with the Phoenix?”
“Quite sure.”
Woolf demanded incredulously, “Mathis, don’t tell me you believe that? For the God’s sake, it doesn’t make sense that they wouldn’t identify him with the Phoenix!”
Alexand asked, “Why not, Father?”
Woolf hesitated, as if seeking the source of a new attack. “Why not? What good will their damned martyr do them if the Bonds don’t know his cause? He won’t be available to sound the call to arms himself. The Bonds must know!”
Alexand stared at his father, at this man who had become a stranger to him. the man who had sired him in an act of love, and who had in love sired Rich, the son whose death, whose future nonexistence, he dismissed so callously with that impersonal phrase, he won’t be available.
He asked. “Do they, Father? Do the Bonds have to know?” He expected the question to emerge as a shout, but it was quiet, almost toneless.
Woolf retorted. “Of course they do! How will the Phoenix take advantage of their noble martyr unless the Bonds know who to answer to—the Phoenix!”
Galinin rose, a monolithic shape looming through an inexplicable haze.
“Phillip, you’re making a serious error.”
Woolf faced him defiantly. “Mathis, if you’re fool enough to believe him—” he seemed incapable of pronouncing Rich’s name, “—I’m not! If you let him go through with this, you’ll give the Phoenix a weapon to blow the Concord apart. You know the inevitable results of this execution, and yet—”
“No. I do not know the results, and I don’t accept the inevitability of a bloodbath arising from his execution. I’m considering the risks to our Houses if he’s denied this . . . martyrdom. I’m weighing those risks against the possibility that his death will serve a positive purpose.”
Alexand was dimly aware of a pale shape floating in some ambivalent space. His mother’s face. She was looking directly at him, her eyes wide with unmasked fear.
“You believe him!” Woolf took two strides toward Galinin, coming between Alexand and his mother. “You believe all that—”
“I believe,” Galinin said firmly, “that Rich may be correct in his assessment of the results of his decision. I believe that it’s within our power to counteract any use the Phoenix might make of his martyrdom; we are, at least, forewarned. Or have you some alternative to offer that would magically negate the risks involved in trying to stop him?”
“I have the only obvious alternative. If Richard Lamb’s arrest can’t be prevented, so be it. He will be arrested—but there will be no execution.”
“Holy God, are
you suggesting that Rich simply be kept under detention for an indefinite period of time?”
“Yes! That execution must not take place!”
“Phillip, even I can’t keep this quiet indefinitely without attracting attention, and we can’t risk that.”
“Not indefinitely. Only—only until . . .” And he finally faltered; silence closed in.
Rich’s voice came softly into its void. Alexand turned to look into that luminescent, mystically beautiful face, and he saw something there he recognized as dread.
“Grandser, he means, only until I die—of my illness.”
The chemistry of rage reached critical mass. Alexand felt the accumulated despair and anger suddenly unleashed within him, pooling with every heartbeat in the pounding cavity of his skull. He had a distinct awareness of the pressure within his head pushing against the delicate interlacings of the sutures in the bone. He wasn’t aware of moving, but now he was on his feet, facing his father, close enough to touch him, but seeing him at an unfathomable distance. The room seemed washed in a white glare that drove off the color, and the sound was unbearable. Yet some part of his mind recognized the quiet outside the exploding pile of his brain, and against the outer silence he heard his own voice and its measured tones.
“Let me understand you, Father,” his voice said, “your intention is to surrender Rich to the SSB and let them hold him until he dies of natural causes?”
“Yes, that’s my intention. We can’t allow—”
“You can’t believe him—your own son. Rather than believe him, you’d put the House in jeopardy and your son in the hands of the SSB indefinitely. Are you aware of the quality of the medical facilities in SSB Detention Centers?”
“I don’t see what bearing—”
“Then you’ve suddenly lost sight of the fact that Rich is ill.” His voice was still quiet, but the pressure was out of control, the heat-flash whiteness fading until he was peering down a long tunnel of blackness at his father’s face. “And are you aware that the SSB will undoubtedly try to break his Phoenix conditioning? He’d be a prime candidate for them. And are you aware of the SSB’s methods of interrogation? The pulsed charges? And their latest development, the neuron sensitizing injections? Perhaps you haven’t had time to concern yourself with such trivia; perhaps I should bring you up to date. The sensitizing injections increase pain susceptibility tenfold. Think about it! Your son laid out on—”
“He’s not my son! Not now!”
“You can’t deny your genes in every cell of his body. He is your son! And you’re condemning him to—how long in hell? Maybe he’ll live a month; maybe two weeks. Maybe he’ll be lucky and die in one week. How many hours in a week, Father? How many minutes? How many seconds?”
“Damn it, he chose the Phoenix! This is a risk he—”
“How long is a second when you’re in pain? And with Rich, they might not have to resort to their refined methods to reduce him to abject agony. All they’d have to do is cut off his morphinine and let nature take its course.”
“I can’t help that!”
“You can help it, but you won’t because of the fear. The fear that’s eating at the guts of this holy Concord of ours. It’s the fear that will destroy the whole rotting pile, and it’s reached you, too, Father. You’re afraid—”
The sound was a stunning crack, and in its wake came a paralyzed silence.
He had seen his father’s hand draw back, seen it move across his body, but it didn’t make sense until he felt the smashing impact of the back of that hand against his cheek.
“Afraid?” Woolf’s voice was blurred with rage, but still mordantly cold. “Perhaps you should teach me courage! My son, of the delicate stomach and dainty sensibilities, the first Lord of DeKoven Woolf to risk a court-martial for flight from battle. You have no right to speak of courage! You’re as much a traitor as your brother!”
Woolf didn’t need Galinin’s sharp, warning command. It hardly registered, and it came too late.
He heard his own words echoing as the torrent of anger dissipated, leaving him empty and intensely aware of the livid mark on his son’s cheek and the burning of the skin on his own hand.
That blow, those words, between one Lord and another, were more than sufficient grounds to call a point of honor. He’d seen men killed with far less provocation. But it wasn’t that prospect that brought the sick despair. It was what he read in his son’s face.
Alexand, forgive me.
Three simple words. They must be said.
Yet his throat constricted on the words, they were gall on his tongue. He could not say them. Then like a signal came the single, sweet-toned chime of the pager. Commander Bary.
The moment had passed. It was too late.
Woolf watched numbly as Alexand turned his back and went to the hearth to stand staring into the red embers. He spoke then, but not to his father; to no one and everyone, in a tone stripped of life.
“I want to speak to Rich. Alone.”
And Elise rising, still dry-eyed, reaching out to her father for support. Rich motionless, eyes closed, the dim light catching the glint of tears moving down his cheeks.
3.
The door closed. Whisper slither and click. And Rich was gone. Their last words together had been spoken, were vanished now into the void of the past.
Click. Again. The door closing.
An echo out of the ago only minutes old. It closed again and again in his mind, and every time the cavernous aloneness of the room loomed larger.
There will be no farewells between us, Alex. . . .
And no landing-roof partings. All the words that could be said had been said in this room before the door closed. The choice was made, the plans drawn, the course plotted.
I promised you a cause, Alex. It was always our cause, but now it belongs to you, and you to it. . . .
His eyes held the images of orange coals; his mind layered more images behind them, wraiths that didn’t assume solidity, transient as flames.
Alexand looked down at his right hand. He’d picked up his glass. The coals glinted through the amber liquid. He’d picked it up after Rich left, after the door closed. Fallor. This golden distillate of the fields of Alber, an endless sea of harvest-ready gold stretching to the sea-flat horizon, spouting billows of black smoke.
VisLord Richard DeKoven Woolf was dead this night, but Richard Lamb would live to suffer his apotheosis. The Bonds, who recognized the transcendent light in that failing body, would have their saint. The nexus of timelines had been passed, and nothing would ever be as it had been an hour ago, a day ago, a year ago. The choice was made.
Click. Again the door closed. Sealed the silence.
He could still move; could raise the glass, but couldn’t taste the whiskey. He could feel the burning of it. A shadow hovered at the edges of his vision. He knew it was there, knew what it was. It would close in soon, the rushing stoop of a predacious bird; a double grief given a ravening edge by regret and guilt, but the choice was made, and by that choice regret and guilt became as inescapable as grief.
On my immortal soul, I take this vow for life and unto death. . . .
And it would be a kind of death. Yet he couldn’t fulfill that vow without accepting another kind of death. He was surrounded by death in countless shapes.
Alex, what about Adrien—can you face giving her up?
The door closed. Whispering slide. Click.
At the shattering moment when his father’s hand struck his cheek, the first image in his mind was Adrien Eliseer, and he weighed that cost first, weighed it with the grief he would inflict on those he loved, the grief he would bear himself, weighed it against the incalculable grief waiting if he refused his own apotheosis.
Father, I could forgive you that blow, forgive you even your betrayal of Rich, of your
son, but the fear . . .
That could be forgiven, too.
But it couldn’t be tolerated.
The shadow. It was coming. . . .
Love him; love your husband, Mother. Teach him not to be afraid. A man who would forfeit his life before he recognized defeat, yet he was infected with the plague of fear. Love him, Mother. Give him more sons. Drown your own grief in new sons; time enough for that; years enough.
It was coming. He saw the shadow, a veil dimming the searing lights of the coals.
Adrien, forgive me what is beyond forgiving. . . .
Click, on the pounding silence; again, the closing door. And an emptiness stretching to some infinite vanishing point, a keening rush of loneliness like a wind.
The glass shattered, collapsed into a handful of knife edges. But there was no pain in that ripped flesh. His whole body shuddered with pain. He couldn’t feel the cuts.
Darkness moved like smoke around him; his mouth was open, a silent cry straining at his throat. He fell to his knees, convulsed in a foetal knot.
In the Holy Writ the prophet wrestled with the angel of the All-God. . . .
He recoiled, quivering, assaulted with peals of sardonic laughter. And what merciless god sent this clawing beast—the black angel of grief?
The ebony wings pounded the air, the talons locked in his flesh, and if he didn’t scream, it was only because his lungs couldn’t find air enough. And if he didn’t weep, it was only because he hadn’t yet surrendered. Tears would be the white flag of defeat.
And death . . . or something like death.
Something he couldn’t name.
In the end he lay panting, numbed with ebbing agony, but he called himself the victor, even though he could still hear the distant thunder of black wings. He hadn’t killed the beast. It would never die. Not until its host died.
