Webdancers

by Brian Herbert

  “We don’t know the particulars,” Meghina said, “only that the Office of the Doge has ordered you to Canopa.”

  “It’s all a waste of time, you know,” Akar said. He scuttled backward, and sagged wearily onto the cot. “Whatever the jurisdiction, I have diplomatic immunity.”

  “And the courts will determine if you flaunted it,” Noah said.

  “Flaunted? In this matter, that is not a legal term. Obviously, I know the law and you don’t.”

  “I’m not here to debate you.”

  “I asked Noah to bring me to check on your physical condition,” the Princess said. “Are you being fed well, Mr. Akar? Have you received treatment for your injuries?” She looked down at his bloodied legs that draped over the side of the cot.

  “The food is unfit for roachrats,” he replied. “And as for my injuries, that is an additional matter. My lawyers will prefer charges for mistreatment of a prisoner.”

  “I viewed the surveillance file on you,” Noah said. “You injured yourself when you fell on the stairs.”

  “I was pushed!”

  “That isn’t what the evidence shows.”

  “I shall send you better food and a doctor,” Meghina said, stiffly. Then, without another word, she turned and left, with Noah behind her.

  “What are they going to do?” Akar shouted after them, “Give me a life sentence?” He cackled, delighted at his own dark humor.

  “That is not up to us,” Noah said, over his shoulder. “We are only holding you for other authorities.”

  “I have a long list of grievances!” Akar shouted after them. “You’ll both hear from my lawyers!”

  “On that, at least, I believe you,” Noah yelled back, as he and Meghina went through the heavy iron door.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?’

  In response, Noah slammed the door shut.

  “A charming man, but I never entirely trusted him,” Meghina said. “That doesn’t mean he’s guilty, though.”

  Noah couldn’t help but agree, though soon—after completing the transfer to Canopa—the matter would be out of his hands.

  * * * * *

  Sometimes, Noah dreaded going to sleep. In his military duties, he spent long hours attending to important tasks, so by the end of each day he invariably felt tired enough to drift off. But so many problems kept churning through his mind that he found it difficult to leave them unresolved. So much seemed beyond his ability to fix or even to understand. At times, he wished he knew less than he did, or at least that he had been exposed to less.

  The mysteries of Timeweb were at the very top of his list.

  It awed him to think of the incredible galactic web that connected everything in a manner that most galactic races could not detect, a structure that had existed for millions and millions of years. During all of that time, it had been strong enough to hold everything together, but now, after so much abuse and neglect, it was falling apart. Reports from the Tulyan caretaker teams indicated some progress in completing repairs, and a number of the most heavily damaged areas had been improved. But there were also ongoing reports of new timeholes needing attention and entire galactic sectors in peril, so the Tulyan Elders needed to constantly adjust their priorities and plans.

  As First Elder Kre’n had said, it was like the triage method of assessing the injuries of soldiers on a vast galactic battlefield, except in this case Timeweb was a single entity, with many widespread wounds.

  Humankind is a single organism, Noah thought, as he made his way to his private quarters in the keep. In fact, all races are a single organism. All races are linked to Timeweb.

  He felt his thoughts stretching beyond prior levels of understanding or connection.

  Suddenly, in the corridor he dropped to his knees, and a green darkness pervaded his consciousness. In the background, he heard guards asking if he was all right.

  Noah was conscious of remaining on his knees, and of people all around him. Some of them touched him, and he heard their distant voices asking if they should help him to lie down. Someone summoned a doctor, and Noah wondered if it would be the same doctor that would attend to the Salducian. An odd, throwaway thought that intruded on others of much more importance.

  Priorities, he thought. Life was about assigning priorities, and acting upon them. He wasn’t sure if he had heard that somewhere, or if he had figured it out himself. Another throwaway thought.

  Then, with all of the commotion around him, Noah became an island unto himself, and voices drifted away around him. He recalled the horrible death of his sister, the way she aged too rapidly and died looking like a haggard old woman, and probably in terrible pain. Certainly, she suffered from a horrendous anguish of the soul. Noah thought back to the last time he saw her, when she stabbed him with a dermex needle, claiming it contained her own tainted blood. Even though doctors subsequently assured him that she had not infected him—and Noah seemed to have his own brand of immortality—he still worried about it occasionally.

  So much information to discard. So many details that only clogged his mind and made it work inefficiently, details that intruded like guerrilla fighters and then retreated, only to irritate him over and over again. Concerning Francella, he didn’t want to think about her bad side, though that was almost all he’d ever seen of her. Instead, he tried to remember the few comparatively pleasant times they had shared (mostly as children), occasions when they almost seemed like normal siblings.

  My life has been anything but normal, he thought. And hers, in its own horrific way, was far from normal as well.

  The Human condition seemed to cover a broad range of purported normalcy. But he realized that at its very core each Human relationship contained an inevitable element of dysfunction, and that people—the optimistic types—tried to put a positive cast on problems, making them seem less significant than they actually were.

  Noah had always tried to be an optimist himself, even when the obstacles against that state of mind seemed insurmountable. Now, more than ever in his lifetime, and he was quite certain—more than ever in the history of the galaxy—the obstacles were greater than ever.

  Like a great flood waiting to break through holes in a dike, Chaos threatened to inundate everything in the known galaxy, ruining eons of cosmic evolution, changing everything for the worse. The Tulyans were like little Dutch boys running around putting their fingers in the holes. But there seemed to be many more timeholes than there were caretakers to fix them.

  He felt the dark seepage of pessimism into his awareness, and fought to push it back.

  At the moment, he sensed someone carrying him, but that part didn’t matter. He cried out, and felt the flood of an abrupt vision that took over his consciousness. Suddenly, he found himself thinking with Francella’s mind and seeing through her eyes. Startling! But fascinating. He didn’t fight the sensations. It didn’t seem like one of the doors to Timeweb; it seemed like something else.…

  It was a gloomy, rainy day on Canopa, and Francella was at CorpOne headquarters with their father, Prince Saito Watanabe.

  “You know,” the old man said as they stood by the rain-swept window, “I might have been wrong all my life about industrial pollution and waste, so maybe I should change after all, as Noah has been preaching to me—even if it means dismantling every business operation my company has. Maybe I should turn operation of the company over to your brother and let him clean things up from the inside.”

  “He can only destroy CorpOne!” she shouted back, her voice cracking. “Noah has never cared about this company or this family! How can you say such a thing?”

  “You will accept whatever I decide,” the old merchant prince said. “If I have been wrong in the past, I must make amends.” He looked at her with rheumy old eyes. “And you must makes amends, too. For a long time, I have noticed how you never reach out to Noah, never seem capable of seeing anything good about him. Why is that? I never wanted the two of you to grow so far apart.”

  He exte
nded a hand to touch her shoulder affectionately, but she pushed it away.

  They argued for awhile, father and daughter, with far more than the normal associated emotions. Finally Francella went away by herself, to her own island of twisted consciousness. She felt extremely upset at what the old tycoon had said to her. In her office her thoughts went wild, and she smashed things around her.

  It was a turning point in her life. Always before, she had imagined doing terrible things, even worse than the financial indiscretions she had long committed against her company and her family. Now, for the first time, she actively plotted to kill her father and blame it on Noah.

  As the images faded and Noah found himself in his own apartment with a doctor tending to him, he was left wondering if he had experienced an accurate vision of her thoughts, something transmitted by her blood—which she had injected so violently into his bloodstream. They had been born fraternal twins, and perhaps the injection had intensified a paranormal connection they’d already had.

  “He’s breathing hard,” the doctor said.

  Through bleary eyes, Noah saw an elderly man with white hair. Noah tried to calm his own pulse, but became conscious of it roaring in his ears as blood pumped wildly through his veins.

  Could their father’s death really have occurred the way he had just envisioned it? Noah was stunned, but somehow it all seemed to fit.

  He felt medications taking effect, and heard the voices drift away again, but this time he blacked out.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Each breath we attempt to take is an adventure into the unknown.

  —Ancient saying

  So much had happened, and of such grave and far-reaching significance, that Princess Meghina had not had time to grieve for her lost dagg, Orga, or for the many citizens of Siriki who had died in the HibAdu onslaught. Many had been her friends and associates. Sadly, she had to face the fact that portions of her past were gone, and irretrievable. Even her once-magnificent Golden Palace was looking worn and tired, from its conversion into a military headquarters for the Liberator forces.

  She didn’t object to the use of her opulent home for that noble purpose, so her sadness was tempered by the stark realities that faced everyone now. There were two grave threats—the HibAdus, and the declining infrastructure of the galaxy. She’d even heard rumors that the Tulyans and Noah thought there might be yet another great peril “out there” somewhere, but whenever she had asked any of them about it, she had received only vague responses. Even Noah, who had a reputation for being concise and direct, had evaded her question. She came away with the feeling that the people around her were bordering on paranoia, and perhaps a quiet hysteria, constantly feeling that terrible things were about to happen.

  It was mid-afternoon on a cloudy day, and Meghina found herself in an improbable place, standing on the edge of a high cliff with Llew Jarro, Betha Neider, Dougal Netzer, and Paltrow. All of them were the “elixir-immortals,” but missing the Salducian diplomat, who was being transferred as a prisoner to Canopa later that day. The five of them were still on the palace grounds, and had gone up in a tram. The high perch had always been a favorite place for Meghina to go, often by herself, and sometimes with one of her rare pet animals.

  “We form an exclusive little club, you know,” said the corpulent Jarro. He stood with his back to the precipice, facing the others. “I thought you might be interested in learning what I have been discovering about our … special condition.”

  “Not that we’re afraid of heights or anything,” Paltrow said, with a little snicker. “But I’ll ask again: Why have you brought us to this cliff?”

  A thick, buxom woman, Paltrow nonetheless didn’t appear to have an ounce of fat on her. She looked to have trained for sporting activities of some sort in the past, but was close-mouthed about her personal history, except to say that she was only too happy to “leave it in the dust,” including her own birth name. With her immortality, she had not only assumed a new body, but a new name of her choosing. Despite the enigma around the woman, Meghina rather liked her, and didn’t sense anything shadowy about her. Not what the Princess had sensed—accurately, in all likelihood—about Kobi Akar.

  “Some things are best demonstrated rather than described,” Jarro said. “I’m about to jump off this cliff. Not to kill myself, of course, because that is an impossibility. I’ve been coming up here on my own, and have gone off several times.”

  Meghina glanced over the edge, and felt a little tug at her stomach, a touch of queasiness. It was a long way down. According to Sirikan legend, two star-crossed lovers had committed suicide from this place, long ago. Through a grove of trees, the Princess saw some of the fences and buildings of her private zoo, and beyond that, a meadow that had been converted to a landing field for conventional military aircraft, and for occasional podships.

  Jarro took a half step backward, so that he barely maintained his footing. “We’ve all heard of the horrors that Noah Watanabe experienced at the hands of his sister, how she kept hacking him up, and his body kept regenerating. From our experience at Yaree, it is clear that we share some of that remarkable ability. We could fall off here, and eventually recover.”

  “That’s true enough,” old Dougal Netzer said. A scowl formed on the artist’s creased, ruddy face. “It wouldn’t be good, though, if we were all trapped in a rock slide. We still have our muscular limitations.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Jarro said, “but the rocks seem stable enough here.”

  “You’re not a geologist,” the old man said.

  “You’re right.”

  “A timehole could open up, too, and start some sort of an upheaval.”

  “You do have an imagination,” Jarro said. “But that could happen anywhere, not just here. I guess we could all decide to remain separate if we’re worried about that. However, I think we have more to learn from each other. I’ve jumped off this cliff eight times now, and … “

  “You’ve used up your nine lives, then,” Betha Neider quipped, “counting your fall at Yaree.”

  “Usually you are a delightful young woman,” Jarro said, “but your inexperience can cause you to be facetious at times. This is one of those occasions. No, Betha, I have many more lives than the proverbial allocation, as do we all. I was about to say, each time I’ve done the jump, I’ve recovered faster than the time before. At first, it was hours before I could get up and walk back to the palace. The last time, it was a matter of minutes.”

  “This promises to be a delightful day,” Betha said, undeterred. “You’ll walk back and have dinner, while we lay splattered at the base of the cliff, until we get up in the darkness and stumble around like zombies.”

  “I’m talking about self-improvement,” Jarro said, glaring at her. “If any of you prefer, you can ride the tram to the bottom. As for me, I have an alternate means of transportation.” He backed up and leaped off backward, tumbling into the air. “See you at the bottom!”

  After a few seconds, Meghina heard the sickening thump of his body when it struck the ground, far below. She looked over the edge, but couldn’t make out where he had hit. A minute later she saw something moving down there, and heard a distant voice that carried all the way up the cliff face: “Come on in! The water’s fine!”

  “See you guys in Zombieland,” Betha said, as she leaped off. Paltrow followed her, leaving Meghina and old Dougal on the high perch. “I can’t have girls showing me up,” the artist said, with a shrug. Then he followed the others.

  For several moments, the Princess stood on the edge of the precipice, looking down. So far, only one person moved down there, whom she presumed to be Llew Jarro. It seemed most untidy and undignified to her to add herself to the splattered flesh and broken bones at the base of the cliff, and a wayward thought occurred to her: What if animals from the woods came and started eating the bodies? Maybe they wouldn’t finish the bodies off before they started regenerating, not even with the help of carrion birds, but it gave h
er pause. Besides, she was not in the mood to make herself the subject of a scientific experiment, especially an impromptu one. In the midst of a huge galactic war, with so many concerns on her mind, she could not afford to be foolish or capricious. She shouldn’t even have come up here with the others, not without finding out what Jarro wanted.

  And by title, she remained the civilian leader of this planet, requiring that she behave with decorum.

  Jarro, and perhaps some of the others, might not agree with her feelings, but that didn’t matter to her. She had heard somewhere that true leadership was not a popularity contest.

  Summoning a different sort of courage than her companions had displayed, Princess Meghina boarded the tram, and rode it down. She would send palace guards and doctors to attend to her friends.

  * * * * *

  That evening, with the necessary transfer documents completed, two MPA marshals escorted their high-security prisoner onto a podship for the flight to Canopa. The electronically-cuffed Salducian was not cooperative, and as they entered the passenger compartment he tried to kick one of the officers—both of whom were burly Human men. They stepped out the way easily, and shoved him roughly onto a bench, then activated a shimmering containment field to keep him there.

  “You’ll lose your careers for this!” Kobi Akar shouted, as he struggled unsuccessfully to break free.

  “Oh, do you hear that, Iktar? We’re really worried, aren’t we?”

  “Yeah,” said the other, as the diplomat glared at them. “Maybe we should turn this guy loose, or ‘accidentally’ let him escape. That would really look good in our personnel files, wouldn’t it?”

  “Sure would. Our salaries would be doubled right away, and we’d be promoted.”

  The one called Iktar sat on a nearby bench, and said, “Too bad we’re having trouble with the restraint controls. I just can’t seem to get them to open up.”