The Thrones of Kronos

by Sherwood Smith

  Despite the fact that it meant a great deal to the Panarch—if a lance attack was impossible, there was no way the Navy could help Vi’ya and her crew—there was no visible evidence of stress in the steady blue eyes or the faintly smiling mouth. But as Osri watched him staring pensively at the blank viewscreen, he reflected that Brandon, who had always looked much younger than the age they both shared, now looked older. There was no specific feature to which one could attribute this change; even the tiny lines at the corners of his eyes had always been there. But the skin molding the bones of his face—the set of his mouth—the quick, vivid blue gaze, all contributed.

  What did my father say once? “Unlike our ancestors, we prolong our youth almost indefinitely, until responsibility, and our own depredations, and finally time slow us down.”

  Brandon turned his way. Osri, embarrassed to be caught staring, said, “How can you be sure they aren’t broadcasting all the data they have?”

  “I’m not,” Brandon replied. “Just an instinct for divining what’s hidden behind information from how the data is presented. That, and a fair certainty of their sources.”

  Osri sighed, glancing at his chrono. Now time crawled. “If you want me to understand, you’ll have to speak plainly,” he said. “I don’t have your mysterious ability to extrapolate mountains of data from one or two obscure and unrelated facts.”

  Brandon laughed, and perched on the edge of a chair. “There’s no mystery here, just wider access plus a well-developed sense of self-preservation.” He gestured at the console, the High Phanist’s plain gold ring glinting on his little finger. “What Cormoran and, by now, the rest of the novosti have probably guessed is that the Telvarna was sent to the Suneater. It’s easy enough to guess: they aren’t on Ares or at any of the staging points, we didn’t shoot them, and they have among their crew a high-level Kelly trinity and a recently-resigned officer known for her noderunning capabilities. And they know now, through rumor from the Rifters joining the Fleet, that the Dol’jharians are seeking tempaths. But they won’t come out with their guess unless they can get proof. The consequences would be too great if they’re wrong. The good ones pride themselves on imaginative illustrations of known facts, but they won’t lie.”

  Osri nodded. “And the only people who know for certain are the command level of the military, my father, the High Phanist, the former Aerenarch-Consort, and your ward. And us.”

  “Also Manderian, Eloatri’s Dol’jharian consultant, but yes, and the novosti have probably figured this out as well. None of these sources are known for loose mouths. The novosti don’t ask for interviews, because they know we’ll only talk around them, but they don’t want to risk angering us by broadcasting possibly false information.”

  “Supposing they do somehow find out,” Osri asked. “Is there any harm in it? It’s already done, and the military aren’t changing their plans, I don’t think, despite the Rifters being there.” Osri felt the words were wrong as soon as they were out, but Brandon did not react beyond a slight shrug.

  “The military won’t change their plans, but I can be forced to change mine,” he said after a long pause.

  Osri nodded slowly. “You’re going. You as much as told me that some time ago.” He shook his head.

  Brandon’s smile twisted sardonically, but the sting was mitigated by the real humor in his eyes. “Tongue sprained? You used to express your opinion of my actions, ethics, and motivations with admirable fluency.”

  Osri fought against the heat creeping up his neck and making the stiff collar of his tunic suddenly constricting. “It was different then—”

  “Yes, you felt you were my moral superior,” the light voice went on, now with pronounced humor. “Has that changed? There are plenty who still maintain that I have no morals at all.”

  Since those terrible days on the Telvarna Osri had only seen Brandon drunk once, the night after the Rifters left, and as for sex, there was no gossip but the wildest speculation; Osri suspected that the truth was that Brandon was—at least of late—more abstemious than Osri himself.

  At the thought of Fierin, Osri could not prevent his face from flushing with a heat that felt radioactive.

  Brandon laughed. “I’m sorry! I shouldn’t bait you into speaking. You won’t, will you? Out of respect not for me, but for the position events have forced onto me?”

  It was then that Osri understood: those words he had spoken in the heat of rage months ago had had an impact, that despite their positions, Osri’s opinion in fact mattered.

  Osri had recognized weeks ago that he’d been wrong about Brandon, wrong in just about everything he had said, but he had let it go after some midnight wrestling with his own blindnesses and prejudices, and a small sense of relief that at least he had kept his mouth shut since then. Wrong not just about Brandon, but wrong about Rifters, which had been some of his motivation in volunteering before the high admiral to be the first to integrate onto a Rifter ship for the coming attack.

  This decision had been partly made because he thought it was what Brandon, as Panarch, needed done at the time, and it was his own private acknowledgment to himself that he had been wrong. But he had assumed that none of it mattered to Brandon, busy scaling new heights in power and prestige—that the old prejudices had been dismissed and forgotten.

  In fact, what it means is, I owe him an apology, Osri thought. As he would any friend, social or military, whom he had wrongfully maligned.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Those things I accused you of when we were with the Rifters. Even when we were boys . . .”

  As an apology it was woefully inadequate, and he tugged at his collar, acutely miserable. How could he realistically explain? Even worse would be the coward’s way out, to appeal for mercy from erring subject to sovereign.

  But then he looked up. He perceived that it had been enough. And for the first time he was grateful for Brandon’s gift of acute observation.

  “When I think how hard I worked to make sure everyone—specifically my esteemed oldest brother—believed all those things, I suppose I should feel grateful my efforts paid off.”

  “Sheer torture, all that indiscriminate drinking and bunnying was, I’m sure,” Osri retorted.

  Brandon laughed, his head back and his hands loose, a venting of genuine hilarity that made Osri laugh as well.

  Somehow it cleared away the residual bad feeling, and Osri said, “All right, if you’ll have it straight, why do you want to go to the Suneater? You can’t do anything but watch, and if the ship with you on it gets blown up, then we’re in worse trouble than ever, win or lose. Your place is here. No Panarch or Kyriarch has gone to war since—” Osri tried searching his sketchy historical memory, then shrugged. “Well, doesn’t matter. Your father didn’t go to Acheront, even though it was Eusabian who murdered your mother.”

  Brandon turned his hand over. “You’re thinking like a Douloi, Osri. And from their point of view, my going to the Suneater makes little sense. Symbolically it would invest Eusabian with equality, a concession he would be cognizant of, as his demonstration in the Emerald Throne Room makes clear. He was very aware of the symbolism of my father staying at the Mandala while his minions went to swat Eusabian at Acheront, which I am certain added its mite to the twenty-year thirst for revenge he nursed. But I don’t care what he thinks.”

  He rose, pacing back and forth, his hands clasped behind him as he talked. “My going to the Suneater would be an equally strong symbolic act to the Rifters we are slowly and painfully winning over. I have to go to keep faith with them, something my Douloi supporters and enemies alike not only don’t understand but will actively resist.”

  Osri nodded slowly, his mind racing. “They want you here so they can continue establishing hierarchy. Even if we go down in defeat, and there’s only a tiny semblance of the Panarchy left.”

  “Forever on the run,” Brandon said, agreeing. “They’d cling even harder to the old ways. My civilian strategy right now is to integrate the tw
o views—Rifter and Douloi—enough so that I won’t lose my nascent power base if—when—I do go. But someone is working just as hard to thwart me. From the Privy Council to the most frivolous social affairs, I’m finding evidence of this counterstrategy, and it is steadily gaining strength.”

  Osri frowned. “Are you sure you’re not jumping at shadows? All I am aware of is a general assumption that of course you will stay on Ares, because it’s traditional.”

  Brandon gestured a brief negation, then leaned against the inlaid console. “It’s there, and it’s active, propagated by someone who knows the high Ulanshu art of expending the least energy to the greatest effect. Think back to what you yourself said about my father, and Acheront, and apply the context to the Rifters.”

  Osri did, then looked up, grimacing. How he loathed personal trespass! But his voice was steady as he said, “The novosti don’t know about the Rifter alliance. They’re already hinting about your relationship with Vi’ya. They’re going to think that you’re going—that you’re throwing everything away—merely to rescue a lover.”

  “Exactly,” Brandon said. “And if they do, then my recent work will be for nothing, and I will lose the chance to build something for the Rifters who have existed this far, flourishing or not, outside of our law. I will have to stay behind.”

  Osri sighed, looking at his chrono. “Time to go.” As Brandon straightened up, he continued, “All this is speculation, anyway. You just said yourself that the people who know for certain are good at keeping their mouths shut. And they have no reason to want to see you fail with the Rifter alliance. It’s military suicide—we need every ship we can field.”

  “Wrong, Osri,” Brandon said softly, palming the door open. “There is someone who cares nothing for the Rifter alliance, who feels that my duty is here, who has a formidable and growing network of influence. And who knows about the Telvarna’s mission. Who, in fact, was instrumental in sending them off.”

  “Not my father,” Osri said hastily. “His only desire is to save the Suneater.”

  “Not Sebastian,” Brandon said as they dropped into opposite seats in the Panarch’s private trans-tube. “Think!” But Osri didn’t need to think. His mind ran along a fresh track, connecting personal clues. The answer made his mouth go dry all over again.

  “Vannis,” he said.

  o0o

  Sebastian Omilov leaned on his console and stared out the huge port of the lab module, his mood heavy. Beyond, far across the upper surface of the Ares Cap, dazzling fingers of light shot up from a refit pit, revealed by the surrounding haze of industrial gas and dust, as tractors eased in a battered battlecruiser in. Deep pits and gashes marred the ship’s silvery ovoid symmetry; where one ruptor turret had been there was only a huge hole, populated by the sparks and flares of several work crews. The flaring light from its radiants washed huge bands of shadow out from the surrounding structures, obliterating the fainter shadows from the giant sun whose gravity well protected Ares from attack.

  For now. The gnostor’s gaze lifted away from the immense ship as he murmured, “Eyes on.” A target square obligingly appeared, outlining an otherwise undistinguished patch of sky where the testing pad orbited a light-minute farther out.

  Jep Houmanopoulis’s cynical voice interrupted from behind, edged with impatience: “What do you expect to see?”

  As Omilov had not been privy to the latter stages of the Rifthaven negotiations, this was only his second meeting with the Rifthaven triumvir, but he was convinced that the cold, cruel eyes and the sardonic smile were a kind of mask of obviousness that hid a very subtle mind.

  “Nothing,” Omilov replied. Regret at his exclusion nagged at him; not that he had needed the added stress of diplomacy, nor would have enjoyed it. He turned from the port to the banks of viewscreens that would show in detail the test-to-destruction of the Urian hyper-relay that the Rifter captain Lochiel had brought to Ares. “Unless the teams from Energetics are utterly wrong about quantum-level machinery.”

  “You never have explained that to my satisfaction,” said Eloatri. The array of instruments in the lab module evidently held as little interest for the High Phanist as the spectacular view; she was, as usual, more interested in the other people in the room.

  “That’s because I don’t understand it myself,” he replied. “I can only repeat what Chloes of Energetics says: that the granularity of action in the Urian hyperwave appears to be near the theoretical maximum. Unlike human machinery, every aspect of its construction down to the subatomic level plays a designed and active part—or, more likely, several parts—in its function.”

  Eloatri shrugged. “So you said before. I still find more approachable what that young woman on the Fourth Expedition to the Shrine Planet—the one who later became a Prophetae—said about the Heart of Kronos.”

  “What was that?” the Rifter triumvir asked.

  “That it gave the feeling that it couldn’t be other than what it was. That any change would be destruction.”

  Houmanopoulis snorted. “At that level I have difficulty distinguishing between theology and energetics.”

  The High Phanist smiled. “Come to Desrien, Jep. You’ll soon abandon the attempt.”

  The Rifter snorted even louder.

  Omilov enjoyed the byplay. Eloatri had apparently been part of the negotiations, which had somehow developed into an unlikely if amicable truce. To Omilov, later, she admitted that the Rifter triumvir reminded her of her grandfather.

  But that comment about what the young woman had said chilled him. Had her noumenal perception seen something that psi could not—at least until the strange human/non-human Unity now on the Suneater had been forged in the heat of the Dol’jharian attack? The thought brought too close again the Dreamtime, whose authenticity he could no longer deny. Tovr Ixvan had said before the trial and riots, “One of the principal axioms of nomics is that pain is not fungible.”

  Omilov wondered if the cost of Eloatri’s betrayal had been as high as his.

  “Three minutes to data,” said Ysabet, his head technician.

  Most of the viewscreens reflected abstract displays of data; one showed the naval control center actually running the test, but the central one imaged the test site. The strange, almost organic Urian machine was clamped firmly to a long frame, the spidery barrel of the rail-gun aimed squarely at it, with no haze of gas: the lights on the test structure showed the sharpness of a much cleaner vacuum.

  Omilov glanced at his console, knowing that it, as well as his presence, was as symbolic as that of the High Phanist and the Rifter plenipotentiary. This test was being executed by military technicians; his group were now observers, for his knowledge of the Ur did not encompass their machines.

  Until the discovery of the Suneater, only one Urian artifact arguably not artistic in nature had ever been found—the Heart of Kronos—and its Guardian had forbidden access to it. Humankind had known the Ur, as much as a race vanished 10 million years since could be known, by their works of art, ranging in scale from the submicroscopic fractal crystals in the Cloud of Unknowing on Schadenheim to the Doomed Worlds scattered throughout the Thousand Suns and far beyond. And by the mark of their passing, or extermination: the Rift, the immense gulf of chaos a small part of which defined one boundary of the Thousand Suns.

  Omilov turned away from his console, twisting his head to ease the tense, tired muscles in his neck. A flash of blue among the drab workaday naval uniforms in the monitor displaying the naval test center caught his eye. Behind Admiral Ng, Brandon moved along the banks of viewscreens, his profile pensive and hands clasped behind him. It was impossible to divine what he thought of the proceedings; there was no indication how important this experiment was to his own plans. Which was probably, Omilov thought tiredly, a communication in itself.

  He sighed heavily. What had been his was now his son’s: the personal confidence of the ruler of the Thousand Suns. Osri stood near the back of the room, straight and neat in his uniform. Did he ever
wear civilian garb? Omilov wondered. Or is it that I only see him when he’s on duty?

  “One minute to data,” said Ysabet. “Test One accomplished. No change in signal from hyperwave.”

  Despite having resolved not to, Omilov could not prevent himself from turning back to the dyplast port. Ysabet could not actually know that the test had taken place as scheduled, as was highly probable, but if so, whatever would happen had happened. They would see the results in sixty seconds. The negative datum from the hyperwave meant nothing: there was no way to tell if damage to the hyper-relay might in some fashion register on the hyperwave.

  “Between the idea

  And the reality

  Between the motion

  And the act

  Falls the Shadow.”

  Eloatri’s voice was soft, her enunciation clear.

  “What?” The words made Omilov’s neck prickle.

  “A bit of poetry I came across at New Glastonbury,” the High Phanist said. “It’s carved on the altar.”

  “There were people on Lost Earth who thought the moment between a lightning stroke and the thunder was enchanted,” Houmanopoulis said with an acid laugh. “There’s no lightning on Rifthaven.”

  A wash of light from the port confirmed the first test. The image showed only a flash of light from the emitter of the rail-gun, followed by a searing effulgence from the hyperwave as the entire machine apparently re-emitted the energy pumped into it by the slug of ultra-dense matter. The screen blacked momentarily; when the image returned, the restraining supports around the hyperwave were glowing white-hot.

  “All parameters unchanged,” said Ysabet. The rail-gun had had no lasting effect. “That rules out a standard lance attack.”